“Apparently a friend of Mr. Delacorte’s experienced some luck capturing the snake. Alive, as it so happens. And the repairs in the walls are already underway.”
“Delacorte told me this was a possibility. That is altogether good news, particularly for the snake. Unless it had snake kittens.”
She didn’t smile.
He didn’t move any closer.
Neither did she.
It seemed preposterous that this fierce, untenable, intimate association should come to an end so quietly. It had been such a consuming force. It had turned him raw side out. He ought to be relieved, the way one appreciated the drama but was pleased when a storm had spent itself.
“Well. I was on my way to the sitting room to visit with my parents and their friends. I would like to say goodbye and good luck,” she said.
“Well. Goodbye and good luck, Lady Lillias.”
She nodded once.
She looked away from him and he studied herprofile as if it were the notches on a mysterious key. That line of her nose, the rose swell of her lips, the luscious dips and curves of her body.
He knew what was worth living for and dying for.
He had never before entertained what might be worth risking eternal damnation for.
And suddenly he was convinced there was only one thing.
“Lillias,” he said softly. He stepped forward.
He gently touched her arm. She turned to him as though he were the sun and she a sunflower. And then she was against his body and in his arms.
He kissed her with absolutely no quarter. As though they were longtime lovers. With greed and desperation. They both knew this needed to be fast. With their arms locked around each other, she met him with a hunger that fanned his own too quickly, too hot. He moved his hand to cup her breast and then his thumb grazed the bead of her nipple pressed against her bodice. He took her gasp of stunned pleasure into his mouth with a kiss. He thought he might face a firing squad if only he could hear that sound over and over for the first time. He did it again, harder. And this time his reward was his name,Hugh, turned into a breathy sob of pleasure in his ear.
He thought he heard voices, faintly, distantly; it was as though they were a memory, the rag-ends of a dream. Perhaps it was just the echoes of the tattered, battered regiment that was all that remained of his conscience attempting to get his attention. And he thought perhaps he’d heard footsteps. Though that sound could have been the thud of his heart or hers. And as she moved herhips against his, he groaned an oath and took that kiss deeper and harder, the plunge and stroke of his tongue mimicking what his cock would never get a chance to do, and shifted his hands to grip her buttocks and pull her hard up against his body.
And this is what the Earl and Countess of Vaughn, the Marquess and Marchioness of Landover, Captain Hardy, Lord Bolt, Delilah, Angelique, and Delacorte saw when the curtain was whipped merrily aside.
Chapter Thirteen
The ensuing gasps probably siphoned any lingering dust, and possibly a lingering spider or two, from the rafters.
There followed a silence like the end of time. And as if the building itself had detonated and blotted the sun, and now all the smoke had finally shifted and cleared to reveal all of those people standing there.
Hugh’s awareness seemed to fracture into crystalline fragments, each of them distinct, each of them possessed of its own sense of time, and it wasn’t unlike perusing a battlefield or aiming at a target. And that was how he saw and felt a hundred little things simultaneously: Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand nearly colliding midair as they gracefully leaped to block the views of the Marquess and Marchioness Landover while Captain Hardy and Bolt and Delacorte performed a sort of reel in their efforts to surround the Earl and Countess of Vaughn.
All the mouths opened in little dark circles.
All the eyes above them white with shock.
He’d immediately shoved Lillias behind him, on the off chance it was not too late to disguise heridentity. He could feel her breathing against him. It made him fierce with the need to protect.
No one said a word for what seemed like an eternity.
And then:
“Lillias?” Lady Landover said on a stunned hush that seemed to echo and echo. “Lady Lillias Vaughn?”
Speaking of eternal damnation.
Son of a bitch, as his Uncle Liam might have said.