that shaped him.
He had, in fact, made a career and a life out of not being helpless, out of always knowing what to do. Which was why it was so unsettling to know that he couldn’t glare emotions into silence with a look, the way he could an insubordinate soldier.
But he didn’t shake his fist at the sun because he couldn’t control it, did he? He lived with the fact of it.
Still. He needed to let this thing be, for her sake and for his. He needed to leave these emotions untended and unacknowledged and he needed to avoid courting temptation. There: now that he knew what he needed to do, he felt some small measure of control returning. There was some small comfort in knowing that once she learned who he was and what he was doing here—which was inevitable, if his mission was a success—he’d sail away in his ship, and he wouldn’t have to witness her shattered betrayal for long.
But suddenly, as if she was already a memory, he found himself mining the moments he’d spent with her for new dimensions of pleasure. The satin of her throat. The beat of her heart against his. The glow of her skin in the dark. The rhythm of her breath against his throat as he moved in her. And her laugh.
Bloody hell. It was like hurling bits of straw onto a bonfire.
He rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed and tipped his face into his hands. He breathed like that, motionless. As though he were in pain.
He was in pain.
Just not the sort he’d ever experienced before. No tourniquet, no amount of whiskey, nothing in Delacorte’s upsettingly exotic collection of herbs and medicines, could ease it.
He perhaps had one recourse.
He stood and staggered wearily over to the little writing desk and yanked out the chair.
He lit the candle and pulled a sheet of foolscap toward him.
Stared at it, as if willing it to yield its secrets, the way he’d stared at the ocean the other night.
Dipped the quill in ink.
But it was torture.
He managed eleven words. Every word was like a drop of blood squeezed from a wound.
And though he tried very, very hard, not one of them rhymed.
“Llover,” Delilah said aloud. The word felt odd, very louche, and cosmopolitan in her mouth. “I have taken a lover. He was born in St. Giles.”
She imagined saying it to the Duchess of Brexford just for the pleasure of seeing her collapse in a rustle of bombazine and a crunch of stays.
That delightful fantasy notwithstanding, she still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the word.
She watched her ceiling during that hazy, lovely netherworld between wakefulness and dreaming, and reviewed the unqualified triumph of the evening. Everyone had taken a turn at singing. They were dangerously close to having a genuine musicale! Could all of her dreams be coming true in such an unlikely fashion?
Even dusty old dreams of romance she’d locked away in a keepsake box so many years ago?
She thought about Mr. Farraday and Miss Bevan-Clark, who by the end of the evening were sitting quietly together on the settee murmuring and smiling as if they’d only just met and were shyly getting to know one another. They’d certainly found the romance and adventure they’d been seeking, rather indirectly.
No. What Delilah had was a lover, not a romance. A lover who had said to her, “I was born in St. Giles,” in a quiet, diffident baritone, which seemed infinitely more thrilling and more dangerous than anything Farraday and Miss Bevan-Clark could get up to. Because she was beginning to suspect that taking a lover was not like taking a meal or taking the air—it was more like taking a beautiful drug, the sort people in opium dens apparently found surcease in. The appetite only grew with the taking of it.
And one knew what happened to people who indulged too much in opium.
“I was born in St. Giles” was like a thread thrown over a loom. For these kinds of revelations were the things that bound people together. She cherished the words, yearned toward them, and wanted to hear more and still more. All of this frightened her.
Because she truly did never again want to be at another man’s mercy.
When jealousy had jabbed briefly and sickeningly tonight, it was alarming—and edifying—to realize how easily a man could tweak her emotional weather. It called to mind the silent, inner contortions she’d performed to ensure Derring remained happy. She’d regained so