Chapter 13
“The blue one. Third from the left.” Hugo stood in the center of Madame Dupont’s establishment on Bond Street and pointed to a gown displayed on a dressmaker’s form near the window.
The fabric was a deep sapphire silk that caught the afternoon light and held it, and the cut was fitted through the bodice with a neckline that would sit just below the collarbone.
Elegant. Tasteful. And designed to make every man in a room forget what he had been saying.
Lily did not look at the blue gown. She had positioned herself beside a rack of sage and dove-gray muslins with high necklines and modest sleeves, running her fingers along the fabrics with the careful attention of a woman selecting armor for a battlefield she refused to acknowledge.
“This one is lovely,” she said, holding up a gown the color of cold oatmeal. “The stitching is excellent.”
“The stitching is irrelevant if the gown makes you invisible.”
“I do not wish to be visible. I wish to be appropriate.”
“You wish to be overlooked, and that is not the same thing.” Hugo crossed to the rack and gently removed the oatmeal gown from her hands.
He replaced it on the rail with the careful deliberateness of a man disarming someone who did not yet realize they were armed.
“Appropriate is what you have been wearing for three Seasons. Appropriate has not captured Lord Wilfrey’s sustained attention.
We are here to try something different.”
Lady Brimsey appeared from behind a partition with a bolt of lavender silk draped across her arms and an expression of pure, luminous happiness.
“Your Grace, Madame Dupont says this fabric arrived from Lyon only last week. Is it not exquisite?”
“It is magnificent, Lady Brimsey. You should have it made up.”
Lady Brimsey clutched the silk to her chest as though Hugo had handed her a newborn. She disappeared back behind the partition, and the muffled sound of animated French carried through the shop as she and Madame Dupont discussed sleeves.
Lady Oldbarrow stood near the front window, examining a pair of gloves with the focused disinterest of a woman who was actually listening to every word Hugo and Lily exchanged.
Hugo turned back to the sapphire gown and lifted it from the form. The silk spilled over his hands like water, cool and impossibly smooth. He carried it to Lily and held it up beside her face.
“This color complements your eyes.” He tilted his head. “Try it on.”
“I will not parade around a shop in gowns you have selected for me as though I were a doll being dressed for a display case.”
“You are going to try on a gown that will make you look extraordinary, and then you are going to decide for yourself whether it suits you. That is not a display case. That is a fitting room.”
Her jaw set. He watched the resistance build behind her eyes, the stubborn, magnificent pride that would rather lose a war than surrender a single battle.
He understood it. He admired it. And he needed it to bend, just this once, because the house party was in twelve days and Lord Wilfrey would be there and Lily could not walk into that drawing room wearing the color of cold porridge.
“P-please.”
The word stumbled out of him before he could catch it. The p caught against the back of his teeth, and for one terrible, suspended second, the sound stalled in his throat the way it used to when he was seventeen and standing in an entrance hall with his brother’s hand at his collar.
He swallowed. The muscles in his jaw tightened. He pushed past it with the practiced ease of a man who had spent fifteen years learning to crush these moments before they could breathe, but the damage was done. The word had stumbled, and it had stumbled in front of her.
He kept his expression neutral. He did not look away. He did not acknowledge it.
Lily’s eyes shifted. Something moved behind them, quick and searching, and then she looked at the gown in his hands rather than at his face, and he was grateful for that small mercy.
“Fine.” She took the sapphire silk from him. “One gown.”
“Three.”
“One.”
“Two, and I will stop talking about your wardrobe for the remainder of the engagement.”
She considered this. “Two.”
“Agreed.”
She gathered the sapphire gown and a second one he selected, a deep emerald crepe with a fitted waist and sleeves that gathered at the shoulder and disappeared behind the curtain of the fitting room.
Hugo exhaled. He crossed to the window and stood beside Margaret, who was still examining the same pair of gloves she had been holding for ten minutes.
“She does not like being told what to wear,” Lady Oldbarrow observed without looking up.
“She does not like being told anything.”
“It is one of her most important qualities.” Lady Oldbarrow set the gloves down and turned to him.
Her blue eyes held the sharpness of a woman who had spent her life watching men and had learned to distinguish the ones who were worth trusting from the ones who were merely worth tolerating.
“My niece is not a project, Your Grace. She is not a rough stone to be polished into someone else’s idea of a gem.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you? Because a man who selects a woman’s gowns is a man who believes he knows what she should look like. And a man who believes he knows what a woman should look like is one step from believing he knows what she should think, and say, and be.”
The words landed with precision. Hugo held Margaret’s gaze and felt the weight of her judgment settle across his shoulders like a yoke.
“I am not trying to change her, Lady Oldbarrow. I am trying to give her a tool she does not know she needs. There is a difference.”
“There is. I am watching to see which one it turns out to be.”
The curtain of the fitting room drew back.
Lily stepped out in the sapphire gown, and Hugo’s lungs emptied.
The silk fitted her like a second skin from the bodice to the waist, where it gathered and fell in a sweep of fabric that moved with her body rather than standing away from it.
The neckline sat exactly where he had imagined, just below her collarbone, revealing the elegant line of her throat and the delicate architecture of her shoulders.
The color turned her green eyes to something incandescent, deep and bright, and the late afternoon light from the shop windows caught the silk and threw sapphire shadows across her skin.
She was not beautiful. Beautiful was a word for women who pleased the eye and left the mind undisturbed.
Lily in sapphire silk was a demolition.
She was the kind of sight that rearranged a man’s priorities without his permission, which made him forget what he had been thinking and why it had ever mattered.
His mouth went dry. He became aware that he had not spoken and that the silence was stretching into something conspicuous.
“Buy the dress.” His voice came out rougher than he intended.
Lily tugged at the neckline. “It is lower than I am accustomed to.”
“It is perfect.”
“You are biased.”
“I am objective. Every man at the house party will look at you and forget his own name.”
“I do not want every man to forget his name. I want one man to remember mine.”
“He will. Trust me.”
Something shifted between them. The fitting room, the shop, the racks of silk and muslin all fell away, and there was only Lily in sapphire blue, looking at him with an expression that held wariness and want in equal measure.
Her fingers stilled on the neckline. His gaze held hers, and the air between them carried the same charged weight it had carried on the balcony, the same impossible, reckless gravity that pulled them together despite every rule and boundary and sensible objection they had constructed.
Margaret cleared her throat.
Hugo blinked. He stepped back and turned to the nearest display of ribbons with the sudden, intense focus of a man who had just remembered where he was and who was watching.
“The emerald as well,” he said to the modiste who had materialized at his elbow. “And whatever Lady Brimsey has selected. I will settle the account.”
Lily retreated behind the curtain. Hugo studied the ribbons without seeing them and concentrated on breathing.
Lady Brimsey emerged with three bolts of fabric, two pairs of gloves, and the radiant satisfaction of a woman who had experienced a religious awakening at a modiste.
Madame Dupont followed with a measuring tape draped over her shoulder and the serene expression of a proprietress watching a Duke spend money.
“Lady Oldbarrow.” Hugo turned to Margaret. “I noticed you admiring the gloves earlier. May I?”
Margaret looked at the gloves. Then she looked at Hugo. Her expression underwent a series of minute adjustments that tracked the collision between her instinct to refuse and her acknowledgment that the gloves were, in fact, exceptional.
“You may.” She picked up the gloves and held them against her hands. “But this does not constitute approval, young man.”
“I would never presume.”
“You presume constantly. It is your defining characteristic.” She paused. “But the leather is very fine.”
Hugo settled the account. The total was extravagant, and he did not blink.
Money had never meant much to him except as a tool, and today it had purchased something more valuable than silk.
It had purchased Lady Brimsey’s gratitude, Lady Oldbarrow’s grudging tolerance, and the image of Lily Readthorpe in a sapphire gown that he suspected would follow him into his dreams for some time.
They left the shop and stepped into the afternoon sunlight. Lady Brimsey chattered about Lyon silk and sleeve lengths. Margaret walked in thoughtful silence. Lily carried her parcels and said nothing, but her cheeks held a flush he couldn’t help but notice.
Hugo handed the ladies into the carriage. When he took Lily’s hand to help her up the step, her fingers curled around his for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
She looked back at him from the carriage step. Just once. A glance that lasted no longer than a heartbeat, but her green eyes held something new, something that had not been there when they walked into the shop.
Then she turned and climbed inside, and the door closed, and the moment was gone.
He watched the carriage pull away and stood on Bond Street with his hands in his pockets and the afternoon sun warm on his face, and the memory of Lily in sapphire blue burning behind his ribs like a coal that would not cool.
Wilfrey, he reminded himself. She wants Wilfrey.
The reminder tasted like ash.