“I know you do,” he said after a moment. Softly.
Lucien might have been tempted to tease her if he wasn’t certain she was indeed feeling genuinely, volatilely wretched. His vanity hoped that had something to do with him, because lately he absurdly wished that all of her thoughts circled back to him. But he could not be sure, and ultimately it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that she was suffering and all he wanted was to do anything necessary to make it stop. Even though for the past several days all he had done, it seemed, was suffer, and mainly because of her.
She closed her eyes and drew in a long, long breath, which she blew out resignedly.
“Mrs. Locksley is all that is fine and lovely. She is intelligent, amusing, and kind as well as quite pleasant to gaze upon, and if we could stock The Grand Palace on the Thames with such people, I should sleep easily for the rest of my days. I like her very much. And that is the truth.”
“Instead you are saddled with the likes of me.”
“Yes.” She said this glumly, almost absently, and with not one shred of irony.
Which normally would have made Lucien grin. But it was clear that she was indeed in a state.
“Do you know, she told us her late husband proposed on bended knee, like Galahad, before a gathering of friends?”
Lucien winced. “Oof. Poor sod. Begging and that sort of thing is not a good look on a man, that.”
Angelique eyed him balefully.
She put her needle through her embroidery once. Then again. Without looking at him she said, “It struck me that she’s precisely the sort of woman a man takes as a wife. Everything is just right about her—her appearance and breeding and sweetness.”
Usually Lucien dodged words like “propose” and “wife” the way he would a drunk man waving a knife in a pub. But Lucien was baffled by the misery with which she said these things. And Lucien had begun to envision another kind of future entirely.
“Oh, certainly, I suppose. When one gets tired of enjoying life one gets a wife like that and retires to the country to replicate the species, as the good Lord intended.”
She did almost smile at that, perverse creature that she was.
Good God, he did like her.
“Perhaps she’ll fall in love with Delacorte,” he suggested. “He has lovely eyes, too. They can make loud, lovely-eyed children.”
But she was so muffled in her mood that not even that could fully penetrate. And surely it deserved a laugh.
“Of a certainty your husband provided something of ceremony when he proposed.”
She went still. Needle poised.
She opened her mouth to say something.
Then closed it again.
“Lucien.” She gave a short sigh and squared her shoulders. “I have never been married.”
Well.
“So the Mrs. is...”
“The Mrs. is just to make me sound... respectable.” That last word was imbued with great irony.
She let that word ring as she sat in what was clearly silent misery.
He was still a moment. His first two emotions, in surprisingly swift succession, were a helpless spike of fury that these men in Angelique’s life had so disappointed her. That neither had seen her for the rare treasure she was, or seen fit to honor her with their name. And this was followed by an entirely irrational, perhaps unworthy satisfaction that no other man had ever been able to claim her as his own.
She was so clearly meant for him.
“Well, obviously your stratagem has worked, for here you are presiding over a fine inn with a list of rules, an epithet jar, and a viscount beneath your roof. And what could be more respectable than that.”