It would not rain forever. As soon as the roads cleared, she would be going home to her father, and to give an earl an answer to his proposal.
Lorcan would be leaving soon.
And this mad interlude in the strange little fairyland of The Grand Palace on the Thames would end.
The night of the recital and party, she emerged from dressing to find Lorcan standing in the center of the suite. He appeared to be taking it in thoughtfully and rather intently—the hearth, the settee, the little table at which they enjoyed their breakfast scones, the view from the window, as though he were planning to draw a map of it.
“I did not expect to be participating in revelry when I came to London,” she said. “This isn’t the dress I would normally wear for dancing.” She smoothed her green silk skirt. The sleeves were short; and the neckline and waist were trimmed in bronze ribbon.
He turned toward her voice.
A stillness came over him. For all the world as if he were withstanding the impact of her.
And he looked at her as though he were seeing her for the first time.
Or perhaps the last.
You are beautiful, he had said fiercely to her.
And inside her the realization dawned soft and brilliant as a spring day: he believed she was.
She thought, no matter what, she could conjure spring inside her always when she thought of him.
“It’s a very pretty color,” he said quietly.
“Thank you. I liked it because it’s very nearly the same shade of new leaves on the hawthorn outside of our home in Sussex.”
His mouth tipped up at the corner as if she’d said something singularly charming.
She didn’t know why this should make her blush.
He wore his black suit and waistcoat in a dashing pewter stripe, done up with silver buttons. He was, in essence, a walking advertisement for the lucrative possibilities of privateering. And he still looked like precisely what he was: staggeringly confident, dangerous, piratical, self-made, bursting with life. No one was going to mistake him for an earl or a viscount.
But his majesty was innate. She knew he was destined to cause a ripple in any room he deigned to enter for the rest of his life.
Her stomach twisted with a sudden realization: she might never know what the rest of his life would be like.
For an instant this so blindly panicked her she couldn’t speak.
For a quiet moment, they merely admired each other.
“Lorcan, would you like me to help you with...” She gestured to his still dangling cravat.
He glanced down. “What’s a fake wife for if not to dress me as well as undress me?”
Her face was warm.
“Tie me a fancy knot, Daphne,” he said quietly.
He stood obediently still while she deftly wound the cravat around him and tied it artfully.
When his eyes met hers, they kindled hotly. He quickly disguised it.
Her hands were suddenly clumsy.
“There,” she said finally. “Now you look like a slightly dangerous birthday present.”
He patted his cravat.