She could not regret it.
For the next two days, as the sun rose and shone and the water drew back and the clouds gave way to watery-pale blue skies, they asked each other no questions about the future. No “what if” scenarios were introduced. Nobody used the word that began with “L.”
It would have been redundant, anyway.
But they did spend an inordinate time in the suite behind closed doors. Daphne felt nearly permanently drunk with lust, distantly aware of the recklessness of all the abandoned lovemaking. She didn’t care. She, like Lorcan, had begun to understand “take what you can get while you can get it.”
“Good heavens. Like newlyweds,” Delilah whispered to Angelique, observing the sultry aura that suddenly seemed to surround Daphne and Lorcan in the sitting room for the next two nights.
Then came word, via Delacorte, that water had receded from the bridge at the end of Barking Road. Carriages could get through now.
Lorcan grew quieter and quieter as the moment came for them to part. The weight of his silence spoke of the gravity of what they felt for each other and what they were going to lose. The density of it was love itself.
She had told him once before, clearly, what sort of life she wanted. She’d meant it.
She could not imagine a life on a ship. She could not bear the loneliness of waiting, and worrying and wondering whether he would return safely.
He had said he never intended to take a wife. Regardless of what there was now between them, there was no reason not to believe him. He knew who he was.
She did not know how to make a wild rogue into a husband, or an interlude into forever.
Regardless, he made no demands or promises.
Neither did she.
They didn’t discuss her impending engagement to an earl with five children, which was the reason she urgently needed to be home before month’s end. In three days’ time.
The reason she would be on the first mail coach available when the roads cleared.
He merely loved her body with his.
The day they were to part dawned clear. They dressed, separately, and packed their belongings, separately. The mail coach that would bring Daphne back to Hampshire, to her father, and toultimately the man she would marry, would depart at just past eight in the morning.
And Lorcan was expected at the docks before then. He planned to row out to his ship with his crew to begin the process of provisioning it. They would sail by the end of the week.
Lorcan had told everyone in the sitting room that Daphne would be leaving to stay with her father while Lorcan was at sea for the next six months. Daphne was so silent and pale, such a study in grief, that everyone treated the two of them with tender solicitousness.
And as the hour for her to depart drew closer, she wept in his arms.
Quietly, but with abandon. The glorious freedom of surrendering what she felt, knowing he understood and that it mattered profoundly to him, that he suffered when she suffered and rejoiced when she did—she had never before known it, and knew she might never know it again. Sadness poured from her, much the way the sky had split and the rain torrented down the night they’d met.
She could feel the ragged pattern of his breathing, and the hammer-hard beat of his heart against hers, and the heat and press of him as he held her, tightly, as if he could brand himself with the shape of her. As he promised, he was strong enough for both of them. She knew it stormed inside him, too.
They had always known there would be one last kiss, and one last time he saw her face.
He kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, her mouth.
“Look up at the stars if you miss me, Daphne.” His voice was graveled. “I’ll be with you. Always.”
He seized his hat. And for the last time, the door shut hard behind him.
The weather was paradoxically brilliant and beautiful, given that internally Lorcan felt barren as a desert as he walked to the docks. Water had finally stopped falling, but everything was sheened in it. The eaves dripped diamonds, and cobblestones glinted like silver. Huge pearly clouds had moved aside just enough to remind the humans below that the color of the sky was actually blue. The Thames was a shining ribbon. The air remained cold enough so that his breath made white puffs.
The roads would likely be hard going for a few days, and he thought of Daphne stuffed in a mail carriage, jostling her way through the mud and ruts, to get back home again.
She would be a countess by the time his ship reached the waters of Spain again.
At that thought, the sheen was off the day entirely.
