Chapter 14

Lilly letout a soft sigh as the last servant departed. Although she’d never given the matter serious thought before today, she preferred for only Giles to see her informally dressed. Now that they had gone, she could stop clutching her robe closed. “What do you like most about London, Giles?”

“Oh, there are so many things.” Giles took a sip of wine.

He rolled the taste around his mouth in appreciation and the way he drank wine made Lilly want to giggle. “Do you go to the theater?”

“Yes, quite often.”

“What is it like?” Lilly smoothed out the creases in the silk robe, admiring the smooth material under her fingertips. She shifted food around her plate. “Have you met many actresses?”

“A few.”

Giles would probably have bedded them. How could anyone resist him? “Of course.”

Giles’ face held an odd expression, and then he scoffed. “Those who tread the boards are very passionate about their craft and pleasing their patrons.”

“Do they please you?” Lilly asked, and Giles laughed, the deep chuckle that vibrated up from her bare toes. “Actresses, I mean.”

He pressed her fork back into her hand. “Are you going to eat that food, or let it go cold?”

“Oh, forgive me. I like hearing you talk, Giles.” Lilly pushed another small bite between her lips and forced herself to swallow. “You didn’t answer my question, though.”

He grinned and poured himself another glass of wine. “And I was not going to either.”

“Why not?” Lilly persisted, enjoying watching him squirm.

Giles’ free hand squeezed the bridge of his nose, and then he shook his head. “How was your lamb?”

“Delicious, thank you. And yours?”

“Perfection. You should have another bite.”

Lilly obliged and when she glanced at Giles again, he was trying hard not to laugh.

Lilly scowled. “That was not nice, Giles. If you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to keep suggesting I shove food in my mouth.” Her fork fell with an unladylike clatter and she pushed her plate away.

“I’m not trying to silence you entirely. I’m simply trying to avoid the subject of my love life. It’s not an appropriate conversation to have during dinner.”

“Why can’t I discuss them with you? I have no one else to ask what gentlemen like.”

Giles leaned across the table and clasped her hand in his. “Actresses are not held in great esteem in society. Most ladies would not mention them at all.”

“I’m not most women.”

“Believe me, I appreciate just how special you are.” When Giles released her hand to touch her face, Lilly snuggled into his warm palm, content to let the matter drop. For now.

* * *

Lilly stood in the weak sunlight and rustled her skirts about her legs. It was such a delight to be properly dressed again and able to see the world. Even though the day was cloudy, it was a better day than she had thought to have.

Giles had made it better.

He had suggested she meet him after luncheon for a stroll around the grounds, but she was only to walk as far as the small pond and wait there for him.

Lilly grimaced at the water and kept a few feet away. Atticus, however, walked through the shallow depths, chasing tadpoles. She had once liked to watch them, too, but no longer. Water was too dangerous and she did not swim. She had enough trouble bathing and loathed water sliding over her face.

Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind her and she turned. Giles. He had spent the entire day with her yesterday, and dined in her room last night. He’d not left her side long enough for her to change into a proper gown.

They had talked until very late, but he had still soothed her back and shoulders, claiming he’d sleep better knowing she was comfortable. Last night her nightgown had remained on and his hands had only brushed her skin at her neck and feet.

It still had the same effect on her though. She rested more comfortably, but Lilly knew his actions had aroused both of them. When they had danced, she had seen the dark linen tenting over Giles’ groin. Knowing him as well as she did, she had not been afraid. She was embarrassed to admit that she was pleased. His obvious state disproved her fears that she was not unappealing.

Watching Giles approach, her heart gave a little flutter and her toes curled in her borrowed slippers. He could stop her heart again at any moment, yet she would still do anything to remain near him. She liked him. She liked her friend very much.

Briefly, she wondered what she would do when Giles’ healing touch was not available. Would she curl back into a bottle of laudanum and wither away? She did not want that.

Lilly wanted a normal life, but she was under no illusions that what she shared here with Giles was in any way normal.

Giles’ smile widened as he reached her, and he offered his arm for her to take. The heat of him, the scent of his body, wove around her and made her feel safe. For all of his threats, she secretly thought Giles Wexham was very good for her. Beside him, she was happy for the first time in perhaps forever.

* * *

Giles swallowed hard as the smile on Lilly’s face changed. He knew that look and it did not bode well for him. Lilly was falling in love with him, and he was powerless to stop her slide.

His usual tactic would be to cool things between them before moving on to another lover. But his previous attempt had been an utter disaster and the repercussions of yesterday troubled him still. Lilly needed a friend and she had foolishly chosen him to be that friend. Her one and only. Normally, the idea would terrify him, but this was Lilly. Despite her innocence, or because of it, he liked spending time in her company.

Giles didn’t know what was going to happen when her father returned to Cottingstone. Dear God, he had forgotten all about her father’s plans. How foolish. He could have written to Lord Winter to let him know she was better, if the baron had bothered to trust him with a forwarding address.

Giles struggled with his doubts for a moment and then shrugged, unsure of what to make of his prickling dread. With Lilly tripping along beside him, so trusting and pure, he couldn’t share his worries with her. He and Lilly were becoming too close.

He wove them around the now cleared garden, along the cobblestone path and out toward the orchard, but his mind tumbled with questions.

“Ah, I see why there is such an array of fruit with every meal. You are heartily spoiled for choice, Giles.”

“The gardens were my mother’s obsession, and I’m lucky they have managed to be spared damage from my neglect. Some of the trees are very old. Cook would pack up and leave without their bounty.”

“She’d never leave you. From what I can tell, Cook, along with everyone else dotes on you.”

Giles laughed and tugged Lilly closer. “Cook has had a willing victim for her creations for a long time.”

He and Lilly seemed to talk all the time, about anything and everything. It was a strange occurrence for Giles. Usually conversation came second when he was with a woman. But Lilly had a lively curiosity about Cottingstone and asked her questions in such a way that nearly embarrassed him. She was so damn earnest about it all and he was deeply flattered by her interest.

That did not mean he had accepted his annoying attraction to her. At the oddest of times, he found himself responding in a way best reserved for the bedroom, or at least a private corner. She had the unique ability to make him hard just by smelling a rose in bloom, as she did now.

He looked away from Lilly’s face in a vain attempt at control, but who was he kidding? He had not had a moment of true control since the first time he had glimpsed her haunting a dimly lit bedchamber of Huntley House.

All of his daydreams and fantasies revolved around the little ghost beside him. He still thought of her that way, too. Lilly was his own private specter, invading his dreams and his life in the most disruptive way possible.

In his short interval at Cottingstone, he had not responded in any positive way to the invitations sent to him from the ladies of his acquaintance. When he went back to London, he would have a blank appointment book before him. A clean slate with no romantic entanglements.

He had no pressing need to return and no desire to take a mistress.

Mistresses were exhausting.

Unlike Lilly.

When Lord Winter returned, Giles would not go directly back to London. He feared it might take some time to purge his thoughts of a ghost of a girl in a white, virginal nightgown.

The sound of water interrupted Giles’ thoughts and he lifted his head, surprised at their location. He had not meant to bring Lilly this far from the house, and especially not here to the creek crossing.

Certainly not to the place where she’d almost died.

A quick glance at Lilly confirmed her anxiety. She stared ahead, holding her lower lip between her teeth. Giles ruthlessly held back the urge to comfort her. A kiss or two might just be the right sort of distraction and her bottom lip looked so lush and soft that he was mightily tempted to break his own rule about getting involved with virgins.

“Do you know that when my parents were newly married and disagreed over a great many trifling matters, but afterward always played silly games to make up? If they were outside, my father would bring mother here, pretend to be a monster and demanded a kiss for every step taken across the bridge.”

Lilly stopped at the foot of the bridge and her frown grew. “I hadn’t heard that but, then again, I don’t remember your parents well.”

That was a shame. His parents had liked Lilly. “I understand that in the first year of their marriage, my mother barely made it to the other side before he flung her over his shoulder and carried her back to the house. It sounds romantic, doesn’t it? For some reason, that story embarrasses my sister, Katarina. I cannot understand why.”

Giles looked down at Lilly, hoping his lighthearted confidence had distracted her enough. He much preferred that earlier look of hers. A frightened Lilly pained his heart. Lilly’s frown faded and her lips quirked, but she didn’t speak.

“I always think that story shows how much intelligence exists in the Wexham line, don’t you?”

Lilly rolled her eyes. “Oh, obviously, and how fond they are of a healthy dose of self-flattery too.”

“My father always said it was better to conduct any battles in bed rather than out of it.” Chuckling, Giles took her hand. She still didn’t look completely at ease. Rules were meant to be broken. “Do you want to play the game?”

“Giles,” Lilly groaned, but he tugged her toward the bridge anyway.

“This is where you have to make the decision to cross and ask to pay with a kiss. Go on, ask away.”

A look of consternation graced Lilly’s face, as if she thought he was barking mad.

“Giles. Giles. How much to pass?” Giles had lightened his voice to mimic a woman’s, but then deepened it to continue. “Just one little kiss, my sweet lady. Then you say, ‘Oh, very well,’ and I say, ‘I never kiss and tell.’”

On his last word, Giles dropped his head and brushed his lips across Lilly’s before he changed his mind. It was a brief kiss, chaste in fact. And he wanted another.

He tugged her forward a step and growled, “Who goes there?”

Lilly choked out a laugh at his silliness.

And it was silly. Giles struggled to remember the last time he had played a game and thought it possibly might have been with his mother when he was very young. Lilly, it seemed, had the unique ability to bring out the strangest behavior in him.

“Giles. Giles. How much to pass?” she asked, giggling.

To which he made the correct reply, making his voice even deeper than before. Lilly shook with laughter that simply had to stop. Giles kissed her, properly this time.

At first awkward, then growing with a surety that shook him to his boots, Giles cradled Lilly’s delicate skull in his hands, holding her lips to his. Kisses had never been part of his repertoire, but he found he couldn’t stop. Lilly’s hands fluttered between them then settled against his chest. When they slid upwards, he dragged her close and started walking.

Giles kissed her every step of the way, walking backward over the bridge until they reached the highest point. Knowing Lilly as he did, he guessed she would have no idea that they had moved. He had never met a woman who focused on him with such single-mindedness.

When her back hit the wall of the bridge, Giles let her lips go and moved to kiss her cheek, her neck, tasting until he just had to return to her lips just one more time.

Lilly’s lips parted, and his world changed.

Why the devil had he ever deprived himself of kisses? Kissing lips was a new pleasure to him, like a fine glass of wine but far more intoxicating. Or, perhaps, it was just kissing Lilly.

Her body arched off the wall and into his chest. He stroked his tongue over her plump bottom lip, tickled along the inside of her mouth and touched her teeth just behind.

Angling his head, he stroked his tongue across hers, once, twice, lost in the taste of her mouth. She tasted like honey, and that was one of life’s greatest pleasures, too. He knew quite a few things he could do with honey that involved sex and eating, all at once. One day he would show Lilly.

That one thought made him stop kissing her. He had gotten carried away again. Pressing his lips to the side of her face, Giles stared off into the distance, breathing hard. Good God, he was planning more than a quick romp between the sheets.

That thought frightened him soft. Did he want to be the one to continue Lilly’s bedroom adventures? Forever?

His body screamed a resounding yes.

Giles did not like possessiveness, and he was appalled to think that he could be the one to cling.

Lilly’s hands untangled from his hair and she relaxed in his arms, but Giles made no move to release her. He couldn’t. He was too overwhelmed by the image of making love to one woman for the rest of his life.

“That was cheating,” Lilly scolded.

Giles smiled. He liked the way she talked to him, clear and un-jaded. She did not rely on coy remarks at the expense of expressing a real opinion. He liked that very much. Very few women did that around him.

“It is too late to be angry with me now anyway. You are already where I want you.”

Reluctantly, Giles released her and moved to stand at her side, no longer blocking her view. Lilly took in a sharp breath. Sliding behind her, he pulled her against him and she leaned back into his embrace. In fact, she appeared to be attempting to push him back away from the edge.

He squeezed her close and his pulse jumped erratically at the contact. Anyone would think he was an untried boy at his body’s antics. “It’s all right. I won’t ask you to show off and climb the wall again.”

“Of course I won’t climb the wall. I am afraid of heights, silly. Can we go down now?” she asked urgently, turning in his arms, her face pinched with anxiety.

Her innocent movement rubbed against his groin and he shuddered. Yes, he had regressed to a green boy. If he ever got inside her, he would probably come on the first thrust.

“It is understandable. You had a nasty fall, after all. These things can get better if you are prepared to face them, I understand.” Although that opinion might have related to remounting a horse that had thrown you, he decided it could have some merit in this situation too.

“I have always been afraid of heights, Giles. I remember I once became stuck up a tree. I can’t quite recall why I was up in the branches now, but Pinkerton had to carry me down. Poor man was as hysterical as I.”

“Who is Pinkerton?”

“He’s Papa’s valet. At least, I think he is still his valet. I have not seen him for some time. I remember now, my kitten was stuck in a high branch. Ooh.”

Lilly slithered through his lax grip and hurried off the bridge. As he trailed after, he had time to consider her words. Boys would go to ridiculous lengths to overcome a fear, even risk injury to prove that they were not afraid of something. If a girl was afraid of heights, would she be willing to do the same?

For some reason, he doubted Lilly had been that type of young girl. Lord Winter had said, after all, that his daughter was an angel. If Lilly had not climbed the bridge, then how did she come to fall in the water that day?

A prickle of unease stirred as Giles remembered something Lord Winter had mentioned on the first night of his stay. Drunk at the time, the man had worried that too many accidents occurred around Lilly.

Without a male child to inherit, the estate—minus Lilly’s dowry—would pass out of the family, and to the next male relation. Giles wondered who Lord Winter’s heir was, and what he thought of Lilly’s up-until-now fragile existence.

Lord Winter’s family was too staid to allow a woman more than a modest dowry. But unease nagged at Giles, and he wondered if their long-forgotten betrothal agreement was here or at his London residence. There might be details of the Winters’ finances in the document.

Ah, hell.What was he doing?

Did he really believe anyone had tried to harm this woman? Unfortunately, he feared someone had. Giles was supposed to use discretion and keep Lilly’s presence a secret. The nurses kept leaving, and Lilly had overindulged in an opium-based medicinal. Then there were the injuries she sustained in the fall from the bridge, a feat that may very well have not been accomplished by a young girl, an angel, who was afraid of heights. Had someone tried to make the angel fly?

He needed to see that document again.

Lilly called to him and stopped his speculation. The light in her eyes reminded him that kissing her might not have been such a good idea. Yes, he had gotten her along the bridge, but he had created another problem. One he might have trouble denying.

He wanted to kiss her again. She had lips meant for it, and her mouth tasted like honey. He shuddered to think what she would taste like elsewhere.

That thought undid him. Giles fought the urge to grab her and sink to the green grass. He wanted to slide her skirts up between them and brush his cock over her blonde curls. He longed to sink his length into her soft depths and pleasure them both blind.

Giles decided he really should stop trying to talk himself out of seducing her. It made him realize that there were far too many opportunities to play, and far too many experiences he wanted to share. If he continued as he was, he would be begging Lilly to put him out of his misery. Lilly could make him her slave, and he probably wouldn’t even protest. Hot, willing and throbbing—that was how she would conquer him.

“Do you know what I think, Giles?” Lilly’s low voice teased him, her fingers brushing his sleeve.

“What is that, oh frightening ghost?”

She laughed and danced away a few steps. “I believe you want to kiss me again. Your face is quite stern.”

“That could be an accurate assumption, Miss Winter.” At her giggle, he added, “It is altogether possible for me to assume, in turn, that you wish to kiss me as well.” He raised an eyebrow and then lunged for her, pulling her to him, pressing his lips to hers, and sweeping his tongue into her mouth.

* * *

Across the bustling village street, a tall, well-dressed gentleman laughed as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Bartholomew hated him and everyone like him. This man, this viscount, was a favored son of the ton. Oscar Ryall, Viscount Carrington, held the opinion of society in the palm of his pampered hand. He could do wrong and get away with it because of his charming smile.

Foolish bloody society. He’d bet there was a nasty skeleton or two in the viscount’s closet he could exploit. He’d learned every family had something to hide. As the fair-headed man stepped into the tavern, Bartholomew toyed with the idea of exposing his secrets. For a price, anyone would talk. And then society would speak of nothing but the prattling fool’s less than perfect behavior.

Still, Carrington bore watching and imitating. Society expected a certain kind of gentleman and Bartholomew had to keep up appearances until he had the title and the necessary wife. But once he’d accomplished his goal, society—at least parts of it—would learn his true colors.

“My lord, I might have some intelligence.”

Bartholomew seriously doubted that statement, but he turned toward his servant. Given Brown’s confident bearing, the man was obviously pleased with himself, with a rare straightening of his shoulders that Bartholomew would happily crush soon. “What news?”

“A black carriage was noticed at the crossroads recently.”

“And?” God, finding one old man and worthless chit was like sucking blood from a stone.

“A boy noticed a slow-moving, plain black carriage on Thursday last, then again on Saturday. Except on Saturday, the carriage traveled at a much faster clip. Springing from the nearby crossroads as if chased by demons, the lad said.”

Bartholomew rubbed his jaw. The old man only traveled fast when Lilly was elsewhere. He wouldn’t risk hurting his precious angel. He looked toward the crossroad, struggling to remember the baron’s associates in the area. He must have dumped her and departed. Bartholomew nearly jumped for the joy of it.

Lillian was alone.

Now he just had to work out where she was staying.

Ignoring Brown, he turned for the tavern, slipped into a far table and called for a tankard of ale. Across the room, Lord Carrington held court with the innkeeper. While the viscount waved his hands expansively and earned a laugh for his performance, Bartholomew restrained a grimace.

Pampered, sheltered, good for nothing but a bullet between his eyes. Bartholomew imagined it—vividly. Then had the devil of a time restoring his expression to show nothing but polite boredom.

He managed it as a clutch of coins changed hands and the innkeeper, all smiles and easy familiarity, led Carrington down a hall toward a private dining room.

The fraudulent smile slipped from Bartholomew’s lips. Carrington was a favorite with many and invited everywhere. He had friends in high places: duke, marquess and earl. They all courted his company.

Like Lilly’s former betrothed, the Earl of Daventry.

A grin split his face—startling enough in its intensity to send a tavern wench far from his table. He fought for control of his features, but elation set his being thrumming with coarse need for her blood.

Damnation, could the old fool have returned her to Northamptonshire?