She drew a struggling breath up from her lungs, hot and shaky. She took another.
“So this stops now,” he said abruptly. “Do you hear me?”
She managed to nod once.
His arms dropped and he stepped back from her abruptly, releasing her into a world that wouldnever be the same again. She nearly staggered, but her formidable pride righted her.
There was silence.
She opened her eyes. But she refused to look at him. She looked steadfastly away, at the wall.
And a moment later, she turned and walked quietly out the door, closing it gently behind her.
Chapter Twelve
“Viscount Bessette is redecorating his Sussex estate,” Lucien said in the smoking room that evening. “His wife no longer wants red in her sitting rooms. Green apparently is in favor. Everything red must go.”
Everyone in the room—Delacorte and Hugh, that was—turned their heads slowly and stared at him in rank astonishment.
He was amused. “We don’t just talk about horses and boxing at White’s, you know.”
Hugh caught on before Bolt said, with amused exasperation, “He’s selling curtains. Twelve feet long, red velvet, wonderful condition, with valances. Three sets. Vaughn has agreed to pay for them. Delilah and Angelique can arrange for them to be sent or—”
“I’ll go,” Hugh said immediately.
Bolt, Hardy, and Delacorte swiveled toward him in surprise. Hugh realized then it was the first thing he’d said in fifteen minutes, which was as long as they’d all been in the room together. He’d been addressed. He hadn’t responded, because he hadn’t heard them. The desultory, contented conversation around him might as well have been smoke for how much he’d noticed it. They didn’ttrouble him; they all knew a man needed a good brood now and again and they left him to it.
Hugh supposed he’d been listening for a lifeline. Apparently it was made of curtains.
He wasn’t in the habit of being melodramatic in his thoughts. But he understood very clearly that his only chance at salvation meant never occupying the same room as Lillias, ever again. He’d been out building the stage all day and hadn’t come in for dinner. He’d only come in for a cheroot. He hadn’t seen her again, and that was by design.
He could hire a hack from the livery stables and easily make the trip, stop in Surrey to inquire about the Clay family, and be back in time to meet his uncle in Portsmouth.
Life had demanded a lot from him. He’d found, every time, reservoirs of strength, insight, cussedness, and endurance, some of it requiring acrobatic spiritual contortions. But ending that kiss had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
Was there satisfaction in knowing she would be just as haunted by it as he was, no matter which aristocrat eventually had the privilege of bedding her? Her voice rising in something near anguish when she talked about being pelted with roses by aristocrats, about being so visible and yet invisible: that’s what haunted him.
And anytime he wanted he could relive it and experience a certain conqueror’s triumph: the sound of her low moan when their lips met. And the blossom-tender give of them beneath his. Or the feel of his tongue twined with hers. Their hips moving together.
But he knew the reason he’d pressed his lipsagainst her breast was that he’d wanted to feel the beat of her heart.
Herheart.
It was this last realization that had him up and out the door just past dawn and all but fleeing The Grand Palace on the Thames.
She would in all likelihood be gone by the time he returned.
“I should think you’d be out of here like a hare out of a trap, Lillias. Off to the Galleria or The Row or some such.”
Ironically, her punishment for smoking a cheroot had concluded nearly in time for all of them to move out of The Grand Palace on the Thames. The snake, still malingering on their townhouse premises, had been successfully lured into a basket thanks to Mr. Delacorte’s friend. Workmen were even now beginning to patch the walls. They could be home again soon. “I would prefer you not to behave like one, if you would,” her father added hurriedly. “A hare out of a trap.”
“Thank you, Papa, but I’ve seen the error of my ways and I think I’d like to spend a little more time in quiet contemplation.”
He scowled at her, unconvinced.
She gazed back at him innocently.
The funny part was that it was true.