She’d gotten hold of a book by a Miss Jane Austen she hadn’t yet read and thought she’d see if it was worth reading aloud in the parlor to the guests. She stared at the first page for a good long time. She found her soul was still too wounded and new words and thoughts couldn’t seem to enter. And so all she did was sit and stare until something about the quality of the silence in the room seemed to change.
She looked up with a start.
Captain Hardy was standing in the doorway.
“Good day, Captain Hardy.”
“Good day, Angelique.”
She gave him a little smile. “Ah, is that how it is now? Very well, if we’re doing that, I will call you Tristan. Though Captain seems like it ought to have been your Christian name. If anyone ought to have been saluted from the cradle it’s you.” She laid her book aside.
He smiled at that. “Thank you. I think.”
Tristan had found that when brave people, the ones who everyone thinks are strong and unbreakable, were savagely hurt, they had no idea how to accommodate it. So they went about hurting for too long.
As Angelique had pointed out to him once, in some ways the two of them were very alike. He found it profoundly difficult to watch such a proud woman suffer.
That was the day she’d intimated that she knew precisely what he was getting up to with Delilah. And she had warned him, in her inimitable way, what the price would be if he hurt her friend. That was the day he knew that Angelique might glitter like a diamond, but her heart was as soft as her hazel eyes.
And hehadindeed hurt Delilah, quite inadvertently.
And she had hurt him, too.
Together he and Delilah had made it right.
And he knew he was on the right side of Angelique’s goodwill only because he had done right by Delilah.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
She nodded once, slowly. Eyeing him somewhat cagily. She knew he was not a social animal on most occasions, and he was a man of few words. He was obviously here on a mission.
He sat across from her on a little chair, since she had taken up the middle of the settee.
And to her wide-eyed amazement, he leaned toward her, and took her hands in his.
“Angelique. I am saying this as a man who knows. You have to let him suffer for you.”
She inhaled sharply in shock and tried to tug her hands free. “I don’t know what you—”
He held on to them, gently. “And if you cannot let him fight all of your battles—and I am not suggesting you should—you have to at least let him be your champion, even if he must apologize later. Because he is in love with you, Angelique. Lucien loves you. Andthatis the kind of love you want. Do you see that? Your pain is his pain. Your heart is his heart. It is all of a piece. Because you’re in love with him, too.”
He would not let go of her hands. He knew, somehow, she needed that anchor, someone to hold on to her, that she was too proud to ask for.
And before his eyes, slowly, her face crumpled. “Tristan. What have I done?”
The tears started softly, but when they took over, when not even she could stop the sobs from racking her body, he awkwardly took her in his arms and she burrowed in and he patted her back a bit. Hell’s teeth.
She needed to be crying, but he was no good at this.
Delilah tiptoed past and peered into the room.
Only to freeze, wide-eyed, at the sight of Angelique sobbing in her husband’s arms.
He gestured her into the room with a nudge of his chin.
She crept in quietly and gently, very gingerly, sat down on the settee next to Angelique.
Tristan gently transferred her into Delilah’s arms.