Lillias stared at it, puzzled.
Dot curtsied and whispered, rather loudly, “I know you didn’t ring for it, Miss, I mean, Lady, Lillias. But Mr. Cassidy said you hadn’t eaten much and so he thought you might enjoy this scone. He hopes...” Dot cast her eyes upward, as though to try to access the ceiling of her brain“... he hopes you appreciate this great sacrifice, as he was going to eat it for breakfast.”
Dot didn’t say, “...and then he smiled at me and what choice did I have after that but do anything he wanted?” But it was absolutely what happened.
Lillias smiled. “Thank you, Dot.”
Dot dropped a curtsy and Lillias closed the door, then ferried her plate to the settee and placed it on the little table, admiring it, quietly amazed.
Hugh’s hand cupped lightly beneath her elbow. The odd, humble moment her attention had returned to again and again tonight. Somehow thosefew seconds transferred to her knees the strength to remain upright at the sight of Giles.
But how had he known?
He knew so many specific things.
Lillias looked across the scone at her mother and was beset by a swift wave of ferocious love and terror and gratitude. She could not imagine doing without any of her family members. Not even St. John.
It’s the only thing that makes life bearable. And it’s the only thing that makes life unbearable.
She thought she could concur.
She was suddenly just as grateful that she could play a part in his forgetting as she was desperately hopeful that the two of them would get what they each wanted.
And Hugh could go home again.
Lillias reached for one of those lovingly knitted coverlets and draped it over her mother. And then she settled back down on the settee across from her and devoured the scone.
Itwasheavenly. Itwasthe food of angels.
She felt better than she had in weeks.
Replete, she caught up the other coverlet and dragged it over her, and lay back down. A few moments later she was lost in a blissfully dreamless heap across from her mother.
The earl tiptoed past them on his way in. He paused to plant kisses on both of their foreheads before he went off to sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
“A picnic! Can I come along?”
Delacorte thought the day at Richmond sounded diverting. He and Hugh had encountered each other very early over breakfast, where they were the first at the table, and which they had enjoyed with the speed and wordless devotion Helga’s cooking deserved. Now in the foyer beneath the chandelier, Delacorte was on his way out the door with his case to visit apothecaries. Hugh awaited Lillias and her parents and the arrival of the Vaughn carriage that would carry them all to Richmond.
“I wish youcouldcome along,” Hugh said, and he meant it. He could think of almost no greater pleasure than watching Delacorte suggest an impotency cure to the Earl of Bankham. “I’m afraid one has to be invited by the host.”
“I don’t know why anyone would want to be an aristocrat,” Delacorte mused.
“I can’t think of a reason, either,” Hugh said.
“How was the ball?”
“Tolerable,” Hugh said, summing up one of the most stunning, complicated evenings of his life in one word. “Lillias and I may have arrived at a plan to free ourselves honorably and gracefully from our hasty engagement.”
Delacorte looked at him quizzically, furry brows drawn together.
Hugh stared back.
“Well, that would be a relief, wouldn’t it?” Delacorte finally said, lightly.
And then Lillias appeared in the foyer in a striped muslin day dress and a straw bonnet featuring a green ribbon tied beneath her ears, and Hugh forgot how to speak.
