Two days of torrential rains later . . .
“Who do you suppose we’d eat first if we were trapped in here and ran out of food?”
Delacorte said this suddenly in the sitting room.
He’d been reading the part of Mr. Miles Redmond’s book which recounted the time he’d almost been eaten by a cannibal.
Angelique and Delilah exchanged a swift glance. More than once they’d discovered there was a razor-fine line between spirited discourse and havoc. It was the thrilling risk they took every night they gathered. Sometimes everyone took turns rhapsodizing about the best apple tart they’d ever eaten. Sometimes, apparently, cannibalism was on the docket.
Occasionally the discourse grew so spirited, so merry or heated, it led to a penny or two clinking into the Epithet Jar, and to this they found they could not object overmuch, since it paid for the morning papers. It was hard to say which direction tonight would go.
“Here now, let me help you dear,” Mrs. Pariseau murmured to Dot, who had inadvertently sewn part of her sleeve to her embroidery. Not for the first time.
All the ladies held hoops tonight, and were clustered industriously in the corner.
“We should eat Delacorte,” Mr. McDonald declared suddenly, under his breath.
“I am mostly gristle, my friend,” Mr. Delacorte said placidly. “Good luck with that.” He was sitting across from St. John, who was taking a very long time to decide which move to make next in chess.
“Mar isbean greasy,” Mr. McDonald muttered pointedly in what sounded like Gaelic.
Delacorte narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know what he meant, and even if it sounded beautiful, it also sounded like an insult.
“We’re not going to run out of food,” Delilah assured everyone hurriedly, noting that the German boys’ heads had whipped toward them with hunted eyes. “We are very, very prepared to feed everybody for quite a long time.”
“Even if it’s mice on toast,” Lucien added, wickedly.
“I hear heirs to earls are tender as a result of standing about and doing nothing, like veal,” Lorcan said idly. He’d taken a chair and a brandy and was merely enjoying the ambiance of the room. The soft light. The pretty women. The bonhomie with a bite (that was Captain Hardy).
St. John looked at him balefully. Then he looked back at his fingertips in sullen resentment. It seemed he was developing calluses from practicing the cello, which half appalled, half fascinated him.
“None of you will want to eat me,” he said bitterly. “I’ll be chewy and leathery by the time this week is out.”
Otto rolled his eyes.
“Perhaps it’s a philosophical question,” Mrs. Pariseau said. “Would we eat people in order of value to the group, or in order of stature?”
“You better stop her, now,” Captain Hardy murmured to his wife. “Before there’s bloodshed.”
Delilah stifled a laugh. “I think I might want to hear some of the answers,” she whispered.
“Well, you don’t want to eat any of the ladies, because we’ll keep everyone’s flagging spirits up with inspiring embroidered pillows,” Daphne said. She held up her project, which would eventually read “Bless this Home” but currently said only “BLE.”
She blushed delightedly when everyone laughed.
Such had the lines of reality blurred that Lorcan felt a genuine glow of pride at how everyone seemed to enjoy her. And a delight in her obvious delight.
As if she was truly his.
“It’s going to be pretty,” he said, encouragingly.
She smiled across at him, and his heart contracted in an odd way, half pleasure, half pain.
For two days, they sat across from each other for coffee and a scone in the morning.
For two days she had spooned sugar into his cup and poured, and he had cut her scone into pieces.
They were kind to each other, and even amusing.
And though every bit of his body remained exquisitely, nearly torturously attuned to every bit of hers—the way her hands moved, the light on her hair, the curve of her lips, the sway of her hips when she walked—they had not touched each other again.
They were intelligent people who understood self-preservation, and this was how they were going about preserving themselves. So be it.
But he had spent an afternoon teaching her how to use her astrolabe, and he could truthfully say those few hours were among the best in his life so far, for reasons he could not quite articulate. It was peaceful and easy and amusing and nourishing. The way her eyes lit with comprehension. The way she laughed. The speed with which she learned. The pleasure he took in imparting knowledge had been a surprise, but it had a good deal to do with how much she wanted to know and the fact that he could give it to her.
Mostly it was a good afternoon because he was there and she was there and they were together and this realization had subtly, somberly haunted him since then.
“We’ll need the strong men to tear the furniture apart for firewood for, er, cooking,” Captain Hardy mused delicately from his chair.
“But big, strong men will eat the most,” Mrs. Pariseau wisely noted. “We can keep a lot of ladies alive for weeks on the amount of food our musician friends here eat in a day.”
The boys merely beamed with pride at this.
“A fellow at White’s by name of Havelstock told me his wife eats the equivalent of three men now that she’s with child,” St. John volunteered.
Daphne went so abruptly, rigidly still that Lorcan felt it like a blow.
And then color and light fled from her face so abruptly it was like watching an eclipse. Something had blotted her out, just like that.
Her eyes were blankly stunned. Her graceful hands paused on her embroidery.
He stared, ice gathering in his gut, as she remained fixed in that position for several of his own heartbeats.
Then she glanced up at the ladies and produced a little smile. She cleared her throat. “If you would all please excuse me for a moment. I just need to fetch my . . .” She gestured vaguely with her embroidery and stood.
He thought he detected the faintest strain in her voice.
They nodded and murmured and smiled and she set aside her embroidery and hurried out of the room.
She didn’t glance back at him. It was as though she’d forgotten he existed.
He was motionless. Suddenly no other sound in the world was audible but her footsteps crossing the foyer.
He listened until he could no longer hear them.
The room came into focus again. Rustles, murmurs, the slide of chess pieces across a board.
He pondered what to do.
Perhaps she did indeed need more embroidery silks, or a different needle, or her shawl. Maybe she just needed a chamber pot.
But he was familiar now with the way color moved in and out of her face. And how she looked when visited by emotion she struggled not to show.
His gut remained icy with portent. He strongly suspected it had to do with the name Lord Vaughn had just uttered and the quiet turmoil he felt over this suspicion shocked him.
“I’ll just go and see what she needs, shall I?” he said pleasantly to whoever might hear. He waited for no reply. He left them.
“So devoted,” Mrs. Pariseau muttered approvingly, and all the ladies murmured in agreement.
Daphne was sitting on the settee staring fixedly at the fire when the doorknob turned, and Lorcan quietly entered.
She scarcely looked up.
For a long moment he didn’t speak at all.
“Daphne . . .” He sounded almost gentle. “Do you feel ill?”
She shook her head slowly, as if it hurt. A leisurely to and fro. It wasn’t quite the truth, and it wasn’t quite a lie.
She didn’t look up at him, but she could sense that he was frowning slightly at her. It was never going to be comfortable to be frowned at by Lorcan St. Leger.
The silence stretched.
“Who is Havelstock?” he finally said.
She turned her head slowly, in absolute amazement. “He’s an earl,” she said, with a hint of dry amusement.
He took this in.
“Who is Havelstock to you?”
She gave a short laugh. “Ah, Lorcan. You never do take the long way round with a question, do you?”
“I do not know enough words to clutter up my sentences with them. If I did, perhaps I would. But I do know your face went as white as an Irishman’s arse when Lord I-Love-Myself said the word ‘Havelstock.’”
She tried not to laugh, but he’d gone and punctured the dark tragedy of her mood, and some of it seeped out.
She sighed instead. “You couldn’t have said ‘white as a ghost’?”
“Trust me, an Irishman’s arse is the whiter of the two.”
“Lord Vaughn isn’t so bad,” she said shortly. “I’ve met worse.”
“I haven’t,” he lied.
She cast a dry look up at him.
He seemed restless and distracted. He was standing perfectly still, poised and alert.
And she realized, with a little jolt of pure pleasure, that he was genuinely concerned. He had come for her because he couldn’t help himself.
She wanted to sit for a moment in the sweetness of this realization.
“Am I right in that something about Havelstock upset you? Or did the eel stew take you the wrong way?”
It felt as though she needed to pull the words up from the bottom of a dark mine, where they were mired in memory. But she managed.
“Lord Havelstock and I were once engaged to be married.”
She had dreaded the need to say those words aloud for years. But it seemed safe to do it now. As though when Lorcan was in the room, nearly anything became safe.
Lorcan was motionless and silent. He seemed to be taking this in.
Perhaps comparing it to the things he thought he knew about her. She wondered if all this time he’d thought she was the veriest spinster.
“And you may have noticed that I am not married to him,” she added. Dryly.
“How did the . . . not being married to him come about? That was my sorry attempt at being something other than blunt.”
“He fell in love with someone else.”
Again he went quiet.
She realized there was something thrilling about watching his face when he was merely thinking. She pictured his mind as a blade, parsing things.
“Was she a governess?” was what he came out with.
“How . . .” Her word was nearly arid from shock.
“When we arrived, when Mrs. Durand said the word ‘governess.’ And you looked as though someone had flicked something hot into your eyes.”
She sat for a moment in silence. “I think it’s a very good thing we’ve never played five-card loo.”
Their eyes met and in his there fleetingly glinted a thousand little jokes about games and wagers and the price thereof, spicy little innuendos, considered and rejected as not appropriate for the moment.
How astonishing that she’d only realized this because she’d thought of a few of her own.
“She is a very beautiful girl. The governess,” she added.
“What a shocking plot twist.”
She was surprised into smiling again.
He was still standing before her, motionless but somehow radiating a sort of restlessness. She realized he was once again charged with a need to see her right. It could not be done in this instance. The damage had been inflicted many years ago. The ramifications might very well be permanent.
“If you do not want me to ask questions . . .” he said.
“No. I don’t mind. I’ll tell you. But I don’t want to bore you.”
“I can truthfully say you have yet to bore me. You are full of surprises, Lady Worth.”
She quirked her mouth. How extraordinary that this was a thing he valued.
She patted the settee near her.
He settled slowly, sat at a proper distance, as if they’d a chaperone, and had never groaned helpless pleasure into each other’s mouths.
“Henry—Lord Havelstock—courted me in the usual way. We had so much in common. And I felt we had such an accord.” She shot a wry sidelong glance at the man with whom she’d had anything but when they’d first met. “It seemed we could speak to each other of anything. It was the first time I felt someone truly knew me. I fell in love. I was twenty when he proposed, and it was like . . .”
She didn’t want to remember that happiness, because now it seemed evidence of her foolishness and naivete. “Walking on air.”
She didn’t look at Lorcan.
He said nothing. Perhaps the cliché had horrified him mute.
“My family was ecstatic,” she added.
“He’s rich. Havelstock,” Lorcan said finally. In a rather neutral tone.
It wasn’t a question. It was a conclusion he’d drawn.
She nodded. “And so . . . well, Henry . . . had a much younger brother. And a short time after we were engaged, about three months, they hired a new governess for him. I remember him mentioning her in passing one day.”
Lorcan took this in with a fixed gaze and single, cynical uplifted brow.
“There came the day, a month or so after he’d mentioned this . . . he took me for a walk. The walk we’d often taken in the woods near our home, for there’s a little path that meanders down to a sort of pond—oh, this doesn’t matter. And that’s where he told me he was in love with her. He was perfectly gracious, he was absolutely himself in every way—he’d always been kind and direct—when he told me about her, which actually made it more horrible. I kept thinking it must be a terrible dream. He said he was tormented and ashamed. He wept. He was wretched. I have never been so confused, you see, because my impulse when someone I love is in torment is to do anything at all to make it better for them. And the only thing I could do to make it better for him was to be . . . to be somebody else.”
She was trembling now as if she’d just, at long last, regurgitated poison.
Lorcan silently reached for the coverlet folded on the settee and wrapped it gently about her shoulders, cocooning her as she’d wrapped him after he’d rescued the child.
The coverlet smelled like him. She could not say why this was so soothing, when the man before her was a walking disturbance.
“He told me he hadn’t slept a night through in months. But he said because he knew me so well, and esteemed me so greatly, that he decided he must tell me. Because he knew I would not want to marry a man who could not . . .” She paused. She gulped in a breath. “. . . love me as I deserved to be loved.”
She glanced over to see that Lorcan had gone white about the mouth.
“The worst part was—Henry was also absolutely glowing. Despite the weeping. He could not keep his face from glowing when he said her name. Because he was so very in love. And I could full well imagine how miserable he was to hurt me, because we were such dear friends, and we always told each other our happy news and he could not tell me about her and . . . Lorcan . . . are you quite all right?”
His face was fully pale now, and his skin was stretched taut over his features, and his eyes were flat and hard.
He looked . . . murderous.
It was the expression, Daphne thought, her attacker must have seen when he’d dangled from Lorcan’s fist.
“Go on,” was all he said. In a tone so pleasant it ironically made her uneasy.
“Some people in town were kind, but the pity . . .” She shivered. “I could not abide the pity. I had a few very close friends, but they were engaged, and it was as though they didn’t want my disaster to taint their happiness.”
“A pox upon the pitiers of the world.”
She smiled faintly at his inimitable brand of solidarity. How bolstering his unequivocal approach to the world.
“And the shame of it. It was such delicious gossip, you see, when he went off and married her. Of course, everyone outwardly agreed it was a scandal, but so many saw him as such a romantic figure. Defying his father’s wishes for true love, and so forth. I went from being admired and emulated to ‘poor Daphne’ overnight. No one knew what to say to me, even people I thought were my friends.”
His mouth was a thin line now.
“Lorcan . . . In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined anything so horrifying as that moment he told me. I could not reconcile this person I loved with this person who was inflicting such terrible hurt. It made me question everything I thought I knew about life.”
He said nothing for a long moment.
But this was clearly because he was exercising considerable restraint.
Finally he abandoned it. “Daphne, your beloved was a selfish bastard.”
She reeled as if he’d struck her. “How dare—”
He was calmly unmoved by her rage.
“You can tell me to go to the devil if you choose. But I do not know how to say this any other way. A real man would not have asked you to choose. He wanted you to take responsibility for his misery, or for your own. Mostly I suspect what he really wanted was absolution for doing something dishonorable from someone he expected would give it to him. Because you loved him. He’s an absolute despicable knave. The governess. What a weak bloody fool. How bloody dare he.”
Daphne went rigid. Her mouth dropped in shock.
She knew at once this was so in essence brutally correct that it scorched away not only any temptation to protest, but another sort of an obscuring mist.
She always took responsibility. There had always been some man willing for her to shoulder a burden rightfully his.
But now she could see the whole affair precisely as Lorcan saw it. And he saw it with absolutely no impartiality.
How novel to take strength from someone else’s outrage on her behalf. How nearly dizzying, as though a window had opened and new air rushed in.
She felt shy, suddenly. Reflexively she turned her head to breathe the scent of Lorcan clinging to the coverlet.
She stopped herself.
“Did your father and brothers offer to castrate him?”
Lorcan’s tone suggested he already knew the answer.
And for the first time in her life, Daphne knew what the answer ought to have been.
It was a moment before she could answer.
“They were embarrassed. I was embarrassed to have humiliated them so. My father was . . . he seemed . . . angry. And distraught.”
Angry and distraught with her, she understood now. The rejection and abandonment of her, the daughter of an earl, for a governess had reflected badly on him.
Her father had, in fact, fussed and railed as though he’d been thwarted. He’d been in a panic. Of course he’d been in a panic.
He’d been counting on Henry to pay his debts.
She was still subdued. Reeling from her epiphany.
“Oh, I am certain he was,” Lorcan said ironically.
Loyalty was the very bedrock of her being. Lorcan’s irony landed painfully. She smacked down a reflex to defend her father. But that new, invigorating anger was now quietly bubbling beneath the sludgy strata of memory.
Lorcan was wearing his gambler’s face.
Carefully still, giving nothing away. He was watching and waiting for her to make conclusions.
She sat for a moment, turning over in her mind and heart fresh, sharp, stunning realizations.
Lorcan finally said carefully, “Do you still love him? Havelstock.”
The world felt strange in his mouth. “Love.” Farcical, even.
He felt he hadn’t a right to it. All his life it had been more of a theory. Like plump pillows, knitted blue coverlets, endless comfort and plentiful food . . . it had seemed a luxury. Or a frivolous plaything for those who had no worries of survival. Or a drug to take when life was grim. That the price he’d paid for peace of mind, for success, for climbing his way out of St. Giles to the top of a secret little empire was dodging it neatly. Satisfying mutual appetites, never making any promises. Avoiding entanglements. Moving quickly on. Thus were his relationships with women.
But now, watching Daphne, he wondered if it was the one failure of courage in his life.
He thought about what she’d said the night he’d first kissed her: “Is it muscle . . . or is it scar?”
He began to wonder which one she’d hoped it was.
Muscle implied you could dive back into the fray, stronger than ever, to try again.
Scar suggested nothing, particularly something like love, could get through anymore.
He found he was tensed waiting for the answer.
Daphne was watching him. “No. I don’t know. Surely not? I haven’t seen him in years. And I am a different person now than I was then. It was just a shock to hear his name in the sitting room and I suppose it’s like . . . I suppose it’s similar to the way your bones ache when the weather changes. They remind you of how they came to feel that way.”
He nodded.
“But I don’t know . . . that is, what are you supposed to do with love when someone kills it at the root? Maybe it just needs to recede, like that flood at the end of the road.”
He didn’t know. He wanted to offer her solace and answers, and it quietly maddened him that he could say nothing of value.
“Lorcan, I have never told a soul any of this,” she whispered. She gave a little laugh.
“I am honored,” he said quietly, after a moment.
But abstractedly.
“I think it’s upset me . . . more because it seems the point at which everything in my life seemed to have gone terribly wrong. I grieved him so. I tried but I could not disguise it. I wanted nothing to do with men for a few years. And of course this is hardly appealing to new suitors, who didn’t precisely clamor, anyway. Something about the whiff of rejection hanging about me, no doubt. There were a few who tried, and then lost heart, it seemed. And then . . . my father revealed to me he’d lost our fortune. Over the past five or six years, he’d gambled it away. We’re living in the caretaker’s cottage, for now. My brothers don’t yet know it has come to this. It was my idea. I was able to find someone to temporarily rent our home. I asked about very delicately, very discreetly. My father told them he prefers to live in a smaller home, now that his children are grown.”
“Clever. I am certain everyone believes him.”
She momentarily seemed to have gone mute. Regardless, she did not reply.
“Your father was counting on Havelstock to pay his debts, I imagine.”
He imagined her scrambling, discreetly, to find someone to rent their family home, and he knew a fresh surge of fury. Because her father, being an earl, of course could not go begging.
“Yes. And marrying the Earl of Athelboro will at last put an end to . . .” she humorlessly quirked the corner of her mouth “. . . my calamitous fall. And my family’s calamitous fall.”
He went still. Holy Mother of God.
“The marriage proposal . . . he’s an earl?”
He said this as if he experienced no emotion whatsoever about it.
And yet. He had somehow not expected this.
Though of course she was the kind of woman who could, and would, marry an earl. She’d been raised to do precisely that sort of thing.
He ought to be pleased and relieved for her.
“I would be his third countess.” She produced a ghost of a very bleakly amused smile.
“Surely, he hasn’t a harem? They frown upon that in England. Or is it more of a Henry the Eighth sort of thing?”
“He’s just been unfortunate. Or, rather, his previous wives certainly were. He does have five children who need a mother.”
Lorcan went still. “Five,” he said carefully.
She didn’t reply.
“How old is he?” He thought he could guess it pretty well.
After a long moment she said, “Fifty-six.” Her voice was frayed.
“Only a few years older than my father,” she added dryly when he said nothing.
And then when it seemed he would never speak, she said, “I’ve only met him once, for a few hours. He was pleasant.”
“He decided he could see himself with you for a lifetime after only a few hours?”
There was a peculiar echo in his head when he said it. As though someone else was asking him the very same question.
Only it wasn’t a question. It sounded like the voice of truth.
Suddenly there was a strange ringing sound in his ears.
“How long does it take a man to decide he wants to buy a horse?” Her voice was a thread. Her mouth twisted ruefully.
Christ.
“So his long letter wasn’t by way of declaring extreme devotion?”
She blinked, as if this hurt her. And he wondered if this had been his intent. Because on the periphery of his awareness, somewhere within him, he could sense a storm gathering, by far more dangerous, more annihilating than the one that had trapped them inside together.
“He was sharing his assets in detail, by way of persuasion. He has fifteen thousand pounds a year, and estates in London, Richmond, and Sussex.”
The amount was nearly bludgeoning. It left him speechless and airless.
He would have about twenty-five thousand pounds to his name when the auction of the ship they’d recently captured was complete. After a lifetime of work. It was indeed a small fortune. But it was a raindrop in the ocean of the earl’s fortune.
“As well he should provide all of that, Daphne,” he said gently, finally. “You are . . . worth persuading.”
The words felt wholly inadequate.
Her little smile then was lovely and grateful, and it was like nails raked across his heart.
“And this is the life you want?” It was a struggle to keep his words even and conversational.
It was a long moment before she replied.
She drew in a breath and released it at length.
“I want to feel safe again. I want consistency. I want children. I want to belong somewhere and to someone. I want to hold my head high. I want to know my family will be cared for. And I want, very much, something of my old life back.”
Nothing about love.
Because love was the anchor that could pull you under and drown you. It was an agonized scream when a child fell into the sea. Love was Daphne shaking violently on a settee purging the memory of heartbreak. Love was his mother, enduring his father’s rage when he was a tiny boy.
It was a toxin, a ruse.
Wasn’t it?
If she married the Earl of Athelboro, she might never need to worry about experiencing that sort of pain again.
Servants, and a grand house to manage, and fine clothing, and people curtsying to her. Never buffeted by uncertainty again.
What a relief that would be, he imagined. He ought to be relieved for her.
He recalled how pleased he’d been to learn she’d had a proposal. She’d be sorted into the proper category, he’d thought. Where she belonged.
He was oddly careful about the next breath he took. As though the whole of his body hurt.
“All very reasonable wants,” he said gently. “How would you explain it if you encounter Delilah or Captain Hardy in the company of your new husband, the earl?”
She swallowed. “Odds are very good I’ll simply never see either of them again. We’ll move in different circles, you see. And from what I understand, the earl seldom leaves the countryside anymore. If I should encounter anyone from The Grand Palace on the Thames, I’ll simply feign polite confusion and suggest they must be thinking of someone else who looks like me.”
She’d clearly given this some long, frighteningly clearheaded thought.
“Ruthless,” he said admiringly. And rather relentlessly. “It seems some of your lessons in make-believe have paid off.”
Her features tensed fleetingly.
But she didn’t reply.
“Mrs. Hardy was once a countess,” he said musingly, as though he was just recalling it. He paused a beat. “She said she’s happy now.”
It was as casually cruel as he’d ever been. And his unworthy willingness to be cruel told him how he felt about all of this.
She went still.
And then her eyes began to shine with tears and he felt like a brute.
“You intend to accept the earl’s proposal?” His voice was uninflected.
Their eyes locked for what seemed an eternity.
Then the corner of her mouth tipped wryly. “What wouldn’t you do for someone you loved?” Her voice was shredded.
She meant, of course, her family.
After a moment, he nodded once.
“Well. So seldom do problems have such a single neat solution,” he said finally. “Congratulations.” His voice had gone hoarse.
She cleared her throat. And gave her head a little toss.
“He’ll be visiting my father at the end of the month, weather permitting. I’m to give him my answer then.”
The end of the month was about a week away.
Lorcan could not reply.
He was impaled by a fury that seemed to have as many prongs as the devil’s pitchfork. It was akin to how he’d felt as a boy witnessing the carelessness with which others treated things—food, and shelter, and clothing—he viewed as precious, and his fury was somehow directed at Daphne, too. It was laced through with a panic he could not quite identify, and this mystery was part of the panic: so seldom was he uncertain about anything anymore.
And so some of this fury was for himself.
Because it seemed unfathomable that she should be viewed as anything—a pawn, for instance, for her father, or disposable, in the case of Havelstock, or a stepmother and bed warmer, in the case of the earl—other than beautiful and precious and rare.
Which told him definitively that he saw her as beautiful and precious and rare.
He breathed carefully through this realization, as if it were a grave threat to his well-being.
If she was able to see herself this way, would she still tremble over Havelstock’s betrayal? Would she trade one life of utility in her family for another of utility with an earl? This girl, with skin like satin, and lips like fire? With a mind like a diamond and a laugh that made him feel the sun rose in his chest?
He did not know to convey any of this to her. He did know that she’d saved herself once before, by lowering herself out the window on bedsheets.
She’d said “enough” then.
Perhaps if another option were presented to her.
“Daphne . . . How much does your father owe?”
For a moment he thought she might refuse to reply.
“Five hundred pounds.”
Good God.
He took this in silently. The gold-and-ruby loop he wore in his ear was worth at least that. No wonder she was interested in it.
He considered what he wanted to do, and whether she would recoil in outrage. Or embrace the opportunity for what it was.
So he allowed an interval of silence to elapse, as they sat together quietly.
How he would miss just . . . sitting with her, quietly, in front of a fire. Just sitting with her had become one of the chief pleasures of his life.
He allowed a little more time to elapse before he risked the question.
“I don’t suppose I could interest you in a game of Spillikins.”
Her head turned slowly and she regarded him at length.
The air between them became at once dense with portent.
And it was a long moment before she replied.
“You could,” she agreed lightly. Though her voice was faint.
“What will we wager?” he asked, as if it was the most casual question in the world.
Again, they locked eyes.
“If I win . . .” She inhaled. There was a pause, during which he held his breath. “I want your earring.”
He exulted, quietly.
“And if I win . . .” He paused at length. “I will take anything you want to give to me, Daphne.”
A moment later, she nodded.
She pulled the little table between them, and shook the sticks out of the tin.
“Would you like to do the honors?” she asked him.
“Why don’t you, so I can go first?”
She nodded. Then she collected the sticks in her fist, then released them with a little clatter.
And Lorcan ducked his head to examine the pile. This time there was no narration.
No sound at all but the ceaseless tick of the rain against the windows and intermittent pops of the fire.
But he examined the pile in his usual way, from various angles.
And so did she. She identified several likely prospects she could safely pluck. No doubt he saw those same options, too.
The world seemed to slow as he reached out.
And Daphne realized he intended to choose a stick guaranteed to topple the pile.
Her breath stopped as he swiftly tugged.
The pile collapsed. The sticks clattered and rolled about the table.
He swore softly. “Clumsy me.”
As Daphne stared at the little wreckage, the room spun violently.
What wouldn’t you do for someone you loved? she’d said to him.
She slowly lifted her head.
She could hear her own staccato breath in her ears as they stared at each other.
“You cheated,” she whispered.
“Nay, I lost.”
“Exactly.”
The world swam before her eyes as she watched him slowly thumb from his ear the beautiful earring. The thing that could restore choices to her. A real ruby and gold worth hundreds of pounds.
“Take it, Daphne.” His whisper was intense. Willing her to obey him.
He held the earring out to her.
For a moment the only sound was their harsh breathing.
“I cannot let you do it like this, Lorcan.” Her voice was thick.
Tears welled in her eyes. She brushed them violently away with the back of her hand.
His eyes flared. His features went tight with a surge of emotion, swiftly tamped.
And for long moments, they merely stared at each other.
When he finally put it back in his ear.
She saw that his fingers were trembling.
She stared.
And a nearly unendurable, breath-stopping elation slowly flooded her.
It was escorted by a near killing fury and despair.
She wanted to howl from it.
It robbed her breath.
The vicious, cruel, mocking injustice of it. The injustice that this miraculous thing that had sprung between them was so spike-edged that even looking at it closely was to court terrible pain. Why? Why this? Why now?
Abruptly, almost angrily, silently, she gathered the Spillikin sticks in her fist.
She looked down at them blindly.
He said not a word.
Then she carefully, neatly laid the sticks down.
She stared down at them.
Her vision was hazed. She could hear her own breath sawing in an uneven rhythm, somewhere between grief and anger.
She reached behind her and with fumbling fingers, tugged loose the laces on her dress.
She looked up at him.
His face was unreadable. He was holding himself rigidly still.
And then leaned slowly forward and gently took his face between her hands. And just for a moment she held it and stared, marveling at its rough beauty.
Then tenderly, slowly, she drew her thumbs along the hard corners of his jaw, savoring the scrape of his whiskers. She delicately traced with her fingertip the shining raised road of his scar. The curve of his lower lip.
His beautiful eyes were filled with pain and wonder and a hope that lacerated her heart. And a desire that could incinerate them both.
And then she laid her mouth against his in a hot, hungry, open kiss.
The iron bands of his arms went around her, and she was engulfed, pulled hard up against his body. She raked her fingers up through his hair and tugged his face closer, closer still, opening her mouth to him, their tongues dueling as she chased her own desire while fanning his. She nipped his bottom lip and he swore softly, and returned the favor. The kiss became nearly devouring, a clash of teeth and a crush of lips, a greedy savoring of textures.
He gasped and took her earlobe between his teeth, lightly, and her breath hitched at the tiny shocking pleasure. She hadn’t known such savagery was within her. She shook with a need that seemed fathomless, that welled and spilled and built again and he was there for her. He met her again and again with a hunger the equal of her own. He knew what she wanted.
She gasped when he swiftly lifted her onto his lap and moved her body so that she was astride the jut of his hard cock in his trousers.
He shifted his hips up against her and her head fell back on a gasp of pleasure as a bolt of lightning went through her.
“Aye, lass. It’s this. It’s this you want.”
He moved against her again, grinding slowly, teasingly as he swiftly finished the job she’d begun with the laces of her dress and tugged her bodice swiftly down.
And suddenly her breasts were in his hands.
His eyes locked with hers as he stroked, dragging his thumbs over her nipples.
Bliss forked through her like lightning, and she cried out.
He grinned like a pirate.
And then he urged her back in his arms and closed his mouth over her nipple and sucked, and teased with his tongue. And when she half choked, half sobbed out her pleasure she could feel his animal groan vibrate through her body, in concert with her own.
“Christ, you are beautiful.” The words were nearly a groan against her ear, and he followed them with his lips, then his tongue, while his hands coaxed pleasure from her breasts. “So beautiful. Move with me, Daphne.” His hands were hot on her bare arse as he pulled her against his cock, still behind the fall of his trousers. “Trust me. Your body knows.”
It did know. Something was flooding her veins, pressing against the very seams of her being, like a river churned in a storm.
They rocked together, swiftly now. Eyes locked so she could see when his went black and hazed. His hot breath gusted against her throat. The cords of his neck went taut. His head fell back and his chest was heaving against hers.
“Oh God.” His words were tattered. “Oh God, love, I’m going to . . .”
Dazedly, stunned, desperate, she stared into his black eyes, his face as wild and hazed and amazed as hers, his forehead gleaming sweat. His head thrashed back.
“Lorcan . . . Lorcan I . . . oh, please help me . . .”
He slipped his fingers down between them and against where she was wet and aching and stroked hard.
The world exploded into fragments of light.
She heard her own scream from somewhere among the heavens, where she’d been launched.
Distantly, she heard him roar his release against her throat.
And as his body quaked in the throes of it, she clung to him like he was flotsam in a shipwreck.
Her head rested on his shoulder. Her arms remained loosely looped around his neck.
His hand moved gently over her hair, then glided softly over the blades of her shoulder, down the little pearls of her spine.
“Are you still among the living?” he asked her.
She gave a single soft laugh. “I saw stars,” she murmured.
“As did I.”
More silence, as she pressed her cheek against his. Lightly, she kissed his neck. She let her lips linger there, so she could feel his heartbeat. Still martial.
“I never dreamed,” she whispered.
He pressed a lingering kiss against her bare shoulder. Like a wanton, her breasts were still out and crushed against his chest.
They merely held each other for quite some time.
“Am I squashing you?” she asked.
“Nay,” he murmured. “I think I could hold you forev—”
He stopped himself just in time from saying that fateful word.
And it was this that seemed to sober both of them immediately.
She could feel the tension gathering in his body and her own.
A moment or so later, he eased her from his lap. They sat side by side for a moment, dazed and sated and thoughtful, while she tugged up her bodice.
He turned to her and they studied each other in yet another new light.
He smiled faintly.
He reached out and drew his thumb softly, slowly over her cheek. “Consider yourself ravished, Lady Worth.”
He stood, and adjusted himself. “I’ll bid you good night, shall I?” he said politely.
He saw hurt flash in her eyes when he looked down at her.
But it was followed swiftly by an understanding that made him feel raw: she knew he wanted to be alone with whatever it was he was feeling. He did not want her to witness it. He’d experienced all manner of things in his life, enough so that he’d developed a response or defense in nearly every possible situation.
He simply hadn’t one for this. Like a child, he wanted, needed, briefly to hide.
He was ashamed of this, and yet there it was.
Her gaze was searching. Then soft. Then accepting. She swallowed and turned away very slightly.
“Good night, Lorcan. Sleep well.”
Lorcan lay awake tracking the shadows the fire cast on his ceiling and listening to the wind hurl rain at his window. To avoid the stunned and somewhat torturous run of his thoughts, he tried to concentrate on sensations instead: the pillow beneath his head. The very good mattress. Even old aches in his bones would do.
He flexed his hand, and he remembered the soft slip of her hair between his fingers.
He’d just been willing to hand over several hundred pounds’ worth of earring to a woman he’d known for mere days and she wouldn’t let him do it.
Moreover . . . he was fairly certain he’d do it again, if she’d let him.
He hadn’t anything else to offer her.
He lay, hollow with disbelief. And hungry, still, for her body. For her presence.
Beneath the rain and wind, another sound emerged.
And it nearly squeezed the breath from him.
In the room next to his, she was quietly weeping.
It scored his heart like acid.
