A sweat broke out on Annalee’s skin.
“My lady . . . or tell me . . .” A hand tugged her sleeve, and wild-eyed, Annalee stared blankly at that appendage gripping her.
Nay, it wasn’t gripping her. It was stroking her. That was different. And it was a man’s hand, not the callused, bloodied one of a woman in search of her child.
“Tell me what I should do . . . pleeeease.” The mother’s pleas as she’d screamed over the rioting crowd, begging Annalee for guidance in finding the lost child, filled her mind.
And then suddenly, she came crashing back from the past, breaking its hold over her, her entire body jolting from the shock of her return.
She registered several things, all at once.
Lord Welles’s less-than-discreet hand, stroking the curve of her hip. The leer on his face. And the looks from several nearby guests.
“Hmm?” Lord Welles purred. “Tell me what you’d like to do, love . . . where you’d like me to meet you . . .”
Annalee stared dumbly back, registering all the details that had found clarity through that moment of madness and that she’d just succumbed to Baron Welles making bold of his touch.
“Somewhere away from the noisy crowd, yes?” The baron leaned down and whispered in her ear, the brandy scent on his breath only making Annalee hunger for those spirits all the more. And he mistook the hunger that brought her lips apart for something more than it was. “Oh, yes . . . let’s find a place, love.”
Her skin pricked and burnt, the feel of a thousand stares upon her in that moment. Nay, it was just one. One person, one man whose gaze had the power of a touch upon her. She glanced past the yammering baron’s shoulder and found him almost instantly.
Wayland.
Stricken.
Like he’d been physically hurt, but by what?
It was preposterous.
Why, when she’d even teasingly suggested a real courtship, he’d been a study in the word “horror.” He wouldn’t care whom she kept company with.
Furthermore, in the unlikely chance that he had felt . . . something . . . about seeing her with Welles . . . if either of them were given to such sentiments in that moment, it was her witnessing him and his Lady Diana. Diana, who’d been with him at Peterloo, and who’d shared all these years in between with him, too. The “post life,” as Annalee had come to think of it. Everything before that summer’s day in Manchester. And then everything to come after it.
Except, it was the wrong thought to let creep back in.
Nausea roiled in her gut.
She wasn’t going to make it this night.
Oh, God. It was too much.
Tripping over herself in her haste, Annalee took flight along the perimeter of the guests.
Her fingers shook as she pressed her flute into the baron’s hand. “Splendid,” he purred. “Where shall we . . . Lady Annalee . . . ,” he called after her. “Lady Annalee?” That query grew more distant and blurred in her mind as she rushed along the side of the dance floor, taking the first doorway out and not breaking the pace she’d set for herself. She ran and kept on running until she’d found a way out.
Her breath grew raspy in her own ears, the pounding of her heartbeat deafening.
She reached the end of the hall that spilled outside, and fumbling with the handles, she managed to get herself free.
The air, thick and hotter than usual for a London spring, however, proved no balm. It only further blended the lines between past and present, where it was the oppressive heat of an August day weighting the air and sucking the breath out of her.
Panting hard from her flight, she staggered to a stop, and hunching over, she let her palms rest atop her knees and fought to breathe. She fought for control.
Then she heard it.
The faintest gurgling.
The tinkling pitter-patter of drops of water striking water. Distracting and soothing as they’d come to be, and they called.
As she walked, Annalee hopped on one foot and freed herself of first one slipper, then the other.
The moment she reached the side of the palladio garden fountain, she hiked up her skirts and stepped over, dipping her feet in. The icy-cold water closed over her ankles, and gooseflesh rose on her legs and arms, a balm that instantly cleared those cobwebs from her mind.
Mayhap this was what those mermaids pulled from sea felt when they returned to the waters—a homecoming. A baptism that cleaned the soul, if even just briefly.
She felt him before she heard him, knowing his footfalls and sensing his presence in the same way that she’d felt his gaze in the ballroom. “Lord Darlington,” she called, not glancing back.
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the slight crunch of gravel, indicating he’d moved.
The moment he reached her side, she rested her palms on the limestone edge of the fountain and glanced up, smiling at him.
“Am I . . . intruding?”
Was she meeting Lord Welles?
That was the question he was really asking.
“No,” she murmured. Would he even believe that denial? And why did she care if he did?
What was he doing here? Why had he come? Why had he left his Lady Diana’s side?
So many questions rolled through her mind, ones that she could not ask and desperately wished to know the answers to.
Wayland clasped his hands behind him, staring at the mighty Aphrodite that stood at the top of the fountain, letting water fall from her fingers.
Annalee hated this silence between them. “Never say you’ve sought me out.” She kicked her toes, splashing him slightly. Several drops landed on the front of his jacket, and he frantically wiped them off as though he were scrubbing lip rouge from his person.
She couldn’t help the sad smile. How she missed the rebel he’d once been.
“Wayland of old would have sat beside me, shucked his boots, rucked up his trousers, and joined me in soaking his feet.”
“Wayland of old also wouldn’t have joined you at a formal ball hosted by a duke and duchess,” he said quietly. “But here we are.”
Annalee drew up her knees and folded her arms around them. “Yes, here we are.”
Then, he did the most unexpected of things: he . . . joined her, seating himself beside her on the edge of the fountain.
And . . . strangely, for all the tumult this night had brought, there came a sense of peace in being here, alone with this man, now.
“Tell me, Wayland,” she said conversationally. “Why do you think I’m always off meeting a lover?”
“Are you?”
She tried to make out anything in those syllables. “No.” Annalee turned her head, studying the upside-down version of this tensely aloof Wayland. She looked him over. “You don’t believe me. Do you know the truth?”
He hesitated, and then gave his head a slight shake.
Annalee leaned in, whispering against his ear, “I’ve never met a lover at a fountain.” She raised her mouth to claim a kiss.
“But you’ve had lovers,” he said, just as their lips would have met.
“And haven’t you?”
She wasn’t so naive as to have failed to hear the places he’d once visited with her brother. His cheeks went red with splotches of color. A blush. Of guilt? Embarrassment? Shame? What accounted for it?
Chapter 16