Dot raised her eyebrows as if she’d made her point.
Delilah sighed. “Oh, Dot. Didn’t we discuss the wisdom of believing all the gossip you read? I admire yourenthusiasmfor reading, but might I suggest something more calming? Mr. Miles Redmond’s book about the South Seas usually puts me right to sleep. It might be just the thing.”
Dot looked crestfallen. “Yes, Mrs. Hardy. Of course you’re right. It’s just he told Mrs. Breedlove that his name was Lord Bolt, you see. So I just assumed.”
Delilah went still.
She darted another glance at her husband. Who arched a brow.
“We won’t be longer than a few minutes,” she told him.
And if they were, he would be there in moments, because Captain Hardy’s unique gift was knowing when she needed him.
Lucien was accustomed to the stares of beautiful women. Countless times he’d watched conclusions made and discarded scud across their faces like clouds on a breezy spring day. They noted the flawlessly sleek black coat, clearly sewn by the lads at Weston. The gold watch fob. The signet ring. The English accent so elegant and precise every consonant seemed to have been turned on a lathe. The exquisite manners, the charm precisely calibrated to weaken feminine knees.
But then there were the contradictions: the childhood French that haunted the contours of his words and syntax. The long, lean body clearly not raised on great platters of English roast beef. And no proper Englishman went around with eyes like his:Vert, comme un chat, one woman, tangled in his sheets, had purred on a memorable occasion. “Like a devil,” another had hissed on a very different memorable occasion. There was indeed something just shy of feral about him, something that implied that one could never predict what he’d get up to, and the fact that this unpredictable man was dressed up in aristocratic finery made them deliciously uneasy.
He had once cared that he did not fit anywhere.
Until he’d learned that he could use this to his advantage.
He was not in the business of making anyone feel more comfortable about anything.
So he let the beautiful ladies of The Grand Palace on the Thames stare, and he said nothing.
On the little table between them, the two pieces of the token lay locked together like lovers, reunited at last. Mrs. Hardy had fetched the other half from upstairs.
Mrs. Hardy’s dark eyes were soft and curious and she wore a gentle smile. Mrs. Breedlove seemed to actually be pressing herself back against the settee. Her chin was up a little, and her hands were folded perhaps more tightly than they ought to be, though her expression was decidedly cool. As though nothing ever surprised her. Their dresses, one red, one golden, overlapped in a shining spill of silk on the seat between them.
Mrs. Hardy’s eyes went to his new gloves, which he’d removed and laid aside on the settee next to him. Black leather, with brown wrists.
They fixed there for a time.
He spoke first.
“I should have thought you’d surround the settee with velvet rope and erect a plaque if the king sat here.”
“Ah. Well, we’ve only the two pink settees at the moment, you see,” Mrs. Hardy said.
She poured the tea from a pot painted all over with periwinkles.
“Ah,” he said, taking great pains to sound fascinated.
She eyed him sardonically as she handed his tea to him. They both knew this exchange was inane.
He took it with a gracious nod. He drank it without sugar, without cream. It was a habit of childhood he could not abandon and it niggled him a bit. It spoke to a time when such things, the niceties and enhancements of life, simply could not be had.
“I once, in fact, sat on the king’s knee. At the sort of party ladies such as you would certainly not be invited to attend. I was three years old.”
It was a deliberate, testing bit of wickedness.
Neither of them even blinked.
Which he liked.
“Lord...”
“Bolt.” He’d happily say his name just like that, all day long, knowing full well the impact it had and not giving a damn anymore.