Lord Brimsey stepped towards Hugo. “Your Grace, we thank you for the hospitality of your box. The champagne was excellent.”
Hugo turned. His expression was composed and revealed nothing. “The pleasure was mine, Lord Brimsey. I am glad you enjoyed the evening.”
His gaze drifted toward Lily. It landed somewhere in the vicinity of her left shoulder and stayed there, as though her shoulderwere the most fascinating architectural feature in the Theatre Royal.
“Lady Lily.” He bowed. “I trust you found the performance enjoyable.”
“Very much so.” She addressed this to the bridge of his nose, because looking at his mouth was out of the question and looking at his eyes was worse. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
The silence that followed lasted perhaps two seconds. It felt like an age.
“Well, then.” Lord Brimsey clapped his hands together with the jovial energy of a man who sensed an awkwardness he could not identify and intended to disperse it through sheer force of personality. “Shall we make our way down? The carriage will be waiting.”
They filed into the corridor. Lily positioned herself behind her father and beside her mother, placing two bodies between herself and Hugo as they descended the grand staircase. The crowd helped. The Theatre Royal was emptying in a slow river of silk and wool, and the press of bodies created natural barriers that she exploited with the strategic instinct of a battlefield commander.
When Hugo paused to greet an acquaintance on the first landing, Lily seized her mother’s arm and guided her forward with an urgency that Lady Brimsey attributed to the cold.
“Goodness, Lily, there is no need to rush.”
“I am chilled. The balcony air was brisk.”
Margaret, walking half a step behind, said nothing. Lily could feel the weight of her aunt’s gaze on the back of her neck like a hand.
They reached the ground floor. The lobby was thick with departing guests, and Lily navigated through them with her chin up and her shoulders set, nodding to acquaintances and offering the warm, measured smiles Hugo had taught her. She did not look behind her. She did not need to. She could feel his presence in the lobby the way one feels a change in weather, a shift in pressure, a gathering of heat.
The front doors opened onto the street, where a line of carriages waited in the lamplight. Lily spotted the Brimsey carriage third in the queue and walked toward it with a pace that stopped just short of unseemly.
“Lily, slow down.” Lady Brimsey tugged at her arm. “You will turn an ankle on these cobblestones.”
“I am perfectly steady, Mama.”
She was not perfectly steady. Her knees felt as though someone had replaced her bones with something softer, and her heart had been maintaining a rhythm better suited to a woman fleeing a fire than one departing an opera. But she reached the carriagewithout incident, and the footman opened the door, and she climbed inside with the controlled grace of a woman who was holding herself together through nothing but spite and good breeding.
Lord Brimsey handed Lady Brimsey up the steps. Margaret followed, settling into the seat opposite Lily and arranging her skirts with deliberate care.
Through the carriage window, Lily saw Hugo emerging from the theater doors. He stood on the front steps, his fair hair bright in the lamplight, his hands clasped behind his back. He was scanning the line of carriages. Looking for hers.
Their eyes met through the glass.
The contact lasted less than a second. Lily looked away first. The carriage lurched forward, and the theater, the crowd, and the Duke of Thornwaite fell away behind them.
“Are you all right, darling?” Lady Brimsey peered at her through the dim interior. “You have been flushed all evening.”
“It was warm in the box.”
“It was not particularly warm,” Margaret observed.
“I found it warm.”
Aunt Margaret regarded her for a long moment. Then she folded her hands in her lap and directed her attention out the window, granting Lily a reprieve that felt more like a postponement.
At Brimsey House, she said goodnight to her parents with a kiss on each of their cheeks. She climbed the stairs. She closed her bedroom door. She pressed her back against it and exhaled.
The room was dark save for the low glow of the fire the maid had banked before retiring. Lily crossed to the window and pressed her forehead against the cool glass. The street below was empty with the lamplight pooling in gold circles on the cobblestones.
She closed her eyes.
The kiss came back to her in pieces. The warmth of his hand cradling the back of her neck. The press of his mouth against hers, firm and certain. The way she had gasped and the way he had answered, deepening the kiss as though her surprise were something he had been waiting for. The taste of champagne. The solid heat of his chest beneath her palm and the steady, fierce beating of his heart under her fingers.
