He had kissed a hundred women. He had kissed them against walls and in carriages and in darkened gardens and in beds that smelled of perfume and champagne.
None of those kisses had felt likethis.
His hand came up to cradle the back of her neck, his fingers threading into her hair, and he kissed her with everything he had been holding back since the night she walked into his parlor and shoved a piece of paper into his chest.
She tasted like champagne and rosewater and something that was only her, and when she gasped against his mouth, the sound undid him. He deepened the kiss, and she answered it. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his waistcoat, pulling him closer, and for a few searing, reckless seconds, she kissed him back with a ferocity that matched his own.
Then she stopped.
She wrenched away. His hand slid from her neck, and the night air rushed between them.
She stared at him. Her lips were swollen, her hair was coming loose, and her eyes held the wild, stricken look of a woman who had just betrayed every principle she held dear.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say. The kiss had happened. It was the most honest thing either of them had done since this arrangement began, and they both knew it.
She turned and walked back into the building.
He watched her go, her shoulders straight, her chin lifted, her hands trembling at her sides.
Hugo gripped the balcony railing. The iron was cold beneath his hands, and the city sprawled below him, indifferent to the fact that his life had just tilted on its axis.
He pressed his tongue against his lower lip.
Champagne and rosewater.
He stood on the balcony until his breathing steadied and the taste of her faded into something he could carry without his hands shaking. Then he straightened his waistcoat, checked his cravat, and went to find a glass of water and a convincing excuse.
When he returned to the box, Lily was in her seat, her posture rigid, her gaze fixed on the stage.
“Apologies. I ran into Lord Calverton in the gallery. The man can talk the paint off a wall.”
He sat down. He did not look at her. She did not look at him.
The opera played on. Mozart’s music filled the theater, enthusiastic, relentless, and merciless, and Hugo sat in the dark beside the woman he had just kissed and understood, with the crystalline clarity of a man who had spent his life avoiding exactly this, that he was no longer pretending.
He was not sure he ever had been.
CHAPTER 10
“What a lovely evening.” Lily delivered the words in a brittle way, as though had rehearsed them during the final twenty minutes of an opera she had not heard a single note of throughout the second half.
She gathered her wrap from the back of her chair and stood before her mother could study her face too closely in the returning houselights.
“The second act was particularly moving,” she added, because saying things about the opera seemed like what a person who had actually watched the opera might do.
“It was wonderful.” Lady Brimsey pressed her handkerchief to her chest. “The last scene… I wept.”
“As you do every time, my love.” Lord Brimsey rose and offered his wife his arm with the patient tenderness of a man who hadattended thirty years of operas he did not enjoy for the sole purpose of watching his wife appreciate them.
Aunt Margaret stood and fixed Lily with a look that suggested she had opinions about several things but had decided to save them for a more private venue. “Shall we?”
Lily’s gaze cut toward Hugo before she could stop it. He stood at the far side of the box, his back half turned, buttoning his coat with the careful attention of a man who had discovered a sudden, consuming interest in his own cuffs.
He had not looked at her since returning from the gallery.
Not once.
The studied avoidance was so thorough that it circled back around to conspicuous, and Lily suspected that if Margaret had not been preoccupied with locating her opera glasses, she would have noticed.
