Lillias was compelled down into the place she’d vacated on the settee.
And for a moment her parents hovered over her.
She was at a grave disadvantage. She felt her full complement of wits hadn’t yet returned, after they’d been kissed into oblivion by Hugh Cassidy, and her body was humming with the remnants of a boiling, unsatisfied need. And the shock of it all prevented the true horror of what had just happened from sinking in, but she knew she was engaged. There was really no getting out of that.
They didn’t speak for quite some time.
“Darling, your hair. I just...” Her mother put her hand to her mouth.
It wasn’t really about her hair, which had been used by Mr. Cassidy to tug her head back for a soul-branding kiss and likely showed the effects. It was also, probably, a little sweaty.
It was just the metaphor for how disordered everything had become in a shocking second. And this on the heels of a recaptured snake. Just when the holes had been repaired, Lillias had gone and essentially, metaphorically, shot a few more holes into their house.
“It was the frank talk with the word ‘naked,’ wasn’t it?” her mother said.
“Oh, honestly, Mother, do you think I haven’t heard that word before? I know what it means. We’ve been to the museum. Literally everything in there is naked.” It was an exaggeration, but it made her point.
“It’s the peculiar alchemy of a handsome, charismatic man and the word ‘naked,’ perhaps.”
It was very, very odd to hear her mother describe Hugh that way, because it sounded like approbation, and this was unnerving. Because she’d already begun to hope that her parents would help to extricate her from this.
“There is no one thing or one person to blame,” Lillias said flatly.
She was not going to sacrifice Hugh, who had fallen on his sword with the most astonishing speech she’d ever heard, thereby saving and ruining both of their lives.
But this wasn’t what her parents wanted to hear, because that left open the probability of their daughter dallying away over the past fortnight.
Her father’s silence was beginning to be more terrifying than the dawning acceptance of her fate.
“Well, I suppose there are worse ways to begin a marriage than with a bit of passion,” her mother mused. “Why, your father and I still—”
Lillias threw her arms up over her head. “NO. OH GOD. I can’t. Please.”
Her mother stopped.
“I’ll admit I imagined you as a duchess or a countess,” her mother said somewhat querulously. If she began to cry, Lillias would cry and perhaps not stop.
Literally everyone had. Lillias couldn’t sort one single complete distinct emotion from the murky soup of shame, shock, horror.
“Darling, you talk to her. I need to lie down for a moment.”
Her mother disappeared into her bedroom.
This is what she’d done to her mother. She’d literally shocked her into needing to lie down, which had never happened for as long as Lillias had known her.
The quality of her father’s continued silence was like the aftermath of a dropped anvil.
Lillias waited.
Anything he said was bound to shock her. The very air on her skin right now seemed to hurt.
“You could do much worse than young Mr. Cassidy. I rather wish he was my own son.”
Nothing, nothing he’d said could have shocked her more.
His tone was almost reasonable. She began to panic.
“Then he’d be my brother, and if you think the broadsheets are going to outdo themselves withthisstory...” she said bitterly.