I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

“Well, that went much better than I expected, Lillias!”

The countess had loosened her stays and was sprawling happily on one of the little settees in their sitting room in The Grand Palace on the Thames suite. “It was clever to wait for everyone to be more than a little drunk before we arrived, I think. They may or may not remember you announced an engagement at all, and may not have time to be shocked later.”

Lillias stifled a smile. Her mother wasn’t an imbiber of much beyond tea, usually, but when a social occasion featured a punch bowl she saw it as her duty to enter into the spirit of the festivities. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was listing a little.

And she wasn’t going to remind her that the Marquess of Landover had already informed half the ton.

Her mother noticed the smile and smiled back at her. “I do rather miss my lady’s maid.” Her mother gave her hair a push up out of her eyes. “A bit of a challenge to get all the pins out when one has had a cup or two of ratafia.”

“Or three or four,” Lillias said mischievously.

“Oh, why count?” her mother said breezily. The word “count” evolved into a wide yawn.

“But it seems Mr. Cassidy made a smashing impression on your father’s friends. He knows so very many specific things.” She lifted a hand languidly.

Now Lillias was curious.

That Hugh did know specific things was inarguable—how a finger drawn along the inside of her arm could make her nipples go hard as little beads, for instance. But she was certain he wasn’t sharing that knowledge in company that included her father.

But she couldn’t be in that room where they discussed all of those things. What did they talk about? How did they see him?

“What sorts of specific things did they talk about?”

“Oh, you know, money, buildings, investments, horses, guns, I believe the word ‘balustrades’ was used but I can’t be certain and I don’t know why, I stopped listening because you know how your father can go on.”

“Mmm.” Lillias did know. She rather wished she’d been in on the conversation. It sounded interesting.

“Gilly invited all of us to a picnic at Heatherfield tomorrow, Mama. Very impromptu. You and Papa are invited, too.”

“Oh, that would be a nice little drive! Your father would like that.” Her mother’s voice trailed drowsily. Her eyes were closed now.

Lillias absently took up one of the pillows lovingly knitted by one of those ladies at The Grand Palace on the Thames. And it felt like that, suddenly: like comfort and love and safety in its dense, plump little form. It was the entirety of the intent they’d had when they’d made it. She wrapped her arms around it, experimentally.

She toppled onto her side, clutching it.

The bliss, the bliss of being motionless.

She’d been caught and tossed by a merciless updraft of emotion for weeks. The vertiginous anticipation of seeing Giles followed by the near knee-buckling relief of discovering the long-dreaded Harriette nowhere near combined by the disembodying sensation of introducing a large and startlingly handsome American fiancé of no particular pedigree to a stunned ton—all of it was nearly bruising in its intensity. Then the smiling and smiling, deftly fielding the glancing blows to her pride, the oblique, insinuating little questions, and oh, yes, the envy. No one at that ball was going to up and marry a handsome behemoth from the wilds of America. They no doubt thought she’d lost her mind. Or her virginity.

But more than one woman would be lying awake tonight wondering what it would be like if Mr. Hugh Cassidy was lying next to them instead of Lord such and such. And well . . . there was a little satisfaction in the notion.

She breathed in.

Exhaled.

And for a time that’s all she did, in time to her mother’s soft snores, listening to the low fire pop and spit, sifting through images of the evening as though viewing it through a prism. And oddly kept returning to one impression again and again, only a few seconds in duration but somehow more distinct than others, like a tiny diamond among pebbles.

She reached behind to loosen her laces. Her fingers lingering at the fine hairs along her nape, reliving the feel of Hugh’s fingers trailing along the bare skin of her back, as soft, secret, elemental as the night air, the two of them and their pleasure not separate from the trees, the sky, the stars, the hum of insects, the call of a nightbird.

Exactly like an animal.

How would she ever have known fingertips feathered across her neck could lead to a riot of sensation through her entire body if she hadn’t smoked a cheroot in the Annex?

But the thrum of Hugh’s restraint was in his touch; it transferred to her that spiky thrill of ferocious desire tightly leashed. More, he’d said. There’s more. She was luckier than she deserved to be—of a certainty another man might not have been so restrained. And perhaps therein had lain part of the thrill, too. So easy to forget when one was in the throes of it.

It was a mercy it would never happen again.

Would Giles touch her the same way, given an opportunity?

She had never imagined him touching her that way, perhaps because before Hugh she’d had no idea of the possibilities. And yet she was daring once again to imagine herself married to Giles. And that was easy to do, because she’d imagined it for so long before.

Hearts are an encumbrance, Hugh had said. And yet apparently the flimsy traitorous things stirred and revived like dead flowers when watered with just a little hope. Hugh’s plan offered that. And after her waltz with Gilly, it suddenly didn’t seem at all outlandish.

If she and Hugh could both get what they wanted, this secret, fraught, wicked interlude would come to an end, and perhaps the ending would herald a blissful return of clarity, certainty, peace. “Forgetting” would no longer be so necessary. There would be no more need to distract herself from misery or to dull pain. She would be herself again.

She was certain she knew the kinds of things Hugh wanted to forget, though she suspected he’d deny it. He kept himself at the slightest bit of a remove from everyone, so slight that you wouldn’t even notice it unless you, too, tried to keep the world from brushing up against wounds. It was a way to create a little pocket of peace for yourself.

Amelia. The name conjured one of those paintings of saints, eyes aimed beatifically toward heaven, halo pulsing around their hairlines. Perhaps this was unfair. After all, Amelia had bolted without a word to anyone. But Lillias knew too well that men often reserved reverence—and she’d indeed heard that telltale carefulness in the way he’d said her name—for women they didn’t truly know.

And yet. Did it matter? When Lillias sat now with the idea of Amelia, this woman he’d pursued across an ocean, two surprising emotions sifted to the surface: envy and gratitude. Envy that she’d been the reason Hugh Cassidy wanted to stay alive in a battlefield hospital.

Nearly ferocious gratitude that he’d had one.

To be so needed. To be the source of someone’s strength. That, suddenly, seemed the point of life.

She lifted her head abruptly when she heard a gentle tap at the door.

Lillias sighed. She found within her the fortitude to get off the settee to go and peer through the peephole.

She reared back when an enormous pale blue eye filled her view, so clear she half expected a meadowlark to go winging across it.

She opened the door to Dot, who was holding a tray upon which rested a little scone and a pot of jam.

Lillias stared at it, puzzled.

Dot curtsied and whispered, rather loudly, “I know you didn’t ring for it, Miss, I mean, Lady, Lillias. But Mr. Cassidy said you hadn’t eaten much and so he thought you might enjoy this scone. He hopes . . .” Dot cast her eyes upward, as though to try to access the ceiling of her brain “. . . he hopes you appreciate this great sacrifice, as he was going to eat it for breakfast.”

Dot didn’t say, “. . . and then he smiled at me and what choice did I have after that but do anything he wanted?” But it was absolutely what happened.

Lillias smiled. “Thank you, Dot.”

Dot dropped a curtsy and Lillias closed the door, then ferried her plate to the settee and placed it on the little table, admiring it, quietly amazed.

Hugh’s hand cupped lightly beneath her elbow. The odd, humble moment her attention had returned to again and again tonight. Somehow those few seconds transferred to her knees the strength to remain upright at the sight of Giles.

But how had he known?

He knew so many specific things.

Lillias looked across the scone at her mother and was beset by a swift wave of ferocious love and terror and gratitude. She could not imagine doing without any of her family members. Not even St. John.

It’s the only thing that makes life bearable. And it’s the only thing that makes life unbearable.

She thought she could concur.

She was suddenly just as grateful that she could play a part in his forgetting as she was desperately hopeful that the two of them would get what they each wanted.

And Hugh could go home again.

Lillias reached for one of those lovingly knitted coverlets and draped it over her mother. And then she settled back down on the settee across from her and devoured the scone.

It was heavenly. It was the food of angels.

She felt better than she had in weeks.

Replete, she caught up the other coverlet and dragged it over her, and lay back down. A few moments later she was lost in a blissfully dreamless heap across from her mother.

The earl tiptoed past them on his way in. He paused to plant kisses on both of their foreheads before he went off to sleep.