“Is that so?” Lord Kirke said speculatively, turning to Mr. Delacorte. “You have the look of a man who can put up a good, dirty fight.”
“HaveI?” Mr. Delacorte, about whom such a thing had likely never been said, was tickled.
“No. Not in the least. Prove me wrong, Mr. Delacorte.”
“Oh, HO!” Mr. Delacorte, always delighted to be teased, gestured with a hand to the table, and they settled in.
Chapter Six
Mr. Delacorte, who was roughly the shape of an egg and had a broad, friendly face and surprisingly lovely blue eyes, was, in fact, a gratifyingly aggressive and wily chess player. He’d trapped Kirke’s queen with alacrity. Kirke was pleased. He loved when people upended his expectations, and he loathed limply played chess.
Kirke maneuvered out of that and cornered Delacorte’s queen a few moves later.
While Delacorte mulled this new predicament, Kirke could feel the little sitting room lapping at his senses seductively, as if it were a warm bath. Or as if he were a cliff it was determined to erode. A certain crafty genius was evident in its design, he thought dryly. The lovely Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand were not just proprietresses. They had a calling.
They were so committed to this calling that they’d commemorated it in the second of their seven house rules:
All guests must gather in the drawing room after dinner for at least an hour at least four times per week. We feel it fosters a sense of friendship and the warm, familial, congenial atmosphere we strive to create here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
The atmosphere in which he’d been raised could best be described as “a pack of starving wolves,” so the notion of a “warm, familial, congenial atmosphere” was as foreign to him as London apparently was to Keating. It was strangely disorienting and odd that all that seemed required of him in this room was his presence. His work had taken him into nearly every imaginable milieu—the wretchedness of the workhouses at Bethnal Green and the slums of St. Giles, glittering ballrooms, hushed libraries where the only sound was the glug of expensive brandy into snifters, the smokey male luxury of White’s, the austere dormitories of the University of Edinburgh—but his reasons for being in each of those places were rooted in purpose and duty. His own, currently somewhat charred home, he’d furnished for utility. He was in it only to sleep, usually.
It seemed to him the primary point of everything in The Grand Palace on the Thames was to... comfort. He could not quite say why. He didn’t think he would have necessarily elected to stuff blossoms in a vase in his room, for instance, but the damned blossoms suited him, which made him feel as though his soul had been clandestinely rifled through to determine his secrets. He absurdly resented it a little. He was not one to give upanythingeasily.
Nor could he object to the company. Bolt and Hardy were the sort of men he liked: both of colorful pedigree—Bolt the bastard son of a duke, Hardy born God knows where, perhaps he’d been born alreadyinthe navy, so renowned were his ruthless smuggler-catching skills—singular of personality, characters shaped by hard work and hard-won authority.
And over in the corner the conversation between the ladies had become very animated. Possibly even heated.
He thought he heard the word “ghost.”
Bloody hell. He was curious despite himself.
As Mr. Delacorte sucked on his bottom lip in contemplation, Kirke discovered that Keating’s profile was within his line of sight, and he noted that the lush curve of her bottom lip was the color of the blossoms in the vase upstairs.
At once, an involuntary primal awareness settled over him like a net of little cinders and his stomach muscles tightened.
He suddenly felt like a lecher. She was a young woman whose woefully inadequate chaperone left her vulnerable in Gomorrah, also known as London. Not one of the forthright seasoned widows and matrons who often issued unmistakable innuendo-cloaked invitations to him.
He turned his head.
The little kerfuffle in the corner was growing in volume.
“But Ipromiseyou, Dot, you’ll enjoy this one, too.” Mrs. Pariseau’s eyes were glinting with a determination. “It might even become a new favorite.”
With a flourish, she produced a book she’d been holding behind her back and held it up so that everyone could read the title:The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
“The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments?” Dot was stubbornly suspicious. “But nights are ordinary! They happen every night! The year is filled with nights! Is there even a ghost?”
“Not as such,” Mrs. Pariseau admitted.
“A love story?” Dot demanded.
“Well...” Mrs. Pariseau hedged.
“It’s a story about how women are smarter than men,” Kirke said idly.
Plink.Silence fell like a dome, so abruptly it was nearly audible.
Alarm and titillation ricocheted between everyone present: it seemed the controversial Lord Kirke was wasting no time in being controversial, right there in the sitting room.
