He released her hand.
“The pleasure was mine.” His voice came out steadily. He considered this a minor miracle. “Entirely mine.”
The double meaning landed between them like a lit fuse. Lily’s flush deepened. Her gaze snapped to his face, and for one unguarded second, her green eyes held everything she had told him she could not feel and everything she had shown him she did.
Then the mask descended. She straightened her gloves and turned to Margaret.
“Shall we, Aunt?”
“Eagerly.” Margaret gathered her traveling cloak. “If I spend another night in the countryside, I shall begin identifying trees by their Latin names, and then I will know all is lost.”
Hugo walked them to the carriage. He handed Lady Oldbarrow up the steps, then turned to Lily. His hand closed around hers as she climbed in, and she paused, one foot on the step, and looked down at him.
The morning light caught the green of her eyes, the loose curl at her temple, and the place on her neck where his mouth had been last night.
“Goodbye, Hugo.”
NotYour Grace. Hugo. His name in her mouth, soft and private and heavy with everything they could not say on a cobblestone drive with a footman standing six feet away.
“Goodbye, Lily.”
She climbed in. The door closed. The driver clicked his tongue, and the carriage lurched forward.
Hugo stood on the steps of Thornwaite Hall and watched it until it rounded the bend and disappeared behind the elms.
The house loomed behind him. Empty. Vast. Full of rooms where Lily had walked, laughed, argued, and looked at him, just once, across a crowded dance floor, in a way that had ruined him for every other woman alive.
He turned and went inside. He straightened his coat. He called for Marsden and asked about the evening’s menu and the state of the wine cellar and whether the east wing fireplaces needed sweeping.
The mask went back on. The world continued.
But her name stayed on his tongue like a taste he could not swallow, and he carried it with him through the empty rooms of Thornwaite Hall for the rest of the day.
CHAPTER 23
“Uncle Hugo, watch this!” Oliver stood on the drawing room carpet with a wooden sword raised above his head and a battle cry forming on his lips.
He was seven years old and possessed the absolute conviction that the sofa cushion propped against the fireplace was a dragon that required immediate slaying.
A few days after the house party had ended, Hugo sat in the armchair near the fire with Edward’s son Leo on his knee. Leo clutched a biscuit in one fist and Hugo’s cravat in the other. He watched his older brother’s performance with the solemn gravity of a three-year-old who had seen this dragon slain before and found the production lacking in originality.
“I am watching,” Hugo said. “Aim for the left side. Dragons are weakest there.”
Oliver adjusted his angle and brought the sword down on the cushion with enough force to send it tumbling off the fire screen. He thrust both fists into the air.
“He’s dead!”
“Magnificently slain. You are a credit to the realm.”
Oliver beamed and retrieved the cushion for a second assault. Leo reached for Hugo’s biscuit with the stealth of a born tactician, and Hugo surrendered it without a fight.
Lily stood in the doorway and watched them.
She had not been prepared for this. She had been prepared for the charm, the wit, the careful performance of a man navigating a social evening with practiced ease.
She had not been prepared for Hugo sitting in her brother-in-law’s drawing room with a toddler on his knee and biscuit crumbs on his waistcoat, coaching an eight-year-old through imaginary combat with the focused sincerity of a man who took dragon-slaying as seriously as parliamentary debate.
A warmth bloomed behind her ribs, unexpected and unwanted. She turned away before it could take root.
