“Wayland,” she rasped, clinging to his shoulders. He felt the bite of her nails through the fabric as she gripped him, leveraging herself forward.
His chest tightened, his breath constricted. “God, you’ve always been so good at that.”
“Have I?” she whispered, squeezing him with clever internal muscles that tightened around his shaft, pulling a gasp from him.
“Annalee,” he begged, tightening his hold on her hips and urging her on.
Then she set a frenzied pace, rising and falling over him. Again and again.
Leaning forward, she laid her hands upon his chest, her face scrunched up as she concentrated on the pleasure she found in this moment, and Wayland lifted his head to meet her mouth.
Annalee’s body tensed.
She gasped, and he consumed that broken, breathy exhalation.
He felt every tightening of her muscles, and she arched her back, tossing her neck, and climaxed. Her channel pulsed and squeezed as her body shuddered and rippled from the force of her pleasure.
He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, straining and fighting for self-control, as her moment of surrender went on forever and then she collapsed atop his chest.
Gasping, Wayland rolled her off him and then turned sideways, spilling himself into the grass in long arcs, his body jolting and spasming from a release so exquisite it bordered on pain.
And then he sagged.
Annalee came up on her knees and rested her cheek upon his shoulder, and then she placed a series of kisses there, moving that trail higher.
His chest moved hard and quick, his heart pounding in his ears.
“I . . .”
“Don’t apologize.”
He rolled onto his back and caught her by the waist, bringing her down atop his chest and pulling a breathless laugh from her. “Is it wrong that I wasn’t going to?”
She lowered her mouth close to his. “It is right that you weren’t. I wanted this.” Her gaze, still glittering with passion, slipped over his face. “All of this, Wayland,” she said with a seriousness replacing her earlier mirth. “This whole day, exactly as it was. I forgot . . . what it is like to be in the gardens.” And then she lay down, draped over him, her ear pressed against the place where his heart continued to wildly pound.
Wayland folded his arms around her and proceeded to rub small circles over her back. “How many of us spent so many days trying to forget and, along the way, forgot how to live?”
She stilled. “You’re speaking about my drinking,” she said guardedly, reality inserting itself into this moment.
“I’m speaking about how all of us coped in a bid to conquer our demons. You weren’t wrong earlier, Annalee.” Annalee lifted her head, propping her chin on his chest so she could meet his gaze. “I made myself who I am because it was something I could control. I had no control that day. I couldn’t stop the mayhem. I couldn’t . . .” His voice broke, and he squeezed his eyes shut, letting all the terror of that day wash over him, the panic of fighting his way through a sea of bodies, looking at the trampled and bloodied and battered around him, alternately fearing he’d see her amongst those masses and that he wouldn’t. That he’d never find her again.
“Wayland,” she said soothingly, sitting up, and he joined her. Hunching his shoulders, he rocked himself back and forth slightly.
“I couldn’t get to you,” he whispered. He couldn’t save her. Ravaged by his failings, all of them in life revolving around this woman, he looked to her and through her. “The one thing I could control after Peterloo was becoming a proper gentleman. There were rules I could follow. There were places I could go and not go. It was a formula. It made sense. But it was also a movement toward one extreme.”
“Just as mine,” she murmured.
He nodded. “We both went . . . off in these extremes. But alcohol, Annalee? It is . . . will not erase those memories we carry. I want you to give it up. Not for me. But for you. I want you to realize you don’t need it. You can and do find fulfillment in other places. Your Mismatch Society. The women who rely upon you. Your sister.” Me. Why was he only just realizing that this offer he’d put forward hadn’t been about easing guilt . . . but that it was about . . . being with her?
Drawing in her knees, Annalee wrapped her arms about her legs. “I don’t . . .” know if I can do it.
“You just try, Annalee. You just do the best you can. You don’t let it control you.”
Wayland folded an arm around her, drawing her against his side, and simply held her.
The world existed on the fringe of those high garden hedges. Any passersby might wander in and find them. And yet, he could not care.
He cared only about Annalee and this moment between them, in this walled-in Eden where only they two existed.
Chapter 24
Annalee and Wayland had agreed to a ruse, a pretend courtship. A pretend courtship served its purpose only if the world saw and the world came to believe in that game of make-believe both actors played at.
And yet yesterday afternoon, at the hour when all of Polite Society was riding and strolling down Rotten Row to be seen, he’d met her in the almost intimately private grounds of Vauxhall. He’d recalled her love of nature and gardens. Why, he’d picked her . . . a peony.
And now, today . . . the second part of their most recent act, he’d arranged a meeting at, of all places . . . a museum.
Why would he do that? a voice needled at the back of her mind. Unless . . . what was pretend really . . . wasn’t . . . And mayhap, just mayhap, he wished to make that which was fake . . . real.
As she climbed the steps, butterflies danced in her breast.
Those little thrilling flutters she’d come to believe herself too jaded to again feel or know had been resurrected by the same man who’d first given them life within her, all those years ago.
“Suspicious is what it is,” Valerie muttered as she stomped beside Annalee up the almost two dozen steps of the Royal Museum. Huffing from the climb and the pace Annalee had set, she shot her friend a sideways glance.
“There’s nothing suspicious about the choice,” Annalee lied, and tiring of those censorious looks directed her way, she adjusted her bonnet. “Many, many couples choose to be seen at museums.” Obscure ones. On the farthest recesses of the neighborhoods resided in by lords and ladies.
“Do you really know that to be fact?”
“Absolutely.” She felt more than a little guilt for how easily that second fib fell from her lips. The undisputable truth was, Annalee knew no such thing of the sort. Wayland had been the only respectable suitor she’d ever had. And back then, he’d been a blacksmith’s son, apprenticing and working, and not afforded the opportunity to court her as couples of the ton did. They’d entered into a pretend courtship, and yet thus far, the places Wayland had arranged for them to meet . . . were not the ones that would put the most eyes upon them. Rather . . . it felt very much . . . like a real courtship.
“Yes, well, I rather think dashing off where no one is seeing the two of you together defeats the whole purpose of your association with the gentleman. It seems underhanded, as though there is a reason he’s keeping you and he a secret,” Valerie muttered, effectively popping the bubble on Annalee’s foolish dreaming.