She thought someone somewhere must have loved him, probably his mother, for him to dive into the water. Some corner of his soul had understood that mother’s scream for what it was.
How odd it was that she, Lady Daphne Worth, of all people, found it difficult to care that she was sharing a settee with a naked criminal. For if he’d been a smuggler, he’d been a criminal. He wasn’t one now. Privateers go out on the seas with a charter from the crown, after all.
But she suspected he’d been some sort of rather grand criminal, too, if Captain Hardy remained so put out by him.
She was beginning to understand what people would be willing to do to survive. And to think, she could have gone a lifetime without knowing. Possibly it never would have mattered. But if her own life was the only bargaining chip with which she’d entered the world, she might ruthlessly, craftily barter and gamble and buy her way into something better, too. She’d learned quite a bit about herself in just a few days.
Even in sleep, Lorcan somehow exuded power and authority in the truest sense of each word. Earned. Not the sort conferred by a title. He had vanquished terrible odds to be here now. He seemed to know precisely what he wascapable of. He was a man who had done difficult things.
And yet she’d still been able to wound him with her words.
She stood to allow him to stretch out his legs. He gave a great sigh and did that. She rearranged his blankets to cover his toes.
And in seconds his breathing was even and his face utterly slack.
She collected his clothes—the wet shirt, the trousers, the stockings, his cravat—smoothed from them the wrinkles, carefully arranged them over the fire screen to dry, and then fashioned a makeshift clothesline from a strand of yarn. She could probably ask a maid for assistance with this sort of thing. But she found it meditative. It was how she cared—through service.
She turned around.
Lorcan did not quite properly fit on the settee.
One of his big furry calves had trailed off the side a bit. Very stealthily, she lifted a corner of the coverlet and draped it back over the bareness.
She hesitated.
Then lightly she laid her palm on his forehead but he was warm, not feverish. She was glad.
Chapter Twelve
The moment she heard from Dot what had happened at the docks, Angelique dropped her mending and raced to find a wet Lucien in their room, standing in front of their clothing press.
He fixed her with a searching, careful look as he pulled open a drawer in search of a dry shirt.
“St. Leger dove into the Thames to save a child and then we all pulled St. Leger out.” He sounded subdued. “We all got wet. St. Leger got the wettest, of course.”
Angelique’s hand went to her throat. “I heard. Lucien, are you...? And is he...? And the child...?”
“St. Leger and the child are both fine. As am I.”
An awkward little lull ensued, to be expected in the aftermath of an unresolved argument. The two people involved were taking each other’s emotional temperature.
Lucien tried for levity. “I’ve a little experience, as you know, with being tossed in the drink so it was a good thing I was there to advise.”
When he’d been an angry young bastard son of a neglectful duke, someone in his life had a selfish reason to want him dead. He’d been set upon and tossed into the Thames late one night and assumed drowned. Fate had intervened in the form of a rescue; he’d disappeared from London. A resurrected Lucien had gone on to shock thetonnearly a decade later.
Angelique was quiet a moment.
“Lucien, when you joke about being tossed into the drink...”
“Yes?” He pulled off his shirt.
“I’ve never told you this... but I’ve had nightmares about it. About what you told me about the night you were kidnapped and thrown into the Thames and how you could have drowned.”
He froze.
Good God, was he beautiful. She’d been married for more than a year, but when confronted by her husband’s bare torso, Angelique still felt a spasm of stunned longing.
“I dream of you sinking, alone in the water... and I wake up and I stifle my screams with my pillow so I don’t wake you.”