Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,104

As though Tristan had been crudely excised from her soul. All of her tears had been scorched away.

Angelique, to her credit, did not say “I told you so.” Everything she knew about Delilah and Captain Hardy was only surmise, anyway. But Delilah was hardly an enigma, bless her heart, and unfortunately, to Angelique, men weren’t enigmas, either.

But Angelique had seen Captain Hardy’s face as he went downstairs.

It wasn’t the face of a man whose heart was filled only with triumph and pride and plans to set sail. He’d understood what he’d done to Delilah. Even if he would not have done anything differently.

And he’d known the cost.

And Angelique’s heart ached for the fools who break their own hearts because they simply couldn’t help themselves.

And for herself, who still had a heart to break, apparently, because it ached right now for Delilah, who had learned a terrible lesson. It was so very difficult to save people from themselves. Delilah might not have tears at the moment, but Angelique did. Her eyes burned with them now.

She said not a word.

She hesitated.

Then she stroked Delilah’s hair, awkwardly, gently, as though Delilah were Gordon, the cat.

“I ought to have listened to you,” Delilah said after a moment. Her voice muffled, as though speaking through layers and layers of misery.

“Oh, now. How dull would things be if you ever listened to me?”

But Delilah felt too stunned and scoured to smile. She understood now that the numbness she’d felt in the wake of Derring’s death was merely shock.

This felt more like a death.

And she had just lied to Captain Hardy because she’d wanted to hurt him, and oh, she knew she had. In the heart or the pride, she would never be certain. But she had.

That delicious moment of anesthetizing revenge was fleeting, however.

And now she loathed herself for hurting him as much as she had fiercely loved him.

Loved. She would need to get accustomed to speaking of him in the past tense.

And then she thought of Angelique, who’d had her heart broken and abused more than once. She understood now and ached terribly for her.

“How could you bear it?” she asked Angelique.

Angelique thought about this. “I think there is a difference between a good man who has inadvertently done harm, and a man who seems good, but who takes what he wants because he can, and cares not for the consequences.”

But Delilah wasn’t ready to hear this, either.

And so delilah and Angelique and Dot and Helga and Gordon and the maids were left alone with a disconsolate Mr. Delacorte, who saw no reason to ever leave such a comforting, welcoming place as The Grand Palace on the Thames. He missed Captain Hardy. He’d grown quite fond of him, perhaps the way one does of a grumpy old pet.

But he still sat in the drawing room at night, because those indeed were the rules. He’d begun to teach Dot how to play chess, which was perhaps the challenge of a lifetime, for anyone.

Mr. Farraday and Miss Bevan-Clark, having had the adventure of a lifetime and having seen themselves and each other in an entirely different light, left a letter saying they’d eloped to Gretna Green and had taken Miss Wright with them. But that they would be back to visit soon.

Delilah had been badly knocked off her bearings. It was as though she needed to relearn how to do ordinary things, like walking and breathing and speaking. She hadn’t known how much joy and hope had altered gravity, the texture of the air, the flavor of foods, her very skin, the things she craved—like his touch. She half wished she could grow a cocoon and retire in there for a bit, not feel her feelings at all while she was transformed into something new and beautiful with no memory of the earlier pain. Everyone understood she was walking wounded, and were very solicitous. But they needed her, too. They counted on her.

And in the wake of scandal, no one knocked at the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames. Certainly no one with roguish tendencies would be tempted to show up at a boardinghouse which had recently, publicly, disgorged a dozen some odd, grim-faced, triumphant soldiers hauling two struggling men wearing dresses.

Nor would any law-abiding citizens knock on the door, for that matter, knowing that smugglers had just been extricated from such a place. If a place was comfortable for smugglers, who else might it be harboring, no matter how shiny the new sign, or