Angelique bit her lip. And then she sighed. “And this one did give us three guineas, and hope, after a fashion, when we had none. Though it was hardly gracious of him to remind us. Alas, my sense of fairness thinks we owe him.”
“If he proves intractable beyond even our expertise, I’ll ask my husband to intervene.”
Delilah still blushed and faltered a little over the words “my husband.” Angelique thought it was adorable even as it whipped her own cynicism into a bit of a white-capped froth. If she were a wagering woman—and she certainly wasn’t, at least not beyond Whist, as the trajectory of her life was a testament to the fact that she was bad at it indeed—she’d put money on the fact that Delilah would say those words in a complicated variety of inflections as the years went by, not all of them flattering.
Delilah seemed to be waiting for Angelique to say something.
Angelique finally made a bored, noncommittal sound, something like “peh,” a syllable she was certain she’d never before uttered in her life, and lifted her hand vaguely.
“I expect we’ll find he’s quite manageably human, as are all men, ultimately,” Delilah mused. “We just have to find his weakness.”
That was the trouble. Standing next to him had been a bit like standing next to a mountain, or an obelisk. She’d detected no weakness at all.
Chapter Two
Lucien could find no fault with his room, really.
It wasn’t for want of trying.
The fire was lively, and it warmed every corner. Not a hint of lint or a shadow of a wrinkle disturbed the surface of the blue-and-white quilted counterpane, which was crowned by two tempting, plump white pillows. Sunlight ricocheted from the spotless, gleaming wood of a handsome little writing desk opposite the bed; a handful of blossoms sprang from a blue-and-white porcelain vase perched on its right edge, and on its left edge rested a little rosewood writing box, presumably so the tenants here could write letters to their friends and relatives extolling the virtues of this inn by the docks.
And as he looked at the desk the memories crashed over him like slops dumped from an upper-story window. Of other blossoms in another room. Of a music box that had lit his mother’s face up like the sun.
And of a letter that had killed the light in her forever.
Lucien had born witness to both moments. But the duke had been present for only the first. The coward.
Lucien was anything but a coward. He’d proven that to himself time and again. He was hardened and jaded and his confidence was a formidable thing, built up like muscle—or scar—over the past brutal, satisfying, edifying decade. He’d created his own wealth, then lost it through speculation and wiser for it, rebuilt it. At the age of thirty-three he’d learned that anything—pirates, illnesses, storms, wealth, mistresses, being hurled into the Thames in the dead of night—could happen at any time.
But damned if he could yet reconcile the jovial, smiling man who’d given his mother that music box with the man who had written that letter. Because one man had carried him on his shoulders when he was three years old, paid for an Eton education when he was thirteen, bought him a watch when he was fifteen years old because “a man ought to have one,” got him elected to White’s at seventeen, and had brought them to live in a country house when he was very small, where his mother gaily stuffed every available vase with blossoms.
The other man had cut them adrift with a few words scrawled on foolscap. Abandoned them, like the slops out the window.
And now this man had aproperwife and aproperson and heir. Which was essentially the primary responsibility of a duke, after all.
In his more honest moments Lucien sometimes suspected his failure to understand this was more an unwillingness to understand. Because a cold, quiet fury stirred when his thoughts touched on it. And fury tended to blind.
When he was at last satisfied he was the man his father could never be—when he was satisfied that he was the manhewanted to be—Lucien had invested in cargo sailing for England. He’d sailed home ahead of it. Because Englandwasindeed home. It had been a decade. And it was time.
He would get answers to all of his questions. He would get justice, and if it was the last damned thing he did, he would get his mother’s music box back.
He ventured forward and idly, almost tentatively, lifted the lid of the little writing box, as though he half-expected it to play Mozart, like his mother’s box. Inside he found foolscap, ink, sand, everything he needed to write his memoirs, if he so chose. He smiled tautly. He could call them... oh,Always a Bastard.
Perhaps in the ludicrous eventuality that his plans for opening a gaming hell did not come to fruition—it had been a full ten years since he’d failed to accomplish what he set out to do—he would write them. Because one way or another he was going to make certain his father and his duchess would never be able to do whattheyhad set out to do all those years ago: erase Lucien and Helene Durand from their lives.
He closed the lid crisply and sat down on the edge of the bed to test it for bounce.
Which it possessed.
Next he decided to test the pillow for softness. He fell backward and let his head sink down onto it.
The next thing he knew, he was jerking awake from a dreamless sleep.
He turned his head and was startled to discover the room’s window revealed a slice of the night, a rooftop, and a bit of a crescent moon.
He fished in his pocket for his gold watch and confirmed that it was after the dinner hour.
“I’ll be damned,” he murmured. It was a magic bed, apparently. When his bed was a bit lumpy or the pillow less than cloud-like, his dreams were sometimes dark as brackish ocean water, and he turned and turned helplessly in that dark, struggling to find his way to consciousness again.