“I accidentally caused her to drop her best stockings into the fire and up they went.”
“Oh, you can’t go and burn a woman’s stockings,” Delacorte said with great conviction. “But most rows are seldom about one thing, are they?”
“Not with women, apparently,” Lorcan said dourly.
This was a novel experience. All of this. Discussing woman problems while in bed with a man.
“Have you any lady friends, Delacorte? A frisky widow, perhaps?”
“Oh, I’ve a few lady friends up and down the coast who are game for a tumble now and again.” He brightened. “There’s one in Devon who always gives me dinner and she knows a few saucy tricks.”
“Tricks, eh?” Lorcan was instantly intrigued.
“She takes two fingers...” Delacorte illustrated by holding up two of his.
“Aye?”
“...and she shoves them up my—”
Lorcan dragged the pillow over his ears just in time. There were limits to what a man could bear in one evening.
He returned the pillow to beneath his head just as Delacorte was saying, “She seems a lovely girl, your wife. A bit sad, maybe.”
“Sad?” For some reason this observation bothered him a good deal.
“It’s probably the weather,” Delacorte said. “We’re all a bit brought down by it. Even me, a bit.”
“Cagedin by it,” Lorcan said. “That’s the feeling, after a while. One gets to know how to endure it over the years.”
“That, too. And true enough.”
“She’s worried about her father and her brothers.”
“There, now, you see. Every little thing looks a bit bleaker when you’re worried about one thing. I find lots of happy shouting takes my mind off things. Donkey races, a lively pub. Or beating Bolt in chess.”
“They are good-for-nothings. Her fathers and brothers.”
He was assuming a lot. But if there were three men in a family and the only daughter was exiting from a window in the middle of the night at the London docks because the father had gambled away their fortune, then as far as he was concerned no other conclusion could be drawn.
“Then it’s a very good thing she has you,” Delacorte said.
Damn.
Lorcan went still.
How had this happened? How did he come to feel responsible for this woman?
Because he bloody well did.
He had only himself to blame.
He closed his eyes briefly, and unbidden images flitted in. Daphne sitting in the window with the sun on her hair. Her hand resting on his arm as he led her into the sitting room. Her slim shoulder blades moving when she hung up her stockings with deft grace. There was a fragility to her at odds with her lacerating wit and crackling eyes and ramrod pride. She would fight like the devil not to break. But she was breakable. He was certain of it. No one who felt things as strongly as she did was unbreakable.
It infuriated him that the men in her life did not seem to care. Caring seemed the very least a man could do.
What a fortunate thing it was she had a marriage offer.
But then he wondered if the husband would be any better.
