“How very on theme, Mr. Cassidy,” Mrs. Pariseau approved.
“Lillias is a talented artist,” her mother said proudly. “Her watercolors are exquisite and her teacher says she has a gift! All the ones she did of Heatherfield over the years are—”
“Ruined,” Lillias said so flatly and abruptly it echoed in the room a bit like a door slamming.
There ensued an awkward silence.
“Heatherfield is the Bankham estate in Richmond,” the countess explained benevolently, and though none of those words meant anything to him, their inflection made it clear that they were synonymous with “money” and “power” and he was meant to be impressed. “We’ve spent many happy days there as a family with the Earl and Countess of Bankham and their son, Giles, and her drawings were rather a chronicle of that. It’s disappointing to lose them.”
Lillias did not concur. She in fact had gone curiously motionless, like an animal who hopes a predator won’t notice it. Quite as though she hoped all questions along those lines would stop.
Intriguing.
“Ah,” Hugh said sagely. “Have you any new drawings in your sketchbook, Lady Lillias?”
Lillias looked up. “Oh, yes. It’s a chronicle of all the fascinating things I’ve experienced during my stay here,” she said earnestly. “Would you like to see it, Mr. Cassidy?”
She raised her brows and extended the sketchbook to him.
He hesitated. And when he took it, his bare knuckles just scarcely—but quite deliberately—brushed her bare fingertips.
Skin against skin. Just that much was as potent as a shot across a bow.
Their eyes met, held. It was an absurd moment before either recovered.
And then he slowly took temporary custody of the sketchbook.
Carefully, and with a sort of held-breath anticipation and, truthfully, respect—drawing was a talent he would have in fact loved to possess—he opened the cover of the sketchbook to the first page.
It was blank.
So he delicately turned to next page.
It was also blank.
He did that, carefully and deliberately, for every page of the book. About twenty of them.
Every last one was a clean, white blank.
He handed it back to her.
“You areverytalented,” he said softly. “I look forward to seeing my face on every page.”
He flashed Lillias a wicked, crooked little smile, turned his back, and made for the smoking room without another word.
The Gentlemen’s Smoking Room looked and felt like an animal den in its scale and color—snug and primarily brown. The carpet was scrolled in cream and brown, the furniture was brown, the curtains were velvet and brown. A man could heave his boots up on the table, smoke, curse, or, as was often the case of Delacorte, silently break wind with impunity, in such a room. Hugh was touched by his proprietresses’ thoughtfulness every time he set foot in it. It was quite lovingly masculine.
Delacorte had followed him in. The Earl had not. At least not yet.
Hugh leaned against the wall and inhaled his lit cheroot into smoking life.
No one looking at him would have known thathis entire being was vibrating as though all of his cells were little gongs that had been individually assailed with little mallets.
Lady Lillias Vaughn was a problem. He’d confirmed that much.
A unique-in-his-lifetime problem.
There seemed to be only one solution to this problem.