Well, this is a shorter chapter but I didn't want to leave you all hanging. Thanks to everyone again for the enthusiasm in my story. I appreciate it.

Ch 11

Elizabeth's words hit Jack like a ton of bricks. He gasped, stepping away from her. The movement caused his wound to ache, his lungs itching to cough again. All he could think about were her words.

'I… think I love you.'

Elizabeth looked at him, her eye's curious, hurt darkening them around the edges. His own eyes widened. Her statement… her words have to be false. They have to be, he told himself fiercely. No one loves Captain Jack Sparrow. No one can. Too much danger involved in such an emotion. I should know. I love the little she devil and look at all the trouble it's brought me.

Still, one foot stepped towards her. Loving her back will kill her. The one time he had given in and it had killed him. "I can love her, yes, but she can't love me. Impossible. Not probable," he mumbled to himself.

"What?" Elizabeth asked unable to make out what he had said, scowling in confusion. The hurt in her eyes had grown, the uncertainty overshadowing the curiosity. She had it in her head that she had been rejected and it was starting to kill the light in her eyes that he had worked so hard to restore.

He opened his mouth but promptly closed it. He turned his face away from her. "Jack Sparrow, don't do this to me." He felt a now warm hand land on his cheek. "Do not put that mask back on."

He kept his face turned. The room seemed much too small now. She loves me, he thought to himself. Despite his refusal to believe anything good could come from the idea, a warm feeling shot up through him from the tip of his toes up to his face.

He was done.

He spun towards her, slamming her up against the window so roughly, a long crack ran up through the fragile glass. His mouth landed on hers demanding. He slid his tongue into her mouth, hands roaming all over her body. Her mouth was yielding. When her hands went for his chest, he grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her arms to her sides. She squirmed a bit under the restriction and he pulled his lips away from hers only to start a vicious attack on her throat.

"Jack," she whispered.

He ran his tongue up to her ear. "What if I were to tell you that I am the most hunted pirate captain on the seas, that danger and debt follow me wherever I go?"

"I would say that it's…" She gasped as his tongue continued its assault. "I would say that it's nothing that I… that I don't already know."

"What if I told you, sweet Lizzie, that I have loved you from the moment I saw you, cliché as it is," he whispered breathlessly against her skin. "What if I told you that every moment you were with that eunuch I was forced to exercise immense amounts of self control not to kill the boy?" He stepped back, pulling her with him out of the moonlight. He didn't want her to see the pain in his eyes that it took him to speak the next words. "What if I told you that… that I can't… that you and I very much cannot love one another."

There was a painful silence in which Jack rethought his positioning them in the shadows. Perhaps it was really her pain he had wanted to hide from his view. "Then I would not believe a word of it." Her voice shook as she spoke. "Jack, you're the only certain thing I have in this world."

Jack winced as if in pain. "Yes, Jack Sparrow is the certainty of danger, the certainty of trouble and bad fortune only narrowly avoided by dumb luck that I have inherited from God knows where."

"You are my wind where Will was my rock."

"Ah ha! Will." Jack could feel himself panicking. He knew he was losing ground that he never wanted to gain. "Will is your rock, a sort of solid foundation. He is something you can be very certain of. If I am your… wind as you say I am, what certainty have you of the way the wind will blow or how the waves will behave as a result of said blowing?"

Jack felt her lean in towards him. He could feel her breath on the hollow of his throat. "We both know the power of the wind, the freedom in the wind to come and go. It is the very thing that makes our lives on the sea possible."

"Winds change. Winds cause change. Winds are change. I am trouble, that's the only certainty you have with me Elizabeth." The word Elizabeth felt strange on his tongue. He rarely called her by her real name.

His eyes stung and he had to use all his well honed powers of self control not to give in and throw her to the floor and love her, not to cry, not to say he wanted to love her and then love her with every fiber of his being and sail with her for the rest of his life. His hand twitched, wanting to touch her. He knew he was hurting her, doing the thing that he loathed most. He was causing pain to someone who was more important to him than anything, even his own life. He felt sick as he brought the point on home, nicely spiced with a lie. "You can't love me. I don't love you." He was the master of deceit and lying was not an unfamiliar tool to him but the four words he uttered to her, to tell her he didn't love her, it was the most painful thing he had ever done.

He wasn't really shocked when he felt the all too familiar sting of a slap across his face. His head was snapped to the side by the force of the impact and it was almost a relief. The sting helped ease the pain inside. "Do not tell me what I can and cannot do," she hissed. "If I tell you I love you than I do. You have the audacity to tell me I am not allowed to feel that?"

When he felt her palms come to rest on his chest and shove him backwards, he made not a move to stop her, not even when he felt that cough and terrible pain threatening to erupt again. "Who was the one who told me that I didn't love Will the way I thought that I did?" She shoved him back another step. A sliver of silver on the floor caught Jack's eye and he knew he was about to be forced into the revealing light of the moon. He found no resistance in his tired frame. "You just asked me yourself what I would do had I known that you loved me from the moment we met."

"I asked what you would do if I told you that. Lies are easy to speak."

"Was I just another whore to you? Were your kisses lies as well? I think I have been lied to somewhere along the line Jack Sparrow and I think it not in your kisses but your words." One more shove and he stood cloaked in the eerie light of the moon again. Elizabeth stepped into the light with him. "Look in my eyes Jack and tell me that you don't love me."

Jack kept his weary eyes on hers. And why can't I just bloody have her, Jack asked himself. She wants me and is she not one the thing I want? Still, he remained speechless.

Jack did react, a bit too late, when Elizabeth reached for his belt, snatching the compass from him. "Let's just see then. Let's see what you want most. You think me to be lying? You think what I speak is false?" The compass lid snapped open and the sound was much louder than it should have been to Jack's ears.

She held the compass in her hand. "Interesting," she said after a moment in a voice that said her suspicions were confirmed. She came to stand by Jack's side. He looked down at the needle just as it came to rest, steadily pointing to him. He snapped his eyes back to hers.

"You know Jack, the day we found the dead man's chest I believe it to have been a stroke of luck. I didn't know what I wanted most in the world. The needle kept switching from the direction of the chest you told me could save will to you." Jack shied away as she reached for his hand. "I also think that it was chance you 'made the compass work.' When you looked at the compass I think the needle pointed to me. If you recall, I happened to be sitting on the spot where the chest was."

"Very self assured now are you Lizzie?" Jack knew what she spoke of to be true, though he had not known it at the time. "You seem very certain that I love you. Seems a very bold thing to say."

Elizabeth ignored him, grabbing his wrist and slapping the compass down into his upturned palm. "Show me then Jack. Show me that I am not what you want most for surely when you love someone that is what you want most in the world. You told me that is what the compass points to so go on. Open it."

Jack wavered. He had never been so effectively cornered before. He knew he was mostly to thank for that. He was startled by the lack of effort he used to deny his love for her. Elizabeth opened the lid and moved away. "Lizzie, this is pointless. If my claim to love you since the moment I saw you, which was a lie by the way, had an ounce of truth, the needle of my compass would not have been spinning so madly when I needed a heading."

Jack found Tia Delma's voice echoing in his head as he glanced down at the needle. 'Jack Sparrow does not know what he wants! Or do you know and are loath to claim it as your own?'

He had known that Tia, with her powers, had known he wanted Elizabeth even before he had admitted it to himself. She had it right on the money. He wanted her but was unwilling and reluctant to give in to it. Now things were different. Now, she was no longer betrothed to another man. Now, she was in love with him.

He assumed that was why, when he looked down, the needle was steadily pointing to Elizabeth.