I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

Bankham,

I have reason to believe Lillias’s affections have long been engaged elsewhere, and her attachment to me likely resulted only from an expectation of disappointed hopes. I shall not stand in the way of a more appropriate match, and will release her from her promise should the future she desires become available to her. Her happiness is all that matters to me.

H. Cassidy

Giles brought the letter to Lord Vaughn, with whom he’d requested a private meeting in the library at Heatherfield.

“I found it this morning tucked beneath my door. He left before dawn.”

Lord Vaughn stared at the letter for a good long time, and thought: Good Christ, why did I ever have daughters?

“You are the . . . ‘elsewhere’?” He said this with faint amazement and looked up at Giles from beneath beetled brows.

Giles looked radiantly bemused. “It would seem so,” he said delicately, and with not a little pride. “I believe Mr. Cassidy detected as such. And I believe this is his way of telling me that he will not shoot me should I wish to step in.”

The earl lowered the letter. His frown remained fixed.

“I seem to recall hearing something of an arrangement with your distant cousin. Harriette,” he said.

Giles cleared his throat. The earl’s frown was having the intended effect, which was to make him uncomfortable just for the sake of it. He said carefully, “It is not a fait accompli, you see. My parents might perhaps be disappointed that we will not be upholding the tradition of an alliance with the Dervalls, but I cannot think they will ever object to my match to Lillias, who is not only the daughter of an earl but possessed of such a sterling character. I in fact think, once they learn of the depth of our mutual esteem, they would rejoice.”

The earl listened to this speech with a good deal of rue, considering the girl in question possessed a character comprised of many and varied splendors. He loved her, but she was human.

“Esteem,” the earl repeated. Finally. Musingly.

Giles, for a moment, wasn’t certain what to do with this.

“Yes, sir. I thought it wisest to speak to you before I spoke to Lillias, as I should hate to cause her consternation if you did not approve of a match. And I do already think of you as almost a father.”

Lord Vaughn stared across at the young man he’d known since birth. He was a fine lad, good-hearted, intelligent, level-headed. He knew nearly everything about him, thanks to their family’s long connection. Certainly the town was plagued with far worse, young bloods who drank and whored and raced their highflyers at foolish speeds. St. John at this point could go either way, really, but the earl controlled the purse strings and St. John was tethered to those. He would simply need to take on faith that he and his wife had instilled proper values in their children and hope for the best while taking a firm hand. One didn’t get to be a parent without understanding that much of life is out of one’s control.

Once again he frowned down upon the letter left by Mr. Hugh Cassidy, who had departed for Portsmouth before dawn on a hired mount. This was not a surprise, as he’d said he’d be doing as such. It could not be said that he was stealing away like a thief in the night. And his stunning little letter indicated that he would also not, for instance, be calling anyone out or otherwise making a fuss should his engagement come to an end.

The still, gray, stunned face of his daughter over breakfast, during which she’d merely looked at her plate of eggs as though she’d never seen such thing before, was a bit jarring, however.

This letter rather explained a lot.

Was it true? Had she been secretly pining for her childhood friend all of this time?

He looked up again. Giles withstood another few potent seconds of his unblinking scrutiny without squirming.

And Lord Vaughn did appreciate the scene in which he was now participating—the handsome, respectable, young titled man in the beautifully tailored clothing humbly begging an audience with his prospective bride’s father. It was how he’d dreamed it would always be. It was infinitely preferable to standing in a small crowd when a curtain was whipped aside to reveal his daughter in the throes of what looked like an expert clinch with a man she’d met only a fortnight earlier.

And yet.

Why the bloody hell hadn’t this young idiot sitting in front of him spoken before now?

It was a terrible pity it was too early to drink.

“Why the bloody hell didn’t you speak before now?” the earl said out loud.

Giles blinked.

“I . . . I could not be certain that the depth of her regard was equal to mine. Everyone admires Lillias and she is in turn kind to everyone.”

The earl turned his head toward the clock, mainly in order to think without the younger man’s hopeful gaze upon him. He could have told Giles that no one is certain of anything ever by the time they were the earl’s age. But he was tired, and it was very clear to him that his daughter ought to get married.

It was just that he knew how Mr. Cassidy looked at Lillias when he thought no one was watching. That mixture of wonderment and fury mixed with something like tender amusement and . . . awe. He suspected it was precisely the way Cassidy looked at the Hudson River Valley.

And he recalled how he had leaped to shield her when that fateful curtain opened. Had touched her elbow in the ballroom. Helped her into carriages. A father notices these things.

And he’d of course done the absolutely right thing by Lillias, at the cost of his own dreams.

The earl looked down. He kept returning to the last sentence of Mr. Cassidy’s letter.

He rubbed his forehead, where he was certain another wrinkle was forming at this very moment.

He did not look forward to explaining any of this to his wife.

He sighed gustily and handed the letter back to Giles.

“You know I hold you in the utmost esteem, Giles,” he said slowly, only a little ironically, “and I think of you almost as a son. It would be a fine thing to have you as a member of our family and I see no objection to this match. No settlement funds have been transferred to Mr. Cassidy as of yet. As entanglements go, it is one easily enough undone.”

If this was not precisely the warm and wholehearted endorsement Giles had hoped to hear—he’d envisioned the earl exaggeratedly mopping his brow at the notion of ridding himself of the difficult American—it was understandably English and understated. My mother used to shoot dinner from the porch. Good heavens. Giles would shudder every time he remembered those words in Mr. Cassidy’s voice.

“But . . .” the earl said. “. . . I have two stipulations. The first one is that I leave the decision entirely in Lillias’s hands.”

Giles nodded. He anticipated no difficulty there. Lillias had been all brooding silence last night and all listless silence this morning. She was not a person of passions and moods, typically. So this meant she was done with Mr. Cassidy, of a certainty, and required only rescuing from her predicament. What a pleasure it would be to rescue her.

He didn’t share with the earl the remarkable conversation he’d had with Cassidy the previous evening. That was between the two men, and he was certain Cassidy would like it to remain that way.

The grace of Cassidy’s gesture wasn’t something Giles would soon forget.

“And the second is . . . I request that you wait to speak to her until after we return to London and have moved out of our fine accommodations at The Grand Palace on the Thames and back into our townhouse. She’s had an eventful week and I do think she will be in a more receptive frame of mind. We will depart this morning from Heatherfield and you may set a date to speak to her in London a week hence. Are we understood, young Bankham?”

Giles thought about Lillias as a girl, riding her horse at breakneck speed, shooting a target dead center just yesterday, sliding down a banister, wading into a creek. For all her delicate beauty, she’d never struck him as fragile. Perhaps she was now. He felt even fonder of her at the notion.

“Thank you, sir,” Giles said. “Understood.”

“I’ll miss it,” Claire said wistfully.

Lillias stared numbly out the carriage window at the little gated park with its valiant sturdy greenery, the shining white building, The Grand Palace on the Thames’s sign with its ghostly “rogue” still visible, the modest gargoyles. The rooftop where she’d sat and looked out over a part of London she would otherwise have never seen, with a man she would otherwise have never met let alone kissed, beneath stars, mist, and a half-moon.

She would not likely see any of them ever again. This strange, mad interlude in her life was over. Things would now go back to the way they were, and that’s the way they would remain, forever.

Of course, nothing had explicitly been said. That wasn’t the English way.

But Giles had said to her gently, after breakfast, “I’d like to call upon your father, Lillias, on Friday at five o’clock on St. James Square. I hope this is happy news to you.”

Lillias had stared at him.

So Hugh had indeed spoken to Giles. And had apparently reassured Giles that he did not intend to run him through if she should wish to end the engagement.

She wondered what on earth had actually been said.

“It’s always a pleasure to see you,” she said. Truthfully.

By this time next year she would be married to Giles. Lady Bankham. One day mistress of Heatherfield.

It was everything she’d dreamed of. She supposed she even had Hugh to thank for it. It had been a remarkable detour in her life, and one day, perhaps, she would look back upon it and understand why it needed to happen.

Their driver snapped the ribbons and the Vaughn carriage lurched forward, out of the little courtyard, away from The Grand Palace on the Thames, forever.

By the time they’d gotten to the little bridge near the Barking Road, they found themselves stopped by what appeared to be bedlam. A clot of carriages and a crowd of milling men on horseback and on foot, shouting and gesturing wildly at each other, lamps held aloft.

There was a polite knock on the carriage door.

Her father slid it open. “What the devil is—oh, good evening, Mr. Delacorte,” he said.

Mr. Delacorte’s usually cheery face was grim and in shadow. He touched his hat. “Saw the seal on your carriage, Lord Vaughn.” He was breathing as though he’d run quite a distance.

“What’s all the hubbub about?”

“Well, it seems the Tropica was destroyed as it sailed toward Portsmouth, some hours out to sea—lightning hit her mast, went up in flame. The Justice found a few survivors floating on detritus at sea and they took a detour into the East India docks to bring them to shore and we’re making room and trying to find accommodations for the men they’ve acquired. It’s been a bit mad.”

Lillias went still. “The T-t-ropica?” Her stomach iced.

“Oh, that is a too bad thing,” her father said. “Poor souls.”

She could scarcely breathe. But she managed to get the question out. “Mr. Delacorte . . . did they find . . .”

He knew she meant Uncle Liam.

Delacorte shook his head slowly.

Nausea struck, swift and dark. She nearly doubled over with pain.

She felt as though she were being pulled into a whirlpool. “Does he know?”

“He knows.” His face was grim. “He’s not in Portsmouth. He’s back at the inn. In his room.” He paused. “His room on the third floor,” he added, rather superfluously and meaningfully. “I must away.”

He closed the carriage door and was gone.

Her father shot the bolt and thumped his walking stick on the roof.

And they lurched hard forward again, but still, progress was halting. Measured in inches.

A roaring sound started up in Lillias’s ears.

It was the sound of her own breathing. In her head was something between a sob and a scream, the sound a heart makes when it is near to breaking.

The carriage inched a few feet more forward.

“Papa, what time is it?” She heard her own voice as though it was coming from outside the carriage, from a great distance away.

“A quarter to eleven o’clock, child.”

Her lungs were sawing now. In, out. In, out.

And then she shoved open the door of the carriage and leaped out.

Her father roared. “Lillias—Lillias! Christ! What the devil is she . . .”

She ran.

The wind yanked her bonnet from her head and it flogged her back, and her pelisse sailed out behind her. She dodged and wove and feinted through the crowds of men and carriages and horses, ignoring shouts of indignation, leers, oaths.

The wind stung her eyes into tears, blurring everything like her ruined sketchbook as she raced past. Her lungs sawed.

And when she finally reached the front door of The Grand Palace on the Thames, she seized the knocker and slammed it five times against the door. Praying.

“Oh, Lady Lillias,” Dot said cheerfully through the peep hatch. “It’s five minutes to eleven o’clock. You almost missed curfew. Have you forgotten something?”

“Dot. You must open the door now.”

“Oh, do you need a bourdaloue?” Dot whispered, with a sympathetic nose wrinkle.

“YES,” Lillias said, thinking swiftly. “Will you go and fetch one for me? RUN!”

“I’ll make haste!” Dot yanked open the door and vanished in the direction of the kitchen, losing a shoe on the way. Lillias slammed the door, bolted it, and hurtled up the three flights, stumbling only once.

The house was already slumbering for the night; the candles had all been doused.

She knocked on the door, gently.

He might not open it for her.

He might not open it at all.

Well, then, she would pound.

She heard the bolt slide, and the door opened. He was in trousers, a shirt open at the throat. Still in his boots.

Hugh froze. And then his face flared into fleeting brilliance. There and gone. His features carefully schooled to stillness.

Behind him, the lamp was lit and the fire was healthy and high.

“I heard,” she said softly. “Mr. Delacorte told me.”

His head went back a little, then came down in a nod. He stepped aside and she followed him into his room.

He closed the door and slid the bolt shut.

He sank down on the edge of the bed as if all of that movement was the last he was capable of.

She hovered in the doorway. Quiet. Inwardly frantic to bear for him the kind of pain that could not be assuaged.

“It’s kind of you to come,” he said finally, formally.

She couldn’t quite breathe properly. “Of course.”

“Giles?” he said suddenly. “Is he . . . ?”

She swallowed. “He intends to call on me tomorrow at five o’clock.”

He studied her face, then nodded once. His features remained immobile.

He was, in fact, alarmingly still. The force that animated him, burned from him, seemed all but doused. He leaned forward, hands folded in his lap.

Her gut went cold.

She worked the knotted ribbon from beneath her chin and freed herself from her bonnet, tossing it on the chair. Then she shook off her pelisse and draped it over it.

She sat down, very gingerly, next to him. The bed had a surprising amount of bounce. They never stinted on the truly important things at The Grand Palace on the Thames.

The crackle of the fire was the only sound in the room.

Together they sat in silence for a time.

“The reason stories like Robinson Crusoe exist . . .” Hugh began finally, as though continuing a thought. His voice was frayed. He cleared his throat. “. . . is because people want to read a story about survivors. Survivors of things that smash our lives apart. There’s something so satisfying in it, I think. And if anyone can survive . . .” He paused. The fire, his breathing, were the only sounds for a time. “Well, perhaps Uncle Liam will turn up one day with a pet . . . a pet parrot.”

He tried a wry smile.

But he looked stunned.

And that’s when she knew her heart had only ever been buffeted a bit before. She hadn’t understood definitively that it belonged to him until his grief broke it open. His grief was hers.

He looked up at her. “But . . .” He gave a short, shamed laugh. “Why?”

The word was hoarse. He was embarrassed to ask a question that was so cliché. That had no answers.

She slid her arms around his waist and linked her hands. And then she held him tight and fast, so that in this moment of his shipwreck, she was the plank he could cling to. She was how he’d find his way to shore. She’d willingly be the island where he rose again, lived again, triumphed. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

He closed his eyes and exhaled at length. As though he’d been waiting for her and for this. As though her presence was a blessed relief.

And he turned and buried his face in her neck and wrapped his arms around her and held on.

She savored with a quiet, awestruck joy the miraculous rise and fall of each of his long, shuddering breaths. Because there was really no reason he ought to be here at all. He could have died a hundred times before. That was the dumb luck and the glory of life. She felt helpless to do anything but hold him, but therein lay the greatest, sweetest power and gift she’d ever known: he needed her.

He didn’t weep, but she did, a little. Her tears swelled and spilled, softly. Since his heart was her heart, she could do the crying for him.

She turned her head to kiss his temple. Her hands unlinked and glided over his back, where other hard days and heartbreaks were etched in scars on his skin. She stroked his hair, gently.

He turned his head and laid his lips below her ear. He drew them along the clean line of her jaw. She took his face in her hands and brought her lips to his and he groaned softly at the sheer privilege and relief to be kissing her again.

Slow, slow. They’d never before had the luxury of leisure, and he drew her into a spinning world with kisses that were a revelation: languid and searching, sorrowful and tender, wholly inebriating, destroyers of boundaries. She was floating or spinning, divorced from gravity, clinging to him and taking and taking, their breaths staccato and rough now. The skillful glide of his lips, the carnal dive of his tongue, the meeting and parting to meet again, the hunger building and building until she was trembling and the world seemed to be falling, but when her head sank into the pillow she realized Hugh had lowered her there in his arms.

She was now flat on the bed and she knew what was about to happen and it shouldn’t. But she wanted it to.

His lips, his breath, and his tongue applied in thrilling combinations and sequences continued their campaign of pleasure over her ear, along her arched throat, down into the shadow between her breasts, everywhere a river of sensation. Her own dress became a caress when, to her surprise, he peeled the shoulders easily down. The hands that had been playing at the nape of her neck had deftly undone the laces.

She slid her hands under his shirt, up over the furred, hard planes of his chest, and felt like a conqueror when his muscles jumped and he hissed in a breath of pleasure.

He reached behind him and through some magical contortion managed to drag it up and off over his head. The glorious world that was his torso lay before her.

He ducked his head and took her nipple into his mouth and sucked gently.

“Hugh . . .”His name was a stunned gasp. Pleasure arced through her.

She arched as he did it again, and he shifted his hips to unbutton his trousers before he filled his hands with the silky weight of her other breast, teasing, stroking, until she was rippling from the new and merciless pleasure.

He covered her mouth again and his hands were between the two of them. He dragged his own trousers down and there was his cock, hot and hard, pressing against her.

He gripped a handful of her dress and furled it swiftly up. She helped.

And suddenly she was bare to the waist and he was over her, and his hand slipped between her thighs. Her thighs fell wider when he slipped his hand along where she was aching and wet.

“Hugh . . . I want . . .”It was a whispered sob.

He guided his cock into her.

Her eyes flared wide, then shuddered closed, her breath gusting from parted lips.

She opened her eyes again to find him watching her as if he beheld a miracle.

How strange, how glorious, to feel him moving in her. The slow glide as her body welcomed and gripped him; locked together, side by side, their bodies began a cadence he guided, and then with which she colluded, arching up to take him deeper, urging him with the speed of her own hips, as they chased the ultimate pleasure. His eyes had gone nearly black and they burned into her and then he closed them as the cords of his neck went taut and his head went back hard against the building rush of need. He vanished when she closed her eyes to isolate herself with sensation. His hand on her hip; her hands against his chest; her head tucked into the hollow of his neck; there was no sound now, no world save the swift, desperate, rhythmic collision of their bodies and roar of their breathing. It was coming upon her again, that Roman candle release, gathering from the very edges of her being to a point of hot light. She distantly heard her own voice, please, Hugh, oh God, in harsh sobbing breaths.

And then bliss all but tore her from her body. She pressed her face into his chest as a triumphant scream, raw and nearly silent, tore from her, and she clung to him as her body was wracked with wave after wave of pleasure. From somewhere in the stratosphere she heard her own name as a groan as he went still, and then his body bucked, at the mercy of his own release.

Stunned, sated, amazed, they held on to each other as consciousness sifted back into their limp bodies.

She opened her eyes to a pair of blue ones staring down at her, as if memorizing her.

“Are you all right?” he murmured.

“Never better.”

He smiled, and he could feel her smiling against his chest.

Their clothing was a shambles; her dress was mostly around her waist, his trousers trapped his legs. Together they helped each other out of the last scraps of decorum and it all ended up on the floor. He reached for her and she reached for him and utterly naked they held each other and savored the miracle of breathing together, of the feeling of bare skin all the way down.

The outrageous beauty of her. The wild gift of her passion. The cataclysmic pleasure. The generosity of giving her whole self to him when he was facing yet another unthinkable loss. Hugh could not think of a thing he’d done to deserve this moment, but perhaps, like fairness, deservedness was not a useful concept by which to live one’s life. Perhaps the animals had indeed gotten it right. When such gifts were provided, the only sin was failing to be grateful. And the only safety was not thinking beyond this moment, her flesh hot against his, her trusting, sated, vulnerable body in his arms.

Her new life would begin—or continue, he supposed—tomorrow evening, with a proposal from an aristocrat. He wouldn’t dwell upon the notion of some other man lying next to her any more than he’d love to dwell upon slowly bleeding to death from a bullet wound. There was comfort in knowing that he’d in the most unlikely fashion made sure she was getting the life she’d long wanted. And he would go back to America. He had a plan, after all.

But for this moment she was his. Only his. And no one knew how to appreciate a moment better than he did. It was all there was of life: moments of grace between the upheavals and changes.

Her hands had begun to softly, slowly move over him. Her fingertips traveled the deep gullies between his muscles, finding the raised scars, dragging her nails along him. Memorizing his textures. Her palms savored the texture of the coarse hair over his chest, the leather of his nipples. To the incomparable comfort and bliss of being so touched, he submitted, drowsily inebriated by the pleasure of it . . . then the gathering tension as desire was inevitably stoked and they were both reaching for each other and for more again.

He stirred and turned and her lips found his and it was his turn to savor. To revel in her discovery of all that his lips and hands could do, feeling her body ripple beneath him, or her eyes go dazed with wonder, then closed as she withstood the pleasure. And to glut his eyes and hands on the splendors of her body. He slid his lips down her throat, to her breasts, and gave each one a thorough appreciation, stroking the satiny weight of them, drawing his tongue around, then closing his lips over her nipples. He followed the silky divide between her ribs with soft fingers and his lips and breath, over her belly, and when he reached the triangle of auburn curls, he dipped his head to taste her and her gasp of shocked pleasure inspired him to do it again, and again, until her thighs had fallen open to abet this feasting. She moved with him, her hands curling into the counterpane, her coppery head thrashing back against his pillow, murmuring his name, turning it into a plea.

Nothing had ever been more erotic. The saw and cadence of breathing, her sighs and pleas, the curl and flex of her fingers in the counterpane, told him she was about to come apart, and he guided his cock into her and she did, her body bowing, her head thrashed to bury her scream in his pillow. She was still pulsing around him as he moved in leisurely, deep strokes, an attempt to postpone that moment of his own release, to build it to a mad crescendo. She turned her head again to meet his eyes. They reveled in each other’s enthralled, lust-hazed expressions. He savored that view of her rippling body, the lift of her sweat-sheened breasts and throat as she once again arched helplessly, another release building. And then his own had its talons in him. He unleashed his restraint and he plunged again and again, hips drumming, until he was nearly blind with need. And then all at once he was fragments, shattered by the ecstasy he’d been chasing.

Side by side, they dozed. Lillias slipped in and out of dreams, naked in her sleep for the first time, apart from the warm arms around her.

She stirred and came fully awake when she realized his heat was gone.

Alert now, she sat up, clutching the counterpane to her.

His clothes were missing from the heap on the floor. Her heart gave a jolt.

And then she saw him, murmuring to someone through a crack in the door.

There was no clock, but the quality of the light through the blinds told her it was just before dawn.

He closed the door and turned and saw her and was still. As if he were memorizing her.

He sat down on the bed next to her.

The kiss was tender and lingering; his hand at her back, a slow caress. But then he closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. Turned his cheek to press against hers. His breath shuddered.

“I will never forget this, Lillias,” he said. His voice was raw.

The breath stilled in her lungs.

She had a premonition about what he would say next.

“And . . . I am sorry. I ought to have . . . perhaps I shouldn’t have . . .”

“What? What are you sorry for?” she whispered.

Her heart was jabbing at her rib cage now.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He swallowed. “I am so grateful for the comfort. I perhaps ought not to have taken it when we don’t love each other. But it was extraordinary and I will be forever grateful for . . . the beautiful gift of this night.”

He looked into her eyes then.

She was falling and falling and falling without moving. Except there was no one there to catch her or to hold her close. Her limbs went cold. Her gut was cold. Her heart stopped beating.

And still somehow she was able to remain upright.

And somehow, words emerged from her mouth.

“Do not apologize. It was my decision, too. I wanted it. I came here of my own accord. And I enjoyed it thoroughly.” Her words were raw and clipped.

She would claim it.

She would not allow him to take it from her.

But now she was staring at him, as if he were a stranger.

His complexion was gray-white in the wan light of dawn. Perhaps it was strain, or weariness, or grief. His hand was visibly trembling as he ran it over his jaw. She stared, mesmerized by the glints of copper whiskers along his chin, this profoundly intimate thing she had never seen because she had never awakened in bed with a man.

“Thank you,” was all he said. He sounded broken. He was clearly in terrible pain. But what had she expected?

She could not accurately say whether any of his suffering had anything to do with her. Perhaps it was moot. Her own was blinding. Her own was crippling.

“For the forgetting?” Her shock sent the words out almost blithely.

His breath was audible.

“For the comfort,” he said firmly. “And for the pleasure of your beautiful body.”

The effort to say these words clearly cost him.

What was happening? She didn’t know why these polite, honest, very true words were like a sword stuck right through her.

His voice was a graveled hush.

He said very carefully, “I have asked Dot to hail a hack. She thinks it’s for me. It will be waiting outside. Your parents will be ill with worry if you aren’t home straightaway. And we must have you out of here safely before everyone is awake.”

She was already furiously moving, faster than she’d ever moved, yanking on her clothing, clawing her fingers through her hair to straighten it and twist it up into its pins, jamming her feet into shoes.

She seized her pelisse and thrust her arms in.

Could she blame him?

Grief could be a madness.

Same as love.

Same as love.

There was indeed no one to blame. She at least could truly say that. She’d wanted him. God, how she’d wanted him. He knew it. She’d taken and partaken. It had been glorious.

And now she supposed they were truly done.

Because Giles would arrive at their family townhouse at five o’clock and she would need to be there.

“Lillias.”

But he said nothing more and she’d lost the ability to speak and it didn’t seem to be anything more than a word, anyhow. A sort of “amen.”

She turned and, with as much dignity as she could muster, made her way quickly down the stairs.