“But Lillias... Bankham isnotyet engaged. He in fact made a point of saying it once he heard about your... our... engagement.”
“I suppose he did,” she said, absently.
Hugh was still baffled. “So he’s marrying this Harriette to please his parents? Out of duty? The vaunted aristocratic appreciation for tradition?”
“So it would seem.”
He gave a short laugh. “I suppose there’s something to be said for that. If either of us were more dutiful we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”
She just made a soft snorting sound. Not quite a laugh.
“Or it’s a singular lack of imagination,” he suggested.
She lifted one hand a little, let it drop, as if it hardly mattered anymore.
“He seems to esteem you, Lillias.”
“Ah, yes. What every girl yearns for. Esteem. Didn’t Byron write a poem about esteem?”
“I haven’t a clue. But I’m certain Gilly would.”
“Oh, he would, all right,” she said darkly.
“Maybe poetry is what aristocrats do instead of passion. The words do it all for them.”
“Ha,” she said. Although the “ha” sounded a little uncertain. It wasn’t the most implausible theory.
“So you’ve been wretched,” he said slowly. “And you’ve been dreading this ball.”
“Ever since then, it has felt as though my heart is being carved out with one of those little spoons we use to put sugar in our tea. A bit at a time. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.”
He made a soft sound, half amazed laugh, half rueful empathy.
“The pain is ghastly and quite surprising,” she said with a certain dull, ironic wonderment. “I’m quite amazed and ashamed. And not a soul has noticed. They would all be astonished to learn I’m sentimental at all. So there’s something to be said about being raised English, Mr. Cassidy.”
The silence was such that the very stars above seemed to ring.
There was a certain relief between them. The relief was new, and this newness, both awkward and peaceful. He looked at his beautiful tormentor, this haunter of his nights. The sheerscaleof feelings she’d stirred—the size of an American tree—somehow restored dimension to his life. It wasn’t at all comfortable. But then neither had been waking up from a fever in a hospital, shot but alive.
And all of the things she felt when she was near him . . . did she feel them for Giles? His masculine pride told him definitively “no.” This thingbetween them was its own singular natural force, like a hurricane. He knew that much.
But maybe that was Giles’s appeal. He was patently not a hurricane. He was patently of her world.
“Lillias?”
“Yes?”
He hesitated. But the curiosity compelled him. He needed to know.
He tried to keep the words inflectionless. “Why do you love him?”
She gave a short, stunned laugh.
And for a time it seemed she intended to ignore the question. Or perhaps berate him for daring to ask it.
And then she sighed, and from her reticule withdrew something. “Hold out your hand, palm up.”
He obeyed. Into it she deposited a little stone.