She’d done that. She’d helped create a place where disparate people could feel cared for, comfortable, safe, and amused.
“Speaking of the sounds of the other guests, I’m given to understand that our new guest, Miss Bevan-Clark, plays the pianoforte rather well.”
He heaved a great sigh.
Miss Bevan-Clark had been gazing at Tristan with fascination, silently, since their introduction at the evening meal. Occasionally dropping her eyelashes 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 as 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 thatIwon’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.