Magnus coughed a laugh, startled.
“Delacorte.” Lucien stared at him. “For God’s sake. Colonel Brightwall is our esteemed guest. If you say things like that... he’s going to want an affectionate nickname, too.”
Magnus smiled. This conversation was the reason Magnus liked smoking rooms in general. Sequestered in such a place, men didn’t have to pretend that they weren’t fundamentally a bit awful, and at least as gossipy as women, if not more. Any night at White’s revealed the truth of this.
“Believe me, I’ve been called many things other than my name.” He paused. He couldn’t help himself. “How much is a lot?”
“No one stands by the Dawsons’ door to do a count, but five times a day seems to be the outside guess. Judging from the... sounds,” Delacorte informed him.
This conversation was doing very little to distract Magnus from his self-inflicted sensual torment.
“That’s about all a bloke is useful for in his twenties, so hats off to him.” Magnus blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Though I’m grateful the French didn’t get him so he can enjoy himself now. The army will be hard enough on him.”
All the men in the room smiled knowingly, as they were all closer to forty than to thirty years in age.
The days of five times or more a night, however, were behind them. And every last one of them was thinking this, and not saying it.
But Magnus doubted anyone could burn more volcanically than a man who had longed for the same woman for nearly five years. Not even a twenty-year-old man.
She’d once loved a young man of that age. And that man had kissed her, and held her face tenderly. This was indeed burned upon Magnus’s memory.
But Magnus had touched Alexandra like a lover today to let her know that he recognized her dawning desire, and that he knew it was all for him. He’d wanted her to know that he not only saw this... he knew what to do about it.
But he might as well have set himself on fire. He had restlessly burned for the rest of the afternoon.
Regardless of what he’d told her, he didn’t think she could ever truly comprehend how desire could be a form of suffering, or what it had cost him to endure it.
He could not quite shake off a low-simmering anger. Wanting a woman who had betrayed him felt like a weakness. Surely war ought to have drummed all frailty out of him.
And yet he felt weak in an entirely different way when he thought of her kneeling next to Mrs. Scofield, gripping her hand, and, with her inimitable fiery grace... defending him.
“Your suite is in the annex, so you may not beaware of this, Colonel,” Delacorte said. “But that little wife of his makes noises like you’ve never heard in your life.”
Captain Hardy sighed. “Delacorte... we aren’t completely exempt from being gentlemen in here.”
“I apologize. But the colonel needs to understand the full picture, I think,” Delacorte defended. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be discussing it. And I didn’t say it was a bad thing. It’s just very loud.”
Magnus looked at Hardy and Bolt for confirmation, eyebrows upraised.
“It’s... good God, it’s quite something,” Bolt agreed, reluctantly. Uncomfortably.
“Ah.” Magnus nodded slowly, taking this in.
It was a damned struggle not to shift restlessly at the thought of making a woman moan in pleasure.
“Maybe Mrs. Dawson is doing it because Corporal Dawson asked her to do it,” Delacorte reflected. “After all, everyone has different tastes. We’re all men of the world. What wouldn’t you do for the right woman? A woman once asked me to say ‘yes, Your Majesty’ over and over again while we were, ah, enjoying a little jingle bang, and did I do it? Yes, I did.”
The other men stared at him.
“I’ll tell you the greatest sacrifice I ever made for a woman,” Lucien finally said. “After I married her, I moved into this boardinghouse, whereupon I met you, Delacorte, and was subsequently forced to hear that story, which I cannot now ever unhear.”
“Ha.” Delacorte, secure in Lucien’s affections, was always delighted to be teased. He gestured with his cheroot at Bolt and Hardy. “I heard the two of you were standing by their door with your pistols drawn. Very gallant of you to want to rescue the girl from the throes of pleasure, of course. But one would think two worldly fellows like yourselves ought to have guessed what was going on in there. A bloke starts to forget when he gets up in years, I suppose.”
Hardy and Bolt fixed him with baleful gazes.
Delacorte smiled at them kindly, wildly amused at having scored a little point.
Chapter Twelve
