Free Lily (Flower Trilogy) by Lauren Royal Page B

tightened around him, and she breathed in his heady scent, tasting him in return. The mysteries of the bedchamber no longer seemed frightening, not when her entire body thrummed from only a kiss.
    Her world was filled with him until he finally eased away gently and rested his lips on her forehead. “I have to leave,” he said, the words gruff against her skin.
    Lady tweeted from the window, and Jasper answered with a chirp. Lily hadn’t heard them while Rand had been kissing her. She hadn’t heard or felt or seen anything—
    except for him.
    She was trembling all over. And Rand was right.
    “Yes,” she said. “You should leave.”

Chapter Eight
    It was a week later, when Lily was exercising her horse, Snowflake, that she spotted Rand running along the banks of the Thames.
    He’d avoided her all that time. Or she’d avoided him.
    Or both—she wasn’t sure. She only knew that now, riding toward him, her heart began to race . . . and it wasn’t from the exertion of the gallop.
    She slowed deliberately, both Snowflake’s gait and her own breathing. It mattered not that the mere sight of this man set the pit of her stomach to tingling. She wouldn’t let him kiss her again. She’d promised Rose.
    Never mind that Rose had contrived to visit Violet every day this week and come back reporting she’d seen neither hide nor hair of Rand.
    Lily was seeing a considerable amount of Rand’s hide now. Above plain buff breeches, his loose white shirt was unlaced and open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. Tied back into a queue, his glorious hair streamed on the wind behind him, shimmering in the sun.
    His boots, unfashionably low-heeled, pounded along the grassy bank in a rhythm measured and unceasing.
    He ran, she thought, like a wildcat, lithe and sleek.
    She knew the moment he saw her. There was a telltale stumble in that perfectly smooth motion. And a matching hitch in her heartbeat.
    He stopped and leaned over, hands to bent knees, panting hard as he waited for her to ride closer. When she did, he straightened and looked up at her, using a hand to shade his eyes.
    His face was flushed; his shirt clung damply to his skin. That piercing gray gaze swept her from her toes on up and then met her eyes, searching, almost as though he were seeing her for the first time. Holding her reins in one hand, she self-consciously smoothed her butter yellow habit with the other.
    “Good day, Lily.”
    She swallowed tightly. “Good day.”
    “I’m finished running,” he said, stating the obvious.
    But for some reason, she had a feeling he spoke of more than exercise. Moving beside her white horse, he reached to help her down. “Will you walk with me? I like to do that after I run.”
    There was no harm, she supposed, in walking. But when his hands spanned her waist to ease her to the ground, she felt a disturbing jolt of sensation. And he let his fingers rest there longer than he needed to before he stepped back.
    She deliberately looked away, taking Snowflake’s reins and looping them over the branch of a scrubby tree. A sparrow fluttered from the sky and alighted in the sparse foliage.
    Rand looked up, then raised a questioning brow.
    “Lady?”
    “Yes. She thinks she’s protecting me.”
    “She thinks I cannot defend you without her help?” His laugh sounded strained. “She’s insulting my masculinity.”

    To the contrary, Lily suspected Lady was complimenting his masculinity—protecting her from Rand rather than in spite of him. But she certainly wasn’t going to encourage him by telling him that.
    They turned and walked along the riverfront, settling easily into a comfortable tempo. Keeping far enough away from him that he couldn’t take her hand, Lily focused on the water. Swans glided majestically, and faint laughter drifted from one of the boats filled with people enjoying the summer sun.
    “Do you run often?” she asked, then realized she knew the answer.
    Here was the reason he looked so