St. John and the German boys took this opportunity to excuse themselves.
Eventually Hardy’s stare evolved into somethingmore abstracted. He turned slightly away, and drank his own brandy.
“Isn’t it remarkable how two boys from St. Giles have since prospered. I own my ship outright now. I’ve been fortunate in my investments.”
“Investments, eh?” Bolt interjected hurriedly. “What do you like these days?”
“Did well with canal shares, in particular, but I do think railroads are going to become important. And gaslight.”
Bolt and Delacorte nodded. Hardy likely took little pleasure in imagining Lorcan prospering thanks to a noxious mingling of ill-gotten gains and privateer plunder.
“It’s amazing to think there’s probably not a thing in the world I truly want that I can’t somehow get now. And I’m grateful.” Lorcan said this almost piously.
It was true. Inwardly, he was just a little sardonically amused.
And he was suddenly glad for an opportunity to say it aloud in a room that contained Tristan Hardy, lest the captain think his beautiful wife and cozy home with the fine smoking room were merely the rewards of virtue.
Lorcan returned to their suite from the smoking room to discover Daphne standing by the hearth, one of her embroidered stockings dangling from her hand.
She spun about and held it sheepishly behind her back.
He paused in the doorway, bemused and diverted by her flushed cheeks.
He contemplated saying, “I saw your stockings before I ever saw your face, when the wind whipped up your skirts. You’ve some of the finest calves I’ve ever seen,” just to watch her blush deepen, or see her expression change. Or to hear what acerbic, precise thing she’d say in her elegant voice.
He respected her dismay and kept his eyebrows in check, though they wanted to suggestively launch by way of teasing her.
“I wasn’t expecting you just yet,” she said finally. “I hope you don’t mind. I rinsed my stockings and I thought I’d hang them to dry out here in the main room, since the fire is larger and hotter. I thought they would dry more quickly.”
“Not at all,” he said. “If you can survive the intimacy of my forearms, surely, I can endure your drying stockings. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to rest here on the settee a bit.”
“Of course not,” she said, magnanimously, while also managing to intimate, “I can hardly stop you.”
Amused, he sighed and sank down onto the comfortable settee. Every bloody thing in The Grand Palace on the Thames was comfortable.
It was like a great trap for domesticity.
A woman ought to be exempt from ogling when she was merely trying to hang up stockings, Lorcan thought. But his mind was restless and his mood remained on edge, and he restedhis eyes on her the way he would watch a bird flit from tree to tree, lulled by the way her shoulder blades shifted beneath her dress as she reached toward the mantel, the sway of her skirts about her ankles, the skim and cling of the fabric over the full apple curve of her arse when she bent a little. She made performing a homely chore seem as graceful as a dance. He didn’t know why he felt blessed to be in the presence of it, but he did, as though he’d suddenly walked in on a snatch of pretty music.
And he imagined her as a girl who had lost her mother, suddenly in charge of a vast house and three men. Just a wee thing, engulfed by duty in the midst of grief.
And it wasn’t as though he hadn’t witnessed girls scrape and struggle before.
That a man such as Daphne’s father should have so many blessings, including a daughter who worshipped him, and had been so cavalier about that she’d nearly been robbed at knifepoint near the docks, struck him as somewhat despicable. It was the carelessness of it. The waste of it all. The indolence of a sort exhibited by Lord Vaughn, who could not help what he was.
“It’s a shame about your father’s lumbago,” he said idly.
“I beg your pardon? He hasn’t lumbago!” She gave a little laugh.
“His game leg, I meant. The wooden one.”
“You’re thinking of someone else, surely. Some pirate friend of yours.”
“Oh, right, right. Hisrheumatismis the trouble.”
“He hasn’t that, either, Lorcan,” she said crisply.
“His wasting lungs. A pity about those. Can hardly get a breath.”