His cheeks fired hot. “That is not the case.” He paused. “Not entirely.”
He’d always been a terrible liar. “The hell it isn’t,” she shot back, giving him a derisive once-over. “You’ve come to tell me . . . what? That I should rescind my invitation and turn your sister away?”
When she put it in those terms . . . he certainly heard the damning sound to them. And yet . . .
“Oh, my God.” Annalee recoiled. “That is why you’ve sought me out this evening.”
She went absolutely silent, her features frozen, and his heart ached because of her hurt.
And then . . . Annalee burst out laughing. Her laughter doubled her over, and she clutched at her sides as tears of mirth streamed down her cheeks.
He brought his shoulders back and looked straight ahead. That amusement at his expense grated. It was mocking and condescending, and looking at this exchange from her perspective, she was within her rights to that condescension. It did not, however, make it any less . . . acute.
Regaining control of her hilarity, Annalee dashed the moisture from her cheeks and met his gaze.
She promptly dissolved into another gleeful fit.
Wayland beat a hand against the side of his leg. Oh, this was really enough. “I’m glad you find this amusing.”
Her amusement receded, and the ire came back in her eyes so quickly that he perversely found himself preferring the lady’s earlier sarcasm. She took a step toward him. “I find it amusing that you know me so little as to believe that I would ever dare bar your sister because of something any man has said to me.”
He jerked. At Manchester, he’d witnessed men being run through, and the sharp way in which her words knifed him, he’d a taste of that unexpected pain. Hell, with the way she’d referred to him—“any man,” despite all they’d shared—he’d have preferred it to the way she severed any connection between them. “You think so little of me,” he said quietly.
“I don’t even know you,” she replied with a lightning quickness, an unflappability at odds with the tumult running amok inside him. “Not anymore.”
They didn’t know one another. That appeared to be something they did find common ground on.
“But you? Seeking to interfere in your sister’s life? Choosing the activities that you deem proper and attempting to cut off those you don’t? In this? Yes, my opinion of you is not a good one, my lord.”
My lord.
From the moment he’d learned he’d be granted a barony because of his act of bravery at Peterloo, he’d hated everything about that title. For Wayland, it had become synonymous with that day and everything he’d lost.
But this? Hearing those two little syllables fall from this woman’s lips was like another blow to the belly. It shouldn’t matter what she thought, and yet it did. It mattered so much. He tried to make her understand.
“My father toiled. He worked until his hands bled, and we still had but a one-room household, one that was cold in the winter and blazing hot in the summer. And when patrons found another who could do work cheaper, there was even less security. I don’t want that life. And I’ll see my sister settled so she is secure, and yes, if that means behaving a certain way and being”—someone he wasn’t—“the stuffy lord you take me for”—his jaw flexed—“then by God, I’ll do that for her.”
Annalee took a step closer, and continued coming until the tips of his boots brushed her bare feet. “Are you speaking about your sister’s security, Wayland?” She looked him squarely in the eyes. “Or your own?”
“I . . .” Her question confounded him.
Heat blazed through him, as it always did when she was near.
She wasn’t finished with him, however. “Who are you, even?” she asked sadly. “You, the great voice of those without ones in their government. The men and women struggling for food, and striving for a leg up in the world . . . That you should so quit, because why? Hmm?” Annalee slashed a hand back toward the duke and duchess’s palatial residence that could have fit a thousand of the hovels he’d lived within. “Because your life improved? Because you are now included amongst the ranks of the people who once shut you out?”
And he was grateful for the cover darkness provided to keep from revealing the stain of shame on his cheeks. Except . . .
“You don’t know what it is to be without that security, Annalee,” he said, willing her to understand. “You have always belonged to this world, one that is secure and safe.” In fact, the only time it had proven not to be the case for her had been when she’d ventured into those fields and mingled with the riotous masses of Manchester. The guilt of that would follow him until he drew his last breath.
She stared at him for a long moment, and he tensed, bracing for the sting of her next biting attack.
That didn’t come . . .
“Don’t I?” she asked curiously. “If I wed, I’m at the mercy of a man, nothing more than his property. And even as a grown woman, I’ve had my dowry withheld, and any monies that were to be mine remain locked away. I’m at the mercy of Lady Sylvia’s generosity, and any funds I do have are because of any wagers I’ve won.”
“My God,” he whispered. “They cut you off.”
“They cut me off,” she confirmed, “because I bring much shaaame to the family name.” Those words flowed so freely from her tongue, there could be no doubting she’d had them tossed her way. “So much shame that they’ve pleaded with me and threatened to send me away, back to their country house in Ma-Manchester.” Her voice broke, and his heart cracked along with it.
He took a step closer to her, but she shot up a palm, forcing him to stop, telling him with that brusque flip of her hand just how much she wanted or welcomed comfort from him in this moment.
“They would send me back to the place of my nightmares,” she whispered, “just to be free of me.”
And it was the first time in the course of his life that he hated her family. Her parents, for cutting her off. Jeremy, for allowing it to happen. And . . . himself, for not having known. Wayland fisted his hands tight.
Her eyes sparked with a determined glint, but her gaze was one that moved through him as though he weren’t there. As though at some point she’d ceased speaking to him and spoke only to herself.
“You see a woman with more freedom than I truly have, Wayland,” she said, her eyes fixed beyond him to that fountain she’d been perched beside. “You see a lady who, because of her birth to a noble family, has security. But I don’t. Not really.” Annalee slid her gaze back to his, holding his eyes with her own. “No woman does.”
“I . . . never quite thought of that perspective,” he said softly, his shame compounded by the truth of that admission. “I . . . simply saw members of the peerage, all of them . . . as secure. Free from strife.” Because as a boy born outside her world, he’d been an outsider looking in.
Annalee moved her eyes over his face. “I don’t have any real control of my life, Wayland,” she said matter-of-factly. “And neither does your sister. When she marries, she’ll have even less. As such, you should support her in whatever pursuits or endeavors she wishes to avail herself of.” While she was able. Before Kitty was constrained by the husband who was supposed to represent security.