to shield her admittedly pretty eyes. Then raising them up again. Obviously this had worked to bewitch men in some fashion previously.
Captain Hardy seemed more bemused than anything.
“Have you yet seen her blink?” he asked resignedly.
“Perhaps she’s never seen a soldier before.”
“Doubtless her parents wisely kept her far, far away from them.”
“Perhaps you ought to tell her about the time you were shot. She might keel over into a swoon.”
“By all means send her over here so that I may get the swoon underway. Anything to prevent her from playing the pianoforte.”
“You’re truly not a music lover, Captain Hardy?”
“I like music well enough.” He sounded surprised by the notion that she might think otherwise. “Good music, well played. It’s just that I’m haunted by one particular sound and I don’t want anything to interfere with my memory of it.”
“The wind snapping in the sails? The ringing sound that bullets make when they glance off your iron hide?”
He’d lowered his voice. “That sound you made when I moved inside you for the first time. It has quite ruined all other sounds for me.”
It was if he’d given the entire room a mighty spin, like a roulette wheel. Heat rushed across her limbs and convened in a pulsing pool between her legs.
He smiled, slowly, wickedly, with a certain sympathetic satisfaction. She imagined him smiling rather like that after he’d run a pirate through. Satisfaction at finding just the right vulnerability and promptly exploiting it.
She would not be surprised to hear the thunk of Miss Bevan-Clark’s maidenly body toppling from the settee onto the floor.
As for Delilah, she looked down at the table.
Her breath, not to mention her composure, was lost.
He didn’t say another word.
“The reason that I won’t play Faro is that I’m not much of a gambler,” she said. “The opening of perhaps The Grand Palace on the Thames notwithstanding. It was less an act of risk than desperation, which has, as you can see, become a triumph.”
He smiled at that, too. “Where is young Farraday this evening? Certainly Miss Bevan-Clark would transfer her pretty gaze to him the moment he arrives.”
“Is her gaze pretty, then?”
Out this came, unbidden. She was appalled that she sounded as much a twit as Miss Bevan-Clark.
He let her stew in mortification for a second or so, before he said, “Certainly. But it’s not your gaze.”
He said these things so matter-of-factly. As though he’d experienced everything in the world, sifted through the dross, and was confident that he emerged with the only things of truth and value.
It was thrilling.
And a bit irritating.
And, in a way, a bit overwhelming, in truth. She hadn’t experienced any of this. Of affairs and flirtation and innuendos.
She caught Angelique’s weather eye from across the room and forced a mild little solicitous smile onto her face, and cast a glance over at the maiden aunts.
“Captain Hardy . . . while I am far from unmoved . . .”
He waited. No prompts, no interruptions, no changes in topic. He waited. As he always did.
And despite the demands of his presence and personality, this waiting felt luxurious. He allowed her space in which to be herself. He did not assume that what she had to say could possibly have no merit, because she was a woman.
He did glance down at her hands. Which were knitted together.
He noticed things, Captain Hardy did.
She put a stop to the knitting.
“I have never before taken a lover,” she said in a low voice. “And in your presence . . . reservations about that begin to seem frivolous.”
“Excellent.”
The little smile and the timbre of his voice and the way his skin took the firelight made it seem absurd that his long-fingered hands were resting against his ritualistic brandy instead of, perhaps, her breasts.
“But away from you . . . when I watch my ceiling at night . . . and perhaps it’s the way I was raised, which seems to have more of a hold over me than I anticipated . . . I begin to wonder at the difference between a woman who takes a lover she knows scarcely a thing about . . . and a woman who works in a brothel earning her living from men she knows nothing about.”
He went utterly still, his face stunned blank.
She saw the words sink in as he slowly leaned back in his chair.
His expression settled in and became troubled.
He, who so excelled at inscrutability.
Well. It seemed she possessed the power to shock, too.
“And while I understand I currently have