Daphne gave a nervous little laugh. “Oh, yes. Mr. and Mrs. Blackguard! That’s us.” Some wayward impulse prompted her to pat her fake husband on the knee.
The collision of her hand and his thigh reverberated through her bones clear to her teeth.
She might as well have struck a rock.
Her hand lay still, momentarily stunned like a bird that had slammed into a window.
Long enough for the wily opportunist to cover it with his own.
Her lungs seized. She could hardly snatch the hand away in front of the tribunal deciding their fate.
They both looked down.
Her hand had all but disappeared beneath his.
The entirety of her being seemed to congregate to where their skin met.
Never mind that for the first time in her life her hand was a mere shocking few inches away from the clothed penis of a man she’d met in an alley.
It was pantomime affection and a liberty taken. By rights she ought to be infuriated, but in her exhaustion, she could not sort out the proper indignation from the clamor of things she felt. She felt two things: a gruesome remnant of bitter regret that it was not Henry’s hand; and, despite that—despite everything—strangely, obscurely comforted.
To her horror, her eyes began to burn with tears.
She looked up to see that the eyes of both women had gone meltingly soft.
A little puzzled shadow had appeared between Lord Bolt’s brows.
The cool steel of Captain Hardy’s regard was now not reserved only for her fake husband. He was watching her, too.
Captain Hardy struck her as the sort who missed nothing and never softened.
She was increasingly certain he had a very good reason not to, when it came to Lorcan St. Leger.
Who finally, gently, lifted his hand.
She withdrew her own gingerly from his thigh and tucked it away at her side.
“Daphne—the former Lady Worth—and I knew each other as girls,” Delilah explained to Bolt and Hardy.
“A pleasure, Mrs. St. Leger,” Captain Hardy said.
Daphne nodded. “The pleasure is mine, Captain Hardy.”
“I suspect you are all amazed that such a finelady as Daphne agreed to wed a great ugly brute like me. But I am no coward so I made free to ask her. I every day endeavor to be worthy of her favor.”
Such a humble, courtly speech. So nearly archaic in its cadences. As she watched that particular fairy dust known as charm settle over nearly every person in the room, she was reminded of why she distrusted it. It was so often employed to obscure a real truth, or to...maneuversomeone.
Or maybe she just envied it. She’d more than once worried she possessed no charm. Ceaseless responsibility had made her habitually briskly efficient. A shyness that no one suspected in her sometimes made her seem too stiffly formal or too earnest. And feelings of all kinds visited her with such force she sometimes went mute from them, which had always seemed to her a weakness to be disguised and managed. For if she had ever been valued for anything, it was for her steadiness.
And while her intelligence was fierce, like her father’s, her wit often had bite.
None of these qualities seemed to add up to winsomeness.
Her cheeks had gone warm.
Everyone had turned to her for her reaction and she had yet to say a word.
Somehow, she found the right ones. “You can see how he won me.”
