Normally, she might have laughed.
But without warning, her temper ignited. She went rigid instead.
“Lucien, you’ve hardly spoken to me for days.” She gave his chest a little shove.
He was surprised. “You know we’ve been busy. Sandbags at the warehouses in preparation for the storm. Meetings with Lloyd’s. With investors. With merchants.”
“I understand. But I’m not like Mr. Delacorte’s midnight cheese. You might have to talk to me a little before you... partake.”
“Partake?”he quoted incredulously.
“Hike my night rail, then.”
He rolled over again and lay flat on his back. He looked stunned. He lay there, clearly speechless.
“You’re the son of a duke,” she continued.
“Oh, we’re still on the ‘beneath you’ question. This is what you want to talk about before we sleep, Angelique? Yes. I’m the bastard son of the worst possible duke who is wholly disinterested in me. No, I don’t feel as though I married beneath me. What does that even mean?”
She could not quite articulate what she meant. Or rather, she felt a little too unsettled and raw to explain it to Lucien, and a little too tired to find the proper words.
Before Angelique had met Delilah, and well before she’d met Lucien, she’d been a governess. But she’d left in disgrace after the gentleman of the house had taken advantage of her. Thus had begun a terrifying descent from decent society until she found herself the mistress of an earl who’d left her—and his wife, Delilah—destitute. She and Delilah had seized upon The Grand Palace on the Thames as a lifeline.
Until Lucien, every man she’d ever known had preyed upon her beauty, used her, and discarded her. She’d endured it, in order to survive.
“You’re thinking about the governess that Havelstock married,” he hazarded, slowly. “And the fact that Lady Worth married a privateer.”
“I was. A little.”
“Is it because you were once a governess?”
She was silent. In truth, though Lucien knew the entire truth of her past, and was fiercely protective of her and had never once judged her, she had never fully explained to him some of the things she’d felt or experienced.
In part because she could still feel the shame of it when she was tired or vulnerable. And in part because he would suffer enormously on her behalf.
“I never thought of marrying anyone at all until I laid eyes on you, Angelique,” he said quietly. But she could hear a bit of impatience in his voice. It was something he felt she should understand implicitly.
“And I married you, didn’t I?” she asked. “What do you suppose that says about my judgment?”
“What the devil?” Lucien was bewildered now.
“Both you and Captain Hardy saw fit to not only question our judgment with regards to Daphne and Mr. St. Leger. Does that apply to my judgment ingeneral, or with regards only to that St. Leger?”
Lucien had gone rigid now. “Is that what this is about? St. Leger? Suddenly I’m too busy to give you the kind of attention you want so yourthoughts have wandered off to a behemoth with an earring?”
“What on earth?” She was aghast. “My thoughts are notwandering. Is that what you think of me? That I’m just that bloody fickle? That I’ll dream about any man in your absence?”
She’d propped herself on her elbow to stare down at him in outrage.
“No. But how about this?” Lucien said brightly. “We make love tonight and you pretend I’m St. Leger.”
“ARRRRRRRGH!”She flounced herself out of bed, seized her pelisse from the wardrobe, threw it on, and stalked out the door.
Usually, they performed their little bedtime rituals together. Tristan would sit on the bed to pull off his boots while she brushed and plaited her hair at her dressing table, because he found it soothing to watch her tame all that silky darkness. And they would have a cozy, meandering chat. Nonsense and seriousness all entwined with the coded language of marriage and love—little jokes, endearments, the details of the world they’d created between them when they’d wed.
Then they would tumble into bed and into each other’s arms.
Theblissof it all.