He felt a large shadow move over him. “Oh, yes. He is alive.” And once more, this youngish voice, belonging to a different lady, contained the greatest disappointment . . . at his being alive.
Wayland opened his eyes. Alas, the hothouse flowers, having landed directly on his face, offered nothing beyond an eyeful of pale pink and fuchsia, silken-soft flowers. Fighting back a groan of misery, he reached up, removed the flowers, and then pushed to his feet.
A group of women formed a line across from him, all ten of them wearing identical expressions of suspicion and fury.
Wayland swallowed hard.
He’d scaled the wrong wall. There was nothing else for it.
Wayland lifted his hand in greeting, and as one, his audience looked to his sorry flowers. Along the way he’d lost another six heads of the peonies, leaving him holding a bouquet of more bare stems. “Uh, hullo?” he greeted dumbly.
And interestingly, a polite hello proved the wrong thing to say.
There came a flurry of cries, more like war whoops of all their cries and shouts rolling together, with only the periodic word peppered through making sense.
And none of them proving good . . .
“Intruder . . .”
“Finish him off . . .”
Cursing, Wayland hurriedly backed away, making for the same wall he’d just tumbled from. And like soldiers in the midst of rushing into battle, they converged upon him.
“Wait!” That cry, piercing through the melee, was a familiar voice, sparing him from being finished off by a bloodthirsty mob of young ladies in mostly white skirts. “That isn’t an intruder!” The group parted and his sister stepped through. She cleared her throat. “That is . . . my brother.”
Ah, so this was the Mismatch Society. Whenever Wayland had read of Annalee’s organization, he’d assumed society’s concern and disapproval of it had stemmed from reasons related to the unconventionality of it—daughters of the ton assembling to discuss societal norms they wished to break.
In this moment, with bloodlust still brimming from their eyes and the pugnacious stance they’d all assumed, the group, feared by men of all ages, of all ranks amongst the peerage, should be feared for many, many reasons.
“Your . . . brother?” one of the ladies asked hesitantly, breaking the silence.
“I . . . am afraid so,” Kitty announced, and moved out from the line of ladies and over to Wayland’s side with a reluctance he didn’t believe for one moment he’d imagined.
“Another one of those sorts,” someone muttered.
“At least he’s brought flowers?” a lady piped in.
“I . . . Are we sure they are flowers?” a third lady ventured.
“They are flowers,” that familiar voice hissed. Lady Diana.
Bloody splendid. Yes, well, there’d been no way around this.
The group immediately glanced at the offering, and Wayland followed their stares to the forlorn bouquet forgotten until now on the ground.
“They don’t look like much of a bouquet,” Miss Isla Gately muttered.
The dark-haired girl wasn’t wrong in this instant. At this point, one couldn’t be certain about the sad stems tied with a blue velvet ribbon.
“Who needs flowers when he is here to remove Kitty from the society?” That hissed query immediately brought a sea of angry stares back his way.
Oh, bloody hell. “I’m not—”
And then intervention came a second time. “What is going on here?”
Oh, thank God.
The line of ladies parted like that infamous sea, and the very clear leader of their ranks swept forward, the queen she was. And for a second time that day, it was like falling all over again and having the air knocked out of him.
Annalee stopped before him. Clad in tight-fitting breeches and a lawn shirt that had been drawn snugly behind her so that the fabric molded to her, she was a veritable Aphrodite.
He felt more than saw every set of eyes swiveling between him and Annalee. Wayland, however, was hopeless to remove his gaze from hers . . . She stopped three paces away, coming up short. “You,” she said softly, and with her ocean-blue eyes forming circles, she embodied every aspect of that goddess of legends.
Except he made the mistake of slipping his stare lower and over her. She was all lush curves, accentuated and on display, and they made it impossible for him to form anything beyond one single-syllable utterance. “Me.” His mouth went dry and hunger filled him.
God, she was magnificent. But then she could have donned an empty oak sack and been nothing less than the goddess she’d always been, captivating mere mortals.
“What’s the problem, Kitty’s brother?” another of the Kearsley girls snapped. “Never seen a woman in trousers?” she demanded, thankfully mistaking the reason all the words and thoughts had been knocked square outside his head.
Annalee had donned breeches many times through the years, more often than not pairs which he’d fetched for her. But never, never like this.
Kitty shot an elbow into his side, effectively jolting him back to the moment. “Do not ruin this for me, brother,” she whispered under her breath. “Any more than you already have, that is.”
He cleared his throat, and assessing the dynamics of this eclectic gathering of women, he opted to speak to the group at large. “Forgive my . . . er . . . entrance?”
He felt Lady Diana’s stare burning a hole in him. There was, however, no helping this. He’d speak to her . . . later.
Annalee . . . She came first.
Wayland slid his focus back to Annalee. “I was hoping to speak with Lady Annalee?” He murmured that last part in quiet tones meant for only her.
She frowned. “About what?”
Wayland sent a prayer upward in a bid for patience. She’d not make this easy. He took a step closer. “About . . . a matter of import.”
It proved the wrong thing to say. That army of girls moved as one, like a wave rolling forward as they converged around Annalee, forming a menacing line.
“You’re here to take Kitty,” one of the Kearsley sisters snapped, making devil’s horns with her fingers and waving them his way.
“I—” Could not get a word in edgewise.
“Just like all the others . . .”
“Except for the flowers . . .”
Bzzzzz . . .
Their fury and grievances hummed like so many bees.
Wayland blinked slowly.
No, wait a minute . . . that really was a bee . . . He glanced down at a pair of bumblebees circling the last handful of flowers in the bouquet he’d brought. A third bee circled around him, and he swatted it away. “You misunderstand,” he said to the group at large.
And Annalee, with the twinkling in her always animated eyes and the dimple made by her devilish smile, was enjoying this.
“They really are misunderstanding the reason for my being here,” he called loudly over the din for Annalee’s benefit.
She folded her arms. “Are they?”
She was right to her suspicions. He’d been nothing short of blunt to the point of rudeness in sharing his opinions about the Mismatch Society. And as a result, the lady was showing no mercy.
Wayland turned back to her devotees. “I’m not here for Kitty,” he shouted over the noise of their chattering, frustration bringing that admission from him. “I’m here to court Lady Annalee.” And to accentuate that point, he bent and swiped up the flowers. Too quickly.