Lady Derring Takes a Lover

by Julie Anne Long

  She stared at Delilah the way Farraday had stared at Captain Hardy. As if surely a grown woman—a widow, no less—no matter how pretty, couldn’t possibly appeal. She was practically a different species, in Miss Bevan-Clark’s mind.

  “And I should be honored if you’d dance the waltz with me, Miss Bevan-Clark,” Captain Hardy said.

  “I should be delighted, Captain Hardy,” Miss Bevan-Clark said as defiantly as if she was making a closing argument in court.

  “I should be pleased to dance with Dot,” Mr. Delacorte said.

  He would until he tried it, thought Delilah.

  Dot performed a witty little curtsy and managed not to tip over, and Delacorte extended his arm.

  “Miss Gardner and Miss Gardner?” Captain Hardy surprised everyone by aiming a determinedly inviting expression toward the sisters in the corner.

  “Oh, we cannot dance,” Jane Gardner said very, very meekly.

  “But I insist,” Captain Hardy said. Kindly. Very gently. “I shall be happy to show you how to waltz if you’re unfamiliar with it. Every woman ought to know it.”

  There was a brief silence as they stared at him, eyes enormous, before Margaret looked down at her lap again.

  “You must,” Captain Hardy repeated. Coaxingly.

  “Oh, no one wants us to trod upon their feet.” Jane gave a soft laugh. “We shall dance with each other. It’s how we learned, after all.”

  There were token protests and demurrals, but finally the Gardner sisters were persuaded to stand up together. They would need to run a gauntlet of furniture and dancers to escape from the room, anyway.

  That left Miss Wright to turn the pages of the music for Angelique.

  Angelique laid her fingers on the keys and leaned into a sprightly, competent version of the “Sussex Waltz.”

  And the unlikely troop of strangers rotated about the room in a rather constrained oval.

  Mr. Farraday’s version of a waltz approximated a lope, and it was a bit like hanging on to a large dog by a lead. Not unpleasant, but it required all of her skill and focus.

  It was undeniably a surprising pleasure to dance again. Derring had done the minimum required of him at the three balls they’d attended while they were married. It had seemed so freeing, so very unlike Derring, to surrender to something so frivolous as turning in a circle around a room. Derring’s inner life only revealed itself in the things he bought.

  “Sorry. Oh, sorry,” Dot was muttering as Delacorte steered her past. He jerked his trod-upon feet from under hers with swift grace for one so sturdy. It almost resembled a jig.

  When Captain Hardy sailed competently by with Miss Bevan-Clark, through some graceful magic, he somehow smoothly transferred Miss Bevan-Clark into the arms of Mr. Farraday.

  While he absconded with Delilah.

  Her breath was quite lost for a second.

  They took a wordless few moments to adjust to the feel and rhythm of each other.

  It was an uncommonly sweet feeling, her hand in his, his hand at her waist, rotating about in a circle in this pleasant homely room surrounded by a cheerful lot of near misfits. He wanted to be kissing her. He wanted to feel his body against hers.

  But holding her hand like this seemed nearly as intimate, and in some ways more so.

  And as it turned out, it was as much a sport as a dance, because it involved the additional challenge of avoiding collision with other dancers.

  They’d rotated once around when he cleared his throat. “I was born in St. Giles.”

  She didn’t fling her arm up to ward off the terrible shock of his slum birth. Her body didn’t stiffen beneath his hand. Her pace didn’t falter.

  She didn’t say a word.

  But her eyes didn’t leave his face. They were warm as a hearth. And soft as that damn comfortable bed in his room.

  He ought not continue. Every word he said felt like a hole punctured in his armor; every word he said planed away a bit of mystery and brought her closer to his rawest self. It felt unnatural and new, as awkward as using his left hand instead of his right, though he could, of course, fight with both. But he could not stop himself from giving her what she wanted. To ease, if he could, whatever shame or discomfort she felt.

  “I never knew my father. I’m not certain my mother was ever given his real name. And I didn’t know my mother for long, either. She died when I was eight. I became a captain’s assistant at ten.”

  Her ribs rose and fell beneath his hand when she drew in a long breath.

  But there was no gushing. No questions. And no pity.

  She watched him, not her feet, and somehow they remained in perfect time and managed to avoid colliding with the other dancers. Then again, he’d had a good deal of experience with navigation.

  And she trusted him.

  The honor of her trust, and the shame of his deception, made a wishbone of him.

  “I suspect you are an exceptional man for many reasons, Captain Hardy,” she finally said. “Not the least of which is risking the eternal ardor and devotion of Miss Bevan-Clark in order to get the two of them to see sense.”

  He smiled.

  How had she gone her entire life not knowing a man’s smile could cut her in two, Delilah thought. In the sweetest way.

  “They are twits. But it’s often easier to know how much you value something when it’s about to be taken from you. Child’s play compared to some of the conflicts I’ve dispensed with in my career.”

  “It was a kindness. I know the extraordinary sacrifice you made in instigating a musical evening.”

  “It was a kindness to myself, mostly. They were a distraction and I would never be able to read at least three more pages of my book.”

  A year ago, she would not have described happiness as dancing a waltz amidst shabby furniture with someone who patently wasn’t a gentleman in a room that included her husband’s former mistress, the worst lady’s maid she’d ever had, a loud gassy salesman, two runaway twits from the country, and two meek, astonishingly homely women of whom she felt quite protective.

  If it wasn’t happiness, she wasn’t quite sure what to call it. But it was a fine thing, and it felt wonderful, and bore so little resemblance to her previous days with Derring that they scarcely seemed part of the same life.

  All at once something else had captured her dancing partner’s attention, however. She could immediately feel a sudden, alert tension in his body.

  She followed his gaze.

  “Isn’t that funny?” she said. “Both Miss Gardners are trying to lead and they are getting nowhere.”

  Tristan said idly, “It looks a little bit like vertical, drunken wrestling.”

  It seemed he could not, in fact, take his eyes from it.

  “Perhaps no one has ever before danced with them,” she said wistfully. “Don’t frown so at them, you’ll frighten them.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Later that night Tristan lay on his blue counterpane listening to Delacorte snoring on the floor below.

  For some reason he was almost glad to hear it.

  Gordon was running up and down the hallway.

  He suspected Gordon of playing as much as he was hunting.

  He was glad to hear that, too.

  And as he listened to a veritable roll call of creaks and sighs as the house settled down for the night, he realized he hadn’t heard that strange, loud thunk again. The one that made it seem as though the house was struggling to digest something.

  Not since the night he’d seen Miss Margaret Gardner on the stairs.

  When he’d insisted upon the Gardner sisters joining the dancing this evening, it was not for the charitable reasons Delilah likely suspected. It was because a suspicion, begun as unease the first time he’d laid eyes on them, was now germinating. He would tell Massey about it tomorrow.

  Massey was probably lying awake dreaming about his sweetheart.

  Suddenly Tristan realized he’d closed his hand around a fistful of his counterpane, as if
it were Delilah’s hand and they were waltzing again. He released it at once. Abashed.

  “Sweetheart,” he said aloud. Sardonically.

  How on earth did Massey say that word so easily? It was such a gentle word, one that evoked blue skies and lambs and meadows filled with flowers.

  Like daisies, perhaps.

  None of Tristan’s feelings—not the desire that kept him rigidly staring at his ceiling right now; not his ever-deepening admiration for her, or his yearning toward her kindness; not the desperate tenderness he’d felt when she sat there, trembling, his coat over her shoulders; not even the weakness that overcame him when he touched her, or even so much as looked into her eyes—were soft or gentle. They were deep as an ocean trench. They were spiky and stormy and unmanageable. Perhaps from disuse. He apparently possessed them, but they’d been left to run amuck, grow wild and leggy.

  He’d once courted a superior officer’s daughter, a pretty, fluttery flirt of a girl who had sought and lapped up his attentions like a kitten, and he’d been flattered and smitten. But she’d been genuinely astonished to learn he might have matrimony in mind.

  “But . . . you’re not a gentleman! I mean . . . I couldn’t possibly!”

  It was all for the best. They would have made each other miserable, and he’d only courted her because it was the done thing for a man his age. Still, his pride had taken a glancing blow, and it had left him wiser and warier.

  He frankly could not imagine being anyone’s “sweetheart.”

  “Spikeheart,” perhaps.

  This was simply who he was, perhaps in part due to the forces that shaped him.

  He had, in fact, made a career and a life out of not being helpless, out of always knowing what to do. Which was why it was so unsettling to know that he couldn’t glare emotions into silence with a look, the way he could an insubordinate soldier.

  But he didn’t shake his fist at the sun because he couldn’t control it, did he? He lived with the fact of it.

  Still. He needed to let this thing be, for her sake and for his. He needed to leave these emotions untended and unacknowledged and he needed to avoid courting temptation. There: now that he knew what he needed to do, he felt some small measure of control returning. There was some small comfort in knowing that once she learned who he was and what he was doing here—which was inevitable, if his mission was a success—he’d sail away in his ship, and he wouldn’t have to witness her shattered betrayal for long.

  But suddenly, as if she was already a memory, he found himself mining the moments he’d spent with her for new dimensions of pleasure. The satin of her throat. The beat of her heart against his. The glow of her skin in the dark. The rhythm of her breath against his throat as he moved in her. And her laugh.

  Bloody hell. It was like hurling bits of straw onto a bonfire.

  He rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed and tipped his face into his hands. He breathed like that, motionless. As though he were in pain.

  He was in pain.

  Just not the sort he’d ever experienced before. No tourniquet, no amount of whiskey, nothing in Delacorte’s upsettingly exotic collection of herbs and medicines, could ease it.

  He perhaps had one recourse.

  He stood and staggered wearily over to the little writing desk and yanked out the chair.

  He lit the candle and pulled a sheet of foolscap toward him.

  Stared at it, as if willing it to yield its secrets, the way he’d stared at the ocean the other night.

  Dipped the quill in ink.

  But it was torture.

  He managed eleven words. Every word was like a drop of blood squeezed from a wound.

  And though he tried very, very hard, not one of them rhymed.

  “Lover,” Delilah said aloud. The word felt odd, very louche, and cosmopolitan in her mouth. “I have taken a lover. He was born in St. Giles.”

  She imagined saying it to the Duchess of Brexford just for the pleasure of seeing her collapse in a rustle of bombazine and a crunch of stays.

  That delightful fantasy notwithstanding, she still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the word.

  She watched her ceiling during that hazy, lovely netherworld between wakefulness and dreaming, and reviewed the unqualified triumph of the evening. Everyone had taken a turn at singing. They were dangerously close to having a genuine musicale! Could all of her dreams be coming true in such an unlikely fashion?

  Even dusty old dreams of romance she’d locked away in a keepsake box so many years ago?

  She thought about Mr. Farraday and Miss Bevan-Clark, who by the end of the evening were sitting quietly together on the settee murmuring and smiling as if they’d only just met and were shyly getting to know one another. They’d certainly found the romance and adventure they’d been seeking, rather indirectly.

  No. What Delilah had was a lover, not a romance. A lover who had said to her, I was born in St. Giles, in a quiet, diffident baritone, which seemed infinitely more thrilling and more dangerous than anything Farraday and Miss Bevan-Clark could get up to. Because she was beginning to suspect that taking a lover was not like taking a meal or taking the air—it was more like taking a beautiful drug, the sort people in opium dens apparently found surcease in. The appetite only grew with the taking of it.

  And one knew what happened to people who indulged too much in opium.

  I was born in St. Giles was like a thread thrown over a loom. For these kinds of revelations were the things that bound people together. She cherished the words, yearned toward them, and wanted to hear more and still more. All of this frightened her.

  Because she truly did never again want to be at another man’s mercy.

  When jealousy had jabbed briefly and sickeningly tonight, it was alarming—and edifying—to realize how easily a man could tweak her emotional weather. It called to mind the silent, inner contortions she’d performed to ensure Derring remained happy. She’d regained so much of her self since he’d left her penniless.

  Then again, she’d only shown her true self to Captain Hardy. Which made it even more perilous.

  There was the other thing about the word take: it often implied that whatever was taken didn’t actually belong to the taker. That the day would come when they would be made to give it up.

  And he would be leaving soon enough, after all.

  Here was where she could put Angelique’s experience to use: now that she was enlightened as to the extraordinary physical pleasures, she could and should make a truly sensible decision, and not partake of Tristan Hardy again.

  Surely she could manage this? It wasn’t as though a stiff wind would howl down the chimney, blow her clothes off, and push her into his arms. It was simply a matter of not doing it. She’d managed to help create this boardinghouse, currently feeding and sheltering the most disparate people imaginable, and it seemed as though their little enterprise was well on the road to thriving. If that didn’t make her a miracle worker she didn’t know what did.

  She sighed heavily, surrendering a little more to the beckoning arms of sleep. Relieved to have removed the serrated anticipation of sex by simply deciding not to do it. She was pleased and proud of herself in a faintly martyred way. She said a little prayer of thanks for having known the pleasure.

  Nevertheless, all in all, it was probably a very good thing that Captain Hardy would be sailing away for good very soon.

  Tristan was shaving himself ruthlessly, as if scraping off barnacles of a hull. Making himself shiny and sleek to face a new day of learning probably absolutely nothing useful about those damned cigars.

  “I am shaving my face, la la la la,” he tried, in the mirror.

  It didn’t make it any more pleasurable, really.

  “I am catching a smuggler, la la la la,” he tried instead. Mordantly.

  He splashed water from the pretty blue-flowered basin on his face, patted himself with a towel.

  He turned and looked at his comfortable room. The wilting flower in his vase h
ad been replaced sometime yesterday, he realized. He was suddenly, unaccountably moved. And appalled to realize that he quite liked having a fresh flower in a vase in his room.

  Then he remembered the sheet of foolscap on the writing desk. He lunged for his shameful travesty and stashed it away in his satchel, lest it ever see the light of day.

  Satisfied with what he saw in the mirror—resolute, hard, handsome, a little weary from staying up all night and writing a terrible poem—he shoved his arms into his coat and left the room.

  He had just turned the key in the lock when he froze.

  His heart gave a nearly painful bounce.

  Delilah was poised to enter the room next to his, wielding a duster and looking, much like he did, cheerfully resolute.

  She froze when she saw him.

  She had faintly purple shadows beneath her eyes, too. Perhaps she’d spent the entire night watching her ceiling, debating with herself the wisdom of undressing and wrapping her legs around his waist again, and concluding it would be very unwise, indeed. Which was all to the best.

  The trouble was, he understood at once as he stood there, eyes fixed on the soft swoop of her lower lip, that wildfires left unattended overnight tend to grow bigger and hotter.

  They regarded each other somberly, making internal adjustments to accommodate the mere glorious fact of each other.

  “Good morning, Lady Derring,” he said finally. “Are you going to narrate the dusting of the room today?”

  “Good morning, Captain Hardy. Why? Did you find my singing tolerable last night?”

  “Survivable,” he said pleasantly, as though correcting her with a more precise word.

  She smiled at that and it really just undid him.

  “You ought to hurry down, Captain Hardy. There are still some eggs left and Helga says you’re a very good eater.”

  “While that’s very flattering indeed, alas, I promised to have breakfast with a colleague.”

  Neither one of them moved.

  So how had the space between them disappeared, and how was it that his arms were going around her waist as her face tilted up to meet his coming down?