Page 104 of Claiming the Princess
“Will you take some food, L?” Luke asked, speaking loudly.
“But is that her?” Linus asked.
“Do you mean my wife?” Luke teased. “Yes, it is her.” He held out a hand and Danielle went to him. Luke had introduced them—several times now. Linus seemed to have as much difficulty believing the reality of Danielle as Luke did.
“How will I ever wrap my mind around the fact that you’ve gotten yourself married?” Linus wondered. “I was only gone a—”
“Do not say it,” Luke complained. He pulled Danielle against him.
“Say what?” the old man wheezed.
“That while you were rotting in a French dungeon, I was acquiring wives and stately homes. That’s not how it happened—”
“Well, it is a little bit how it happened,” cut in Danielle.
“I returned to France again and again, trying to recover you, L,” defended Luke. “When Surcouf would speak only of this exiled princess, my strategy shifted to acquiring her to use as leverage.”
“A bit shortsighted, don’t you think?” Linus asked, and Danielle laughed. She looked less tattered and mud-streaked after their hours at the convent, but he knew she was exhausted. Despite this, she pushed away and knelt beside Linus’s bunk. She began unpacking a basket of bread.
“Entirely shortsighted,” Luke said. “My plan was to haul her to France, but I didn’t reckon on fancying her for myself. Even more remarkable, her fancying me.”
Linus laughed, although it quickly devolved into a fit of coughing. Danielle reached out to him, resting a hand on his shoulder.
“The dungeon was worth it, then,” the old man finally said.
“Never say it,” Luke warned, although this was exactly the sort of selfless proclamation Linus Welty had said to Luke all of his life. It felt revelatory to have this conversation in front of Danielle. Luke’s crew had accepted the easy affection Linus demonstrated for Luke, but their circle had been small and tight. Beyond the crew, Luke was known as a cunning smuggler and an aggressive seaman. He was a private man by design, enigmatic. Certainly, conversations like this were private. But Luke reminded himself he had nothing to hide from Danielle. She knelt beside the bed of his surrogate father and cut slices of bread. She’d moved seamlessly from abandoned wife, to castle infiltrator, to doting daughter-in-law. It was remarkable that a woman like Danielle existed on this earth, let alone that she’d somehow consented to marry him.
“You were always too clever to be a smuggler,” Linus was saying, “and too bighearted to be a bachelor. You wanted to horrify your mother’s family with your smuggling, and you’ve done it. You wanted to escape your mother’s rejection by being alone, and you did that for many years, too, didn’t you? Now you may live your life free from all of it. Now you may do as you please.”
For this, Luke had no reply.
“Oh, I’ve news of Lady Nancarron,” Danielle said, rising to pour water into a cup. “We’ve begun an informal correspondence, she and I.”
“You haven’t done,” Luke said. He had no wish for the worst bits of his old life to interfere with the hope of his new one.
“I have, actually,” she said. “A topic for another time, perhaps, but she is not exactly what you’ve thought.”
“I’ve given her no thought,” he said, a reflex.
“So you haven’t,” Danielle said, kneeling again with the water. “Her detachment, Luke—the years of being willfully unavailable—was not because she did not want you. She protected you by keeping her distance.”
“Protected from whom?” Luke sounded bored, but his heart had begun to pound.
“From her own father. The Earl of Canham. He’s dead now, thankfully, but she was quite the prisoner there, in her childhood home. For most of her life, she had no freedom. Not for herself, and certainly not for a child.”
“There are worse prisons than Fern Vale,” Luke said, trying to keep his voice light. “It’s one of the finest estates in Cornwall.” He could feel himself purposefully not understanding—he did not want to understand.
“The house may have been fine, but the sort of tyranny she endured from her father was very brutal, indeed. It was, as she puts it, no place for a child.”
Luke stared at her. The words slowly circled his heart, knocking on various weak spots.
“As I said,” Danielle went on, “a topic for another time.” She paused in her work and stared at Linus. Luke followed her gaze. Linus was snoring lightly, fast asleep.
Danielle rose quietly. “Will he be alright, do you think?”
Luke stepped into the passageway and beckoned her. She covered the refreshments, set them aside, and went to him. He closed the cabin door. “If he can survive a year in a dungeon, I assume he can survive a Channel crossing.”
Danielle chuckled and looked up at him. She said nothing. She licked her lips.
