“She’ll be sleeping in a state of nature,” Simone muttered to herself with an unsteady giggle. “His lordship has that sort of look about him.”

It wasn’t until long after the Lark was dark and quiet, with no one awake but the first mate at the wheel, that Patrick and Sophie slipped out of the cabin and made their way to the kitchen.

They found asparagus soup waiting in its tureen; even better, they found champagne floating in a pool of melted ice. The dinner buns had gone hard, but that was all right. They sat side by side on the kitchen table (it was too bothersome to remove the chairs from their nighttime position strapped to the wall). They drank the soup and dunked the hard dinner rolls into champagne.

They sat so close that their legs pressed together and Sophie’s hair, falling in unruly waves down her back, brushed Patrick’s shoulder.

It was a feast fit for the gods.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

I won’t do it, Braddon. I won’t do it.” Back in London, the Earl of Slaslow was employed in the task that had obsessed him since the Lark left its moorings, two weeks previously. He was pleading with Madeleine.

“What on earth will it hurt to try, sweetheart?”

Madeleine didn’t even look up from where she was sweeping a curry brush over Gracie’s round, hard sides. “It’s not proper. You are asking me to lie.” Her mouth was set in as firm and stubborn a line as Braddon’s family had ever seen on his face.

He rolled his eyes, not for the first time. “Don’t you see that it’s a small lie in service of the greater good?”

“The greater what?” Madeleine’s French accent became more marked when she couldn’t understand something.

“The greater good,” he repeated lamely. “It’s a phrase that means … well, that it’s all right to do a small wrong in order to obtain a larger right.”

“That’s not what French philosophers say,” she snapped. “Monsieur Rousseau says that les bons sauvages, those who are truly innocent, do only good.”

Braddon dismissed the alarming signs of learning that Madeleine liked to throw at his head in moments of tension. He dared to reach out and stroke her cheek. Lately she had been like a tyrant and wouldn’t even let him kiss her. At the moment, for instance, she had edged around the stall so that Gracie’s bulk stood between them.

“Please, Maddie. Please. I want you to be my countess,” Braddon whispered. “I want you to have my children. I don’t want to leave your house at night and return to mine. I want you to live in my house. Don’t you see, I want you to be my wife, not my mistress!”