Lillian turned as Lucas Clairmont downed a large glass of punch, the lot hardly touching his throat before he helped himself to another.
He looked angry and she could not quite reconcile this man with the one who had sent her flowers and kept silent about a scandal that could easily ruin her. The bruising around his eye was largely gone and the velvet of his dangerous glance made her wary and uncertain. Caroline Shelby seemed bent on following him and Lillian could well see why she had been often named as the most beautiful girl of her Season. Wilcox-Rice beside her laid his hand beneath Lillian’s elbow in a singular message of claim and she saw Clairmont take in the movement.
Caught between convention and other people’s expectations, she could do nothing save for smile, her practised speech of thanks buried under the weight of a careful control.
‘Miss Davenport.’ When she gave him her hand he held it briefly. The warmth of his skin made her start with the recognition of his touch.
‘Mr Clairmont. It is nice to see you once again.’
He dropped contact almost immediately.
‘You two know each other?’ Cassandra was astonished.
‘A little.’ Her words.
‘Not well.’ His.
Cassie’s giggles drew the attention of Caroline Shelby as she gained their small circle.
‘What a lovely party! I knew I should have left London earlier. If it had not been for you, Mr Clairmont, I should not even be here by now. I hope that I have not missed too much, for you all seem very festive.’
‘I am certain you are quite in time, Lady Shelby,’ Lillian returned.
‘Miss Davenport. How wonderful that you should be here. I have long admired your sense of style and bearing and your dress-’ she gestured to the white moire silk ‘-why, it is just so beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My friend Eloise says you have your clothes made in England, but I think that cannot be true as the cut and cloth is just too wonderful and I said to my mother the other day that we should ask you about your seamstress and use her ourselves because…’
Was she nervous, Lillian thought, switching out of the constant barrage of never-ending chatter, or just frivolous? She made the mistake of glancing at Lucas Clairmont and almost laughed at the comical disbelief on his face. Lord, and he had had a whole hour of it coming down from London. No wonder he had almost leapt from the coach as soon as it had stopped.
‘Do you enjoy flowers, Miss Davenport?’ Caroline’s shrill and final question pierced her ruminations.
‘I do indeed.’
‘Is not the garden here just beautiful? All in shades of white, too. I suppose with your penchant for the paler hues you would prefer your flowers in the same sort of palette?’
Lillian smiled. Now here was an opening she could take, and easily. ‘Lately I find that I have a growing preference for orange.’
She caught the expression of puzzlement on Lucas Clairmont’s face, but with John at her side could make no further comment.
‘Orange?’ The girl opposite almost shouted the word. ‘Oh, no, Miss Davenport, surely you jest with me?’
When Cassandra St Auburn suggested that the party now retire to dress for dinner Lillian could do nothing but lift her skirts and follow, noticing with chagrin that Lucas Clairmont did not join them.
Chapter Eight
Luc took a sixteen-hand gelding from the stables of St Auburn and rode for Maygate, a village a good ten miles away. He was tired and using the last light of dusk and the first slice of moon to guide him he journeyed west.
Dinner would still be a few hours away and he felt the need to stretch his body and feel the wind on his face and freedom.
Lord, how the English enjoyed their long and complicated afternoon teas, something which in Virginia would have been thought of as ludicrous.
Virginia and a green tract of land that reached from the James to the Potomac. His land! Hewed from the blood, sweat and tears of hard labour, the timber within his first hundred acres bringing the riches to buy the rest.
A piecemeal acquisition!
He ran his thumb across the scar on his thigh, feeling the ridges of flesh badly healed. An accident when the Bank of Washington was about to foreclose on him and he had no other means of paying to get the wood out. He had dragged it alone along the James by horse, unseated as a log rose across another and his mount bolted, pushing him into the jagged end of newly hewn timber. The cut had festered badly, but still he had made it to Hopewell and the mill that would buy the load, staving off the greed of the bank for a few more months.
Hard days. Lonely days.
Not as lonely as when Elizabeth had come, though, with her needs and wants and sadness.
No, he would not think of any of that, not here, not in the mellow countryside of Kent where the boundaries of safety were a comfortable illusion.
He stopped in a position overlooking a stream, the shadows of night long as he ran his fingers through his hair. Such dreams were no longer for him and he had been foolish to even think they could be. He should depart again tonight for London, leaving Lilly with her enticing full lips and woman’s body to his imagination. But he could not. Already he found himself turning his horse for home.
Lillian felt like a young girl again, this dress not quite fitting and that one not quite right. She was glad for the help of her lady’s maid and glad too that her aunt Jean was still in bed, her headache having turned into a cold.
When she finally settled on a gown she liked she walked to the window and looked out. The last of the daylight was lost, the moon rising quickly in the eastern sky and the gardens of St Auburn wreathed in shadow. She was about to turn away when a lone rider caught her eye, his gait on the horse fluid. No Sunday rider this, the beat of the hooves fast and furious.
Lucas Clairmont. She knew it was him, the raw power of his thighs wrapped about the steed in easy control and the reins caught only lightly as the animal held its head and thundered on to the gravelled circle of the driveway.
Caught in the moonlight, hair streaming almost to his shoulders and without a jacket, he looked to her like the living embodiment of some ancient Grecian God. What would it be like to lie with such a man, to feel him near her, close?
Shocked, she turned away. Ladies did not ponder such fantasies and she had been warned many times of the man that he was. Yet surely a light flirtation was a harmless thing and, perhaps, if she were generous, she could place her clandestinely bought kiss into that category. But she should take it no further. To cross the line from coquetry into blowsy abandonment would be to throw away everything that she had worked hard for all her life. Stepping to the mirror, she looked at herself honestly, observed eyes full of anticipation and the smile that seemed to crouch there, waiting.
For him!
Adjusting her chemise so that a little more flesh than usual was showing, she smiled, still proper indeed, but bordering on something that was not. This wickedness that had leaked into her refined formality was freeing somehow, a part of her personality that had until lately lain dormant and unrealised.
‘Oh God, please help me.’ Spoken into the silence of her room, she wondered just exactly what it was that she was asking. For absolution of sin or for the strength to see her virtue in the way she had always tried to view it? Shaking her head, she sought for the words to cancel such a selfish prayer and found that she couldn’t. There was
