There was a nonplussed little silence as they all pictured this. It was difficult to reconcile with the lovely, imperious young woman who sat so quietlyin the drawing room with someone enthusiastically yanking on a bell rope.
“I should think the temptation to ring the bell would be irresistible once you’re up there,” Delacorte said, quite reasonably and charitably, given that she was, after a fashion, his enemy.
Imagining Lillias succumbing to temptation made Hugh want to ask Delacorte about remedies for male nerves.
“Has she ever done anything like that before?” Hugh asked before he could stop himself.
“Not as such. She was a bit of an adventurous child. Never a tomboy, mind. She loved her dresses and ribbons and whatnot. Just not a shrinking violet. Not afraid of much of anything, not fussy. Loved to read and still does. I encouraged it, and I... well, I sometimes wonder if that was wise, because you get notions when you read, don’t you?”
He looked about the room for approbation.
Hugh was recalling how touchingly pleased she’d looked to say the word “raccoons.” This must be how she’d learned it.
He was irritated to realize that it frankly... charmed him.
On the heels of this, unbidden, that sweet little smile she’d exchanged with her sister winked in him like a light in the dark. It came with an odd jab in his solar plexus.
“But a few weeks before the church bell nonsense, she was out for a ride and tore off on her horse without warning. Nearly scared the life out of her groom.”
Hugh was silent.
He thought about her stillness in the sitting room. As he viewed her through another lens, it occurred to him that there was something stoic about it. As if she were waiting for something. Or waitingoutsomething.
He found himself frowning faintly, then willed the frown away.
Everyone was regarding the earl with gentle sympathy. He was clearly concerned about his daughter.
“No doubt it’s just an excess of high spirits,” the earl said absently. “It’s probably just time for her to get married.”
“That’ll fix ’er,” Bolt said absently.
Captain Hardy stifled a smile. They both counted themselves lucky to have married complex, utterly singular, perfectly imperfect women.
No one man in that room truly suffered from the delusion that a remedy imported from any continent could solve women.
Chapter Five
“Youliketowers, if you’ll recall. You can pretend you’re Mary in the Tower, to make it more interesting,” Lillias’s father said mordantly the following morning. “Only infinitely luckier than Mary, of course... as long as you stay on the premises.”
And then he’d gone off with Mr. Delacorte to speak to a man who “knew how to coax snakes out of hiding”—how one acquired that skill she could not begin to guess, as it didn’t seem like something one could or should practice, like shooting at Mantons. St. John had gone for a ride in The Row in order to be admired by young ladies in carriages as not enough of that was taking place at The Grand Palace on the Thames. And her mother and Claire had gone to Leicester Square to view an exhibit of Miss Mary Linwood’s exquisite needlework.
Lillias had smoked a cheroot, and this, like original sin, threatened to haunt her for the rest of her days.
She could lay this, and the fact that she would not see Miss Mary Linwood’s needlework, at Hugh Cassidy’s door. His transgressions were piling up like wood about Joan of Arc’s ankles.
She could now add to them the fact that she hadn’t slept much at all the previous night. Not thatshe’d slept much in recent weeks. She’d become accustomed to using the time between sliding under her blankets at night and the time the maids came in to poke up the fires for calculating the hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until the Landover Ball. Much more effective than counting sheep and practical, too: Why not use her encroaching doom to improve her math?
She’d begun to dread going to bed.
Last night she lay awake, all but winded, exhilarated as though she’d survived a climb up a crumbling, narrow mountain road, around whose corners stunning vistas or fanged predators were just as likely to appear. She felt she could not take her eyes from Hugh Cassidy when he was near. It was some combination of wariness—as though he were indeed feral—fascination, and irritated wonderment that such an arrogant, self-satisfied man should possess such a riveting collection of features. Skirmishing with him had demanded the kind of wily strength of wit she’d all but forgotten she’d possessed. She so rarely encountered a will as strong as her own.
He was entirely too pleased with himself, and this could not stand.
“Ball locks.” Her mouth slowly curved into a reluctant smile. Very well,thatwas funny. And if she was being honest with herself, so was the way he’d orchestrated her trip to the epithet jar. She might have done something similar to one of her siblings.
The way he’d watched her walk to the jar wasn’t at all funny. It was perhaps the most soberingly adult thing to happen to her in her twenty years of life.
She wasn’t unfamiliar with lust. Nor was she naive about where it led. But she could not deny there was no relationship between the occasional thrill that traced her spine when she waltzed with a handsome blood and the inexplicable all-out siege Hugh Cassidy’s mere presence had waged on her senses. Even now, in this empty, quiet suite, her skin hummed like a crystal glass tapped with a fingernail. The caress of her silk dress along her shoulder blades as she pulled it over her head, the cool glide of sheets against her bare legs, the warmth of the fire on the back of her neck—she was suddenly acutely reminded of her capacity to experience pleasure.