His touch found a slow, devastating rhythm, and Lily moved with him, helplessly drawn into the same tide. The water hid them, but it could not soften the heat of it, the intimate pull and retreat, the aching sweetness that built with every passing breath.
Her forehead fell against his as the world slipped loose around her. There was only Hugo. The low rasp of his breathing. The strong arm holding her steady. The brush of his mouth against her temple, her cheek, the corner of her lips.
“Lily,” he whispered, and her name sounded like a vow.
The tenderness in it nearly unraveled her.
She answered with a broken little sound and pressed closer, matching him with shy, instinctive movements that made hisrestraint tremble beneath her hands. He kissed her again, but this time there was nothing controlled about it. The kiss was deep and consuming, full of everything he had been holding back, and she felt the answering hunger in herself rise to meet it.
The pleasure gathered slowly at first, a golden warmth low in her body. Then it grew brighter, sharper, and spread through her limbs until she could scarcely tell where the lake ended, and Hugo began. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. Her breath came in soft, uneven gasps against his mouth.
“Hugo, I?—”
“I know.” His voice was rough, almost unsteady. “Let go for me. Do it for me.”
Those words unraveled something inside her.
She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. Her lips parted, and the evening air cooled her flushed skin while the water lapped warm against them both. His fingers moved with patient, devastating purpose, and the pleasure built in slow, tightening waves, each one cresting higher than the last. She gripped his shoulders. Her breath came in sharp, broken pulls. And then the release swept through her, sudden and consuming, and she buried her face against his neck and held on as her body trembled and the last rim of sun slipped behind the trees and the lake settled into gold around them.
Hugo gathered her close, his mouth at her throat, his own breath ragged now.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
The lake rocked gently around them, cooling what the sunset had left burning. Lily rested against him, boneless and breathless, her cheek pressed to his shoulder while his arms held her as if he had no intention of ever letting go.
At last, Hugo kissed the damp hair at her temple.
“You are going to be the death of me,” he murmured.
A soft laugh escaped her, still shaky at the edges. “If this is how I kill you, I suspect you will die happy.”
“Exceedingly happy.” His arms tightened around her. “And entirely at your mercy, which is a position I am not accustomed to and find deeply unsettling.”
Afterward, they dressed on the bank with their backs to each other, though the modesty felt absurd given what had just transpired. Hugo shrugged on his shirt and turned to find Lily struggling with the buttons at the back of her gown. He crossed to her and fastened them without being asked, his fingers moving with a tenderness that contradicted the wicked things those same fingers had done minutes before.
He draped his coat over her shoulders. The fabric was warm and smelled of sandalwood, and she pulled it around herself and breathed him in.
They walked back to the house as the sun dropped behind the tree line. Their shoulders brushed with each step. Neither of them spoke.
At the garden entrance, Hugo held the door for her. She paused on the threshold and looked up at him. The last of the daylight caught the amber in his eyes.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the swim.”
“Thank you for jumping in.”
She held his gaze for a beat. Then she walked inside, and his coat stayed on her shoulders all the way up the staircase to her chambers. She did not take it off until Nell arrived to help her dress for dinner.
She hung it on the back of her chair, where she could see it from the bed.
CHAPTER 30
“You have not touched your wine.” Hugo watched Lily across the candlelit dinner table, her fork resting against her plate, her gaze drifting toward the window where the moon bathed the lawn in silvery light.
They were alone. The servants had laid the meal and withdrawn, and the dining room at Thornwaite Hall felt vast and intimate at once, two chairs at one end of a table built for twenty.
“I am not thirsty.” She picked up her fork and set it down again. “I am not particularly hungry, either.”
“You are nervous.”
