“You have a natural swing, Lady Lily.” Wilfrey positioned his ball at the sixth hoop. “Have you played before?”
“My aunt taught me in the gardens at Oldbarrow.” Lily stepped up to take her turn. “She is ruthlessly competitive.”
“I heard that,” Margaret called from her chair beneath the awning.
“You were meant to, Aunt Margaret.”
Edward cleared the final hoop with a stroke so clean it barely disturbed the grass. He straightened and handed his mallet to a footman without a word.
“Show-off,” Hugo muttered as he passed.
“Strategy,” Edward corrected. “Sophia suggested I aim for the left side of the hoop. The ground slopes.”
“You are taking tactical advice from your wife in a lawn game.”
“I take tactical advice from my wife in everything. It is why I win.”
Sophia applauded from the sidelines with the contained enthusiasm of a woman whose strategic advice had proven decisive. Sir Philip finished last. He examined his mallet with the betrayed expression of a man searching for someone to blame.
“Faulty equipment,” he announced to no one in particular. “The balance is off.”
“The balance is fine, Edmund,” Lady Hale said. “You simply cannot aim.”
“That is a matter of opinion.”
“It is a matter of geometry, darling.”
As the guests drifted toward the terrace for refreshments, Hugo fell into step beside Lily and Wilfrey. He inserted himself into their conversation about Roman aqueducts with the practiced ease of a man who had spent his life joining conversations uninvited and making himself indispensable.
“The engineering is extraordinary, of course,” Wilfrey was saying. “The gradient calculations alone required a mathematical sophistication that we often underestimate.”
“Agreed.” Hugo nodded. “Though I have always thought the most impressive aspect was not the engineering but the political will. Convincing an empire to fund infrastructure that would outlast its builders by two thousand years. That requires a vision most men lack.”
Wilfrey considered this. “A valid point, Your Grace. I had not thought of it in those terms.”
“His Grace has a gift for seeing the human element in things,” Lily said.
Hugo glanced at her. She did not meet his gaze.
Wilfrey nodded thoughtfully and excused himself to join Sir Philip at the refreshment table.
Hugo walked beside Lily in silence for several steps. The afternoon sun was warm on his shoulders, and the lawn stretched green and peaceful around them, and he carried the sound of her words in his chest like a held breath.
His Grace has a gift for seeing the human element in things.
She had defended him. Not strategically, not as part of the performance, but instinctively, the way a person defends someone they care about without thinking about it first.
He filed it away beside every other small, impossible, indescribable thing she had given him since this arrangement began.
He was running out of places to put them.
CHAPTER 21
“You are out of your mind.”
Lily seized Hugo by the lapel and hauled him through her bedroom door before the corridor swallowed the sound of his footsteps. She shut the door behind him and pressed her back against it, her pulse hammering.
Hugo stood in the center of her room with his hands in his pockets and the faint, infuriating curve of a smile on his lips.
