I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

She had the sense that she had been talked about.

Their expressions—rather gentle, worried, a trifle indulgent, charged with some sort of secret understanding—gave her a hint of what her own expression might be. Her hair and skirts might have been restored to order, but internally she was nothing but a pulsating thundercloud. That flush in her cheeks could well be taken for temper.

“Mr. Cassidy thought he saw a . . . a hedgehog . . . and wanted to have a look.” She explained Hugh’s absence this way. It was met with bemused silence.

“Americans,” the earl said sympathetically, finally.

“I told him I’d like to go back with you. He said we oughtn’t to wait for him.”

If things were not going at all well with Mr. Cassidy, they were all on her side. That much was clear. She saw no judgment, no glee. Perhaps there was a little hope. Her engagement was all of two days old, after all. And they were her friends, people who loved her, and she felt the softness of their care as they all moved back toward the house.

She knew a little mordant amusement imagining how the disappearance of Hugh Cassidy would brighten the worlds of a group of benignly spoiled aristocrats.

Just the thought of Hugh made her being contract with a pang like a lightning strike. Swift in brilliance and thrill.

And how much darker than before it left everything when it was done.

How odd to feel soothed as her family surrounded her like a cradle and Hugh echoed in her body. If she raised her hands to her face now, she could smell him on her hands.

She did that just now. It went to her head like a drug. She nearly stumbled.

Giles fell in beside her, and that was comforting, too.

The rest of their party fell back just a little.

Subtle!

Despite herself, there was no denying it was comfortable and familiar, and just those two things began to soothe her roiled emotions, if only just a little. Her feet on the grass, the sun above, even the birds singing were probably the descendants of the same birds who had sung at Heatherfield for generations.

“Lilly . . . Lillias . . . it has been such a pleasure seeing you here again,” he said.

“It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you, Giles.”

“One could even imagine a lifetime of beautiful days just like this. Don’t you think?”

She managed to smile up at him.

He smiled back at her.

At least she could make someone smile. There was some relief to be had in that.

He was her dear friend and she loved him, she did. She truly did.

She struggled not to turn her head to look behind her.

And soon the house loomed into view again, as it had hundreds of times before.

“Did you enjoy investigating the hedgehog, Mr. Cassidy?” Lady Bankham asked solicitously.

Hugh slowly raised his head cautiously.

Perhaps this was a euphemism or a code of some kind?

Everyone was looking at him with pleasant expectation.

Lillias was studying her plate.

“Yes,” he decided to say. “Thank you for asking. We don’t have hedgehogs in New York.”

“There’s such a long list of things that are here and not there,” Lady Bankham said.

“I suppose that’s true,” Hugh said, thinking of the list of controversial words Lady Vaughn had suggested compiling in the drawing room at The Grand Palace on the Thames. He did not say, “And the reverse is also true,” because that would make for a very long dinner indeed and it simply didn’t matter anymore. He’d caused enough consternation in the span of one picnic.

Because he could do what he needed to do no matter how battered he’d been, and do it with conviction, Hugh managed to keep aloft for nearly an hour a very uncontroversial conversation about carriages. Men were simple, as he’d said, and it worked a treat, as he’d known it would. All the men engaged in what was apparently a satisfying time reminiscing about their first barouches and their component parts—silver trim and lamps and the like—and about learning to drive a team, horses they had known, races. The ladies interjected now and again to assist with blanks needing filling (“Do you recall the name of that groom who . . . ?” and so forth).

Lillias spoke only once, to the footman trying to refill her glass. She said, “No, thank you.”

She managed to appear interested in the conversation, propping her chin on her linked hands, eyes bright. It must have been something of a Herculean feat, but she was a veteran of ballrooms and soirees where almost nothing real was said.

When a lull set in, and stomachs were patted and napkins plucked from the collars of shirts and the footmen had ferried away the empty dishes, Hugh said, “I wondered if I can interest Giles in a game of billiards?”

Lillias stared at him then.

He met her gaze full on, because only a fool would miss an opportunity to gaze at her in candlelight.

As usual, it was like taking a dart to the solar plexus. If his soul was a target, the very essence of her hit that red center every time. He’d once resented it, and now he knew it for the magic it was. For the loss it would be.

But there was no hope for his soul if he played any part in her unhappiness. And there was redemption in playing a part in giving her the life she wanted.

Giles poured brandy for the two of them.

Balls were racked. Cues chosen.

And then Hugh leisurely reached out and closed the door.

Giles froze in chalking his cue and eyed the closed door for a moment, somewhat warily.

He continued.

They shot two rounds before Hugh spoke.

“Bankham . . . I’d like to ask for your opinion about something.”

“Definitely the barouche,” Giles said absently, lining up a shot.

“It’s about women.”

He all but felt the man go rigidly still.

After all, Hugh was large and he was holding a long stick and they were alone in the billiard room.

“A confounding topic to be sure,” Giles said lightly.

Hugh nodded. He eyed the table for his next shot.

“What would you do . . .” he leaned forward and took aim “. . . if you were concerned that the affections of the woman to whom you were engaged were . . . more strongly engaged elsewhere?”

The ball clattered across the table.

The silence was long.

The two of them stood at either end of the table as though this was a duel, and not a game.

“Interesting philosophical question, Cassidy. I should think it would be an uncomfortable realization, indeed.” Giles didn’t look at him.

Giles leaned forward and eyed the table for his shot. He drew the cue back, measuring, measuring again. “Out of curiosity, what do your sort do if another bloke intervenes in an engagement? Is it duels with pistols? Or do you simply snap them in half over your knee like a bundle of twigs?”

“We tie them up, coat them in honey, and leave them in the forest for the bears and ants to have their way with. They’re not worth wasting good bullets on.”

Giles missed his shot badly.

He stood upright again.

The assessing stare returned. Giles was wary now. His face hard. He had centuries of breeding behind him. Innate confidence bequeathed by money and the power of his family name. And he could lay claim to his own strength of character.

“But I don’t think there’s any honor in holding a woman to a promise if there was a certainty she could have the life of which she’s long dreamed,” Hugh continued. “And if there’s a certainty she’d be cared for, protected and cherished by someone she cares for, only a brute wouldn’t step aside.”

Hugh knew that honor was more a thing of theory for Giles, who hadn’t fought for his homeland, hadn’t made choices about who and what to shoot. That he wasn’t yet thirty and most of his life choices were already made for him, though he didn’t realize it and it would never occur to him to view it that way. But he was a decent sort. He was intelligent. He was everything Lillias had said he was. And in Hugh’s mind, while this was something of an indictment, it still brought him some small measure of cold comfort.

Hugh took his shot. The ball milled madly around the pocket, then sank very prettily in.

Time itself seemed to hold its breath as the two of them looked across at each other.

Giles was transfixed. At first. The evolution of his expression was subtle, but not unworthy of him: triumph, relief, sympathy, all had their flickering turn.

“I’m not a brute,” Hugh said quietly.

The following quiet was elegiac. Something had ended.

Neither of them pretended to be playing billiards anymore.

“Well, then,” Giles said quietly but very distinctly, as though he were issuing a statement before a magistrate. “As a man of honor, I can say with full certainty that it’s safe for you to step aside.”

She wasn’t to know that after he wrote the first letter, he’d pulled another sheet of foolscap toward him and stared at it, and then turned to stare out the window. He saw in its reflection her face as he’d first seen her in the twilit dark of the Annex, a startling, arrogant, maddening, vulnerable jewel wreathed in smoke. She wasn’t to know that she’d stopped his breath then and any number of times since, which meant the next breath he took after that was like the first one he’d ever drawn. So it was like he was being born anew every time he looked at her.

And she wasn’t to know, though she might have guessed, that he’d followed Amelia to England in part because he had indeed wanted things to return to the way they were, when in truth his life would and could never be the same.

And she wasn’t to know how he suffered torments over trying to choose words to capture something that was both one emotion and every emotion: fury and jealousy, a lust that awed him with its tenderness, shamed him with its savagery, and tested the limits of his considerable restraint; the terrible regret that his mother would never know her, and that Hugh would never know if she got a dog and a cat of her own. And the gratitude—for the surfeit of pleasure he took in touching her skin, for the revelation that he’d not been fully alive for a very long time. And he knew this for certain because now everything in him and on him hurt as though he was waking in that hospital in Williamsville again, or being cast into a new world, naked. But perhaps that was as it should be. And perhaps that had been the point. He hurt, and he was alive again, because of her.

And she didn’t know that he’d watched, his hand trembling a little, the pendulum on the clock swing and swing and mark off the hours, and that as he did so he’d cursed, finally and for the first time, his inability to make words sing or ache. In the end, all he could do was write his truth.

So all she read was:

I wish you every happiness.

Yrs,

Hugh Cassidy

Lillias was motionless. She stared at the letter in her hands, searching every word for meaning, while behind her the maids began moving about and packing her things.

And then she drew in a breath, and tucked the letter into her sketchbook, like the final page in a story. Every page of the sketchbook was filled now. She’d been awake all night doing just that.

And then she stared out the window.

She couldn’t see nearly far enough.