Page 166 of Immortal Rose

“I cannot help you with Immortal Rose, you know this,” he said softly.

“This isn’t Immortal Rose,” I said.

His brow furrowed. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached for it, lifting the bottle by its delicate neck. “Will this give me claws and scales? Because I might deserve that.”

The bastard deserved a tail, too, for what he’d put me through.

I made my way around the table to the door, and he knew better than to stop me. The loveliest scent of blackberries, lemon, and tea leaves whispered into the air.

I looked back as Hugh inhaled sharply. His profile had gone slack, his eyes losing all their usual intensity. There was a heartrending softness to his face, the boy he had once been daring to surface, only for a moment. His shoulders hunched, as if his whole being was trying to bring that scent closer.

There was a loneliness to survival, to being the one left to remember, while the remembered slipped away more with each day. If I could give him nothing else, I could give him this.

“I found the formulation in the Treasury and thought it might be the one.” I was speaking to his back now. “Tonight, then.”

And with that, I left him to commune with the ghost of his mother’s memory.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Hugh knew he had made a fatal mistake agreeing to this harebrained plan the moment Viola appeared on the landing in a swirl of beaded sapphire taffeta.

His world contracted around him. There was nothing worth seeing but her. The way the fabric shimmered in the candlelight, as if intentionally baiting his eyes to go straight to where it clung to the supple curves of her body, felt like the purest form of torture God could devise.

She stopped on the bottom step, holding out her slender arms, clad in fiendishly appealing black satin gloves, like a soldier waiting to pass muster. The fete was a masquerade, no doubt to allow for some anonymity as people were on their worst behavior, and his own mask suddenly felt too tight, too itchy on his face.

Hugh knew he had been silent for too long, drinking in the sight of the fiery and white-gold curls spilling down over one shoulder, the way the black domino mask framed her hazel eyes. The scratches on her face and neck were nearly healed thanks to the salve, leaving luminous, clear skin brightened with a bit of saucy rouge at the cheeks and lips. The goddess Venia would have wept with envy.

“Well?” she murmured.

And then he noticed the bodice.

What was left of it.

“What have you done to that gown?” he croaked out.

The neck had been lowered to a scandalous degree and, combined with the wicked efforts of the stays, presented the creamy expanse of her breasts to him like an offering. One slight movement, one raise of her arm, and he knew it would reveal a hint of nipple.

It had not—it most certainly had not—looked like that when he’d selected it in Audette’s shop. He wasn’t a madman bent on self-destruction.

Every ounce of blood in his body was traveling south, until he was no longer secure in the belief that his cloak covered his now raging cockstand. His hands brought his topper discreetly in front of him, gripping it with the same force of longing he had to touch her.

Viola instinctively made to cross her arms over her chest, only to force them back to her sides, as if settling herself into tonight’s role. He almost groaned. Her full lips set in that little determined line that usually heralded his favorite sort of trouble.

“What’s the matter with it?” she demanded. “We’re meant to slip in as Lord Dover and his doxy, are we not?”

That glint in her eye. The challenge. She wanted him to say it. To admit it.

He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. His mouth was dry, and his head was utterly empty of anything save one desperately sensual fantasy: taking his finger and drawing down that little strip of fabric that remained over her pale breasts, allowing them to spill out into his hands.

Giving her the most complete pleasure she would ever know.

She had been the one to regain her senses first last night and pull away—and thank God for that. Hugh had found the combination of her innocence and confidence in pursuing her pleasure so intoxicating, he’d been drunk on it. All but mindless, damn it. If there was to ever be anything there, they would need to take it slow, to ensure it was what she truly wanted and not just the heat of a passing moment.

But tonight, perhaps emboldened by her attire and role, that confidence had returned. The way she was looking at him now, the dark heat in those eyes, was exactly how he imagined Greystone had looked each time he surveyed his new territory. Possessive. Hungry. Victorious.

Bloody hell. He was all but panting at her, wearing an obnoxiously lavish velvet suit and tasseled boots. Damn Dover and his gaudy tastes. It wasn’t as if it made up for his deficient personality.

And the black satin ribbon tied in a pretty little bow around the creamy column of her throat, like she was the most delightful of gifts to unwrap . . .