Daphne pensively took apart her scone and ate it with sips of black coffee while Lorcan’s uneaten scone rested accusingly on the plate across from her.
Eventually she covered it gently and carefully with a napkin.
She thought about him as a boy, grateful for any scrap he could get, and her stomach tensed miserably.
She hoped he’d gone down to breakfast.
She hadn’t. And she’d slept poorly. Last night’s argument and the ensuing cascade of realizations went round and round in her head all night until it ached dully, and it still did. She wasn’t in the mood yet to eat competitively with the German boys.
By eleven o’clock in the morning, Lorcan still hadn’t returned to the suite.
She sighed, then curled up on the settee with a book, Gordon the cat purring against her thigh, and drank tea and desultorily read a few pages.
BAM BAM BAM.
She shot to her feet, sending Gordon flying through the air in shock. He landed neatly on all four feet, cat-fashion, by the hearth, and raced to the door.
She peered through the little peep window.
“It’s Mr. Delacorte. I’ve got your husband. Hurry! It’s a matter of utmost urgency!”
Daphne’s heart at once was an icy block. She clawed the bolt and swung open the door to find Mr. Delacorte and Mr. St. Leger.
She gasped.
The latter was soaked to the skin. His shirt and trousers were glued to him, his hair was flattened against his skull, his skin was stark white and his lips were blueish, and his boots and coat were missing.
Lorcan’s shivering, stoic abjectness flipped her stomach in upon itself.
She whirled about, snatched the coverlet from the settee and flung it over him, as if he were a fire needing putting out.
“Oh my goodness. Come,” she said gently. She got him by the arm and steered him gently toward the hearth. He objected to none of this. She could feel him shivering violently beneath her hand.
“We got his boots off downstairs, but he’s frozen near stiff. You’ll need to get him out of those clothes straightaway,” Mr. Delacorte said matter-of-factly.
Oh, God.
This was merely true.
And naturally it was a thing a wife would have done many times before.
“Aye, you’ll want to get me out of me c-clothes, missus.” Lorcan’s joke was punctuated by the chatter of his teeth.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“You ought to know he’s a right blood . . . he’s a right hero!” Delacorte said fervently. “He jumped right in and plucked that child from under the water like he was a wee cork and handed him out to Hardy. Like it was nothing at all. Nothing! Cor, never seen such a thing in my life and I have seen a lot of things.”
“A child?” She turned to Lorcan, stunned. “You saved . . . you jumped . . . what on . . .” She re-collected her wits. “Mr. Delacorte, will you kindly ask the maids to fetch us some coffee and a tisane for fever, if Helga has one.” She issued those orders crisply. “Some brandy, too.”
Taking grown men in hand was her bailiwick, after all. For better or worse.
“It would be my honor. I would have done that right off but I thought you’d want him brought straight to you. You could have lost him for good,” he added with something that sounded ever-so-slightly like gentle reproach. Delacorte shut the door.
She and Lorcan regarded each other.
He looked no more pleased about these developments than she felt.
She was being thrust into too many new experiences over and over, and each one a fresh shock, a bit like his dip in the Thames.
But she was hardly a child.
So then. Time to rapidly strip naked the big, strange man she’d locked out of the suite the night before.
“Do you mind if I . . . ?” she asked shortly. She knew she was already blushing.
“B-b-believe me, if I’d a choice . . .” he said grimly.
She shifted the coverlet she’d flung over him to hang off his back like a cape. He clutched it in one hand.
She pulled in a long breath, as if she was about to enter an airless cave, and got right to it. Her fingers clumsy with nerves, she peeled up the long tails of his shirt from where it clung like seaweed to his trousers. She could feel him quaking. Sympathy knotted her stomach.
Submitting to her help was probably well nigh unendurable for him.
From there she was compelled to pluck the shirt free from where it clung transparently to muscles which, from the looks of things, were as hard and precisely hewn as the ruby in his earring. He quivered where her fingers brushed his chilled flesh. His skin was shockingly soft over all of that hard muscle.
Her breath snagged at the contrast. Her eyes burned with peculiar emotion, not all of which was embarrassment.
Her heart clenched.
It seemed wrong. By rights he ought to have been made of iron.
And just like that, her hands were like leaves in a windstorm. Visibly trembling.
Moreover, there was no way he wouldn’t notice.
She wished she could transfer some of the heat in her cheeks into the huge shivering man. The fact that she could not speed through the whole affair, and was compelled instead to painstakingly peel his shirt upward like a venetian blind, gave the whole thing an absurd air of ceremony, as if she was unveiling a statue.
She tried crossing her eyes to spare him any ogling she was tempted to do while he was in this vulnerable state. She succeeded only in moderately blurring the gradual reveal of great curving mounds of chest lightly furred with the manliest of black, curly hair. More of which, dear God, trailed up from the band of his trousers.
It was all searingly new and almost wholly unanticipated to her. Unnervingly, primitively magnificent, equal parts beautiful and ugly, intimidating in its implicit raw power. It flooded her senses; she braced herself against it, tensing every muscle, clenching her teeth.
She couldn’t repress her sigh of relief once she got the shirt up around his clavicle.
“Lorcan, can you raise your arms?” Her voice sounded strange in her own ears.
He tried. They were stiff; he needed help.
Together they levered his big arms up as if they were pump handles.
The massive gleaming mounds of his shoulders were revealed. Her head officially went as light as if she’d been punched.
She cleared her throat. “All right, that’s done. Let’s have this all the way off.” She’d tried for brisk and jocular.
But her voice emerged at a flutelike pitch.
She took a fortifying breath. And then another. As if she was preparing to rescue him from the Thames.
She averted her eyes from the vast, stunning bareness of his torso as she pulled up his shirt only to meet the gaze of Gordon the cat, who was unabashedly staring at her.
For a fraught moment Lorcan’s face vanished in the wet, white folds of linen, like a mummy or a ghost. Dot might have indeed fainted clean away if she’d gotten a look at him.
“Help,” he said through the shroud.
After a harrowing moment of struggle, Daphne was able to reach up and pull the shirt over the back of his head, where it swung damply. Briefly he resembled a large hairy nun before it dropped to the floor.
His cravat was quickly dispensed with, as well.
“Very good. Here now,” she said gently, and tucked the coverlet all the way around him. “Hold on to this.” She seized one of his chilled hands and closed his fingers over a blue knit corner.
She glanced up at him, to discover some expression she could not interpret fleeing from his face.
For a moment their gazes locked.
His eyes were glinting with unholy amusement. “Trousers now,” the wretched man said.
“Thank you. Yes. I know,” she said tersely.
She pulled in a sustaining breath.
And went to reach under the coverlet for the fall of his trousers.
He stopped her hand with his.
“Nay, Daphne. I was jesting. I’ll do it.” He sounded amused, but gentle.
His hand was still icy on her wrist and it oddly made her nearly frantic to help him.
But he’d noticed her distress. She was grateful, even as she felt ashamed, like the veriest virgin, and useless. Imagine feeling shame at not unbuttoning a man’s trousers.
Then again, in all likelihood, she was very nearly the last woman on earth he’d want to undress for.
His hand vanished beneath the coverlet for a time.
“There. I’ve got the buttons,” he said. “I may need you to t-t-ug just the legs of them a little.”
His voice sounded somewhat strangled, too.
She was certain he was hardly savoring the need to be undressed like a helpless child. All the better to hurry this along.
She squeezed her eyes closed briefly, reached under the coverlet, and managed to pinch the nankeen between her fingers and tug. But the fabric hugged the great cannons of his thighs with as much loving tenacity as his shirt had hugged his torso, and ridiculously, she had to fight to drag them down. Her fingers brushed hard, hard, furred muscle and she felt it tense like iron.
Oh God oh God oh God.
When they finally collapsed in a heap at his ankles, she was envious. She wanted to collapse into a mortified, scorchingly blushing heap, too.
“So I’m nearly naked,” he announced, superfluously. “Our ordeal is almost over.”
She gave a short, strained little laugh.
She nudged the settee closer to the fire and gave him a little shove. He sat down, drawing the coverlet around him, huddled there while she whipped the blankets from her bed and covered him in layers like papier–mâché.
She dropped to her knees before him. “Hold out your hands. Keep the coverlet over them, the way you would mittens.”
Without question, he obeyed.
And one at a time, she took his hands between hers and chafed vigorously.
And this, and the crack of the fire, was the only sound in the room for a good long time.
She looked up when she sensed in his body an easing of his shivering tension.
She looked up at him. His eyelids had gone a little heavy. Likely he was exhausted.
“Thank you,” he said, after a moment. Quietly.
She paused. “How are they?”
“I can feel them again.” Beneath the coverlet, he flexed his fingers. “They ache a bit. Coming back to life will do that to a body. I’ll live to use them to catch women flying off of crates.”
More color had returned to his face and to his lips.
She hadn’t fully realized how desperately worried she’d been until relief nearly made her dizzy.
He continued chafing his own hands. Suddenly he stopped.
“Who is that?”
She followed the direction of his gaze. “Oh. That’s Gordon.”
“We have a cat now?”
He sounded so surprised she gave a short laugh. The word “we” landed strangely on her ears. For some reason, it was a relief to hear it. “He visited last night and I let him in. Then I let him back out. He returned today. He seems to like it here. Probably we have the juiciest mice in all The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“So you let the cat stay last night. I see. I take it the cat isn’t a right bast—”
Very surprisingly, he stopped just short of using the whole objectionable word.
Gordon stared benignly back at the two of them as if he’d never seen anything more interesting in his life.
“Do you mind having him here?” she asked, somewhat carefully.
“No. Clearly you missed having a homely hairy beast about the place.”
She snorted softly. “Where did you sleep?”
“With Delacorte.”
“I imagine he’s twice as good as a heated brick.”
“Aye. But there were a few drawbacks,” he said shortly.
She blew out a breath.
“All right. You ought to be able to chafe your arms a bit on your own now. You do that while I do—”
She stood and reached for a shawl and dropped it down over his head as if he were a parakeet in a cage. And perhaps a little too vigorously rubbed his hair.
He squawked a little.
“Sorry,” she said insincerely.
More gently, she wound the shawl around his head, turbanlike.
He ought to have looked absurd, and any other man might have. Instead, he resembled a stern sheik, awaiting the arrival of his harem.
“Stockings now,” she said valiantly. “Or can you do them?”
“I’ll do them,” he said.
She watched to make certain he could.
He bent and peeled his wet wool stockings from exquisitely shaped, huge, hairy calves. She tried not to stare at his big bare feet, tufted in hair. Like the rest of him, they were profoundly, aggressively masculine.
He pulled his feet up into his nest of blankets and rubbed them with his hands.
She collapsed in a weary heap on the opposite end of the settee. Who knew relieving men of their clothes could be so thoroughly draining?
“I know it was difficult for you,” he said somewhat stiffly. “So thank you,” he said, finally. Then added, more amused, “for helping me out of my clothes.
“I would have done the same for you,” he added.
She gave a little shout of laughter. She had the pleasure of seeing his eyes light like fireworks.
Delilah was in her room searching for the proper color of thread to mend the hem on one of her gowns when her husband appeared, grim-faced and far wetter than the rain ought to have made him.
Her heart gave a jolt.
They briefly, silently stared at each other. He didn’t look well-rested. She certainly wasn’t.
“Tristan, are you all right? What happened?”
“We went down to the docks. St. Leger saved a child from drowning. He could have died. He and the child. Neither did.”
Delilah felt the blood leave her skin.
Her hand went over her heart. “Oh . . . my goodness. Are they . . . are you . . .”
“Child and St. Leger will both live to tell the tale. St. Leger is with his wife. I’m fine.”
Delilah sat down hard on her bed.
She watched her husband strip off his damp shirt.
The words were out of her before she realized she was even forming them.
“Tristan. Stop it.”
He turned to her. “Stop what?”
“The cold, short, curt answers. The not looking at me when you speak. Stop it.”
His eyes flared in shock. Her last words were pitched in near hysteria.
“The worst thing in the world I can imagine is to be without you. Worse than death.” Her voice was trembling now.
“Aye,” he said hoarsely, stunned. After a moment. “And that goes for me losing you, too.”
“When you go . . . cold and hard and remote . . . it feels like I’ve lost you, Tristan. Like you’ve died. Like you never loved me at all.”
And just like that Captain Hardy was breathing swiftly in horror.
“I can’t feel you at all when you’re like that. I imagine it’s how it would feel if you ever stopped loving me. And if you do that, you’ll win every argument, because I’d do anything to make it stop. But do you want to win that way? Tristan, it terrifies me.”
And she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
She might as well have run him through with a sword.
“Christ, Delilah. Oh God. My love. Sweetheart. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, love.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly into his body. He fanned the back of his hand against her hair and buried his face in her throat. She was shaking with sobs.
“I never meant to . . . Delilah, I would die rather than hurt you.” His voice was a desperate rasp.
“Then why? Why do you do it?” she demanded. Her tears were both angry and heartbroken as she pulled her hands away from her face. “What is wrong?”
“I just . . .” His words clogged jaggedly in his throat.
“Tristan. Talk to me. Please. Please.”
“Because I’m afraid.” He said the words in a low rush.
She went still. “Why are you afraid?” She stopped crying nearly at once.
He took a shuddering breath. Hers was held.
“It’s fear that makes me a bastard. Fear and shame. Because I’m ashamed of being afraid.” His voice was gruff. “And then I’m ashamed of being a bastard. Delilah, what bloody good am I if I cannot keep and protect you? What is the point of me?”
She was stunned. “Tristan . . .” she breathed. “Oh my God. What on . . .”
He took a breath. “If we lose the ship, we’re insured, but it will take us over a year to catch up to where we are now, and that’s income that Bolt and I aren’t bringing in. And we all will feel the effects. Delacorte, too. It was years of work to buy the ship in the first place. I’m feeling a little helpless, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt helpless at all. Probably because I’ve never felt that way. At least since I was a child. I was really bloody good at my job and you know it. It was who I am. Perhaps it is still who I am. And then St. Leger shows up, reminding me of a failure, and . . . I do not like being reminded that I am fallible.” He gave a short laugh. “In the past, if I was fallible, people could die.”
He tenderly drew a strand of hair away from her wet cheeks with a single finger and tucked it behind her ear.
“I do not know how to reconcile being afraid with the man I thought I was. The man I want to be for you. I understand now that I never felt helpless because there was never as much at stake. I love my life with you more than anything. And I love you more than life.”
“Oh, my heart,” she said softly. She gently kissed his chilled cheeks, his eyelids, his mouth. “I don’t love you for your ability to slam the heads of intruders on tables.” Which was, in fact, something he had once done in order to save her from a man who had intended to harm her. “Or because you make love like a demon. I love you because you fell completely apart and showed me your heart and wrote me a poem. The fact that you can slam heads and bark orders is a useful feature. I love this part of you. I love what you’re telling me now. You are safe with me, do you hear?”
She sat down hard on the bed.
He sat down next to her.
Then they lay down together, stretched out, loosely wrapped around each other.
She stroked his hair while he rested his head on her chest, soothed by the reassuring rise and fall of it. The very fact of her.
“A terrible poem,” he murmured.
“The best poem I’ve ever heard,” she sniffed.
“I trust you implicitly, you know. I do. There are two of us now, and you have enough bravery for a whole continent but even the sun can’t always shine through clouds, Tristan. When you cannot be brave, I will be brave for you. Don’t you see, there’s nothing we can’t face together? We can fight about anything you like, but you cannot use . . . taking yourself away from me . . . as a weapon. Or as a way to protect yourself. Do you understand? You can’t. I cannot bear it. You must talk to me.”
He drew in a long breath, then exhaled at length. “You have my word. I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.”
Already the tension he’d been carrying for weeks had left his body. She could feel it, and she rejoiced.
She knew his word was as good as his wedding vows. And she knew how tremendously difficult it was for him to be open and soft. It was too close to surrender. Life had trained him to be so very hard.
“Thank you for telling me how you felt, Delilah.”
“We’re still learning how to be married,” she said.
He gave a short, pained laugh. “Humbling as hell to not be perfect at it.”
She laughed softly.
For a long time they merely lay in peaceful silence.
“He’s a good man, Delilah,” he said after a moment. “Years of commanding men, and I think I can discern a man who acts the part and a man who fundamentally is. I think I’ve always thought he was a good man. Even a fine man. He’s certainly a singular man. It’s not about diving in and saving babies. God only knows why he did that. But that’s what has eaten at me. I saw who he could have been, and then there was what he did, and . . .”
“He probably doesn’t think of it as a waste, Tristan. He probably sees it as the reason he’s alive.”
She said this very carefully, delicately. She knew honor was an ironclad notion for him; it was as much a part of him as his spine. He’d been saved from St. Giles in a way that Lorcan St. Leger had not. He owed his life and loyalty to the navy. But the military had gotten lucky when they’d saved the ten-year-old Tristan Hardy. He’d been as brilliant and dedicated an officer as ever walked. His men would walk through fire for him. As would Delilah.
“I am struggling with whether . . . accepting this . . . is a betrayal of everything I have stood for in my life.”
“What if what you stood for . . . is all that is good in the world? Maybe he is good, and the path to good was simply different for him. Maybe he’s meant to do better in the world. Maybe he was meant to save that child today. Maybe . . . something in you never really wanted to catch him.”
He was quiet. But she knew he was listening.
“I don’t know if I can change who I am this late in my life,” he finally said.
“Maybe it isn’t a change. Maybe it’s sort of like . . . trees. Nobody says trees are changing when they sprout new leaves. They’re merely . . . oh, fully expressing what they are.”
This awkward analogy made him smile. “Like me with my terrible poem.”
“Like you with your brilliant poem.”
Daphne gave a start when a sharp rap sounded at the door.
Funny, she thought, how knocks had personalities. The maid’s knocks were polite and deferential, Mr. Delacorte’s was loud and cheerful. This one sounded like the law was at the door.
She was unsurprised to find Captain Hardy on the other side when she opened it.
Behind him, Dot was holding a tray bearing coffee and what must be a tisane.
She stepped aside so this little delegation could enter.
Lorcan immediately straightened warily.
And from out of nowhere a wayward sense of protection surged in her. As though she wanted to put herself between the man on the settee and Captain Hardy.
Captain Hardy said, “I brought whiskey.”
He gestured with a flask in his hand.
Lorcan jerked his chin in her direction. “Give it to her first. She’s had quite a shock.”
He winked at her, very subtly.
Both men were looking at her, eyebrows upraised in a question at her now.
She’d never tasted anything stronger than champagne. “Perhaps a little splash,” she said.
Dot settled the tray and departed, and Daphne poured coffee into the cups. Captain Hardy sprinkled a few drops from the flask in hers and tipped a torrent into Lorcan’s.
They all sipped.
Daphne’s eyes widened. It was at once clear that ratafia had nothing on whiskey.
Lorcan closed his hands around his cup, gulped, and closed his eyes in apparent ecstasy.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Gordon apparently found this lull so uninteresting he plunked down, hoisted his leg, and began urgently licking his privates.
“Fetching bonnet,” Hardy said to Lorcan, finally. He gestured.
Lorcan reached up and touched his shawl turban. “Thank you. My wife made it for me,” he said somberly.
Captain Hardy said to Daphne, “Did he tell you what he did?”
“Mr. Delacorte told me. It was an extraordinarily brave thing to do.”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” Captain Hardy said.
Lorcan and Captain Hardy were still staring at each other from across the room, having one of those complicated silent conversations.
“But it’s just like him. He is always doing brave things,” Daphne said softly.
Even somewhat defiantly.
Lorcan looked at her swiftly.
Maybe it was the two drops of whiskey she’d just sipped. It was odd how little this seemed like a lie. As though something within her, beneath her defenses, understood this to be essentially true.
Captain Hardy merely nodded.
“You’ll take care of him?” Captain Hardy said finally. Gruffly.
She had a feeling he wanted to say a good deal more, but his very presence, the whiskey gift, a little jest and a taciturn compliment, somehow said what a thousand fancier words couldn’t.
“Of course,” she said softly.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said.
He departed.
Daphne and Lorcan stared at the closed door.
She thought she was beginning to more clearly understand a few things. “Captain Hardy was a blockade captain,” Daphne said carefully.
It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yes, a brilliant one. But not a perfect one. And that’s what he is struggling with.”
She turned to Lorcan.
“Blockade captains are charged with capturing smugglers?”
He looked at her at length.
“Yes,” Lorcan said finally, gently.
Clearly, he was not going to guide her to conclusions that she was about to make on her own.
She was suddenly certain he would answer her questions if she mustered the nerve to ask them. She did not want to ask them. She wanted to remain suspended in this moment for a little while, spent, warm, a trifle tipsy, a condition in which judgment would glide right off her. A rare, pure state of just being, which allowed truths to surface, unfettered by breeding, manners, or assumptions.
From his nest of coverlets, from beneath eyelids at half-mast, Lorcan watched Daphne as she watched the fire. He liked the lines of her profile—the soft swell of her lips, her sharp little nose. The valiant Lady Worth, he thought, bemused. She’d leaped to help him today before she’d known he was an alleged hero. Within her was a fundamental decency and sense of fairness. She had taken care to thank him for her window rescue, even as it must have scraped against her pride.
Your truest self was what sprang forth when you were tested, Lorcan had come to know over the years. Challenge any man, or, he supposed, woman, and you’ll discover their wounds and weaknesses as surely as you’ll discover their strengths.
He wondered what it said about him that he’d dived in to save a child. He hadn’t known that he would. It had simply seemed unthinkable not to.
More accurately, he hadn’t thought at all.
“That sound.”
She lifted her head. “I beg your pardon?”
He was surprised to realize he’d said those words aloud.
He cleared his throat. “She screamed when he fell in the water. His mother. It was as if . . . it was the sound of someone’s heart being sliced out. It nearly peeled the skin from me body. I have heard screams before, mind you. But I’ve never heard a sound like that before and I never want to hear a sound like that again.”
Daphne’s breath left her in a gust and she squeezed her eyes closed. As if she could see it all too clearly.
He was suddenly very glad he’d told her, because it was so very clear she understood.
When she opened them again, her eyes were haunted and weary and wry. “Love is terrifying.”
He went still.
He understood something with uncomfortable clarity then.
She probably knew her father and her brothers loved themselves more than they loved her. It didn’t matter. She did what she did because she loved them. And it caused her pain.
He felt a peculiar weight on his chest.
“How did it happen?” she asked.
“He did what children do, and ran impulsively out onto the dock and slipped and into the water he went. I went in after him at once. Dragged him out by his wee arm. Handed him off to Hardy. Delacorte threw the rope in and they fished me back out, like a big eel.”
“You could have died.”
“I might have died any number of times before. I’d have been just one of thousands of men who’ve drowned in the Thames.”
Her expression was a picture of incredulity at his relative nonchalance.
“I’m glad you were there. I cannot even imagine what his mother must have felt.”
They were quiet a moment.
“Everyone thinks you’re my wife. You would have inherited all of my worldly goods.” He was amused by this.
“I could always use a few pairs of gigantic stockings.”
He laughed.
And then silence again, apart from Gordon making snorkeling grooming sounds into his striped flanks.
“Daphne . . .”
She looked up at him.
“I should like to apologize for upsetting you so terribly yesterday. And for the loss of your stockings. I was . . . I overstepped.”
She fixed him with a deep, steady, measuring look. Surprisingly it was not at all discomfiting to gaze back at her. He liked seeing what she thought of him reflected in her eyes, regardless of whether it was flattering.
“You think I’m ridiculous,” was what she said finally.
It wasn’t the beginning of an argument. It wasn’t an accusation. It sounded as though she was not going to let him off with a rote apology. She was going to solve this.
“No. It isn’t the word I would choose.”
“You cannot sympathize with the way I was raised, because you were not so much raised as born and then let loose to fend for yourself like a wolf cub. And you succeeded against enormous odds.”
He coughed in astonishment. “Christ. No wonder everyone in your village thought you were clever.”
She snorted softly.
“Very well then . . . it doesn’t give me the right to disdain the things that are precious to you. For I do not, in fact, disdain them. I think they merely remind me of what I am not and cannot be.”
He began to realize he was a little drunk. Something about the cocoon of coverlets, the whiskey, the near death, had stripped a layer of reticence from him.
Her eyes flared in shock.
“And whatever you think of me—and odds are even the worst you can imagine would not be far wrong—I know the value of things. I know the value of people. I do not ever take the things I value for granted.”
Her eyes flickered as her expression reflected amazement.
And then she ducked her head.
He could no longer read her expression.
After a moment she lifted it again. “I don’t really think you are a heathen. It was about the worst thing I could think to call you, so I said it.”
“You struck bone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think you are very sorry, however.”
And now she was clearly suppressing a smile.
“And may I introduce you to the very useful word ‘bastard’?”
Damned if she didn’t laugh. What a lovely laugh she had. A happy, cascading, shouty sort that made him laugh, too.
How bright the gray day seemed, for an instant.
“I am not so sheltered or ignorant as you might think, Lorcan. Not in all the ways you think.”
He nodded, humbly acknowledging that he realized this.
“Perhaps I should not have said those things about your father and your brothers. Perhaps it is not any of my business, after all.”
“No,” she agreed softly. “But there is something to be said for a person who sees a truth so clearly and so swiftly he knows where to insert the sword. And that is how you are clever, Lorcan.” She paused. And then surprised him again. “I don’t completely dislike it.”
She’d said it hesitantly.
He was still, silently taking her words in, turning them about in his mind. And as he did, he felt a peculiar pinprick of light in his chest. He did not know what to call it. Almost like excitement. Perhaps happiness. It was like that first sliver of sun you see in the morning on the horizon, when you don’t know what the day will bring. Anything at all could happen.
“And . . . you weren’t completely wrong,” she said more hoarsely.
And for a moment her expression slipped and the shame and grief she’d never faced was revealed. And it was like a knife through him: she knew she was not valued as she ought to be.
Perhaps she’d always known it.
He wanted very much to speak to her more. He wanted very much to hear her thoughts and watch her expressions shift and to see the light in her eyes change with them.
But the whiskey, the fire, the exertion, the blankets, the soothing presence of a woman and a cat . . . all of it was conspiring to knock him out for a good long sleep.
“I think I canna stay awake, Daphne.”
“Drink the tisane first, will you please?” she said. “It’s only willow bark. You shouldn’t want to get a fever. And then you can have a nap right where you are.”
He sniffed it. He was familiar with willow bark tisanes. So he drank it.
He closed his eyes.
The falling rain, the crackling fire, the grooming cat, the breathing man.
Daphne watched him unabashedly, the way one would if they stole across a sleeping satyr in the forest. His thick, dark lashes brushed his stern cheekbones.
Somehow, he did not look any more innocent asleep than awake.
Her heart squeezed, oddly, for the boy who had never been allowed to be innocent.
She thought someone somewhere must have loved him, probably his mother, for him to dive into the water. Some corner of his soul had understood that mother’s scream for what it was.
How odd it was that she, Lady Daphne Worth, of all people, found it difficult to care that she was sharing a settee with a naked criminal. For if he’d been a smuggler, he’d been a criminal. He wasn’t one now. Privateers go out on the seas with a charter from the crown, after all.
But she suspected he’d been some sort of rather grand criminal, too, if Captain Hardy remained so put out by him.
She was beginning to understand what people would be willing to do to survive. And to think, she could have gone a lifetime without knowing. Possibly it never would have mattered. But if her own life was the only bargaining chip with which she’d entered the world, she might ruthlessly, craftily barter and gamble and buy her way into something better, too. She’d learned quite a bit about herself in just a few days.
Even in sleep, Lorcan somehow exuded power and authority in the truest sense of each word. Earned. Not the sort conferred by a title. He had vanquished terrible odds to be here now. He seemed to know precisely what he was capable of. He was a man who had done difficult things.
And yet she’d still been able to wound him with her words.
She stood to allow him to stretch out his legs. He gave a great sigh and did that. She rearranged his blankets to cover his toes.
And in seconds his breathing was even and his face utterly slack.
She collected his clothes—the wet shirt, the trousers, the stockings, his cravat—smoothed from them the wrinkles, carefully arranged them over the fire screen to dry, and then fashioned a makeshift clothesline from a strand of yarn. She could probably ask a maid for assistance with this sort of thing. But she found it meditative. It was how she cared—through service.
She turned around.
Lorcan did not quite properly fit on the settee.
One of his big furry calves had trailed off the side a bit. Very stealthily, she lifted a corner of the coverlet and draped it back over the bareness.
She hesitated.
Then lightly she laid her palm on his forehead but he was warm, not feverish. She was glad.
