Fourteen more days. A fortnight until the last of her dream would be murdered, and she would have no choice but to be there and witness it.
She was half tempted to grind her heel on the invitation as Mr. Cassidy had done away with her cheroot.
She felt invigorated by the little flame of fury that reared up at the very thought of him.
Go inside, little girl.
She rubbed her hand against her cheek as though the words were a glove with which she’d been struck.
She knew she could ascribe her beauty to the roulette wheel of fate and a couple of pleasant-looking parents. It wasn’t something she’dachieved. She wasn’t daft about it. But women were afforded so little power as it was, and if someone had handed an unarmed man a sword and sent him into battle, wouldn’t he learn how to use it? Since her debut she’d deftly parried everything from worship to bitter envy and she couldn’t honestly say she’d been above wielding—and enjoying—a certain queenly, if benevolent, social supremacy. It still hadn’t gotten her what she wanted.
And now here she was, confined to her room like a child for her transgression, as though she’d never had any power at all and never would. But now she understood the most infuriating thing ofall about him: two minutes with Hugh Cassidy had given her a taste of thetrue, thrilling, unnerving power she possessed.
And then he’d stripped her of that power with a few words.
She intended to take it back from him.
Chapter Three
Hugh hesitated on the threshold of the sitting room at The Grand Palace on the Thames, feet planted firmly on the marble of the foyer, postponing his entrance the way he would any rare pleasure, taking in the view. Mrs. Pariseau was emoting from a book fanned open in her hands. He counted four other shining heads bent over knitting and embroidery—Delilah, Angelique, the Countess of Vaughn, and a girl of about fifteen with red-gold hair who must be Lady Claire, all leaning into the story like it was a quenching rain. Mr. Delacorte, who’d been teaching Dot how to play chess, was sitting across from her at a little table, chin in his hands, looking ever so slightly martyred, which was inevitable when facing off against Dot in anything, really.
Against the mantel leaned a tall young man in exquisitely tailored clothes, dark hair swept artfully back from a fine, high forehead. His sole occupation appeared to be insouciance.
And then Hugh saw her.
She was sitting alone at one of the little tables placed about the room. One hand propped up her chin as she gazed toward the curtained window as though she could see right through it. She was still,but not inert. He imagined a queen of yore might adopt the same posture—patient, absorbed, at peace with her blue-blooded birthright—while her ladies in waiting settled ermine capes about her shoulders and a crown on her head. She was wearing a dress the approximate shade of new leaves, and the firelight in fact had given her something of a flaming coronet. Her hair was precisely as he recalled: a half-dozen shades of mahogany, the color of good, old, gleaming wood.
She turned slowly, her brow furrowed slightly, as if she’d caught a snatch of elusive music.
She saw him, of course.
Sparks ought to have arced from the collision of their gazes.
Slowly he stepped over the threshold into the room.
And... well, he recalled hearing that Sir Galahad had been speechless when he’d first clapped eyes on the grail. It was a bit like that. Words seemed both pointless and impossible.
But Galahad had allegedly been pure of heart, and that’s where the comparison ended.
Hugh’s thoughts were anything but.
Taking refuge in manners, he bowed. A little sardonically.
“Good evening, Mr. Cassidy,” she said, when he was upright again. “I see you’ve returned. I wasjustthinking that the only thing missing from this cozy evening was a moral arbiter. The epithet jar’s presence notwithstanding.”
Her voice was just as he remembered—all velvet superiority.
“Good evening, Lady Lillias. I’m surprised youcould bring yourself to say my name, as it doesn’t begin with ‘Lord.’”
Having each thrown an initial blow and established how they meant to go on, they assessed each other for weakness or injuries. Neither of them blinked.
“It’s the very Americanness of ‘Cassidy,’ perhaps,” she said thoughtfully. “You look as though your best friend might be a bear.”
“Lillias,” her mother said reprovingly from over in the corner, and somewhat doubtfully, as if perhaps there was nothing at all wrong with having a bear for a best friend. As if one never knew with Americans.
Hugh didn’t reply. Instead he found himself slowly peeling his gloves from his hands, as though he were preparing for a bare-knuckle fight, or demonstrating how he would undress a woman whose body he intended to thoroughly savor.
Lillias’s gaze flickered.