Free Lily by Patricia Gaffney Page B

looking.
    What he wanted was to touch her. The dress she’d worn that day in his room hadn’t even hinted at the loveliness of the woman underneath the faded blue cotton. He watched his hand go out, then pause in the air an inch or two from her shoulder. His arm cast a shadow across her pale back, darkening the thick stream of hair that hung down past her shoulders. The moonlight silvered her skin and made it look indescribably soft. He saw her white-fingered grip on her upper arms, and wondered fleetingly if she was frightened. He wanted to hear her voice again. “Will you turn around?” he said quietly.
    She shook her head.
    “No?” he prompted.
    “No.”
    “But you must. Have you never heard of the droit du seigneur?” he murmured with uncharacteristic whimsy, mostly to himself.
    Without a thought, Lily snapped out, “That was a Norman, not a Cornish custom, and anyway, it died out six hundred years ago.”
    Devon’s hovering hand jerked away. “How do you know that?” he asked in amazement.
    She bit her tongue. “Please, please, I cannot talk to you like this!”
    “Why? Are you embarrassed?” She looked like a warm marble goddess to him, tall and straight and slender, and he had an urge to touch each fragile vertebra with his fingertips, moving down so slowly, past her narrow waist to her sleek, saucy buttocks. “You’re much too beautiful to be embarrassed.” On an impulse he said, “Meet me tonight, later. Come to my room.” Instantly he regretted his words.
    Lily was so overwrought she wanted to weep. “No, I can’t, I can’t. You’ve mistaken me, my lord, I’m not—like Lowdy.”
    “Your friend?”
    She nodded.
    “No indeed,” he agreed in a murmur, “you’re not at all like Lowdy.” Regret drifted away. And now it was impossible not to touch her; his earlier scruples vanished—she was only a maid, after all. But when he pushed her wet hair aside and slid his fingers along the delicate ridge of her backbone, she gave a soft gasp and dropped her head; he could feel light tremors quaking through her, from her shoulders to her long, white thighs.
    “You must let me go,” Lily pleaded in a strained whisper.
    “I’m not detaining you.”
    “Please. You don’t understand.”
    What he understood was that she needed subtler handling. With deep reluctance, he let his hand fall away; when it grazed her hip, she shuddered again and went poker-stiff. “Meet me tomorrow, then,” he suggested in a whisper. “In the afternoon. We’ll go for a walk.”
    She said the first thing that came into her head. “I have to scrub the stillroom floor tomorrow afternoon.”
    He ventured a smile. “I commend your industry. But I think you might manage to postpone that particular chore, don’t you? Four o’clock, inside the park gates.”
    Lily took a deep breath. “A walk?”
    He nodded solemnly. “A walk.”
    “And if I come, will you go away now?”
    “Are you bargaining with me?” When she made no answer, he conceded gravely, “Yes, I will go away.”
    “Very well, then. I—I will meet you.”
    “I’m much relieved.” Did she think he would have accepted a refusal?
    There was a lengthy pause.
    “Well?” Lily said finally. She couldn’t stand this much longer.
    “Ah, I’d forgotten. The bargain.” He took a step back, sweeping her with one last glance. With what he considered saintly restraint, he walked away and left her alone.

Six
    B UT WHEN FOUR O’CLOCK came the next afternoon, Lily was kneeling in a half-inch of caustic suds and scouring the tile floor of the stillroom with a bristle brush. Devon found her there at four-twenty. His irritation was extreme, and derived from two sources: an inability to understand, in the harsh light of day, what could possibly have seemed so urgent last night; and bafflement over the fact that he’d actually gone to meet the chit anyway, had been waiting at the appointed time and place like some lovestruck footboy come a-courting—and