I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

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 her identity. 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.

But suddenly he was coldly clear. He’d destroyed Lillias’s reputation before the kinds of witnesses who fed gossip to the broadsheets the way rivers fed the ocean. He’d destroyed his own, for that matter.

And he may have destroyed that of The Grand Palace on the Thames.

There was only one thing he could do.

He silently aimed a request for help up to whatever deity or celestial entity would have mercy on him. He must have been heard, because he found the words. His mouth moved, and haltingly, but with remarkable coherence, the words emerged.

“We must beg for your forgiveness, as we never dreamed there was a possibility we might startle or offend. We sought privacy to celebrate the joy and solemnity with which we move forward into the next years of our lives. For you are looking upon the happiest man alive. Lady Lillias has agreed to be my wife. Our union awaits only the blessing of her parents.”

Her parents were utterly motionless.

They were riveted in what appeared to be amazement and horror, as if snake kittens had popped from the wall.

Lady Landover clapped a hand over her heart and her mouth dropped again.

“That is the prettiest speech I’ve ever heard.” She quickly fumbled for a handkerchief and dabbed the corner of her eye.

“I always thought Mr. Cassidy should be on stage,” said Mrs. Pariseau, proudly.

“Oh, is that his name? Mr. Cassidy! My heavens, how original of you, Lillias, to choose a Mr. Cassidy. And an American, at that!”

“Does this make him a rogue?” Delacorte said quietly and received a quick sharp elbow in the ribs from Lucien.

“Oh, my, Lady and Lord Vaughn, you sly things! Is this what you meant when you said you suspected her engagement was imminent?” This was Lord Landover.

Wide and perilous as the ocean was the silence that followed this question.

Hugh could hear Lillias’s breathing behind him.

“We knew of their attachment,” the earl said very, very slowly, sounding as though he’d just been handed a stone tablet engraved in Turkish and was translating it aloud into English. But his tone was interestingly thoughtful. Like a judge handing down a sentence. “And they . . . have our blessing.”

Hugh could feel Lillias go rigid behind him. She’d stopped breathing.

“Well, isn’t that exciting news!” Lady Landover said gleefully. “Congratulations, you darling, rascally young ones. You must bring Mr. Cassidy to our ball. It’s typically quite a crush, but we can of course make an exception for Lillias’s fiancé.”

That was the first time anyone had used that word.

Both Hugh and Lillias flinched.

Delilah and Angelique ferried the marquis and marchioness swiftly away, followed by Dot and Mrs. Pariseau.

“My heavens, how very exciting and romantic,” the marchioness ventured. “Do romantic things often happen at The Grand Palace on the Thames?”

“Very often,” Angelique said, sensing a publicity opportunity.

“I’ll have a word with you in a moment, Mr. Cassidy,” the Earl of Vaughn said icily as he and his wife flanked their daughter.

Lord Bolt, Lucien, and Delacorte had surrounded Mr. Cassidy, managing to look both like jailers and medics.

Lillias was similarly escorted away by her terrifyingly silent parents.

In their suite, Claire was lounging on a settee, legs hooked over the arm of it, reading The Ghost in the Attic by holding it straight over her eyes. It was a peculiar way to read and her mother despaired of it.

She gaped in astonishment when the three appeared, each parent holding Lillias by one arm.

“Go to your room, Claire,” the earl ordered.

Such was his tone that she scrambled upright, seized the book, and disappeared. Lillias’s last view of her was the whites of her eyes before she closed the door.

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 with this story . . .” she said bitterly.

She trailed off at his incredulous—almost wounded—stare.

Lillias felt tears of frustration begin to press against her eyes.

“I don’t feel as though I know you anymore, Lillias. Have I failed you in some way?”

“No, Papa. Not at all. It wasn’t you or Mama.”

“Then . . .”

How could she possibly explain?

“Papa . . . what if Mr. Cassidy was just . . . falling on his sword, so to speak?”

“Well, I’d of course have him killed at once for having the temerity to trifle with the daughter of an earl, of course.”

Lillias’s limbs iced.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Of course I wouldn’t have him killed. I’d have you killed.”

At least he was joking again.

Mostly.

“Lillias, it’s a nonsense use of time to entertain the question because surely neither you nor Mr. Cassidy would do anything so stunningly foolish for the lark of it. You’d only do it because true, true love gave you absolutely no choice in the matter.”

This was all said quite tersely and ironically. He carefully did not ask whether she was in love with Mr. Cassidy, which was somehow better and somehow worse. Her father wasn’t one to entertain illusions.

She was quiet. Shame, and regret. Those emotions were nice and distinct now.

“So. Congratulations on your engagement, Lillias. It seems you have gone and chosen yourself a husband. It’s not quite how we envisioned it happening, but I wish you every happiness and we will support you in this matter.”

Lillias pressed her hands against the settee. It suddenly seemed as though the earth had cracked open and she was slowly, little by little, sinking into it.

“We will be attending the Landover Ball, and since Mr. Cassidy is now invited, you will introduce him as your fiancé. Because you can be certain Lady Landover will dump this little bit of news into the stream of ton gossip like whiskey in a bowl of ratafia. We will make it very clear that he is everything we dreamed of in a member of the family. Everyone will want to get an American fiancé from the wilds of New York after this, because it is such a wondrous thing. Am I making myself clear? You will speak of him glowingly, as will I and your mother, and we will make a silk purse of this. And as I said, it isn’t quite how we envisioned your life or ours, but in the end we’d like you to be happy, and that means St. John will have to make a spectacular match. Or Claire.”

She couldn’t speak. Her limbs were icy and a knot in her throat prevented words from escaping. Her status in society, the life she’d envisioned . . . she’d thrown them away for a chance to kiss . . . a stranger. For that’s how he seemed now, when his arms and lips weren’t on her. When she’d known all those other boys in the ton nearly her entire life.

She almost didn’t dare ask the question.

But not asking it would be the height of foolishness.

“Papa . . .” Her voice was shamefully small. “What if I don’t want to marry him?”

Her father went still.

And then he sighed.

He sat down on the settee across from her, leaned forward with his hands folded, and regarded her with a complicated expression. Sympathetic, just a little. Affectionate, just a little. But utterly implacable.

“I assume you’re asking a hypothetical question because surely it can be nothing else, as, clever as you are, you would have considered the following things. To wit: since your . . .” her father closed his eyes, then issued the word the way one might squeeze a shirt through a laundry press “. . . embrace . . . was witnessed by the people in a position to report in exaggerated detail the events of the evening, it would indeed become part of the ton’s flow of gossip. Rowlandson might make salacious drawings of it. Remember the caricature of Olivia Eversea we saw in Ackerman’s Repository? Cobwebs hanging from her. Merciless and very funny, or so we thought at the time. Yours, of course, would be so much worse because of all the people who actually witnessed it. And how they would laugh and laugh at all of us. But most especially at you. Because you . . . would . . . be ruined.”

Those last words he delivered as one might hammer in a few final nails.

“Of course.” Her voice was frayed. Black dots scudded before her eyes. “Well, certainly. Noted.”

“And then, of course, you’d have to take into consideration the matter of what it would mean for Claire’s or St. John’s prospects in marriage and society, and how this reflects on your mother and me. Once besmirched, a family’s reputation can remain that way for generations, if not forever. And our history has been pristine, if uneventful. This is not an accident of fate. Generations of Vaughns have understood the value of a family name and have taken pains to protect it. We are not a family of saints. But we are, thus far, a family of people who exercise discretion.”

Those last two words were delivered with a certain punishing exactitude.

She couldn’t remember her father ever using the word “besmirched” before, and for some reason it was that that burned away a little of her shock and revealed to her the true horror of her circumstances.

Not the least of which was this: Mr. Cassidy’s little speech had pulled her back from the razor’s edge of ruin.

A stubborn little voice inside her insisted: But it wasn’t my fault that we were caught. I was exercising discretion.

What other possible end could there be to their dalliance? It was explosive all along, and it had concluded, like any good show of fireworks, like a Roman candle going up.

“And so, given your nimble mind, Lillias, I do wonder what your solution would be if, as you say, you did not want to marry him. It certainly poses a fascinating intellectual conundrum.”

There was quite a long pause.

“I suppose I’ll have to sleep on it,” she said carefully.

“You do that.” He stood up with a great sigh and headed for the door. “If you can. Now, I’m off for a word with Mr. Cassidy.”

“He wants to live in America,” she called after him, rather desperately.

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” her father said, almost mildly.

He shut the door behind him.

Hugh was in the smoking room.

He couldn’t quite remember how he’d gotten here. He couldn’t, in fact, quite feel his own limbs.

He felt a bit like a ghost at his own funeral.

After his burst of eloquence everything was a bit of a blur, as if every bit of his emotional and physical resources had been spent.

The hush, despite the presence of the three other men staring at him, was dense as the carpet.

Six eyes—Bolt’s, Hardy’s, and Delacorte’s—were fixed upon him. It occurred to him that this was likely how he’d gotten there. They’d somehow escorted him away from the stage and back into The Grand Palace on the Thames’s main building.

Those eyes were variously amused, pitying, sympathetic, and wondering, the expression shifting across them the way light glanced from mirrors.

Still, nobody spoke.

He ought to smoke. It would clear his head. The act of selecting a cigar, lighting it. The soothing familiar ritual.

He reached for the humidor. He was shocked to see his hand shaking badly.

He pulled it back as though it had betrayed him and thrust it into his coat pocket. The hand that had so recently touched a trembling, sighing Lillias.

His breath stopped for an instant.

Lucien was the first one to speak.

“Perhaps we ought to have discussed this during one of our evenings in this room . . . but getting caught is optional, Cassidy.”

And at this Hugh moaned, sank down into the brown wing chair, bent forward at the torso, and crossed his arms over the top of his head, as though a boulder were hurtling out of the sky toward him.

Although of course, metaphorically, the boulder had already struck.

He breathed in.

He breathed out.

He heard his own breath as though he were inside his little cabin in New York and the wind outside was battering at it.

Then he became aware of a faint shuffling sound, which he suspected was his friends gathering around him, and the reassuring sound of a bung being plucked from a decanter.

Delacorte cleared his throat. “I was surprised you were able to get an entire handful of her derriere,” he said gravely. “I always imagined she was made of marble.”

Hugh slowly levered up his head and stared at him in rank amazement.

“Tink tink.”Delacorte tapped the air with his forefinger. Illustrating, presumably, the sound a marble derriere would make. Interpreting the incredulous stares as need for clarification.

“Some circumstances are better served by quiet commiseration, Delacorte,” said Captain Hardy, who thought every circumstance could be improved if only everyone just stopped talking.

“Oh, yes, of course, I take your point.” Delacorte lowered his voice to just a notch above hushed, bent until his limpid blue eyes were level with Hugh’s, and tenderly placed a hand on his shoulder. “She is terrifying and I am truly sorry for you, my friend. But I sincerely wish you every happiness.”

Then he stood back and clasped his hands, eyebrows locked in a worried position.

Hugh continued to stare at him. But Delacorte said every word of what he meant. There were few enough men in the world like that.

“Thank you,” Hugh managed finally, with great irony. His voice was a dry croak. He supposed it was a good thing that somewhere in the smoke and wreckage of his life, his sense of humor was still alive.

“Drink this.” Hardy thrust a glass at him.

Hugh bolted it. Then coughed.

It was whiskey.

It burned a path down his gullet and he gasped, and suddenly he felt clearer but he didn’t know if that was better.

“I don’t suppose you’re in love?” Bolt mused. As though this predicament he was in—not so much a predicament as a cataclysmic event reshaping the landscape of his life, like an earthquake—was a problem that could be solved once Bolt had enough information.

“I’m not entirely certain we even like each other. But she’s . . .”

They waited.

“She’s . . .”

They leaned forward.

“We’ve naught in common except . . .”

Whiskey was truth serum, damn it.

“Ah, yes,” Bolt said. “That ‘except’ will get you every time. But here’s a hint: don’t say that to her father.”

Hugh glared balefully at Lucien.

“I’ve never been so grateful to not be handsome,” Delacorte mused. “Resisting all that temptation to become a rogue must be exhausting.”

“I’M NOT A ROGUE.”

Was he?

“Of course not,” Delacorte humored him soothingly, shooting an “if you say so” sidelong glance at Lucien and Captain Hardy.

Hugh gulped a few breaths.

“Bolt here was the one with a Moroccan mistress. And wasn’t there a soprano who threw a vase at your head? I think those are in the How to Be a Rogue handbook.”

“Are you implying I might be a rogue? I’m an upright, somber married man now and will be for the rest of my life.” Bolt paused theatrically. “As you soon will be, too. For the rest . . . of . . . your . . . life.”

“You’re lucky I don’t have a vase to hand right now, Bolt.”

Bolt grinned, lit a cigar, sucked it into life. And then he leaned down and gently tucked it into Hugh’s hand.

Hugh gripped it as though he’d been thrown a lifeline.

“She’s a beautiful girl, Cassidy, and if you’ll forgive the Delacortian bluntness, she looked as though she knew what she was about. Once the children come along you’ll be kept so busy you probably won’t have time to be miserable.” This was Bolt.

Oh, God.

“Children,” he repeated hoarsely. In incredulous horror.

“Stop torturing him, Bolt,” Captain Hardy interjected. There was a pause. “It’s my turn.”

He took the empty glass from Hugh and poured another from the flask in his coat. So that’s where the whiskey had come from. The ladies were wise enough not to stock anything much stronger than brandy in the smoking room.

He planted himself in front of Hugh and said slowly, “Cassidy, did you consider how this dalliance of yours could reflect on the reputation of The Grand Palace on the Thames should it become discovered? Because it was very clear this wasn’t the first time you and Lillias done that.”

For the first time he realized that Captain Hardy’s silence, all this time, was really a sort of simmering anger.

“All I can say, Hardy, is . . . I saw the lay of things at once, as if I was floating up over my body. The people standing in front of me. The woman with me. The circumstances. The consequences for everyone, for me, for Lillias, for her family, for The Grand Palace on the Thames. I knew I needed to act immediately and decisively in order to shape a story and so I did.”

Hardy studied him. “I think that was some of the quickest and bravest thinking I’ve ever seen a man do. And all without firing a shot.”

Hugh thought, but didn’t add, “. . . and with an erection, to boot.”

He smiled faintly, humorlessly. “You should have seen me in the war.”

“I wish I had a man like you when we’re running smugglers to ground.”

Hugh nodded once at the high compliment this was, which was probably much more than he deserved in the moment.

All the men were somberly quiet a moment.

He’d so hoped that life from now on would be free of battles.

“Every moment of my life has been considered. But with her . . . when I’m near her . . .”

Her.Even now the word caused an anticipatory ripple along his traitorous nerve endings; even now his muscles were tightening in anticipation, bracing for the glut of pleasure.

She was no safer than opium. Opium only led to disaster.

And what was this if not a disaster?

All three pairs of eyes aiming at him were now sympathetic and thoughtful. Both Bolt and Hardy understood that any man, no matter how formidable, could become Achilles when the right woman—or the wrong one—came along. Delacorte only wanted a cozy domestic life and a woman who adored him for who he was.

But no one was offering suggestions for a way out of this. And that was because, given the facts at hand, there was no other way out of this.

He unconsciously gripped the edge of his chair, as though if he held on strongly enough he could keep the life he’d imagined for himself from snapping its tether, sailing away from him, lost forever. Cornflower-blue eyes and corn silk hair and a gentle laugh seemed like an echo now.

“Cassidy . . .”

Hugh looked up at the sound of Hardy’s voice. “There’s no shame in wanting to lose yourself for a little while.” He said it quietly. “We could all use a little forgetting now and again.”

Hugh locked eyes with Captain Hardy. He was surprised but he didn’t let it show. He didn’t much like being seen so clearly. He wasn’t certain he liked knowing that he’d destroyed his entire future for something so human, so universally banal, as lust and . . . forgetting.

“I probably have a thing or two in my case that’ll keep you from thinking, if you’d like.” Delacorte said. “I’ll have a look!”

“Thank you, but no. I don’t run away from consequences. I will see this through.”

“Weren’t those the last words of Big Bartholomew Bellamy before he went to the gallows?” Lucien mused.

Delacorte snapped his fingers. “I thought I’d heard them somewhere before.”

And then they all turned at the sharp rap on the door.

The other three men filed out.

Hugh was left alone in the room with the Earl of Vaughn.

Despite the fact that the Earl had said, “I’d like a word with Mr. Cassidy,” he said nothing for a good long while. He studied him thoughtfully, almost quizzically, from the opposite side of the room. He didn’t reach for the cigars or the brandy.

Hugh met the scrutiny head on, without blinking, without flinching.

There wasn’t an expression in the world that could break him, even as he died a thousand deaths internally. He could only guess at some of the things the earl was thinking.

Finally Hugh spoke. “Lord Vaughn, I deeply regret the manner in which you learned of our attachment.”

The earl barked a laugh. “You regret it,” he said dryly. “Like a bloody show at Piccadilly, the curtain going up, there you were.”

Hugh didn’t say, “You’d have to pay dearly for that sort of show.” He was in an agony of shame and disbelief.

And then another moody silence ensued.

“I was young once, Cassidy. I did a few inadvisable things. Not on stage, mind you.”

Oh God.

“Yes, sir.”

“Here is the thing,” the earl said. “While I’m tempted to issue a more vociferous objection and castigation based on the circumstances—in other words, I’m tempted to have you hog-tied and flogged—the truth is I think you will be good for Lillias. She is strong-willed and too clever for her own good and I think you are just the man to keep her in line and protect her from herself. Her settlements are generous and will enable you to dabble in business here while you keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed. A house in Devon will be at your disposal. She is my oldest daughter. I’d dreamed of a grander match, of course, but her happiness is paramount to me.”

It was a guillotine coming down.

Hugh stared at him. “Dabble.”

What he wanted didn’t matter, that much was clear, given the circumstances. And though it was more or less what he’d expected, the brief rote recitation of what his domestic life would be like—the cozy life in Devon, finances controlled by her father—settled like a cannonball on his chest. As did, oddly, the notion that Lillias ought to be “kept in line,” something he might have concurred with some weeks ago. As though she was a pet requiring tethering, not a person with agency and original thoughts and restless desires.

“But I will not have you take her out of England to live,” the earl said. “If you do, there will be no settlement at all. And while I do have some sympathy for your disappointed dreams, if you abandon her to return to America, I will see to your ruin. Do you understand me?”

Hugh breathed in and breathed out.

“Yes, sir. Upon my life, I will never abandon her,” he said quietly.

“I know you won’t. That’s not the sort of man you are.” The earl sounded almost sympathetic. “Congratulations. Welcome to the family.”