Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,66

If you can refrain from speaking to me as though you’re the Duchess of Brexford.”

“I loathe the Duchess of Brexford! Did I sound like her?”

“I’m assuming. I loathe her, too. But if she should ever wish to stay here . . .”

“We’d charge her double the rate.”

They laughed at this.

“Derring never would laugh at my jokes,” Delilah said. “But I laughed at all of his.”

“Puns,” Angelique said blackly. “How I hated his puns.”

Delilah wanted to say, but didn’t: Captain Hardy smiles at me when I say things, and nearly every one of his smiles contains something of surprise and delight, like I’ve handed him a gift. His laugh is wonderful, and rare. He is far more thoughtful than one would think. He has on occasion made me laugh. He is dry, and a deeper thinker than one would suspect.

But if a woman were to take a lover solely for the sake of taking a lover, none of these things ought to matter. She ought not to consider them at all. His magnificent thighs, on the other hand . . .

A wave of weakness passed through her at the thought.

Angelique said, somewhat haltingly, “I have found that desire . . . doesn’t care whether a man is good or not. It doesn’t distinguish. It sometimes fixes itself to an inexplicable object. It seems grotesquely unfair that women should be burdened with such a thing when it’s infinitely more dangerous for us, in many ways, than for men. And yet, there we have it. And the first time your heart is broken is by far the worst. The second time is not much fun, either. And finally you consign the thing to a scrap heap because it rattles about in your chest like dropped china.”

Delilah’s own heart hurt terribly, hearing this. How she wished Angelique hadn’t learned these things the hard way.

“Or so I’ve heard,” Angelique added. “I never had one to begin with, you know.”

Delilah snorted.

Chapter Seventeen

“Mr. Brinker? I’m Lady Derring, one of the proprietresses of The Grand Palace on the Thames.”

Dot had gone and let a strange man into the house after curfew. “I’m so sorry, but I did it without thinking, Lady Derring.” She’d wrung her hands. “It’s so very wet and cold out, you know how the wind gets, and it’s so warm in here, and he looks like a gentleman, and I thought, what would Lady Derring want me to do? She would want me to be kind.”

Lovely. Delilah had apparently been imparting lessons to Dot and perhaps hadn’t let on that those lessons contained nuances.

Angelique had already gone to bed. Their other guests, Captain Hardy included, were safely in, Dot had told her. She’d in fact left him with a pot of tea an hour ago.

The man in question turned at the sound of her voice. He was tall and thickset, almost perfectly rectangular. His elegant, many-caped coat swung in flawlessly cut elegance from his shoulders to his ankles. He appeared to be holding their list of rules.

Dot was right. She could almost trace the provenances of his clothes to Hoby, to Weston, or to Guthrie.

He looked at her rather . . . longer . . . than she preferred before he finally bowed.

And when he was upright, his gaze remained a trifle too familiar. His dark eyes were sheltered by straight, bushy brows and his face was heavy, pale, and very English. She fought the impulse to smooth her hair or her apron, to fidget.

Familiar. A word that belonged to her past, she realized, because she might have a title, but her station couldn’t really shield her from a gaze like that.

A man would, however, she thought rather bitterly. Damn it.

She thought of Captain Hardy snug in his bed, hopefully sleeplessly watching his ceiling and revisiting, again and again, that kiss. In other words, precisely what she’d been doing for the past two nights. But she’d also avoided being alone with him. She rather hoped, given distance, sense would settle in, because the decision seemed too momentous and too fraught, the outcome too uncertain, and part of her thought that everything would be easier if she didn’t have to make it.

She resented that she wished he was standing here right now. Lucifer and Atlas, indeed.

“My horse threw a shoe and I cannot get it seen to until tomorrow morning, I fear, Lady Derring,” Mr. Brinker told her. “I’ve stabled him at Cox’s Livery and I wondered if I could prevail upon you for a room