Lady Oldbarrow stood near the front window, examining a pair of gloves with the focused disinterest of a woman who was actually listening to every word Hugo and Lily exchanged.
Hugo turned back to the sapphire gown and lifted it from the form. The silk spilled over his hands like water, cool and impossibly smooth. He carried it to Lily and held it up beside her face.
“This color complements your eyes.” He tilted his head. “Try it on.”
“I will not parade around a shop in gowns you have selected for me as though I were a doll being dressed for a display case.”
“You are going to try on a gown that will make you look extraordinary, and then you are going to decide for yourself whether it suits you. That is not a display case. That is a fitting room.”
Her jaw set. He watched the resistance build behind her eyes, the stubborn, magnificent pride that would rather lose a war than surrender a single battle. He understood it. He admired it. And he needed it to bend, just this once, because the house party was in twelve days and Lord Wilfrey would be there and Lily could not walk into that drawing room wearing the color of cold porridge.
“P-please.”
The word stumbled out of him before he could catch it. Thepcaught against the back of his teeth, and for one terrible, suspended second, the sound stalled in his throat the way it used to when he was seventeen and standing in an entrance hall with his brother’s hand at his collar.
He swallowed. The muscles in his jaw tightened. He pushed past it with the practiced ease of a man who had spent fifteen years learning to crush these moments before they could breathe, but the damage was done. The word had stumbled, and it had stumbled in front of her.
He kept his expression neutral. He did not look away. He did not acknowledge it.
Lily’s eyes shifted. Something moved behind them, quick and searching, and then she looked at the gown in his hands rather than at his face, and he was grateful for that small mercy.
“Fine.” She took the sapphire silk from him. “One gown.”
“Three.”
“One.”
“Two, and I will stop talking about your wardrobe for the remainder of the engagement.”
She considered this. “Two.”
“Agreed.”
She gathered the sapphire gown and a second one he selected, a deep emerald crepe with a fitted waist and sleeves that gathered at the shoulder and disappeared behind the curtain of the fitting room.
Hugo exhaled. He crossed to the window and stood beside Margaret, who was still examining the same pair of gloves she had been holding for ten minutes.
“She does not like being told what to wear,” Lady Oldbarrow observed without looking up.
“She does not like being told anything.”
“It is one of her most important qualities.” Lady Oldbarrow set the gloves down and turned to him.
Her blue eyes held the sharpness of a woman who had spent her life watching men and had learned to distinguish the ones who were worth trusting from the ones who were merely worth tolerating.
“My niece is not a project, Your Grace. She is not a rough stone to be polished into someone else’s idea of a gem.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you? Because a man who selects a woman’s gowns is a man who believes he knows what she should look like. And a man who believes he knows what a woman should look like is one step from believing he knows what she should think, and say, and be.”
The words landed with precision. Hugo held Margaret’s gaze and felt the weight of her judgment settle across his shoulders like a yoke.
“I am not trying to change her, Lady Oldbarrow. I am trying to give her a tool she does not know she needs. There is a difference.”
“There is. I am watching to see which one it turns out to be.”
The curtain of the fitting room drew back.
