“Noble, but impractical, I’m afraid.” He pushed away from the mantel and took a step toward her. “The damage is done, and hunting down a printer will not undo what every guest at that ball now believes.” He watched her fingers curl at her sides. “How about you tell me with whom you danced tonight?”
“Well… Lord Wilfrey.”
He took another step. “Wilfrey is a careful man. Methodical. He does not attach himself to anything that carries risk. After tonight, you present a risk.”
The words hit their mark. He saw it in the way her shoulders dropped half an inch, in the quick, involuntary press of her lips. She knew. She had already arrived at the same conclusion, and hearing him say it aloud was simply the confirmation she had been dreading.
Hugo did not enjoy causing her pain. That surprised him. He caused people discomfort regularly and rarely lost sleep over it, but there was something about the way Lady Lily absorbed a blow, straight on, without flinching, without looking away, that made him want to hand her a solution rather than another problem.
“What are you suggesting?”
He closed the remaining distance between them. She smelled of rosewater and the faint, sharp tang of night air. Standing so close, he could see the freckles scattered across the bridge of hernose, the flecks of gold in her green irises, and the rapid pulse beating at the base of her throat.
She was aware of him. He could see that, too, in the way her breath shortened, and her weight shifted backward until her heel met the edge of the side table.
“A temporary arrangement.” He kept his voice low. “We announce our betrothal. The scandal becomes a courtship. Society accepts it, your reputation recovers, and when the fuss has died down, and you have secured a suitable match, we dissolve the engagement quietly.”
“What you’re suggesting…” Her voice climbed, and color flooded her cheeks. “An engagement is the single most consequential event in an unmarried woman’s life, and you are treating it like a game of whist.”
“I am treating it like what it is. A tool. Nothing more.”
“A tool.” She stepped to the side, putting distance between them. “You have no idea what an engagement means to a woman in my position. You toss the word around as if it costs you nothing, because for you, it means little. You are a Duke. You could announce an engagement, dissolve it a month later, and thetonwould pat you on the back and offer you a fresh drink. I would be ruined twice over.”
The words struck something beneath his composure.
She was right. He knew she was right, and he did not like the shape of that knowledge, did not like what it revealed about the ease with which he had made the suggestion. He had offered an engagement the way he offered everything: as a transaction, clean and detached, stripped of the weight that other people attached to such things.
But the weight was real. He could see it in her eyes.
“You would not be ruined.” He softened his voice. “I would ensure it.”
“And I should trust the word of a man who I believe was licking whipped cream off a woman twenty minutes ago?”
The grin broke through before he could stop it. “She was licking the cream off me, actually, but I take your point.”
Her cheeks blazed. She straightened her spine and lifted her chin. At that moment, with the firelight catching the loose curls at her temples and the defiance burning behind her eyes, Hugo felt something shift in the room. A subtle displacement, like the air before a storm.
“No. I will not bind myself to a man I barely know, even in pretense. My dignity is the only thing I have left tonight, and I will not trade it for the convenience of a Duke who treats scandal like sport.”
Hugo studied her. His grin faded. She meant every word. She would walk out of this house and face whatever came next on her own terms, with nothing but her pride to protect her, and she would not bend.
He respected that.
“Very well.” He inclined his head. “I will not press the matter.”
She released a breath. “Good. Then I will see myself out.”
She turned toward the door. Hugo watched her go. The set of her shoulders, the lift of her chin, the way she moved through his parlor as if it belonged to her and he were the intruder was intriguing.
He did not plan what happened next. The words formed somewhere beneath his ribs and rose to his mouth before the calculating part of his brain could intervene.
“Lady Lily.”
She stopped. He crossed the distance between them in two strides, stopping close enough to catch the scent of rosewater, close enough to see the fine hairs at the nape of her neck rise as his breath reached her skin.
She turned. Her green eyes met his, wide and wary and luminous in the candlelight.
“Whether you like it or not, Lady Lily,” he said, and his voice came from somewhere deeper than charm, somewhere that had nothing to do with performance or practice or the polished persona he wore like a second skin, “you are mine to protect.”
