And suddenly all eyes were on Lucien.
He considered saying something glib, which would have been the fun thing to do. And indeed, it was right on the tip of his tongue.
But he was aware of Angelique’s gaze on him.
Hell’s teeth. He would need to give it some proper thought before answering.
“I would say it isn’t something to aspire to, for it adds little value to your life, all in all, Dot. But if the things written about you are true, you should be unafraid to face them with your head held high.”
He was aware of Angelique studying him as though he was a Latin text.
“Well, that is very sagely put, Lord Bolt,” Mrs. Pariseau enthused.
“Your approval means the world to me, Mrs. Pariseau.”
Mrs. Pariseau shot him a droll look. “What about you, Mrs. Breedlove? Wouldn’t you want to appear in the broadsheets?”
He pivoted his head back toward Angelique. For some reason, his breath was held.
“Oh, good heavens. Never. Firstly it would hardly be good for business, would it? And I feel life at The Grand Palace on the Thames is quite operatic enough. An ordinary, quiet respectable life is quite a fine thing and it is everything I want. And life here with all of you is as entertaining as a musicale, which almost makes musicales redundant, wouldn’t you say?”
It was Delilah’s turn to aim a dry look at Angelique.
An ordinary, quiet life. Beautiful women were seldom allowed to have those sorts of lives. They were objects of fascination, envy, lust. Men would be fools for them. Or brutes.
Had life buffeted her so thoroughly—life, largely meaning whatever men had courted her—that peace was her sole ambition?
Clever woman that she was, no doubt she knew no encounter of the naked kind between the two ofthemwould be entirely peaceful.
But neither were oceans or skies. And they were spectacularly beautiful.
His mood grayed a little as he freed another strand of yarn from where it was hopelessly tangled about other strands, and thought about how sex always changed things between people, a bit the way an earthquake shifts a landscape. After the delightful sweating and grappling, came the need to pick their way through the new terrain, confronting new qualities churned up, like possessiveness or jealousy or temper. His various associations with willing widows and mistresses often ended with recriminations and vases being thrown across the room. But then he supposed those women had been volatile reflections of the man he’d been then. Temperamental, selfish, restless.
That man would have been shocked to learn that the man he apparently was now found the notion of anything, even magnificent sex, bringing to an end these moments of quiet confidences, these evenings of ease, with Mrs. Breedlove was unsettling.
“Mrs. Breedlove, will you join us at Whist?” Mrs. Pariseau called.
Mrs. Breedlove, it seemed, would.
She tucked away her knitting, stood and left him with one of those smiles that pierced like an arrow shot by a cherub.
“Perhaps you’d consent to read aloud, Lord Bolt, while we play?” she called over her shoulder.
“Anything for a friend,” he said.
Bloody hell. He was beginning to think that was true.
Chapter Nine
“I don’t know why we’re doing this to ourselves,” Delilah said wistfully.
The estate agent had handed them the key with his usual laconic “watch out for rats and falling timbers,” and Angelique and Delilah had gone to view the building for sale near them one more time. “Thought it might be a location for a thriving whorehouse, until you came along and ruined the street with your respectable business,” he called after them. He always eyed them with a certain wondering reproach.
“Why, thank you.” Angelique and Delilah were touched.
Change was difficult for everybody.
The Grand Palace on the Thames did indeed glow like a jewel, which rather highlighted the dinginess of their neighbors. Keeping its white stone facade clean was a near Sisyphean task here at the docks, subject as it was to the winds off the sea scouring it, then racing through London, collecting as much smut as possible, and depositing it right back on the buildings by the docks. But by virtue oftheirefforts a few businesses nearby had made similar attempts to keep things a little cleaner, and within a decade or so they could probably anticipate that no men would feel free to piss anywhere beneath the windows of The Grand Palace on the Thames.