Read Online Lily (Flower Trilogy) by Lauren Royal - Free Book Online

the ladies get in next. He settled himself beside Lily, and for a few awkward minutes, Rose alternately glared at her and aimed flirty smiles at him.
    Rand appeared to be avoiding Rose’s heated gaze, staring out the window instead. He hummed the same tune Lily remembered from the night before, perhaps in an attempt to fill the silence.
    Suddenly Rose sniffed the air. “Sulfur,” she said disapprovingly. Parentally. True, she was displaying her intelligence by recognizing the chemical, but was she not the one who’d told Rand that men didn’t care to be mothered?
    Lily nudged her with a foot and gave a little shake of her head.
    Apparently getting the message, Rose next spoke with indulged amusement. “While you were waiting for us, did you play with the fire-making things? After you told Rowan you would return them? Did you use them all up?”

    Rand appeared anything but chastised. “What does Ford need with a scrap of paper and a few bits of wood?
    I’m sure he has more, and I think young Rowan has learned his lesson.”
    Boys would be boys, Lily thought, then rushed to change the subject before her sister made the mistake of saying that again out loud. “How is it that a lord became a professor?”
    “Yes,” Rose put in, “how on Earth did that happen?”
    Her tone implied that regardless of how it had happened, she was hoping he could go back to just being a lord.
    Rand, however, only shrugged. “I’m a second son. A practically disowned second son.”
    “Surely not,” Lily said.
    “Perhaps not officially, but I might as well be. I couldn’t wait to get away from home, and once free, I never wanted to go back.”
    Even Rose looked genuinely concerned. “Did your parents mistreat you?”
    “From what little I can remember, my mother treated me wonderfully, but she died when I was six. My father, well . . . let me just say that his dogs received more of his attention than I ever did. He only noticed me when I was in trouble.”
    Lily imagined him young, fresh-faced, misbehaving.
    “Were you often in trouble?”
    “Mostly just when I tried to expose my older brother’s misdeeds. The exalted heir who could do no wrong. Or so my father was convinced. Any attempts on my part to prove otherwise were hopeless.”
    “What did your brother do?” Rose asked. “Was he naughty like Rowan?”
    “Rowan?” Rand’s expression was one of total disbelief. “Rowan is a saint compared to Alban. The man is downright cruel—or at least he was as a boy. I’ve not been home in eight years, so I cannot say how he is now.
    I suppose people can change, although I don’t expect that Alban has. He’s always hated me. He hates a lot of people. There’s something evil about my brother.”
    Eight years. Lily couldn’t fathom avoiding her family for eight years. There was a loneliness in Rand, a loneliness in his eyes. A loneliness she ached to help him heal.
    “Evil,” she mused. “Could it not have been your imagination? Jealousy on your part? After all, he’s the heir—
    perhaps if you go back—”
    “I have no desire to go back. I’m happy with my life as it is. And if you had read Alban’s diaries—”
    “You read his private diaries? No wonder he hated you!” Despite his distress, Lily was tempted to laugh. If she’d read her sisters’ diaries, or Rowan’s, they’d be out for her blood, no mercy. Not that any of them kept diaries, but that was beside the point.
    To Rand’s credit, he turned a dusky shade of red.
    “’Twas only because I was hoping to expose him—”
    Rose made a rude noise. “Hoping to get him in trouble, you mean.”
    “Well, he deserved it. And I didn’t precisely read them,” he said, a bit defensively. “I transcribed them.”
    Beatrix leapt onto Lily’s lap. “What do you mean?”
    “I decoded them. He wrote them in secret languages that he devised. Because they were so incriminating.”
    “And you broke the codes?”
    “Constantly. It infuriated him, of course.