And that proved the moment Annalee was forgotten. Her mother directed all the rage she felt for her daughter back to her husband. “We have tolerated so very much where she is concerned, but this?” The countess’s nostrils flared, giving her the look of a bull Beckett had rented for a raucous summer party when he’d had a bull-baiter waving a red flag. “This is a line too far, even for her.”
“Is there any line that is too far for her, really?” her father asked tiredly.
Tired. He always had the air of the exhausted when it came to talking about Annalee, or discussing anything with her.
Not that they’d truly spoken. Not for years and years now.
Her father scrubbed a hand beginning to wrinkle across his forehead.
His disappointment had also become familiar enough that the evidence of it had hurt, until it hadn’t. Now it was just accepted.
And were it just her disdainful parents, she would have been all too happy to meet them with the flippancy she reserved for them and their lectures and disappointment.
But this wasn’t about them. Or her.
It took a physical effort to turn her head once more and face her big brother. “I am sorry, Jeremy, for the scandal,” she murmured. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Not this time” would certainly apply.
After all, many, many, many times before this one, it had invariably been her fault. Nor was she the guilty sort, taking ownership of actions that weren’t her own. She was quite aware of her sins and scandals.
At his silence, she stretched out a hand, which only managed to set the crystal beads dripping from her sleeve shaking and drips of water flying. Water caught her brother in the cheek, and he flinched.
Pulling a kerchief from his immaculate sapphire wool jacket, he patted the moisture from his person.
“It wasn’t her fault, she says,” her mother seethed, pacing back and forth, the only hitch in her stride the moment she faced her elder daughter and had her in her sights.
Annalee looked once more to her brother, Jeremy, hopefully. Hopeful that he could see not only her sincerity but also her regret.
Standing at the hearth, his hands clasped behind him, he caught her glance.
He gave his head a slow, slight shake, a disgusted one. It was a barely perceptible flick of the head Annalee had also become well accustomed to over the years. Not, however, from her brother.
And not for the first time since she’d been caught sprawled in the fountain with her family’s most prominent guests as witnesses, guilt burrowed deep in her chest.
Alas, there’d be no rescue this time, in this place.
Not that she could blame her elder brother; it wasn’t every night a young gentleman had his betrothal ball before all of Polite Society . . . and had that grand affair spoiled by his drunken sister.
Though, in fairness, this time she wasn’t three sheets to the wind, she’d been well on her way to it, and quite happily. Her family’s tedious, always proper, invariably boring affairs had that effect upon a lady.
Wicked ladies anyway. Of which she was decidedly one.
With a sigh, Annalee withdrew a cheroot from her pocket, and heading over to the nearest sconce, she raised the scrap to light it.
“What is she doing?” her mother squawked.
“Smoking,” she said needlessly. “You might find it helps with your nerves.”
“I don’t have nerves,” the countess snapped.
And with a great deliberate show meant to rile, Annalee took a long draw of the smoke, letting it fill her lungs, and then exhaled a perfect ring of white.
Her mother’s eyes bulged. “The only frayed nerves I do have are because of you. You are the source of all the woe of this family.”
Annalee dropped a hip against the wall. “Ohhhh, would we realllly say there’s familial woe? Jeremy is in love. You and Father are obscenely wealthy and well received. Why, some might say that our family is blissfully blessed.” Annalee took another pull from her cheroot.
“What are we to do with her?” her mother demanded as Annalee became invisible to the exchange once more.
“The only thing we can do. The ball is concluded. We return with Jeremy and speak to Sophrona and her family, and she”—her father cast a long, sad look Annalee’s way—“she will not attend. She will return to her residence—”
“‘She’ is still here,” Annalee pointed out gleefully, waggling her spare hand.
Both parents continued to ignore her.
“Yes, yes. You are right. We must try to smooth this over,” her mother murmured to herself, as if she’d just heard words so profound that they now fueled her courage and confidence to face the great challenge of meeting Polite Society after this scandal. “They will be devastated.” The countess pinched her pale cheeks, bringing an immediate splash of crimson to them. “Come along, dear.” Her husband immediately sprang to his feet like a dutiful terrier, and together, the pair made to march from the room.
They lingered at the threshold, casting a questioning glance at Jeremy.
“I’ll be along shortly,” he vowed.
With that they left, and Annalee was, at last, alone with Jeremy. Her elder sibling, and her only brother. Her champion. Or, rather, the former still applied. Much had changed over the years. Everything had changed over the years.
“Well, they took that better than expected,” she said dryly when the door had closed behind them.
“It isn’t amusing,” he said, his tone rich with the same disappointment their parents expressed toward Annalee. “And need you really do that?”
She followed his glance to the scrap between her fingertips. She immediately stubbed out her cheroot. Annalee may not give two damns about her mother’s opinion on the habit, but she quite adored her elder brother. “It was an accident, Jeremy,” she said earnestly, using really the first words he’d spoken to her as an invitation to join him.
“There’s always an accident and some such . . . The time your hair snagged on Lord Wembley’s buttons.”
“It looked worse than it was,” she lied. She’d been doing with Lord Wembley precisely what the whole world had taken it for when they’d come upon her and the earl in Lady Stanhope’s gardens.
“Your being discovered alone at Vauxhall Gardens’ pleasure paths?” he went on.
And if she could still manage a blush, being called out by her brother for when she’d been caught enjoying a different sort of fireworks on those famed grounds would certainly be the time for one.
But she wasn’t a young girl. Or naive. Or innocent. Not in any way.
“I was alone this time,” she pointed out brightly. Surely there was something to be said for th—
Jeremy pressed at his temples. “Is everything a game with you, Annalee?” And had his tone been as outraged or disgusted as it had been throughout this whole discourse, and not this, this resignation, it would have been a good deal easier.
Apparently there wasn’t something to be said for it, after all.
But then, after having his betrothal ball turned into a source of gossip, Jeremy wasn’t one to receive such an empty reminder as the one she’d given him.
It didn’t matter that she’d been donning her slippers when those fireworks had erupted; it didn’t matter that a memory of a different time, a long-ago, darker one, had intruded. When memories so rarely did. Or that they’d had the same potent, crippling effect and left her facedown in that fountain she’d once so very much loved.