The fish course arrived, and Wilfrey turned to the subject of moths.
“The Oleander Hawkmoth, in particular, is a specimen I have been pursuing for three seasons.” He set down his fork with thereverence of a man about to discuss something sacred. “I spotted one in a garden in Kent last September and spent the better part of an afternoon chasing it with a net.”
“Did you catch it?”
“It eluded me. I returned the following weekend with improved netting. It eluded me again.”
Lily tilted her head. “Perhaps it simply preferred its freedom, my lord.”
“A romantic interpretation. I prefer to attribute it to wind patterns. I have since changed my technique.”
“You changed your netting technique for a single moth?”
“For science, Lady Lily. The moth was incidental.”
She fought a smile.
The moth was not incidental. The moth was everything. Lord Wilfrey had spent two weekends and an engineering overhaul chasing an insect through a garden in Kent, and he saw nothing unusual about this.
By the cheese course, he had moved on to a story about correcting a Parisian museum curator who had mislabeled a butterfly display.
“I sent him a letter afterward with illustrations.” Wilfrey sipped his wine. “He has not responded.”
Lily laughed. The sound escaped before she could catch it, bright and genuine, because the image of Lord Wilfrey sending corrective illustrations to a French museum was so perfectly, irredeemably Wilfrey that she could not help herself.
She let the laughter reach her eyes and did not suppress it. Wilfrey straightened in his chair, and the tips of his ears colored with pleasure.
Wilfrey was a good man. He was intelligent, well-read, and genuinely passionate about the subjects that interested him. He was… Companionable. Safe.
But both words fell flat in her mind.
Hugo’s gaze found her again. This time, when their eyes met across the table, he did not look away. The candlelight played across the angles of his face, and the amber of his eyes held something that was neither charm nor amusement.
It was hunger. Quiet and controlled and banked like a fire that had been burning too long to extinguish.
Lily looked down at her plate. Her pulse kicked against her throat.
After dinner, the party moved into the drawing room. The room was large and warm, paneled in deep oak, with fires burning in twin hearths and the curtains drawn against the June evening.
Brandy and port circulated among the gentlemen. Tea and cordials appeared for the ladies. The conversation fractured into smaller clusters, and the atmosphere loosened with the pleasant, languid ease of a country house settling into its evening rhythms.
Lily stood near the pianoforte, accepting a cup of tea from a footman, when Hugo materialized beside her.
She turned to look at him and found him avoiding her gaze. He lifted a glass of brandy from the tray and surveyed the room with an easy confidence. His shoulder was close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his sleeve.
“You were magnificent tonight.” His voice came low, pitched beneath the hum of conversation, meant for her ears alone. “Wilfrey could not take his eyes off you.”
“I applied what you taught me.”
“You exceeded what I taught you.” He raised the brandy to his lips and took a slow sip. “An excellent pupil. You ought to receive a reward for being such a good girl.”
The words landed like a match struck against flint. Heat flared through her chest, down her stomach, into the base of her spine.Her fingers tightened around the teacup. Her breath caught in her throat, and for one terrible second, the drawing room with its oak panels and its well-bred guests dissolved into nothing but the low rasp of his voice and the heat it left behind.
She turned to respond, to deliver the sharp, cutting retort that would put distance between them and restore the equilibrium she needed to survive the next three days in this house.
He was already gone. He had crossed the room and was shaking Lord Pemberton’s hand and laughing at something Lord Edmund said. The space beside her was empty, and the warmth where his shoulder had been was fading.
Lily stood by the pianoforte with a teacup trembling in her hands and the echo of those words burning through her like wildfire.
