I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

Whether the haggard parents waiting up for Lillias believed them or not proved moot. Lillias let St. John do the talking. He repeated the story she’d given him with admirable accuracy. They maintained an impenetrably united front for two people in their respective conditions (one deflowered, sated, and distraught but hiding it well, one a little drunk and displeased to be out the five pounds that he’d lost at a gaming table, and hiding it well).

Her parents did what appeared to be a limb count, performed sweeping glances to determine if anything on them was bleeding or torn, and they were allowed to go straight to their bedrooms.

“Remember Giles will be here tomorrow at five o’clock, Lillias,” her father said. Probably thinking that madness like leaping out of carriages would end once she was good and married.

“It’s not something I would ever forget,” she said.

St. John paused to stare at her on the landing, eyebrows up around his hairline.

“Good night, St. John,” she said.

“Good luck, Lillias,” he said, wryly.

They went to their separate rooms.

There was a clock on the mantel in the sitting room down below, and from her room she could hear it softly bonging out the hours, the half hours, the quarter hours. Because she didn’t sleep. Or if she did, it was in scraps of time, minute as the silk a ruby-throated hummingbird might weave into her nest. Her thoughts were just as fragmented. She ached everywhere in ways she’d never ached before. She was sore between her legs. Her very soul was bruised. Like Persephone, she’d been yanked from the heights to the depths.

And she knew that no matter what he’d said, if Hugh were to climb into bed with her now, she would turn to him for more.

More. That’s what Giles had said. She was always a little “more.”

It occurred to her that he saw it as something to solve. Perhaps something to rectify.

Hugh saw it as something to give her. To show her. To watch her become.

Once you see one, you’ll never forget it,he’d said, when he told her she looked like a Hudson River Valley sunrise. They steal your breath.

We don’t love each other.

He didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

The clock bonged six in the morning.

Perhaps he was right about this. Perhaps this lust was so potent and consuming and messy and dangerous that one was tempted to call it something more noble in order to justify indulging again and again. Perhaps it was how addicts felt about opium, and everyone knew opium was a bad idea in the long run.

Once you know what truly matters in life, and once you know who and what you truly love . . . your aim will always be true.

Why would he lie to her?

Nothing is like us.

Perhaps this would all fade like a fever, once he was gone again.

Perhaps he already knew that’s exactly what would happen. Which is how he was able to let her go.

Nothing is like us.

It was too soon to imagine herself underneath Giles’s naked body. She would need to be, as that’s how the heirs would get made. It wasn’t as though the thought was distasteful. It was that she simply couldn’t form a picture of it, as if her mind kept it behind a closed door. Which is where sex ought to have been kept before she was married, if she were truly a lady. But then, she’d always been a little more.

She exhaled roughly, sat up, pressed her palms against her eyes, then looked about her familiar room that soon enough she’d move from and into, presumably, one day, Heatherfield. The rose and cream and green carpet and the curtains in spring green. Her wardrobe and writing desk and the portrait she’d drawn of her mother and father in pastels, the first work she’d thought good enough to frame.

How could she ever do without any of these people?

She closed her eyes.

Tentatively, reluctantly, she raised her arms before her, then curved them into a wide circle. Inside them she could conjure the heat and shape of Hugh; she could feel the rise and fall of his back. The powerful, precious feeling of knowing his breathing had steadied because he’d turned to her, and she’d held him. And with it, an ache of loss that almost gutted her.

How set free she’d felt, naked in his arms.

And just like that, he’d sent her away.

She slammed her fist down on the bed in grief and frustration, and it nearly bounced back and hit her chin. If that wasn’t a metaphor for her entire life at the moment, she didn’t know what was.

She sank back down against her pillows.

But at five o’clock she would be set free from ambiguity. And eventually, this anguish would end, because it must. She would get on with things, as Hugh had needed to do so many times after disasters befell him. That was simply the nature of life.

But she would marry Giles. There was no reason not to do it. She would have a fine life. It had been her dream, after all. How many people could say that their precise dreams had come true, even if this particular dream had expired?

And her new life—which would be more or less like her old life—would begin.

The day both crawled and raced.

She didn’t emerge from her room until noon, and she took one look at herself and realized she would need at least a few more hours to look like she hadn’t been thoroughly ravished the night before. She called for a bath. Her body stung in surprising places, yet not so surprising given how thoroughly those places had been used last night. Honestly, if she could bottle the smell of him she would.

And if she’d had a choice, she never would have bathed again, so she could smell like him forever.

But she washed herself in French milled soap. She could not meet Giles redolent of sex with another man. And perhaps she could consider this a ritual washing away of the past, because as of the moment she’d left him, Hugh was of necessity officially the past.

And then she chose a dress—the pink muslin day dress, with the spray of daisies at the waist and hem. It usually lightened her mood, that dress, and she knew she looked fresh and lovely in it. Pink slippers. With the help of her lady’s maid, her hair was braided and coiled, and two curls were allowed to trace her jaw.

Giles would be brought through to her father’s study upstairs when he arrived. And then, she supposed, he would seek her out. She refused to hide in her room.

Smelling like lavender, a feast for the eyes, she went downstairs to the little sitting room at half past four to wait by the fire, and tried not to feel a thing.

She held herself very still, until the heat of the fire made her close her eyes.

She might have dozed just a little, because they opened again only reluctantly, and only after the clock chimed the quarter hour.

She stirred and stretched and then went still.

Standing before her was Hugh Cassidy.

Her hand flew to her throat. Her heart had immediately flown there.

For about three heartbeats, they regarded each other.

And then:

“I love you,” he said.

“Oh.” Her breath rushed out of her.

Not a bludgeon. A catapult. She was instantly soaring like a gyrfalcon.

“I didn’t want to leave you in suspense as to the purpose of my visit.” He sounded so serious. He wasn’t smiling. “May I sit beside you? Those three words about took all my strength.”

She nodded slowly.

She was trembling.

But she’d spent all of her strength on that one word. Oh. She didn’t need to speak ever again. It seemed unnecessary, anyway. He was here, and he loved her. What more would she ever need?

Gingerly, he lowered himself to the settee next to her.

“Lillias.” He took a breath. And then another. “Sweetheart . . .”

He turned to her.

He blurred as the cool, cleansing tears filled her eyes. She knocked them away so she could drink him in. He blurred again.

“Letting you leave this morning was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” His voice was hoarse. “I just . . . didn’t want you to go into your new life with regrets or heartaches. I could not have lived with myself if you left thinking you may have broken my heart. And I . . . I could not be sure that you loved me. I thought . . .” He cleared his throat. “It would be the height of selfishness. I thought it would just . . . I thought it would just prolong your misery.”

He paused to draw in a long shuddering breath.

Gently, she reached out, and laid her hand on his.

He looked up at her slowly then. And his face lit like the dawn.

She was awed at this extraordinary power she’d learned she possessed. She could bring comfort and strength to this man by just being herself. Just by loving him. He threaded his fingers through hers.

“I thought love was meant to be an easy, peaceful thing, Lillias. But it’s like life itself. It’s maddening. And beautiful. And changeable and funny and passionate. It’s . . . like a Hudson River Valley sunset. Underneath all that fire and glory the sky is ever constant. It’s like you. For me, it is you. Do I make sense?”

She nodded. Her heart was pounding so her ears were ringing. Joyously as church bells.

“I realized . . . that I, in my way, have actually been courting you from the moment I laid eyes on you. And I thought . . . we get few enough opportunities in our lives to love or be loved at all. And no matter what, she ought to know she has my love, wherever life takes her. And so here I am.”

She didn’t mean to make him wait. But it was a moment before the words could emerge, because they had to travel from the depths of her heart, and her heart felt as vast and deep as the sea now.

“I love you, too.” Her voice was trembling.

Her words had made him softly brilliant. He looked like he contained the very sun. “So I gathered.”

She gave a little laugh and a sniff.

She reached for him as he reached for her. He pulled her into his lap, which was just as sturdy and comfortable as she’d always dreamed. Her tears were cool against his temple. And they just held on to each other. Lulled and enchanted by the very fact of each other, by the gentle sway of each other’s breathing. Like ships finally at harbor. Dumbstruck by their luck. Awestruck that they were loved by each other.

“You will marry me?” she murmured.

“Sweetheart, I will marry you.”

“I want to live in New York with you.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to lose my family . . . I don’t want to hurt them . . .” She swiped her tears. “I love them so. But . . .”

“You never will lose them. And we’ll have a family of our own.”

“. . . but I want to love and be loved. Fiercely. Forever.”

“I know exactly how to do that.”

There was no doubt in her mind.

“I want to see and do and feel new things and create a new life in a new place. I want two boys and two girls. I want you. I need you.”

“I’m yours. Forever,” he murmured. He kissed her nearly senseless.

Against her lips he paused to whisper, “You are sure? You’re not scared?”

“So scared. And so sure.”

“We are going to have a wonderful life, Lillias. And we are going to soar so high.”

“Oh, I know,” she said.

They were luxuriating in slow, slow kisses, made possible by the fact that they now had all the time in the world to indulge in such things, so they didn’t hear the approaching footsteps. First on marble, then muffled by Axminster.

Which is how the Earl of Vaughn discovered not young Bankham waiting for him, but his daughter in Hugh Cassidy’s lap.

The earl threw an arm up over his eyes.

“Arrgh! Dear God . . . what on . . . again?”

They didn’t fly apart from each other. They did stop kissing. They looked at him, expressions glazed with wonderment and happiness.

“No, no, don’t get up on my account,” the earl said acerbically.

But Lillias gracefully and unapologetically slid from Cassidy’s lap, gave her skirts a shake. And then Hugh stood.

Cassidy looked like he hadn’t slept in two nights, which was more or less true.

“Papa . . . I’m going to marry Hugh,” she said calmly.

The earl had no words.

Hugh reached for her hand, and gently, inexorably as a vow, they laced their fingers together.

They were already a united front. They might have been married for years. He knew what he was witnessing.

And while this was almost precisely what he’d thought would happen when he’d told young Giles to wait a few days to speak to her, the earl also sensed what Lillias was about to say next. He felt every muscle in his body bracing for it.

“And I am going to live in New York with him,” she said gently.

She wasn’t asking permission.

He’d never before been in the presence of such radiant, peaceful happiness, such certainty, and the earl was surprised at the relief he felt. This was rightness. They were the embodiment of the quiet after a storm. Two more besotted people never lived, he thought. Unless it was, once upon a time, he and his own wife.

He heaved an enormous sigh. “Well,” he said, quietly, somewhat gruffly.

Cassidy remained quiet. No arguing, no attempt at persuasion, no superfluous words, no triumph. He waited, hovering like a sheltering tree. Because he knew how the earl felt, and how Lillias felt. This was their moment.

But there was no mistaking it. Their decision was mutual and unequivocal. Lillias was now his. And Hugh, as he’d said the other night, would protect what was his.

Life sundered. And life joined.

The countess quietly entered the room, and he sensed her there, as he had so many times before, and he slipped his arm around her. Her eyes didn’t even widen when she saw Hugh. She and her husband had talked about this probability the night before.

“Lillias, daughter . . . we know your heart,” her father said. “We may not know all of its intricacies, but we have more of a sense of you than you know. I was waiting for you to know your heart, too. And . . . I . . . we . . . think you have made the right decision. Mr. Cassidy is a fine man. We are very glad indeed for you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hugh said.

“And . . .” her mother added, through tears. “We think you should go to America. You’ve our blessing. We will miss you desperately. But we will come to visit.”

Lillias’s smile then would be a gift they would remember for the rest of their lives.

“And of course you’ll have all your settlement money,” the earl said. “Get rich. Change the world. And build her that house, Cassidy.”

Giles had never set out for London at all that day.

He remained in the familiar, soothing surrounds of Heatherfield, nurturing a rather bittersweet heartache and singed pride.

Once Giles had seen the contents of her sketchbook, he had known the conclusion was foregone. He loved Lillias. But he didn’t love her the way Cassidy loved her, and she didn’t love him the way she loved Cassidy. He had sense enough not to want to compete with that for the rest of his life—or to deprive Lillias of her true love for the sake of their mutual sentimental attachment to a past they were both understandably reluctant, maybe even afraid, to release.

But things could never go on being the same, even if he’d married her. He was the same as he’d always been; Lillias was not. But Giles found relief in knowing she would now be who she was meant to be.

She was indeed more.

He was not. And this was fine with him. He didn’t want more. He didn’t want challenge. He was uniquely happy in that he wanted exactly what he already had. He would pick up the thread in the family continuum, and be part of the weave of history.

And besides . . . Harriette might actually turn out to be quite a nice girl.