“She did. The dowry helped.”
Lily looked up at him. The candlelight caught the amber of his eyes and the fine scar above his brow, and she thought about two thousand pounds given to a woman who had tried to destroy her, not out of kindness toward the mother but out of decency toward the daughter. A familiar ache settled in her chest.
“You are a better man than you pretend to be,” she said.
“Do not tell anyone. It would ruin my reputation.”
She pressed her lips together against the smile and looked away.
The evening wound down. Hugo handed Lily into their carriage, and the door closed. Then the noise of the ballroom faded into the quiet of the London night.
“My mother asked about children,” she said.
Hugo’s hand, which had been resting on his knee, stilled.
“We have not discussed it.”
“No. We have not.”
Silence filled the carriage. The wheels turned on the cobblestones. The lamplight from the street flickered across Hugo’s face, and Lily watched the thought move behind his eyes.
“There is time,” he said. “For that conversation.”
“There is.”
“When you are ready.”
“When we are both ready.”
He turned his head and looked at her.
She saw him.
Not the Duke. Not the rake.
Just Hugo.
He reached for her hand. She gave it to him. His thumb traced a slow circle against her palm, the same gesture he had made at the altar, private and hidden and meant for no one but her.
She leaned her head against his shoulder. He rested his cheek against her hair.
The carriage carried them home through the London dark, and neither of them spoke. The silence between them was no longer empty.
CHAPTER 32
“Tell me about Sebastian.”
Hugo’s hand stilled on the brandy decanter. The study was quiet, the fire burning low, and Lily stood in the doorway with her shawl still around her shoulders. Her posture suggested the stillness of a woman who had been building toward this question for days and had decided, tonight, to stop waiting.
He poured. The brandy splashed into the glass with a steadiness his pulse did not share.
“Sebastian was my brother.”
“I know that much. The man in the village mentioned him. Lord Sudberry mentioned a deficiency.” She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. “You shut down every time someone speaks his name, and I have given you space, Hugo.Weeks of it. But I am not asking out of curiosity anymore. I am asking because I am your wife, and I deserve to know you.”
He took a long sip. The brandy burned, and the burn was useful, a physical sensation to anchor himself against the pull of everything those words threatened to dislodge.
“You know me.”
