He turned his hand over beneath hers. Their palms met. His fingers closed around hers, warm and rough and trembling so faintly she might have imagined it.
They stood like that for a long time. The lamp flickered. Dorado’s breathing slowed into the deep, steady rhythm of an animal at rest. The stable smelled of hay and copper hide and the cool night air drifting through the open door.
“We should go back,” Lily whispered. “Before someone notices.”
“In a moment.” His voice was quiet, stripped of its usual polish. “Just… in a moment.”
She gave him the moment. She gave him several. And when he finally released her hand and stepped back from the stall, the man who turned to face her wore no mask at all. Just Hugo, tired and grateful, with straw on his sleeve and lamplight in his eyes.
He walked her back to the house in silence. At the garden entrance, he held the door and paused.
“Thank you, Lily.”
“For what?”
“For not asking me to explain.”
She looked up at him. The moonlight caught the scar above his brow and the fine lines around his eyes and the vulnerability of a man who had just allowed someone to hold his hand in a stable and was not yet sure whether he regretted it.
“When you are ready to explain,” she said, “I will be ready to listen.”
He held her gaze. Something passed between them that required no language, a thread pulled taut in the dark, fragile and strong at once.
Then he inclined his head, and she slipped inside, and the door closed between them, and Lily climbed the stairs to her chamber with the warmth of his hand still burning against her palm and the quiet, terrifying certainty that something between them had changed tonight.
Something that could not be unchanged.
CHAPTER 20
“Ihave been thinking about what you said at dinner.” Wilfrey’s voice carried from the morning room through the half-open door.
Hugo stopped in the corridor with his coffee cup raised halfway to his mouth.
He should keep walking. A gentleman did not eavesdrop. A gentleman continued to the breakfast room, ate his toast, read his correspondence, and did not stand in a corridor straining to hear a conversation between his fake fiancée and the man he was helping her catch.
Hugo did not keep walking.
“Which part?” Lily’s voice held the warm, measured tone he had taught her, the one that invited a man to continue without pressing him.
“Your observation about the moth. That perhaps it preferred its freedom rather than being caught. I found it remarkably perceptive. I had not considered the pursuit from the specimen’s perspective before.”
“You are kind, Lord Wilfrey.”
“I am honest. It is a perspective I had not previously considered, and I have thought about it at some length.” A pause. Hugo heard the soft clink of a teacup against a saucer. “I must confess, Lady Lily, that I have found our recent conversations to be among the most stimulating I have had this Season. You have a quality of mind that I find increasingly compelling.”
Hugo’s fingers tightened around his coffee cup. The porcelain creaked.
Compelling.
Wilfrey found Lily compelling. Wilfrey, who had walked away from her at the Fenwick ball without a backward glance, who had sent a cold note canceling his call, now found her compelling because she had learned to soften her edges and tilt her head and let his mistakes pass uncorrected.
The jealousy coiled in Hugo’s gut, hot and corrosive and profoundly unwelcome. He set his jaw and swallowed it.
This was the plan. Wilfrey’s growing interest was evidence that the plan was working, that the lessons had achieved theirpurpose, and that the house party was delivering exactly the result Hugo had designed it to produce.
He should be satisfied. He should be relieved.
He felt neither.
