Wayland knew the very moment he’d fallen in love with Lady Annalee Spencer.
He’d been swimming in her family’s lake, and she’d scaled an enormous oak, climbing to the highest possible branch. The moment she’d reached the top, she’d shucked all her garments until she was nude. And then, with a stunning grace and elegance, she’d brought her arms above her head and launched herself into a flawless dive, disappearing beneath the serene water’s depths before breaking through, splashing him and declaring that neither he nor any boy could or would ever dive as perfectly as she did.
That confidence, that gumption—her sense of pride and the knowledge she’d possessed of her own accomplishment—had fascinated him.
But that had been when they’d been children. And his life from that moment on had never, ever been the same.
As he’d grown up and become a man, and she a woman, he’d learned the real reasons he’d been so hopelessly and helplessly in love with her: her strength. Her belief that people, regardless of station or gender, should have a seat at the table that was the world.
He’d never known there could be a woman like her.
Hell, he didn’t know a single person like her.
It only made sense that they should meet now, beside water, when it had always beckoned to her.
And yet, that love of water had also become something that wasn’t just intimately known by him. These fountains that had come to represent trysting spots.
And fire seared his veins at the thought of her meeting Welles . . . or anyone else . . . out here.
“Do you want to know why I’m always in fountains, Wayland?” she whispered, leaning close.
He shook his head tightly.
“It is because I like them. I search them out because they relax me. They soothe me.”
They relax me . . . They soothe me . . .
Those weren’t the same reasons she used to give.
“Because of Peterloo,” he said somberly.
She stiffened, and his body tensed alongside hers.
It was the first time they’d ever spoken of it. In those earliest days, when her family had rushed her off to London and he’d been left behind in Manchester, he’d written note after note. Pleading forgiveness. Swearing to atone for having placed her in the path of danger that day.
At last, she spoke. “Because of Peterloo,” she said softly. “It was hot that day.”
“So hot,” he added needlessly, his voice rough, and yet echoing that reminder forged the memory in his mind.
They were speaking of it. And it felt . . . right. And freeing. Speaking to her, the one woman whom he’d loved more than anyone else.
“Oppressive. Like the crowds.”
The crowds. Yes, when he’d left her, she’d been far in the distance on the side of the road, but the crowds had swelled and soared and been dispersed in every direction that day. She fell silent. They both fell silent. And he knew she wanted to let the discourse die.
Only he’d always been selfish where Annalee Spencer was concerned. And now that they’d begun speaking of that summer’s day in Manchester, he didn’t want to let the moment of closeness go. A fledgling bond had been kindled, forged from that day of hell. He wanted to keep talking with her about it. Because then, mayhap if they did, it would bring them back to a place they’d once been—if not lovers . . . then friends.
“I never saw that many people in my life,” he murmured, staring vacantly at his image beside hers reflected in the duke’s watering fountain. “I couldn’t imagine there was anything more exciting than all those men and women, come together to advocate for change.” The pings raining down from Aphrodite’s fingertips, little teardrops upon his and Annalee’s frames, were so very fitting, a metaphor for both that day and what had happened to their friendship. “A damned fool, I was.” Bitterness lent a hard edge to that utterance.
There was a slight rustle of satin, indicating Annalee had shifted closer. “Because you sought to bring about reform to the existing way of life? A way that is unfair?” She rested a hand on his sleeve, her fingers finding a purchase upon his person as though it were the most natural thing in the world to touch him so. “What you saw, what you spoke of, Wayland,” she said, her voice impassioned enough to let him know she actually believed the words she spoke, “were all the men who were and are unfairly denied the vote. You spoke up and out against a law passed to pay for a war on the backs of the most oppressed, the ones with the least financing the luxuries of the few.” She looked up at him. He saw it in those same waters, a reflective mirror that allowed him to look upon the two of them together, but also to avoid her eyes as the coward he was. “Those were your words, Wayland. You spoke them.”
He swallowed painfully past a wad of bitterness. “I was a naive schoolboy who resented that I didn’t have more.”
“And there was nothing wrong with expecting you should be afforded the same rights,” she said calmly.
A woeful smile brought his lips up. “When did our roles become so reversed?”
She let her arm fall from his sleeve. “I always believed those things you were fighting for, Wayland. You were the one who stopped.”
When he’d been granted his title.
She didn’t speak with recrimination. She didn’t speak with anything beyond a relaxed matter-of-factness. So why was he unable to meet her eyes, even in that watering fountain? Why did shame turn in his belly?
“I don’t suppose that is why you’ve come?” she gently prodded him, dropping her chin atop her knees and rubbing that dainty point back and forth along the yellow fabric. “To speak about Peterloo?”
“No,” he said gruffly. And he found he’d been wrong earlier. With her gentle challenges and questions, ones that made him think about those aspects of Peterloo and his own life which he didn’t wish to contemplate, he was grateful for the shift away from talks of that August day.
“What is it, Wayland?” she asked softly, trailing the tip of her right toe along the surface of the water, writing a little line with the ripples she made, then erasing it with the heel of her foot. “You are serious.” She paused, smiling up at him. “That is, more serious than usual.”
He’d not always been the stuffy, grave figure she now took him for. She’d known him back when he’d been lighter, and life easier. But her remarks also served to remind him of why he was here. “I wanted to speak to you about Kitty,” he began, hating himself even as he got those words out, because he knew they’d sever the brief but beautiful connection he and Annalee had found here.
She smiled. “I adore her. She’s grown into—”
“She cannot be part of your club,” he said flatly before she mistook this meeting for anything other than what it was.
And just like that, all the warmth they’d shared, the kindred connection they’d forged of their past, and the high opinion she’d once carried for him, died a quick death. All the light in those eyes went dark. And in that instant, he wished he could call back the real reason for his being here. Restore them back to that connected plane they’d existed in. A place he’d never again thought to be with her.
“That is why you’ve sought me out?” Annalee narrowed her eyes upon his face, and the glint icing her eyes, a shade of blue that would forever captivate him, marked the death knell for any further closeness between them. “Bah.” She stormed to her bare feet. “Of course that was why you came looking for me. The stuffy, always proper Lord Darlington would nevvver”—she wagged her palms—“seek me out unless I served as some possible threat to you and your precious reputation.”