He seemed to be considering what to say as he studied her.
“If you’ll indulge my curiosity, Lady Worth. You thought that I assisted you from a second-story window in the dead of night in a storm, then dispatched a thief who set upon you, all in order to keep you alive long enough to ravish you in this peculiar little fairy land of a boardinghouse withrulesand apparently stocked with everyone we once knew?”
He did sound curious, and not accusatory. They were different species, after all. He was trying to puzzle out her customs.
When he put it that way, she could see how it would seem churlish. She flushed.
“I... have stopped assuming anything at all about men and their motives. But in my experience, they often do just what they want with little thought to the consequences, particularly with regards to women. And forgive me if you don’t strike me as the sort given to... charitable works.”
Surprisingly, he half smiled at this. As if she’d just delivered a surprise he did not object to.
After a moment he said, “You were fleeing a man.”
Startled, she replied, “Yes.”
“Not a husband.” It wasn’t inflected as a question.
How did he know? Was he the type of manwho could tell a spinster at forty paces? Perhaps all men could.
If she hadn’t felt desolate before, she did now.
How much information did she owe him?
And then she realized she ought to define to him who she was. To more clearly draw the boundaries of her character, and class, and station.
“The husband of an older, nearly deaf gentlewoman to whom I was briefly serving as a companion as she traveled to London to meet up with him, a position for which I was to be paid. He thought my duties ought to extend beyond the ones described to me. He was hovering in the room outside of my bedroom door, otherwise I would have made a more orthodox exit.”
Thusly she dryly summarized what had, in fact, been harrowing, frightening, and exasperating.
“Why would a gentlewoman, as you say, choose to stay in a room near the docks?”
Daphne took a breath. “The gentleman in question runs to extreme thriftiness. They were rooms over a shop owned by his solicitor, and he was offered the lodging for no cost.”
He dipped his head in a slow nod.
She sensed a dozen other questions were gathering in his mind.
But his expression changed not at all. It was clear this man was difficult to shock. Read one way, it was a strangely reassuring quality. Her own steadiness was all about effort, an effort she struggled to conceal.
His was different, she understood. And unnerving therefore. Because it seemed an earnedquality. One would have needed to experience quite a few unthinkable things to achieve an unshockable condition.
What manner of man was Lorcan St. Leger?
“Whydidyou help me?”
“Damned if I know.” He sounded sincere, and puzzled. “God saw fit to make me do penance for past misdeeds, I suppose. And perhaps because I suspected you’d say things like ‘blithely ignorant,’ which is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He reached again for the doorknob.
“My apologies for the ‘damned,’ my lady, but there’s naught on the little card of rules about cursing in the rooms.”
He winked at her and vanished into his room.
She heard the door lock immediately. As if he was afraid she might rush into the room and touch his knee again.
Once Daphne was behind a locked door she stood, motionless, to see which of the thousands of emotions she’d struggled to hold in check all night would sift to the surface first.
She was surprised to discover it was exultation. It was weak and short-lived, like the last bubble to drift to the top of a glass of champagne. But there it was.