Chapter 30
“You have not touched your wine.” Hugo watched Lily across the candlelit dinner table, her fork resting against her plate, her gaze drifting toward the window where the moon bathed the lawn in silvery light.
They were alone. The servants had laid the meal and withdrawn, and the dining room at Thornwaite Hall felt vast and intimate at once, two chairs at one end of a table built for twenty.
“I am not thirsty.” She picked up her fork and set it down again. “I am not particularly hungry, either.”
“You are nervous.”
“I am not nervous.”
“You have rearranged your asparagus four times without eating any of it.”
She looked down at her plate. The asparagus had, in fact, been organized into a precise geometric pattern. She pressed her lips together.
Hugo rose from his chair. He picked up his plate and his glass and walked to her end of the table. He set them beside hers and sat in the chair next to her, close enough that his knee pressed against hers beneath the tablecloth.
“Better?” he said.
“You were twenty feet away.”
“An unacceptable distance on my wedding night.” He cut a small piece of the honeyed pear on his plate and lifted his fork. “Open.”
Lily stared at the fork. “You are not going to feed me.”
“I am. Open.”
“Hugo.”
“Lily.”
She opened her mouth. He slid the fork between her lips, and her eyes closed as the sweetness hit her tongue. A soft sound escaped her, half pleasure and half surprise, and the sound traveled through Hugo like a lit fuse.
She opened her eyes. He was watching her. He had not moved the fork.
“Good?”
“It is a pear, Hugo. It is not a revelation.”
“The sound you just made suggests otherwise.”
Color flooded her cheeks. He set the fork down and reached for the honeyed pear with his fingers, lifting a thin slice to her mouth.
Her lips parted. She took it from his fingers, and her tongue brushed his thumb.
The contact, brief, wet, and electric, sent a bolt of heat straight through his chest.
He stood. He turned to the doorway where a footman had appeared.
“That will be all for the evening.”
The footman bowed and disappeared. The door closed.
Hugo turned back to Lily. She sat in her chair with honey on her lower lip and her green eyes wide and dark in the candlelight.
He crossed the room in three strides, bent, and lifted her from the chair. She gasped and gripped his shoulders. He held her against his chest with one arm beneath her knees and the other at her back, and she weighed nothing.
“What are you doing?”
“Carrying my wife upstairs.”
“I can walk.”
“You can. But I have been thinking about this since the lake, and I will not be denied it now.”
He carried her through the dining room and into the corridor.
The candlelight threw their shadow long and merged against the wall.
Lily’s fingers curled into the fabric of his coat, and her breath warmed the side of his neck.
He climbed the staircase with her in his arms and felt the particular, devastating rightness of holding something he had wanted for so long he had forgotten what it felt like to want.
At the door to her chambers, he paused. He looked down at her. She looked up at him. The lamplight caught the honey still glistening on her lower lip.
“I already have my dessert,” he murmured. “She is in my arms.”
He carried her inside and set her on her feet beside the bed. The fire burned low in the grate. The curtains were drawn. The room held the quiet, golden warmth of a space that had been prepared for this moment and was now waiting for them to fill it.
Hugo raised his hand to her face. His thumb traced her lower lip, collecting the last trace of honey, and he brought it to his own mouth. Her breath hitched.
“Turn around,” he said.
She turned. His fingers found the buttons at the back of her gown, and he unfastened them one by one, pressing a kiss to each inch of skin as it appeared.
The nape of her neck. The curve of her spine between her shoulder blades.
The warm hollow at the small of her back.
With each button, the gown loosened, and with each kiss, her breathing quickened, until the silk slid from her shoulders and pooled at her feet.
Lilystood before him in nothing but her chemise and the firelight.
He turned her to face him. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips were parted. Her green eyes held the vulnerability of a woman standing on the edge of something enormous and choosing not to step back.
Hugo cradled her face in both hands and kissed her. Slowly. With none of the urgency of the terrace or the lake. This kiss was a conversation. A question asked with his mouth and answered with hers, patient and thorough and achingly tender.
He drew back. He lifted the chemise over her head and let it fall. He looked at her, all of her, in the firelight, and the sight drove the air from his lungs.
He laid her on the bed. He undressed himself while she watched, and the way her eyes moved over his body made him feel more exposed than the nakedness itself.
He lowered himself over her, bracing on his forearms, his body hovering above hers without touching. Close enough to feel the heat of her skin. Close enough to count her heartbeats.
“Look at me.”
Lily lay beneath him in the candlelight, her hair fanned across the pillow, her chest rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. Hugo braced himself above her on his forearms and waited. He was not going to rush this. Not tonight. Not the first time.
Her eyes opened. Green and gold in the flickering light, wide, uncertain, and wanting.
“There she is,” he murmured.
“I am nervous.”
“I know.” He lowered his mouth to the curve of her jaw and pressed a kiss there, soft and unhurried. “We go as slow as you need. If you want to stop, we stop. No questions. No judgment.”
“I do not want to stop.”
“Then look at me.” He held her gaze. “Stay with me.”
Hugo traced the line of her collarbone with one finger. Slowly. The way he might trace a sentence into a book he wanted to memorize. Her skin pebbled beneath his touch, and her breath caught, but her eyes stayed on his.
His finger trailed lower. Down the center of her chest, between her breasts, following the curve of her ribs. He watched her face as he touched her, cataloging every flutter of her lashes, every hitch in her breathing, every place where her body responded before her mind could intervene.
“You are beautiful,” he said.
“You are stalling.”
“I am savoring.” His finger traced the dip of her waist, the swell of her hip, and the soft skin of her stomach.
Her hands gripped the sheets. Her chest rose and fell. Her eyes never left his.
He lowered his mouth to the place where his finger had been and kissed his way along the same path, retracing every inch with his lips. Lily’s back arched off the bed, and the sound she made was not a word but something deeper, something that lived beneath language.
He shifted above her, his weight braced on his forearms, and looked down at her face.
Her green eyes were dark in the candlelight, her lips swollen from his kisses, her hair fanned across the pillow.
She was trembling, but not from fear. He could read the difference.
This was want, pure and urgent, and it mirrored his own so precisely that the restraint nearly broke him.
“Lily.” He brushed a curl from her temple. “Are you certain?”
He eased into her. Slowly. Watching her face, reading every flicker of her expression the way he had learned to read her over months of arguments and lessons and charged, complicated silences.
Her breath caught. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. He stopped.
“I can stop.”
Lily opened her eyes. In response, she drew her knees wider and pulled him deeper, and the sensation that flooded through him nearly shattered the last of his composure.
Her body was warm and tight around him, and he bit back a groan and held himself still, giving her time to adjust, giving her space, though every instinct screamed at him to move.
He wanted to ravish her. Possess her. Claim every inch of her until the boundaries between his body and hers dissolve into nothing.
He did none of those things. Instead, he moved with deliberate restraint, a man who understood that this moment belonged to her, not to him, and that the gift of her trust was worth more than any fleeting surrender to his own hunger.
Her breath shattered against his mouth. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, and then her hips found his rhythm, tentative at first, then surer, and the feeling of her moving with him undid something at the center of his chest.
“All right?” he murmured against her temple.
She nodded. Her eyes glistened. “Do not stop.”
He moved. Slowly. Carefully. Each movement a question, each response an answer, and the rhythm they found together was not the frantic collision he had experienced a hundred times before with women whose names he had forgotten by morning. This was something else entirely.
Lily’s hands moved from his shoulders to his face. She held him there, her palms warm against his jaw. Her eyes found his in the candlelight, and the look she gave him stripped away every mask he had ever worn.
He pressed his forehead to hers. Their breath mingled. The fire crackled in the grate, and the world outside the bed ceased to exist. Hugo moved with her and against her and inside the wordless, devastating intimacy of a connection he had spent his entire life pretending he did not need.
When she came apart beneath him, her back arching, his name breaking from her lips like a prayer, he followed her over the edge, pulling out quickly.
The release tore through him, vast and consuming, spilling onto her thigh.
He buried his face in the curve of her neck and held on to her as though she were the only solid thing in a world that had just tilted on its axis.