In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,104

she called, unable to still the hopeful quiver in her voice.

The panel slipped open, and her sister entered.

“Sylvia,” she greeted dumbly. Her heart fell.

Not her servant. Not any servant who’d come to inform Lila that there was once more a guest.

“No need to appear so thrilled with my visit,” Sylvia drawled, pushing the panel shut.

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. I was . . .”

“Expecting another?” her far-too-insightful sister finished for her.

“No.” She’d been hoping for another, which wasn’t altogether the same.

“You’re a horrible liar, Lila March.” Sylvia joined her, drawing herself up onto the edge of the mattress alongside Lila. “You always have been.”

“And you always saw too much, Sylvia March.”

“Nay, not March,” her sister said, sadness layered within that amendment. “Caufield. Sylvia Caufield,” she murmured to herself. With a sigh, Sylvia drew herself higher onto the mattress and sat tailor-style, with both legs folded toward her body and crossed at the ankles.

Lila matched her sister in repose so that they faced one another. With their dark muslin skirts rucked up about them, squaring off as they were, the moment may as well have been taken from their youth, back before life had gone and broken their hearts, leaving them forever changed.

“Well?” her sister pressed.

“Well, what?”

“Well, it is just . . . I have been very absorbed with Vallen and . . . and . . .” With her grief. Sylvia didn’t finish that thought. Nor did she need to. It was as real as spoken. “I’m not, however, a ninny.”

“I don’t know what you’re on about.” Lila fought the urge to shift under her sister’s pointed gaze.

Sylvia snorted. “Don’t you?” Her elder sister rested a hand on Lila’s. “Surely you don’t think I’m so naive as to believe it a mere matter of chance that a gentleman paid a call to my household, looking for you . . . in error?”

Actually, she’d rather hoped her sister hadn’t overthought Hugh’s presence there yesterday.

“Given the fact that you sought out Clara, the only logical conclusion is at some point, you’ve snuck around and had some interactions with the gentleman . . . who just so happened to be society’s latest Lost Lord.”

Damn her sister for that intuitiveness. And yet at this moment, Lila couldn’t bring herself to share the details by which she’d first sought out Hugh . . . because Sylvia would never understand and would see Hugh in only the worst light and by the gossip her sister had been reading aloud—a horrendous light he was undeserving of.

“He wasn’t a lord when I met him,” she finally brought herself to confide. “He was just a man from East London, and . . . I was just a woman.” Lila drew her knees to her chest and looped her arms about them. “And he didn’t treat me at all different because of Peterloo.” She didn’t stumble over the mention of that day as she had every other time before. In speaking to Hugh yesterday, and in sharing all those details aloud about the hell of that day, it was as though there’d been a cathartic release, a breaking of chains. “Of course, he didn’t know about Manchester,” she added softly to herself. “I told him yesterday.”

Her sister was silent for a long moment. “What happened?”

He ran. “He listened.” He’d held her. “And then he left.”

“And . . . you wished he’d returned today.”

Lila bit her lower lip. “And I wish he’d returned.” For when she was with Hugh, she was whole in ways where she’d only been fragments of her former self. “But he was different after he learned.” Just as everyone was, when they discovered about Lila’s time at Peterloo.

“Why was he here?”

Lila blinked at the unexpectedness of that question . . . and then recalled what Hugh had shared—Sylvia’s father-in-law. “He wanted me to help ease his entry into Polite Society.” Specifically, he’d wanted Lila to secure him an invitation to the Marquess of Prendergast’s annual ball. There could be only one explanation as to the gentleman whom Hugh believed responsible in some way for his suffering and that of so many others.

“And . . . you don’t wish to help him?” her sister ventured.

“I don’t think I’m capable of helping him,” she corrected. “Not to the extent he needs me.” That was ultimately what it came down to. Despite the shared connection between Lila’s family and the marquess’s, she’d wished to help. Regardless of his connection to Sylvia’s late husband, if Prendergast was responsible of wrongdoing, he should