I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

When she was eight years old, Lillias, Gilly—Lord Bankham—and her brother St. John decided to try to ride down part of the stairs at Heatherfield on a little carpet.

Once they got going it was rapidly clear the ride wasn’t going to be as amusing as they thought it would be, but there was no way to stop once they’d gotten it going. Bump . . . ka bump . . . bump . . . her head banging on her collarbone, her teeth clacking . . . no choice but to endure it until they got to the floor. Intact but wiser.

That’s a bit how it felt now that her cherished assumptions about life had crumbled into dust. Everything was a jolt now.

There was nothing she could do about the uncomfortable forward jolt of time toward the Landover Ball apart from distract herself from it, or pretend it wasn’t happening at all.

This wasn’t easy to do when the well-meaning maid brought up a newspaper filled with gossip.

And Mr. Cassidy had not appeared in the drawing room last night. That was yet another jolt.

Of course, she might have left the boarding house if she’d been able. To make the point that she could. Just like her brother, just like all men, who could up and go where they pleased as whim took them.

It was just . . . she’d been so certain he would be in the drawing room. After this afternoon in the little park outside, it seemed as inevitable and inexorable as that carpet trip down the stairs. He’d been enthralled. She’d wanted the balm of the distraction. The tribute of his attention.

She’d felt thwarted. Which was to be expected.

She hadn’t expected to feel . . . bleak.

Or strangely . . . ever-so-slightly panicked.

Finally, she was coolly resolved. He was merely an American laborer, his way with words notwithstanding. If they were not confined together here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, she likely would not have taken any notice of him at all. As of course their worlds would never have intersected.

She had time to come to this resolve as everyone in her family was out again today. Her mother had taken Claire for a fitting for new shoes. Her father had gone off to do something related to being an earl, and St. John was off enjoying being an heir.

“Enjoy your day in the tower, darling. Your sentence is almost up!” was how her mother bade her a cheery farewell.

And now it was quiet. She was left alone with her shattered assumptions, encroaching dread, restless, nascent, inappropriate lust, and worst of all, a badly shaken sense of herself. The fact that all of this was occurring away from her usual environment, in a suite of rooms by the docks, lent to the air of unreality.

Only seventeen thousand two hundred and eight minutes until the Landover Ball. There was nothing unreal about that. It was going to happen.

Partly from reflex, partly to comfort herself by doing something familiar, she stood and poured water from her basin pitcher into two little battered tin cups she carried about with her for that purpose.

She brought them to the table nearest the window, the one looking out toward the ocean and the garden.

She hesitated again.

And then she fetched her paintbox.

She gently, almost tenderly, settled it before her, and slowly unlatched it. As though whatever lived inside was sleeping, and might bite if awakened.

She hadn’t opened it in a few months.

“Good day,” she whispered to it. “Sorry I’ve been away.”

She peered inside and her pulse quickened a little with joy.

All those colors represented infinite possibilities.

“Infinite” . . . where had she last heard that word?

Oh, of course: Mr. Hugh Cassidy.

She set her teeth at the thought of him, as though that alone could push it away.

But suddenly she understood in a way that she hadn’t before that all of these colors represented a sort of freedom. She could do with them what she would. Make them into anything she’d like.

She lined up her brushes.

Gingerly, almost reluctantly, Lillias opened her sketchbook. She stared at the first thrilling white page.

She pensively tapped her brush. An inspiration gnawed at her; it had begun yesterday. She resisted it. It remained persistent. And as she didn’t have a spyglass, there was no other way to bring this vision into focus other than to try to coax it out of the paint.

She dipped her brush and added red to blue on her palette, eyed it critically, added a bit more blue.

Once delicious contact was made between brush and paper—how she loved that first moment—the brush seemed to know what to do.

Almost unnervingly, little by little, she began to reveal to herself something she’d never before seen.

In merciful absorption, in a world luxuriously free of expectation, disaster, or barbed anticipation, she worked in a deep black-purple.

Then with slate blue and deeper grays.

Then with greens.

At some point she became aware of a rhythmic thumping. How long had that been going on?

She paused and frowned, and listened, hand frozen over the paper.

Could it be footsteps on the stairs?

Just in case, she threw her torso over her painting, just shy of touching it. Her heart slammed as if she were about to be caught in the act of smoking another cheroot.

Seconds later she realized she knew the sounds of her family’s footsteps as well as she knew their faces. That sound wasn’t caused by any of them.

She opened the door of their suite and peered out. The hall was empty of maids; the light through the windows at the far end of the hall was pale; candles burned in sconces. She appeared to be alone.

The sound stopped.

Then started up again.

She left the door of the suite open a crack, and followed the stop-and-start pounding down the stairs to the main floor, as it grew louder and louder.

All the way to the ballroom.

She peered in at the glossy expanse of golden floor.

A very long ladder was pushed against the far end of it, and from the hole in the roof a shaft of sunlight poured through.

Suddenly, a pair of booted, buckskinned legs appeared on the ladder. Her breath stopped when a bare, vast-shouldered, wedge-shaped, gleaming, pale golden torso came into view. So dumbstruck and riveted was she by the little gap between the waistband of his trousers and his narrow waist and the elegant play of muscles beneath his skin during his descent that realization lagged. It only arrived with a resounding jolt when he reached the bottom rung. She was beholding Hugh Cassidy.

Shirtless.

He was holding a hammer in one hand.

The banging sound was now officially her own heart.

He jumped down gracefully, pushed a hand through sweaty hair, and his shoulders lifted and fell in a sigh. And then he turned around.

Because he must have heard her heart beating from where he stood.

He froze. She was caught.

He didn’t reach for his shirt.

She was fairly certain he didn’t even pull in a breath. Those magnificent shoulders, that broad chest, didn’t appear to be moving.

He just stood in that shaft of sunlight pouring through the little gap in the roof, like a wild animal caught in a clearing, fully, gloriously illuminated. Or like some pagan god. Half-naked and gleaming with sweat.

She turned her head swiftly away, heat roaring through her like a flame up a fuse. Her hair would surely ignite. She squeezed her eyes closed.

Centuries of propriety ran in her veins. It did put up a bit of a fight. All of her female ancestors had been taught to be chaste and modest. She understood at once the very good reasons for that.

Because in seconds she flung modesty out the window like slops, and her head was turning of its own accord.

Her muscles tightened as if the shape of him were being stamped upon her, as if she were wax, or a coin. Marked by him. He was made of distinct lines cutting his torso into sections of muscle and gleaming slopes and curves; a slim trail of ferny dark hair divided his ribs and vanished into the waist of his buckskins. And scars—a white slash across his torso, a darker round mark where a bullet must have struck. Battered and beautiful and all too alarmingly real.

Her skin burned and hummed as though each cell was keening softly in recognition. As if she were born already knowing how his skin would feel pressed against hers and craved it.

She could hear her own breath in her ears.

Even from this distance his eyes were as blue as a distant sea. Perhaps as blue as that lake viewed from his land in the Hudson River Valley.

What did Mr. Cassidy see when he looked at her? Parted lips, scarlet cheeks, virginal shock?

His expression was inscrutable. He still didn’t pull his shirt on, and a gentleman most decidedly would have.

He was making a point.

But she thought there was a hint of a question in the angle of his head. Something fierce—a yearning, suppressed—in the tension of his features.

He knew precisely what she was feeling.

And for that reason, he’d already won.

She didn’t quite understand why she felt a thwarted sense of fury. Which, in fact, inched toward despair.

He reached for his shirt.

She watched the slide of muscles beneath his skin as he swiftly stretched upward; furry armpits were exposed, and then all of that disappeared beneath his shirt.

She backed away. Leaned against the wall.

She closed her eyes and drew in a shivering breath.

Less than twenty seconds. Twenty seconds that altered her notions of perfection forever and drew a line beneath precisely how dangerous this game was.

She whipped around and ran back up the stairs.

She said she was not prone to hysterics. He was inclined to believe her.

He wasn’t particularly worried that he’d be evicted from The Grand Palace on the Thames for emerging, half naked, from a hole in the roof, for the riveted audience of the daughter of an earl.

But both he and Lillias were subdued that evening in the little sitting room.

She carefully did not meet his eyes. It called to mind the way one might, out of an excess of caution, avoid looking directly at an eclipse. She seemed contemplative. Perhaps even a little sullen. As though she’d gone confident and well-armed into a sword fight only to discover her opponent had a secret weapon, like the ability to shoot quills.

She was wearing a blue wool dress and a loosely draped shawl.

He could have told her that the pearly expanse of skin between her bodice and chin was enough to drive him to his knees. That he could well extrapolate about the rest of her from there. That he could close his eyes, and had, and followed in his mind’s eye the curve of her lips, the angle of her jaw, the arc of her throat as it sloped to her collarbone to the swell of her breasts, then down, down along that sensual violin curve of her waist to her hips. All the places he would follow with his tongue and fingers if he could.

That he could have himself hard in seconds if he imagined it.

Her evolving expression during those twenty seconds in the ballroom haunted him. Stunned, blushing innocence to carnal yearning to a sort of . . . fury. How dare he make her want him?

He understood every one of those things all too well.

It was so cripplingly, distractingly erotic that he lost quickly and badly in chess to Delacorte, who fixed him with a disbelieving, rather baleful, almost wounded stare.

Hugh did the only honorable thing and removed himself to another chair and pretended to be fascinated by the coverlet unfurling from Mrs. Hardy’s needles. Dot took his place in front of a beleaguered Delacorte.

Mrs. Durand was also knitting. Mrs. Pariseau was trying to get up a game of Faro. Lord Bolt was in the corner, contentedly reading from a little book. Captain Hardy had gone to dinner with his friend and former subordinate, Sergeant Massey, who was in London with his wife, and St. John was holding up the fireplace, counting the minutes until he could bolt to his club.

“So when do you plan to run for office, Mr. Cassidy?” the Earl of Vaughn asked, blissfully unaware that Hugh and his daughter were locked in morose sensual torment. The earl liked to merely sit for a bit, digesting and reminiscing about the wonder of his dinner, before he decided what delightful parlor pastime to partake in for the evening. In the smoking room for the past several nights he’d thrown himself with gusto into conversations about business with the other men, more after the fashion of enjoying a novelty, or the way one would enjoy an exciting novel, like Robinson Crusoe—he had no wish to be shipwrecked on an island, really, just as he’d no real need or desire to work. But he did like to hear about it.

“When I return to New York, sir, hopefully within the next few months. The current mayor’s term is up at the end of the year.”

“Think you’ll win?”

This Hugh could answer readily. “Yes. I know personally nearly every member of my prospective constituency—mainly because I’ve done work for most of them from the time I was a child. They’ve experienced firsthand my work ethic and commitment to the well-being and prosperity of the town. I know their needs, their families, their hopes for the future. And they know me as an adult who unfailingly keeps his word and knows how to turn these dreams into realities.”

“Well, my heavens! Listen to you! Spoken like a politician,” the earl said, sounding pleased. “You have my vote.” He raised his voice a little. “Tell Mr. Cassidy what you did last year, St. John.”

“I bought a horse,” St. John said easily.

“With my money, to boot,” his father expounded mockingly, as if praising a child for a well-done lesson.

“Indeed,” St. John replied. “I ruminated about it for a good day or two, too.” His lazy little smile was entirely self-mocking, but not self-loathing.

Hugh had been prepared to thoroughly dislike St. John, but he couldn’t, quite. The difficult people were those who made others uncomfortable by trying to be something they fundamentally were not.

“You’ll need a wife if you go into politics in America, Mr. Cassidy.” The countess smiled at him cheekily.

“Oh, of a certainty,” Hugh said gravely.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Lillias lift her head slowly.

In fact, all the women were on alert now, such was the interest in Mr. Cassidy’s romantic life, as he’d been an object of speculation and hope since he’d arrived.

“And she’ll have to be able to shoot anything from the porch,” Hugh continued thoughtfully. “Because of all the rabid pumas and grumpy Indians, of course. As well as look elegant in silk and velvet. Also, she’ll need to know how to skin rabbits. And charm foreign dignitaries during balls and dinners. Fell a tree with an ax. That sort of thing.”

It was probably unfair to set out to deliberately disconcert the aristocrats. But once he started he couldn’t seem to stop. His mood revealed itself to him as bristly and a little untenable, and he was a bit too tired to attempt to rein it in completely. His usual control was swaying like a rope bridge in a stiff breeze.

They eyed him uncertainly.

Except Bolt and Delacorte, who were thoroughly amused.

“Well, Mr. Cassidy. I hope for your sake that those kinds of women abound in America,” said the countess. Which was actually a very kind thing to say.

“I was jesting,” he said gently. “Forgive me. My wife will be treated like a queen. Or rather, since we don’t have those in the United States, a goddess. We’ll have a full complement of servants and a beautiful house on beautiful land. But if she should like to shoot dinner, I won’t stop her.”

Lillias still didn’t turn to look at him. Her own mood, it appeared, was quite determinedly bristly.

“Oh! Just a week or so ago Lord Bolt read aloud a sonnet that mentioned something about goddesses,” Mrs. Pariseau said suddenly. “Perhaps he’d like to share it again? It’s lovely, and he reads so well.”

“Oh, I believe you’re thinking of Sonnet 130, Mrs. Pariseau.” Lord Bolt—who knew it by heart—began:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

This was followed by an appreciative stillness, because there was no denying he was a skillful orator.

“That’s . . . oh my . . . that’s not very kind.” Dot was aghast. “Wires! Her hair! I ask you! In a poem!”

“It has a happy ending, Dot,” Lucien assured her. “It turns out he’s rather fond of his mistress, after all. It goes like this:

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

“A goddess who treads on the ground,” Hugh repeated quietly.

“That’s the sort of wife you need, Mr. Cassidy,” the countess said.

He looked at her, surprised.

Mrs. Pariseau sighed happily. “Ah, the Bard. Wouldn’t it be lovely if recitations were held on the stage in the new ballroom?”

“It’s nearing completion,” Hugh said shortly. Absently. He’d be almost sorry when it was. It had been cathartic to have something to beat with a hammer.

“And we’re so grateful to you, Mr. Cassidy,” Angelique said. “Before we hold any events, we’ll need a fine curtain to complete it. We’d love to have velvet . . . but we’ll need so much of it,” she added wistfully.

“It’ll come very dear, curtains like that,” Mrs. Pariseau mused.

“Velvet is indeed dear,” the earl said. “We’ve velvet everywhere in the country house.”

He wasn’t bragging. But he perhaps hadn’t quite heard how this sounded to a pair of proprietresses who had furnished The Grand Palace on the Thames more by bartering, repairing, reusing, begging, and sheer acrobatic ingenuity than by throwing about pound notes. They were earning fairly well now, but almost all of the profit was immediately reinvested in their business.

“The stage will be beautiful when it’s done,” Hugh promised them.

They smiled at him.

He felt a little better. It was undeniably soothing to be smiled at by kind women.

“What a fine thing it will be, too. I do believe Lord Bolt and Mr. Cassidy could enthrall an audience with recitations of poetry,” said Mrs. Pariseau. “The public might even pay to see it.”

Hugh was far from sure of this.

Lucien was amused. “Cassidy has no patience at all for poetry.”

Hugh smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid he speaks truth.”

“Why, that is a shame, Mr. Cassidy,” the countess said. “We’ve spent many a pleasant evening reading poetry aloud to each other by the fire, haven’t we, Vaughn?” She beamed upon her husband.

Hugh sought the right words. “It’s just that . . .” He pushed his hair back. And then he sighed. “I feel that if one is properly living life . . . an excess of rumination and metaphor can put you at a remove from all that’s beautiful about it. If one takes advantage of all the senses—breathing, feeling, seeing . . . touching . . . tasting . . .” he tried not to look at Lillias “. . . then merely being alive is poetry.”

There was a little lull as everyone reexamined their beliefs.

Lillias turned to him, then, and said her first words of the evening.

“So what you’re saying is that you’re a bit like an animal, Mr. Cassidy.”

The quiet in the room was instant, total and shocked.

And not just because these were the first words she’d said all night. Something about her tone, even as elegant as it was, seemed so nearly accusatory that even the fire seemed to stop crackling in order to hear how Hugh would respond.

“No,” he said finally, gently, with great patience. “Exactly like an animal.”

He met her eyes. It was warning, an apology . . . and, after a fashion . . . a promise.

She turned away again abruptly.

He watched her profile avidly. Which is how he saw her throat move in a swallow.

He looked down at his hands while a bolt of lust sliced right through him.

He drew in a steadying breath. He ought to be ashamed to be beset by such carnality while her parents sat right next to them.

“Interesting point of view, indeed, Mr. Cassidy.” The earl was tapping his chin thoughtfully. “But wouldn’t you agree that the ability to create art, music, and magnificent architecture elevates the human above the animal? The sense of tradition and ritual? The ability to reason? Governments? The, er, ruling classes?”

Nervousness about insurrection doubtless ran through every aristocrat’s blood.

Hugh leaned back. “Well, isn’t it about perception? How do we know whether, for instance, the ruby-throated hummingbird doesn’t consider her nest a towering architectural achievement? Gyrfalcons return to the same nests again and again, year after year. One might consider that tradition. Generations of falcon may in fact use the same nest for thousands of years.”

“A thousand years!” Delacorte marveled. “Imagine how much bird shite is in those nests by then!”

The clicking of knitting needles ceased. Delacorte was fixed in the beam of reproachful feminine eyes.

He sighed, resignedly pushed back his chair, and fished a pence from his pocket. He made approximately the fiftieth trip to the epithet jar since he’d arrived at The Grand Palace on the Thames.

“You should have heard me before I lived here,” Delacorte volunteered weakly, when he returned to his chair.

Dot had yet to make her move.

Lillias gave him a small, taut smile.

“Of course, the aristocracy never makes messes of their own nests,” Hugh said, slyly.

“Papa shot holes in our nest,” Claire pointed out. “There is plaster everywhere.”

“Thank you, Claire, that’s very helpful,” her mother said acidly.

“Perhaps the snake has already had snake kittens in our furniture,” Claire added.

“I don’t think that’s what baby snakes are called, Claire,” St. John said.

“What are they called?”

“Horrifying,” her mother said firmly. “Horrifying is what they’re called.”

“Perhaps it’s in the variation, Mr. Cassidy,” Lillias said suddenly. “The evolution of architecture over the centuries is a reflection of the sophistication of the mind of man. Heatherfield, for instance, is an achievement on that scale. And cathedrals. Whereas birds build the same types of nests over and over.”

He turned to her, grateful to have a reason to meet her eyes. “Perhaps the nests are exquisitely unique from the point of view of the bird. Ruby-throated hummingbirds use spider silk to knit their nests together, which helps them cling to branches and to stretch and move as their children grow. And they use bits of moss, lichen, even silk or yarn. Every nest is different and subtly beautiful. My mother used to put out scraps for them to see which ones they’d choose.”

Lillias was clearly listening to all of this avidly. One would have sworn it was nectar. He could almost see the pictures her mind was forming: his mother with the nests, the birds.

“Which scraps did they choose?”

Her question surprised him. It was somewhat quiet, and sounded as though nothing, nothing but unbearable curiosity could have compelled her to ask it of someone who had the temerity to possess a very fine torso.

“Not always the silk, believe it or not. They seemed to like green.” He offered a tentative smile.

She held his gaze a moment. She seemed to want to say, or ask, something else.

Then gave a short nod and turned away again.

“Are the Indians truly grumpy, Mr. Cassidy?” Claire wanted to know, shyly.

“Ah. Well. I’m sorry, but I was jesting. And I’m uncertain how much you know about this, Lady Claire, but ‘Indians’ is a word applied by European settlers to the original occupants of the continent. There are, in fact, many tribes with many different names. It’s considered impolite to shoot at them if they don’t shoot at you.” He gave her a little smile; enough to intoxicate but not devastate her. “It was, in fact, an Algonquin friend who taught me about gyrfalcons. I met him through my infamous Uncle Liam, who has been everywhere in the world, and will soon be coming to visit England.”

“I can’t wait!” Delacorte interjected cheerfully. “He sounds a right card.”

“An Algonquin friend!” the countess repeated slowly, in quiet wonderment. “Imagine!”

“But didn’t Indians shoot at Americans during the war?” St. John was stirred to ask.

“Some tribes fought with the British and Canadians. Some fought with the Americans. I was born an American, and I proudly fought for my country.” The issues surrounding the war were complicated and could be viewed from many angles, but the time to explain it wasn’t now.

“Mr. Cassidy’s brother and father lost their lives in the war.” Bolt said this quietly, but in a way that made it clear that more talk of war was discouraged.

Hugh knew why he’d done it, and was grateful.

And that’s when he felt Lillias’s eyes on him.

This time it was he who carefully did not meet her gaze. Another yearning for home swept through him with a sudden visceral violence. For the smells and sounds and sights. Usually he could muster patience and diplomacy. But he was weary. Bridging the gulf between his way of life and that of the blue blood he wanted to ravish was abrading.

“The most useful thing I learned in war is that there’s not much difference between men when they’re naked and dead,” he said shortly. “Indian, American, British, titled, untitled.”

There was a stunned little silence.

“Oh . . . my . . .” The countess swiveled her head. “Ought we . . . that is . . . that word . . . Mr. Durand? Mrs. Hardy? Do you really think that . . . that word . . . is appropriate immediately after dinner?”

“Which one, ‘dead’ or ‘naked’?” Hugh said calmly. His mood had officially shifted to mutinous.

“Good night!” St. John all but bolted from the room.

Lillias was staring at Hugh now. A flush had traveled from her collarbone up to her forehead. He sensed that she was experiencing the sweet hell of picturing him entirely naked.

He fixed her relentlessly in his gaze.

“The . . . latter word,” the countess said.

“I’ve never quite thought of ‘naked’ in that light,” Delacorte mused, happy to have a problem to mull.

“It does rather conjure a vivid picture,” Lillias reflected, slowly. “The word ‘naked.’”

Her delivery of that last word—slowly, savoringly, her eyes level with his—was a masterpiece of torture.

Hugh almost closed his eyes. He cast about desperately in his mind for an erection queller and hit upon Delacorte breaking wind in the smoking room. It worked.

The countess stood up and sat down then stood up again, turning this way and that in a little panic, as though each “naked” was a spot of fire she might need to stomp out.

“Lillias, stop conjuring,” she said finally. Sitting down.

“Do as your mother said,” the earl echoed.

“It’s difficult to stop once you start,” Lillias said softly.

“Entirely my point,” Hugh ground out evenly. Tautly.

She turned away from him and tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear.

Hugh began to wonder what sound she would make if he traced her ear with his tongue.

“Naked!” Lady Claire muttered, just to say it before it was forbidden.

The countess’s brow furrowed. “Perhaps Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand ought to introduce another jar for words like that that are just a hair too . . .”

“Foolhardy? Potent? Dangerous?” Hugh suggested, relentlessly.

“Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. I see you do have a grasp of the situation,” the countess said.

“I’m afraid ‘grasp’ might be another of those words requiring review, Lady Vaughn. One can grasp so many things . . . in so many ways.”

Lillias’s gaze flared hot and stunned. Flickered.

Dropped.

He’d conclusively won that round.

“Oh, dear,” the countess said sadly. “You may be right.”

“Lady Vaughn . . .” Delilah ventured. “The presence of more than one jar might make our guests feel a trifle inhibited from spirited conversation, though spirited conversation may encompass disagreements about words. Perhaps monitoring ourselves is the best solution for now?”

“Perhaps we ought to compile a list of words that may prove to be controversial?” the countess countered weakly, desperately but valiantly sensing she was losing this battle that she possibly should never have undertaken, and feeling about for a way to be gracious.

“Words besides ‘naked,’ you mean?” Hugh said gravely.

The countess closed her eyes.

And when no one said anything else, a little relieved, awkward silence ensued. Cautiously, knitting needles were taken up and began to move again.

“I nominate ‘moist,’” Delacorte said brightly. He’d clearly been giving it some quality thought. “Because when you think about it—”

Delilah and Angelique had already risen as one, and in a swift, graceful, coordinated blur of garnet and gold silk, traversed the room, and settled in at the piano. The rest of Delacorte’s sentence was lost in a jaunty little duet.

“Well, that’s rather lovely, isn’t it?” The countess exhaled. “Music.”

“Music has charms that soothe a savage breast,” Mrs. Pariseau agreed happily.

The countess sighed.

Hugh found himself on his feet. He was, he realized, about to bolt, though there wasn’t a place he could go to evade his mood.

His room would be as fine a place as any. But he’d need to walk past Lillias on his way out. And suddenly he understood Odysseus’s mast-lashing precautions.

But he’d meant it when he’d said his powers were greater, and just to prove it, he slowed his pace when he was abreast of her table.

“How do you suppose beasts become savage, Mr. Cassidy?” she said softly, her brows furrowed in mock innocence.

Her struggle to hold his gaze was apparent in the bright pink spots on her cheeks, but she managed.

“By wanting what they shouldn’t,” he said grimly.