“But it’s just like him. He is always doing brave things,” Daphne said softly.
Even somewhat defiantly.
Lorcan looked at her swiftly.
Maybe it was the two drops of whiskey she’d just sipped. It was odd how little this seemed like a lie. As though something within her, beneath her defenses, understood this to be essentially true.
Captain Hardy merely nodded.
“You’ll take care of him?” Captain Hardy said finally. Gruffly.
She had a feeling he wanted to say a good deal more, but his very presence, the whiskey gift, a little jest and a taciturn compliment, somehow said what a thousand fancier words couldn’t.
“Of course,” she said softly.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said.
He departed.
Daphne and Lorcan stared at the closed door.
She thought she was beginning to more clearly understand a few things. “Captain Hardy was a blockade captain,” Daphne said carefully.
It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yes, a brilliant one. But not a perfect one. And that’s what he is struggling with.”
She turned to Lorcan.
“Blockade captains are charged with capturing smugglers?”
He looked at her at length.
“Yes,” Lorcan said finally, gently.
Clearly, he was not going to guide her to conclusions that she was about to make on her own.
She was suddenly certain he would answer her questions if she mustered the nerve to ask them. She did not want to ask them. She wanted to remain suspended in this moment for a little while, spent, warm, a trifle tipsy, a condition in which judgment would glide right off her. A rare, pure state of just being, which allowed truths to surface, unfettered by breeding, manners, or assumptions.
From his nest of coverlets, from beneath eyelids at half-mast, Lorcan watched Daphne as she watched the fire. He liked the lines of her profile—the soft swell of her lips, her sharp little nose. The valiant Lady Worth, he thought, bemused. She’d leaped to help him today before she’d known he was an alleged hero. Within her was a fundamental decency and sense of fairness. She had taken care to thank him for her window rescue, even as it must have scraped against her pride.
Your truest self was what sprang forth when you were tested, Lorcan had come to know over the years. Challenge any man, or, he supposed, woman, and you’ll discover their wounds and weaknesses as surely as you’ll discover their strengths.
He wondered what it said about him that he’d dived in to save a child. He hadn’t known that he would. It had simply seemed unthinkable not to.
More accurately, he hadn’t thought at all.
“That sound.”
She lifted her head. “I beg your pardon?”
He was surprised to realize he’d said those words aloud.
He cleared his throat. “She screamed when he fell in the water. His mother. It was as if... it was the sound of someone’s heart being sliced out. It nearly peeled the skin from me body. I have heard screams before, mind you. But I’ve never heard a sound like that before and I never want to hear a sound like that again.”
Daphne’s breath left her in a gust and she squeezed her eyes closed. As if she could see it all too clearly.
He was suddenly very glad he’d told her, because it was so very clear she understood.