“Fine.” The word left her mouth on a long exhale, carrying with it the last remnants of the future she had been constructing since the night she walked into Hugo’s parlor and shoved a scandal sheet into his chest. “I will marry you.”
Hugo nodded. His expression did not change.
“Rest tonight,” he said. “I will speak with my solicitor in the morning and arrange for a special license. We can marry within the week.”
“Within the week,” she repeated. The words sounded foreign.
“The sooner we act, the less time Lady Stapleton has to cause further damage.” He paused. “I will take care of everything.”
He crossed the room and stopped at the door. His hand rested on the handle, and for one breath, his back was to her, and she watched his shoulders rise and fall with an exhale that carried more weight than anything he had said aloud.
Then he opened the door and left.
Lily stood alone in the drawing room. The fire crackled. The candles guttered. The pamphlet lay on the side table where Sophia had set it, its cheap paper and smudged ink glinting in the light.
She pressed her hands flat against her stomach and breathed.
She was going to marry Hugo.
Not because he wanted her. But because a woman named Lady Stapleton had decided to destroy her, the only man willing to stand between her and the wreckage was the one man who refused to tell her why.
CHAPTER 26
“What about this one?” Lady Brimsey held up a bolt of white silk, her eyes glistening, her lower lip trembling.
“It is lovely, Mama.” Lily stood beside a display of lace trimmings and stared at them without seeing them.
Her fingers rested on a spool of ribbon she had picked up three minutes ago and had not yet set down. She had not turned it over. She had not examined the weave, the color, or the quality. She was holding it because her hands needed an occupation, and her mind was elsewhere.
Hugo watched her from across the shop. She had been like this for two days. Polite. Present. Absent. She answered questions when asked, nodded at the appropriate moments, and moved through the wedding preparations with mechanical efficiency, following a map someone else had drawn.
It was not like her. Lily did not drift. She held up bolts of fabric and delivered opinions about stitching and weave count with an authority that suggested three books on textile manufacture committed to memory. This quiet, pliant version of her unsettled him more than any argument ever had.
“The silk is excellent, Lady Brimsey,” Hugo said. “Though, if I may suggest the ivory rather than the white? It will complement Lady Lily’s complexion.”
Lady Brimsey clutched the ivory bolt to her chest as though he had handed her a holy relic. She disappeared behind the partition with Madame Dupont, who had already been paid triple her usual rate to employ six additional seamstresses and deliver the finished gown in four days. Hugo had arranged it that morning. Some problems yielded to money, and he was grateful this was one of them. The sound of animated French rose from the fitting area like birdsong.
Lady Oldbarrow stood near the front window, examining a display of fans with focused disinterest.
“She has been holding that ribbon for four minutes,” Margaret observed without turning around. “I counted.”
“I noticed.”
“She does not normally hold things without purpose. She is either reading them, critiquing them, or using them to make a point. She does none of those things when she is preoccupied.”Margaret set down the fan. “What did you say to her when you proposed?”
Hugo’s jaw tightened. “I told her I would protect her.”
“And?”
“And that I would handle everything.”
Lady Oldbarrow turned. Her blue eyes held the sharpness of a woman who had spent sixty years observing men and had refined her contempt to an art form.
“You told her you would manage everything. How romantic.”
“It was not meant to be romantic. It was meant to be practical.”
“It was meant to be safe, which is worse.” Lady Oldbarrow’s voice dropped. “My niece is not a problem to bemanaged, Your Grace. She is a woman who is about to marry a man she believes does not want her, and you are standing in a dress shop watching her hold a ribbon like a sleepwalker and doing nothing about it.”
