There was a little silence.
“Aren’t you going to bow to the daughter of an earl, Mr. Cassidy?” It seemed to amuse her more than anything.
She thought he could be played with.
“Why waste a second doing that, when I can remain upright admiring you?”
Her expression flickered. Eyes widened as she reestimated him.
She studied him in silence. Her mouth curved slightly. “American, Mr. Cassidy?”
“Why, yes. I’ve noticed the English do like to announce whether they think someone is American or not. A bit like a child pointing out shapes and colors.”
Lillias Vaughn blinked then.
Hugh indulged himself then in a swift head-to-toe inspection of her, swifter and more expert than hers, and the bands of muscle tightened across his stomach ever so slightly. The lines of her body seemed expressly designed to shorten a man’s breath.
She noticed.
And now there was something breathlessly anticipatory about her.
He approached her slowly, slowly. As though she might spook and flee like a doe.
She didn’t move at all. Her chin did go up just a very little.
Finally he was close enough to smell the soap scent that rose from her body, something floral and French and fine. To see her pupils flare, and how breath, swifter now, flutter the little curls at her temples. If he wanted to, he could close those few inches between them and lay his lips against hers.
He reached and plucked the cheroot from her fingers, dropped it to the floor, and crushed it beneath his boot heel.
“Go inside, little girl,” he said softly. “I’m off to tell your father you were smoking a cheroot. It isn’t anywhere near as daring as you think it is. You wouldn’t know ‘daring’ if it bit you.”
And he left her the way he came.
Aunt Lizzie was comfortably installed in a room in The Grand Palace on the Thames. The oldest Vaughn daughter had been located, thoroughly scolded—a cheroot! Angelique rolled her eyes. Mr. Cassidy had pulled her father aside and told him this regretfully, man to man, and she’d been fetched in and thoroughly castigated.
The entire exhausted family had been settled into the suite, fed, tea’d, warmed by fires, and every last one of them was wearing a dreamy little smile, even the clearly-going-to-be-trouble Lillias, when she and Delilah stopped by to see how they were. Every now and then all anyone needed was someone to lift their burden, if only for an hour or two.
What an exhausting, thoroughly rewarding day.
Angelique walked out to admire, yet again, the place where that dead, bare tree had poked up from a patch of dirt between The Grand Palace on the Thames and the Annex. It had been replaced by a patch of riotous greenery, lovingly, laboriously planted and chosen for its beauty and projected survival skills, and surrounded by a wrought iron fence in the fierce hope the winds off the ocean wouldn’t uproot them and blow them all away. The one impractical choice was the little apple tree planted in honor of Lucien’s mother; it was hardly the best spot for it to thrive. Inside the wrought iron fence was a little flagstone path. It led to a surprise she had for Lucien, which had also arrived today.
And so she waited, the wind lashing at her, pelisse whipping about her ankles, for her love to come home.
The sun was gilding the gargoyles presiding over The Grand Palace on the Thames when three men came into view, two very tall, one short.
It was all she could do not to hike her skirts in her hands and run to Lucien like a girl.
When he was ten feet away and she could see his smile, she realized she could feel anything she wanted to feel now and show it, and off she ran.
He scooped her up easily in his arms.
Delacorte and Captain Hardy grinned at them and left them to it, pushing open the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames and vanishing into its cozy warmth.
Lucien put her back down on the ground and kissed her as though he’d just returned from the war, and who could possibly feel the chill off the ocean when she was kissed like that?
“I want to show you something,” she whispered. She took him by the hand, and led him to their little green area, and turned the key in the wrought iron gate.
There on a modest bench she’d gotten for a bargain was a little plaque that read: