Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,15
left her in a gust. “You don’t mean it!”
“Oh, I’m quite serious,” Angelique said almost blithely. “I’ve had enough. I have played all of the modest hand that I’ve been dealt in life and I have played it badly, and I have lost again and again and I am out. I am weary of the perfidy or sheer tedium of men, and I see no way to prosperity or comfort without saddling myself with one of those creatures, and I haven’t the fortitude to begin again, or the imagination to become a flower peddler, for instance, and dream of being rescued by a prince. Princes do not exist, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t exert the effort to rescue me. Dreams are pointless. I am done. But cheers to you, Lady Derring. I wish you the best.”
“But . . . your jewels! You can sell your jewels and live on the proceeds!”
Was she was actually campaigning for her husband’s former mistress to sell the jewels he’d bought her?
“If I sell them, I shall have enough to live in relative comfort for a year, perhaps two. I aspire to more than mere survival.”
And with that, she reached for her glass of sherry.
Delilah seized Angelique’s wrist and held it fast.
And suddenly Delilah knew, without a doubt, that she was stronger when someone needed her. Stronger, perhaps, than this woman, who might be sophisticated and clever and jaded but who had acquired her polish the way gems in a tumbler do. She might know infinitely more than Delilah did about all manner of things. But she suspected one could only be tumbled and jostled so many times before saying enough.
Delilah had been a countess for six years, after all. She’d gotten accustomed to controlling one or two things.
Angelique wasn’t the only bossy one.
“It’s a shame,” she said, her tone light, her grip firm. “I am here tonight because I came to look inside my inheritance, the building adjacent. But I’m not certain Dot and I should venture into it on our own. Since I am a bit naive and unfamiliar with the hazards that may await in this part of town. And do call me Delilah.”
Angelique narrowed her eyes.
She clearly suspected Delilah of a tactic.
The reason Delilah was so very good at hiring the best staff (with, perhaps, the exception of Dot, and the traitorous butler, her husband’s choice) was because she understood that everyone, to some extent, needed to be needed and appreciated for the things they liked best about themselves, and for fine qualities they might not even realize they possessed.
“Well, then,” Angelique finally said, “do you care to pull one of your hatpins, Delilah, so that we have a fighting chance against rats?”
Chapter Five
On his first day as blockade commander, Tristan had ordered the burning of every single sailing vessel in Hackbury.
He’d stood there, cold eyed and stone-faced, on a gray morning in Sussex, staring down the villagers through the flames as his men torched the boats, one by one. And there had been defiance in some of the villagers’ eyes, but not one of them dared say a word. They knew their days of lending horses for late-night smuggling runs in exchange for a cask of contraband rum, of ferrying contraband tea along secret cart tracks toward London, of rowing out to reel in casks of goods sunk near shore brought in by boats painted black, of piloting their own black boats were over. Every last sailing vessel in Hackbury had been used in smuggling somehow. They were, in fact, getting off lightly.
Next time they would not.
Hardy is ruthless. Word spread quickly: he was a different sort of blockade commander. He taught his men to be relentless. Organized. Thorough. And tactically, skillfully violent. They slashed open coiled ropes on ships to find the tobacco hidden within. They found the false bottoms in barrels where illicit liquor was stored; they once even hacked apart the mast of a cutter to find it hollow and stuffed with silks. They were everywhere, day and night, haunting the country and coastal byways on horseback and watching it in towers. They could not be bribed, like blockade runners of yore. They were zealots and they were heroes. Because while some villagers were willing participants, more of them were terrorized into silence or participation by increasingly murderous gangs. Smuggling had held them captive, and Hardy’s men were setting them free.
He was born for the job. Tristan understood smugglers. How they thought, and how they