But now she seemed nearly crumpled in on herself. She was so still, so lightless, she might as well have been a puppet tossed there.
Her eyes were bitter. Two dark bruises in her face.
And any illusions he might have had about it all being all right in the end dissolved.
He drew in a breath that burned, and a chill raced down his arms. This, then, was what doom felt like. He realized all at once that he was, in truth, frightened, in a way he hadn’t been since he was perhaps ten years old. It was an entirely new sensation. Here, at the end of his career, at the moment of one of his greatest triumphs, he sensed he was losing something.
How had he, in the process of being who he was, of doing his duty, never anticipated he might murder himself somehow?
It seemed he did not, in fact, know everything.
He walked toward her slowly.
He sat down across from her on the settee.
Neither said a word for a moment.
“Congratulations, Captain Hardy,” she said finally.
“Thank you.”
That made her quirk her mouth bitterly.
Neither spoke for a moment.
“I imagine you think I’m ridiculous. Two men in dresses. Smugglers. And I didn’t... even... suspect. You must think I’m the veriest fool.”
“Never.” His voice was quiet. Hoarse. “You’re just naturally kind, Delilah. You want to see the best in people. It’s... one of the loveliest things about you. You couldn’t have predicted potentially murderous smugglers wearing dresses would move in. Nobody could.”
He could not now see how it might have been different, unless he’d never touched her at all. That would have been the honorable thing. And yet even now it seemed as though it would be easier to lasso the moon and pull it down from the sky than to do that.
But if she wanted the moon, he would certainly try to get it for her.
“Well.” She stirred herself and sat bolt upright and with a sort of macabre, artificial brightness, and brought her hands together in a little clasp. “Even so,Ifeel a right fool. I thought I was doing so well, you see, here at The Grand Palace on the Thames. That our guests might become a little family. That they were precisely what they said they were despite appearances. I see now that it’s a ridiculous dream.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” he said shortly.
“But you knew what they were? The Gardners?”
“I knew fairly quickly something was a bit off. But I could not say precisely what.”
She gave a soft laugh again. “Imagine me not knowing what you were after this entire time, Captain Hardy. I suppose it was always right there for me to see. But I was blinded by the glory of you”—she waved a hand—“and flattered, and then of course, seduced. How fortunate that you should find a naive fool like me here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, because you were able to use it to your advantage.”
Bloody hell.
“I see now, when I think about it, how cleverly you asked your questions. Well done. Did you laugh at me?”
He was suffering. “Delilah... no. I would nev—”
“You thought perhaps I might be a smuggler, didn’t you?”
He was silent. There was no safety here. Not in the truth, and not in attempting to skirt the truth. She would know.
“Delilah. I could not be sure,” he said as evenly as he could. “Surely you can see that. I cannot afford to make assumptions in the work that I do. If I do, people could die. An entirefamilydied because of the Blue Rock gang. And if they continued to fail to get into that room, I’m fairly certain they would have, of desperation, resorted to violence. They didn’t count on how dedicated you were to your guests, whether or not they were actually present. Or the captain of the blockade moving into the boardinghouse and staying.”
He could not apologize, and hewouldnot apologize, for doing what he’d needed to do. He should not feel shame. But he did; there it was. He couldn’t order it away. He could not have known that here, in this boardinghouse near the docks, that the best things about him—his strength and sense of duty and his courage and his belief in justice, the only things he’d known to be true in life, the very things that had given his life meaning—could be the things that broke his own heart.
And the heart of a woman he loved.