“A momentary lapse. It will not happen again.”
The conversation drifted. Ashton returned to his canal shares. Philip described a horse he was considering purchasing from a breeder in Newmarket. Harcourt held forth on the state of Parliament with cheerful pessimism.
Hugo listened with half an ear and turned his empty glass between his fingers. The brandy was gone, but the taste lingered, and beneath it, the ghost of champagne and rosewater that he could not scrub from his memory no matter how many drinks he poured over it.
This was desire. Straightforward, physical yearning, sharpened by weeks of abstinence. He was a man accustomed to satisfyinghis appetites, and he had agreed to starve himself for the duration of an engagement that existed solely to repair someone else’s reputation. His body was protesting the terms. That was all.
The sooner Lily secured Lord Wilfrey’s attention, the sooner the engagement dissolved, and the sooner Hugo could return to his life. His rooms. His freedom. His evenings spent precisely as he pleased, without the complication of a woman who argued with him, challenged him, and kissed him as though the world were ending, and she had decided to spend her last three seconds with her fingers twisted in his waistcoat.
The thought should have appealed. Instead, it landed flat, a prospect stripped of whatever quality had once made it worth pursuing.
He signaled the steward for another brandy and pushed the thought aside.
“Harcourt.” He cut into a lull in the conversation. “You hosted a house party last autumn, did you not? At your estate in Hampshire?”
“I did. Twelve couples, five days, and my wine cellar has never recovered.” Harcourt patted his stomach. “Why do you ask?”
“I am considering hosting one myself. At Thornwaite Hall.” The idea had been forming since the opera, shapeless and half-realized, and now it crystallized. “A weekend gathering. Select guests.”
“Thornwaite Hall.” Ashton raised his brows. “You have not hosted at the Hall in years.”
“All the more reason. The estate could use some life. And it would give Lady Lily an opportunity to meet my circle in a more intimate setting.”
The logic was clean. A house party would bring Lily and Wilfrey into sustained proximity. Not the fleeting contact of a ballroom, where a waltz lasted three minutes and a conversation was interrupted every thirty seconds by another guest angling for the Duke’s attention. A house party meant shared meals, afternoon walks, evening parlor games. It meant days of access, and if Lily applied what he had taught her, Wilfrey would find himself drawn back to the woman he had abandoned over a scandal sheet.
Hugo would invite Wilfrey. He would seat them together at dinner. He would engineer every opportunity for Lily to remind the man what he had walked away from.
And then the engagement would end. And Hugo would be free.
Free to do what, precisely, he did not examine.
“Capital idea,” Harcourt said. “A house party at Thornwaite Hall. I shall tell Lady Harcourt at once.”
“Do. And gentlemen, feel free to suggest any guests who would round out the party.” Hugo paused, timing the delivery. “LordWilfrey, perhaps? I have been meaning to extend an olive branch. He and I have not spoken at length in some time.”
“Wilfrey at a house party.” Philip snorted. “The man will bring a magnifying glass and spend the entire weekend examining your hedgerows.”
“All the more entertaining for the rest of us.”
Ashton chuckled. Harcourt proposed a toast to the revival of Thornwaite Hall. The glasses clinked in the warm, smoky air, and the club hummed with the comfortable murmur of men who believed they controlled their own destinies.
Hugo leaned back in his chair and let the plan settle into place. It was clean. It was logical. It solved the problem.
He did not think about the fact that a house party at Thornwaite Hall also meant having Lily under his roof. Lily in his corridors, at his dining table, in his gardens. Lily sleeping in a guest chamber down the hall from his own, close enough to find in the dark if he lost his mind entirely, which was beginning to feel less like a hypothetical and more like a schedule.
He did not think about that. He would not consider the possibilities.
He ordered another brandy instead.
CHAPTER 12
“Again, Auntie Lily. Again!”
Oliver launched himself off the settee and onto Lily’s back with the fearless abandon of a seven-year-old who had not yet learned that his legs were now long enough to knock the wind out of an unsuspecting aunt. Lily caught him under the arms and swung him around until his laughter filled the Heatherwell drawing room like church bells.
“You are going to break your aunt,” Sophia called from the armchair by the window, where baby Jane dozed against her shoulder in a warm bundle of white linen and milk-scented skin. “Oliver, let her breathe.”
“I want to fly!”
