He swallowed hard. “We have to . . .” His words trailed off as she brought her palms up, pressing them against his chest.
And this time, swallowing, that most reflexive of actions, became an impossibility, and his heart thumped a powerful beat where her hands touched. She tugged free his silken cravat, and his mouth formed the words of a protest . . . that, God help him, he couldn’t force out.
She’d always been a siren to him. Forbidden to him by her birthright, and because of his relationship with her brother. And now . . . forbidden to him for altogether different reasons. That reminder was enough to break through his hungering.
She laughed, that husky contralto wrapping around him. “Do you truly believe I’m trying to seduce you, Wayland? Even I would not do that.”
His ears went hot. His face. His entire body. The burn of mortification that he’d even thought—
Annalee leaned in, placing her lips close to his ear. “At least not in the midst of my brother’s betrothal ball,” she whispered, and then she darted out her tongue, flicking that flesh along the sensitive shell of his ear.
He croaked, “Annalee.”
“Oh, hush, you fusty thing.” And then, with an intimacy befitting the wife he’d once yearned for her to be, she gave several firm tugs to the cravat she’d mussed a short while ago. “I’m merely fixing you.” She adjusted the folds of that silken article. “Mustn’t send you out rumpled, Lord Darling.” She clucked her tongue. “Whatever would people say?” And with a greater efficiency and rapidity than even his own valet, she was done. “There,” she murmured, and this time, she sounded so very much like . . . Annalee of old. The bold but still respectable lady he’d intended to make his wife . . . until the world had caught fire and their relationship had been devoured by that conflagration.
Annalee rested a hand on his thigh; his muscles went tight under that bold touch. She stilled, a knowing glimmer lighting her blue eyes, and ever so slowly, she stroked her fingers higher. She continued that path, and when she showed no hint of stopping as she reached the place near the vee between his legs, he immediately caught her fingers. Even as he stopped her, that traitorous flesh between his legs sprang harder than ever. “I preferred you rumpled.” She winked, the graceful glide of her long, flaxen lashes a different form of temptation, but one no less dangerous.
Firming his mouth and his resolve, he removed her hand from his person. “I’m not here to play games, Annalee.”
“That’s unfortunate, because I do have cards for vingt-et-un. Or . . . whist? I do believe you were a whist man?”
She knew. She knew because he’d been the one to teach her everything she knew about cards and wagering. Both pastimes she now engaged in freely with all the most disreputable members of Polite Society.
“Your brother has asked . . .” Bloody hell. He’d once been smoother with his words. “He said . . .”
Annalee’s lips curled up slowly at the corners. She would enjoy his discomfort in this. Determined to just have it done, he got to the heart of the reason for his being here. “He asked that you return to the ball,” he said flatly. What would she say if she learned of the other request Jeremy had put to him?
“On your arm?” Annalee slapped her fingers to a daringly low neckline, bringing his focus to the lush flesh straining the lace-trimmed bodice. “Do imagine the scandal, Darling.”
He wrenched his focus away. “Not with me. Ahead of me. Just so that—” He caught the sparkle in her eyes. “You’re teasing,” he muttered under his breath.
She leaned forward and, bringing the tip of her thumb and forefinger together, whispered, “Just a bit. I don’t need a nanny or a governess or any other manner of keeper, Wayland.” It was the first hint of frosty cool, a deviation from her usual flirting and baiting and teasing. Annalee gave him a once-over, the look cursory. “Not from you, and not from any man.” And with that, she filled her arms with the nighttime picnic materials she’d assembled and headed toward the doorway which led outside.
Wayland stared after her retreating frame. “I don’t wish to control you, you know,” he called after her.
Without looking back, she raised an arm, and giving a wave, she headed for her mother’s outdoor gardens.
He should have known this wouldn’t be easy. Not with Annalee as the impossible charge he’d been instructed to guide back to the festivities. As she disappeared outside, he hesitated, going back and forth between the favor Jeremy had put to him and the woman who had no interest in being escorted.
With a curse, he started after her.
Chapter 3
I don’t wish to control you, you know, he’d said . . .
That had been one of the reasons she’d lost her girlish heart to him. Having a mother who bowed to society’s constraints, and a father whose strategy for life was “please thy wife and live in peace,” she’d always chafed at her mother’s demands that she be a certain way. And for eighteen years, Annalee had been that way publicly. Only when she’d been alone with Wayland had she let herself live freely. And she hated that she remembered any of it. The past life she’d lived.
Setting down her provisions beside the enormous stone watering fountain at the back of the gardens, she grabbed the blanket she and Harlow had occupied and snapped it open. She’d just finished depositing her things upon the edges of the fabric to keep it from blowing and twisting with the occasional night wind when the churn of gravel gave him away.
He stopped beside the fountain. “Annalee, your brother asked for your return.”
Goodness, he’d always been obstinate. That tenacity he’d once put toward more important goals . . . like exacting change for the oppressed and improving the lives and lots of people born outside the aristocracy.
“And tell me . . . What if I don’t do what I’m supposed to, Wayland-dear?” She leaned forward, putting her bosom on display. “What if I refuse to head abovestairs? Will you”—his gaze fixed on her breasts spilling over her bodice, as she’d intended—“force me?”
He instantly recoiled, jolting. “Of course not,” he sputtered.
And Annalee didn’t know whether to laugh or be offended. Any other—nay, every other—man whom she’d pressed herself against in that way had gotten tongue-tied, and had been hopeless to do anything but stare at her bosom.
But then, Wayland hadn’t looked her way in years. More specifically, since Peterloo. That had been the day that had changed him, and her, and how they’d looked at one another.
Nay, his tastes now ran to the proper, where she’d been running away from propriety these past years. And she’d no regrets, and certainly no interest in the man he’d become.
“I thought you said you’d no wish to control me, my lord,” she said tightly, surrendering all teasing.
“I don’t.”
“Splendid.” She clapped her hands twice. “Then might I suggest you return and leave me to my”—she nudged at the blanket laid out—“pleasures . . . ?”
He followed her focus to the glasses, one the flute Harlow had drained of lemonade, the other Annalee’s half-drunk champagne. The cards. And she knew. By the way his jaw set and the disapproval creasing the hard lines of his mouth, she knew precisely the assumption he’d arrived at: she’d been meeting a lover earlier and now wished to continue her assignation.