She laughed. “Mr. Marchand seems unusually wise with regard to children. I wonder what his story is?”
“It’s actually a little like mine. St. Giles included, according to Bolt. And I expect a man like him won’t ever feel safe sharing all of his secrets until the right woman comes along.”
She knew this was true of her beloved husband.
“Why do I have the feeling that being a father will be a thousand times harder than being a blockade captain?” he murmured.
“One is about war, the other is about love?” she guessed.“And as Eros demonstrated when he shot Apollo, love is even more challenging.”
“It almost seems greedy to want more out of life than we already have. I feel lucky every single day,” he told her. “And yet... a little Delilah... a little Tristan...”
Her heart felt swollen as she imagined a little boy that looked just like him. “We’ll make it work the way we’ve made everything work so far. And if for some reason it doesn’t happen for us...” Her voice had gone a little thick. “We’ll make that work, too.”
They fell quiet.
“By the way, Tristan?”
“Yes, love?”
“My favorite look of yours is the one that comes over your face... when we’ve just, ah, joined... and I’m under you... and I’ve just wrapped my legs around your back...”
“Oh, I think I can oblige you withthatlook, milady,” he murmured.
It had felt almost sacrilegious to do something so mundane as play spillikins with Mrs. Pariseau in the sitting room a mere few hours after she’d been kissed into weak-kneed oblivion. It was Ginny’s valiant attempt to prove to herself that nothing had really changed. But she’d played badly. Her blood had been heated to lava temperatures a few hours earlier and had only just now ebbed to a distracting, low simmer. She blamed that for her unsteady hands.
Well, that, and a lingering, wild, piercing exultation that made every breath feel like the first she’d ever taken.
This exultation would not and could not and should not last.
But she decided she wanted to be alone with it as long as it did, to savor the feeling.
So finally she excused herself so she could pace in her own little room.
She walked from door to window over and over. Giddy. Enervated and frightened.
She’d been raised within the confines of a set of beliefs about class and aristocracy. She was a lady and proud of it. She’d grown up thinking she knew precisely how gentlemen and ladies should behave, what kinds of friends she ought to cultivate, what constituted goodness and morality. There was a right kind of man and a wrong kind and a right kind of woman and a wrong kind. At no point had she thought to question any of the things her parents had taught her. Why would she? Everyone she knew felt the same way.
But now it was as though the kaleidoscope of her life had been given a twist. All the pieces were the same, but everything looked different.
She understood now that Lucifer’s Fall, that alleged palace of sin, was after a fashion Marchand’s monument to love and his fortress against loss. He had been born into chaos and survived the unthinkable and had still managed to embrace life with grace, humor, courage, panache, and a healthy helping of insufferable arrogance. She could only begin to imagine all of the things he’d been compelled to do to become the person he was today, so very many of them unsavory.
All of those experiences were the scaffolding upon which his extraordinary character had been built.
The daughter of a viscount could hardly veer farther away from her upbringing than passionately kissing a rogue in a graveyard. And not just any rogue. An orphan bastard who had once eaten a rat, rammed a cutthroat in the larynx with his elbow, was apparently wealthier by far than the Woodvilles, and had been instrumental in divesting the Woodville heir of his fortune, but who had essentially looked after their daughter as though she was infinitely more valuable than the Ming vase they were seeking.
One might even say—though this felt like the height of heresy—better than the father who could not have been bothered to drive his high-flyer carefully.
She could too vividly imagine how stricken her parents would be if they’d known about him, however. How betrayed they would feel.
But, oh, God... when she was in Marchand’s arms, she could feel how badly he’d needed to be held.
Almost as desperately as she’d wanted to hold him.
Her heart twisted.
She could not bear to be the reason he suffered another single moment of pain or loss.
And yet it seemed inevitable.