To their credit, her brothers both visibly recoiled as this appalling sentence registered.
Their heads pivoted between her and her father.
“What on earth...? Father? Daphne? Is this true?” Charles was bewildered.
“She wanted to help your third cousin, Mrs. Leggett, who offered to pay her,” her father said tersely. “I could see no reason to deny her the wish to help. She would have been paid. Daphne, were you paid?”
Daphne couldn’t speak. Her heart broke a little that this was the first question her father chose to ask.
“How... how... did you find us?” Montague asked Lorcan.
“I have friends everywhere, in all walks of life,” Lorcan said. “Many in London, Calais, Dover. I gave my message and your names to the right people and merely asked that it be passed on. It seems it was.”
This was not a sentence calculated to make anyone comfortable. It rather made him sound omnipotent, and he was unnerving enough as it was.
“I did this on the same day I found an orange.” He turned to Daphne.
“What an efficient day that was,” she teased softly.
He smiled at her.
Her brothers’ eyes had gone huge, witnessing the two of them smiling at each other.
“Daphne...” Her father’s voice was trembling with outrage. “Whoisthis man? What the devil is going on?”
This man is the heart of my heart, she wanted to tell him. An outrageously demanding, skilled lover who took my virginity and made me scream with pleasure, then cradled me in his arms as though I was treasure. My rescuer. A peeker into my soul. This man is possessive and vulnerable and brutal and brilliant and funny and he’s mine. He’s mine.
She longed to say it.
Her voice was lost.
“Daphne,” Lorcan said softly.
And suddenly they were the only two in the room.
She smiled softly at him.
She wished she wasn’t so weary, and sweaty, and a trifle disheveled, but the night they’d met her hair had stood up fuzzy as a pussycat and he’d fallen in love with her anyway. He was looking at her as if she were an angel sent down from heaven, with that mixture of bemusement, wonder, affection, and frank desire.
He cleared his throat. “I should like to speak privately with you, if you are amenable,” he said quietly.
For a moment she couldn’t speak.
“Of course,” she finally managed on a whisper.
“Now, see here, Daphne...” Her father sounded nervous. And incensed.
Lorcan turned to her father and said very politely, “If you would be so kind as to excuse us for a moment, Lord Worth.”
It was not a question.
Her father, whether out of astonishment or outrage—or fear—wisely said nothing at all.
She led Lorcan into a tiny sitting room and shut the door. And locked it.
She knew everyone outside that door would press an ear against it. She didn’t care.
The settee wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the one in their suite at The Grand Palace on the Thames, but it was smaller, which meant they really had no choice but to sit very, very close. Her thigh right up against his hard one.