Read With This Kiss: Part One for Free Online

steps.
    In the ballroom, there was no death and blood. No tears. No letters to be sent to mothers.
    He smiled down at the lovely lass in his arms. Her lips were the color of spring roses and her eyes were soft and affectionate. Lily was like a whirlwind made of laughter. The faster they twirled, the more she loved it, leaning back against his arm and giggling.
    After their dance, he asked for Grace. But he was secretly glad when it turned out that she had gone home with a headache.
    “She never would have left if she knew you were coming,” Lily told him. “She absolutely adores you, though I don’t know why. You obviously don’t deserve it!”
    Over her fan, her eyes shone with a merry, wicked light. Around them pretty girls swirled, their dresses light and airy against their perfectly shaped bodies, arms gleaming in the candlelight, lips rosy. He traded Lily to a sleek young lord who told him, languidly, that he had deep admiration for the navy. “The bravery,” the man said, waving his hand. “All the courage you chaps display. Quite remarkable.”
    He danced with a friend of Lily’s, who had bouncing curls and shining white teeth. In fact, her teeth were rather mesmerizing, and he found himself imagining her head as a skull, but then he forced the image away— away —and managed to put himself back in the gaily turning ballroom.
    “More champagne?” The evening was drawing to a close, but Lily and her friends were as fresh as daisies, as beautiful as they had been hours ago.
    He took the glass, perhaps his fourth, perhaps his eighth, and met Lily’s eyes with a smile. He was sure it was a smile because he turned his lips the right way.
    “I want to meet your friend, Mr. Philip Drummond!” she said.
    “You know of Philip?” For a moment the two worlds collided; with an effort of will he pushed the other one away.
    She laughed, gaily. “Of course I know of him—from the letters you’ve sent Grace, silly. We all know Philip or, rather, Lieutenant Drummond now, isn’t it?”
    He managed only half a smile this time and tipped up the glass of champagne. “Drummond is a capital fellow. A great friend.”
    “Where is he now?”
    The champagne rushed down Colin’s throat in an angry rush of bubbles. “With his family in Devon.”
    “Oh, of course!” Lily put a hand on his sleeve. “Colin, it’s time to go home.”
    He frowned down at her.
    Her eyes were sympathetic. Everything you’d want a wife’s eyes to be. “You’ve had too much champagne,” she told him. And then she came up on her toes and, to his utter horror, wiped a tear from his cheek. “Come on, old thing,” she said, tucking her arm under his and towing him off toward the door. “I expect the navy doesn’t give you much champagne, do they? We must have Father send you a case in the diplomatic bag…”
    He stumbled along with her, letting a stream of words carry him to the door, whereupon his father appeared from somewhere, and then he fell into the darkness of the carriage.
    “I don’t sleep much,” he told his father, blinking because Sir Griffin was a little hazy in the dark carriage. “But I think it will be all right tonight.”
    “I’m so glad,” his father said, but he sounded sad.
    So Colin added, “Because of the dancing. Because of Lily.”
    “Lily?”
    His father sounded a little dubious, so Colin made the statement even more positive. “When she’s there, and I’m dancing with her, and she’s smelling of roses in late summer, I don’t think so much. She’s my tonic.” He swept his hand in the air and accidentally hit the wall of the carriage.
    His father’s hand landed on his knee, warm and steady. “I love you, Colin. We all love you.”
    What was the point of saying that? He would have asked, but all the champagne swept up into his head and he collapsed into the corner of the carriage.
    In the end, the memories invaded his sleep, anyway.
    But when he woke up, he remembered that it was Lily who had