“That’s Claremont.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It is in a bubble. It isn’t real. Not for us.”
“And Oxford is? The town is unchanged since the crusades.” She found herself strangely aggravated by the discussion.
Catriona looped an arm through hers. “Never mind. I just mean to say that Oxford is a good place for us.”
“Of course it is,” she murmured.
* * *
An hour before midnight, a rumor circulated that the lord of the manor had returned, and yet he still shone with his absence. The house party guests gathered in the reception room for drinks and snacks and gossip.
“. . . rockets were imported directly from China . . .” someone said.
“. . . the last duke had hired a contortionist, not sure whether it was male or female . . .”
“. . . and then Lady Swindon’s hat went up in flames.”
When the large pendulum clock struck eleven thirty, Lady Lingham, who seemed to stand in as hostess, ordered everyone to move to the terrace. Annabelle drifted along, the stream of people carrying her to the ballroom where the doors to the terrace were flung open wide. There should have been a dark, forbidding figure on the upper balconies.
But there wasn’t.
How could he not attend his own New Year’s Eve party?
“Annabelle!” Hattie was weaving her way toward her. “Come! I have reserved you a seat with us.”
She was tugged along onto the terrace.
The chatter and laughter of a few hundred inebriated aristocrats engulfed her, leaving her briefly disoriented. The terrace and the French garden had turned into a fairground. Rows of floating red paper lanterns threw flickering shadows; fragments of music drifted up from the depths of the garden.
He was not here, she felt it in her bones.
It was for the best. It was madness, this urge to be near him.
A group of children flitted between her and Hattie, and her hand slipped from her friend’s grasp.
Before she could catch up, she was stopped in her tracks by an apple hovering before her, ruby red and glossy in its sugary coat.
“A candied apple, milady?”
The vendor towered over her on stilts, his long, striped trouser legs billowing. His wide smile was painted on.
“Annabelle.” Hattie’s voice reached from a few paces ahead.
She didn’t move.
Madness or not, she had to say good-bye, and not when they were leaving tomorrow, terribly formal in the courtyard. In truth, she did not want to say good-bye to him at all.
She turned on her heels.
Not sensible of her at all.
She moved faster, dodging animated guests streaming toward her.
In the ballroom, the throng of people moving through had thinned. She paused under the grand chandelier, pondering, then took a course back to the great entrance hall.
The long hand of the clock stood at twenty minutes to midnight.
And then she knew where she had to go. She turned toward the west wing.
She hurried along dimly lit corridors on soundless tiptoes like a thief. She arrived at the door to his study panting; a breathless moment of hesitation, and then she rapped against the dark wood.
Silence.
Her hand hovered over the door handle.
She quickly, quickly, pressed down and—found that the door was locked.
Her heart sank.
She moved on, using paintings and potted plants as markers to find her way back to the music room. She opened the ornate double door and stuck her head through the gap. Yawning emptiness. The piano looked alien and abandoned in a shaft of moonlight.
A wave of panic welled from her stomach. Had he returned at all?
She dashed through another corridor, and another, until all sense of direction was lost and her corset was biting into her flesh. She had to pause and hold on to a banister, her chest heaving.
Reason, see reason.
Claremont had three floors and two hundred rooms; she could never search them all.
Damnation. She had been so good, so sensible.
How could she have allowed Montgomery to turn her into a panting madwoman haunting his castle?
How could she not?
She had evidently sleepwalked through her days in Kent. Oxford had revived her mind. Montgomery had shocked the whole of her back to life; he hadn’t even tried, he had been cool reserve and bluntness and before she knew it he had snuck under her skin. Now she didn’t know how to dislodge him again. Did not quite want to, either. It felt too good to be alive. It felt too good to be seen. His kisses had lifted a loneliness off her she hadn’t even known she carried.
She forced another breath into her lungs. The skin on her back was sticky and beginning to cool.
One last attempt, and then she’d return to the terrace.
Up, up, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, past a startled maid . . .
He stood near the door to the winter-sky library with Bonville the butler.
She came to an abrupt halt, her head swimming.
Montgomery turned toward her, and the moment their eyes locked, tension crackled up and down the length of the corridor.
He must have said something to Bonville, for the butler melted into the shadows.
A rushing noise was in her ears as she approached. She should have laid out the words, the purpose, for this beforehand. She hadn’t; her body had been driven to find him like an animal was driven to find water after a spell of sweltering heat. Now that he was here in the flesh, watching her, the urge faded into a dizzying sensation, a shyness. She hadn’t expected to feel shy.
By the time she reached him, meeting his eyes was a little difficult.
He looked taller than she remembered. He felt different, too; there was a raw, glinting edge just beneath his quiet surface.
His fingertips glanced over her cheek, and the contact shimmied through her whole body. His caress traveled along the soft curve of her jaw to the side of her neck, where her pulse fluttered and her skin was damp.
“You ran.” There was a rasp to his voice.
She swallowed, and he stroked lightly over her jugular, as if to settle her right where she couldn’t hide her agitation. It worked. Gradually, her limbs loosened, and a heavy warmth sank into her limbs under the steady up-and-down glide of his fingers.
“Your brother,” she whispered, “have you found him?”
His hand slid from her neck to her shoulder as his other hand reached for the door behind him, and he pulled her with him into the dark silence of the library. He backed her against the door, then she heard the key twist in the lock.