But then, Wayland hadn’t looked her way in years. More specifically, since Peterloo. That had been the day that had changed him, and her, and how they’d looked at one another.
Nay, his tastes now ran to the proper, where she’d been running away from propriety these past years. And she’d no regrets, and certainly no interest in the man he’d become.
“I thought you said you’d no wish to control me, my lord,” she said tightly, surrendering all teasing.
“I don’t.”
“Splendid.” She clapped her hands twice. “Then might I suggest you return and leave me to my”—she nudged at the blanket laid out—“pleasures . . . ?”
He followed her focus to the glasses, one the flute Harlow had drained of lemonade, the other Annalee’s half-drunk champagne. The cards. And she knew. By the way his jaw set and the disapproval creasing the hard lines of his mouth, she knew precisely the assumption he’d arrived at: she’d been meeting a lover earlier and now wished to continue her assignation.
Not that he was jealous, nor did she care one way or the other whether he was.
“Under different circumstances,” he said brusquely, “it is hardly my affair whom you were meeting”—he flicked a cool, condescending stare over the blanket—“or where . . . but in this particular instance, it is my business.”
“Shove off, Wayland,” she said, giving him a shoulder.
He slapped a hand against his thigh. “Your being out here in the middle of your brother’s betrothal ball isn’t proper.”
“And you are nothing if not proper,” she drawled. Perfect. And prim. A paragon. And every other p-word for one of his flawlessness.
All those terms she’d delighted in applying to him in recent years proved a delicious incongruity with the muscular, six-foot form he possessed. A blacksmith’s body was what she’d always said. With biceps that bulged through his shirts, and sinew in his thighs wide enough to rival a tree trunk.
“I’m here as a friend,” he said quietly.
“To whom? Me?” She swiveled back around, facing him. “Or Jeremy?”
“Why can’t it be both?”
“Because we haven’t spoken in years.” In part because she’d never answered his notes after Peterloo. In part because of the contents of those notes. And in larger part because she’d gone out of her way to avoid him.
“That . . . is a fair point.” He abruptly quit that distracted thumping of the side of his leg. “Annalee, as I said, I would never presume to tell you who to meet or where to meet them,” he began.
So that was what this was to be, then?
A lecture.
To her annoyance, this would prove one of the few times where she hadn’t been engaging in the very activities he assumed she had. “I wasn’t meeting anyone.”
He knitted his brows. “You . . . weren’t.”
Except, that wasn’t quite true. “I wasn’t meeting a lover.” She didn’t know what compelled her to tell him that detail.
Did she imagine the slight sag of his shoulders?
Of course she did.
It was merely being alone with this man, her first love and lover, all these years later, which created an illusion that he might have cared whether she’d been meeting a man.
And furthermore, why should it matter either way what he thought about her or her reasons for being out here? The fight drained out of her, and she slid onto the side of the fountain. “You should just go,” she said tiredly.
He hesitated, then took a seat next to her.
“I was playing whist with Harlow, and just talking with her. I . . . don’t get to see her anymore.” She had to swallow several times around the pain of that.
Annalee couldn’t explain how or why she’d shared that piece with him.
“I . . . have heard as much,” Wayland murmured.
Annalee glanced over. “From Jeremy?”
He nodded.
Raising her voice a smidgen, she spoke through her nostrils. “I’m a shameful, wicked influence who will only corrupt.”
Wayland looked her way. “Your mother?”
And this time, Annalee nodded.
They shared a smile, and it . . . felt oddly wonderful; it was a shared bond with a friend from long ago. That was what it was. That was all it was. Even so, that connection proved unnerving. Restless, Annalee leaned down and scooped up a handful of pebbles and gravel. Sifting through them, she proceeded to toss the larger stones, one at a time, off into the opposite side of the fountain. Each one landed, pinging droplets. “Whenever I come here”—which was rare—“I find whatever time I can to steal with Harlow.”
“She has your spirit.”
“Don’t let my parents or brother hear you say that.” The way he said it, however, made her heart leap in the funniest little way.
“Jeremy is the one who said it,” he said. “Numerous times.”
“Oh.” It had been Jeremy. More of that oddly placed disappointment filled her. “It also seemed better to stay out of the way, as trouble invariably finds me.” She glanced his way. “You should have a care. You’re going to get your jacket and trousers wet; people will talk.”
“No one is going to pay close enough attention to me to notice.”
“Because you’re the stuffy, proper gentleman?” she asked without inflection.
“Precisely.” He winked. “See, there is some good in it. I’m spared notice and free to enjoy myself.”
It was a dream she couldn’t even imagine. Granted, she’d never conducted herself in a way that would see her permitted the same luxury he enjoyed.
She released her last rock, then dusted the gravel from her palms. “Do you know how to enjoy yourself anymore, Wayland?” Curiosity made her ask the question that, at the most unexpected times, would come to her when she allowed herself to think of him.
“I do.”
Did he recognize both the pause between her query and his answer and the hesitancy that made his answer a lie? She spun on the makeshift bench she’d made of the ledge, and facing him, she drew up her knees. “All right. Out with it. What brings the great Wayland Smith, now the Baron Darlington, joy?”
“Annalee,” he said, his voice pained.
She swatted him. “Don’t be stuffy. I promise to return to the festivities if you answer it.”
“Very well.”
Annalee snorted. “That’s all it took? I should have offered a lesser prize.” She motioned with her palms. “Tell. Tell.”
“I . . .” His high, broad brow creased. “I . . .”
She pointed at him. “You don’t know, because you don’t really find pleasure in anything.”
“I do,” he said indignantly. “I . . . I . . . like my coffee,” he said on a rush, as though he’d just landed on it.
A laugh exploded from her lips, a great big snorting noise born not of the past years’ cynicism but of genuine mirth that she’d forgotten the feel of. And how very good it felt, too. She laughed so hard her shoulders shook, and she leaned against him.
Wayland bristled. “What?”
“Th-that isn’t a life’s pleasure,” she said when she managed to rein in her hilarity. Annalee brushed the moisture from her cheeks.
“It is.” He paused. “Though, I’ll allow, a simple one.” He made to stand. “Now you promised to re—”
Annalee snatched his sleeve and dragged him back to the seat beside her. “There has to be . . . more.”
“I enjoy my meetings at Parliament.”
She smiled wistfully. “That I can believe.” And she could. A man who’d once yearned for a voice had been granted one through the title he’d earned for his heroic act of bravery that day at Peterloo. “Is it . . . everything you had hoped? Having a voice?”
Wayland brushed some of the remnants of gravel that remained from before off the edge of the fountain and back onto the ground below. They rained down with faint little plinks. “I find myself, ironically, with a title that allows me to be part of the government and yet unable t
o exact any real change. I may be amongst their ranks, but I’m not really part of the nobility. The members of Parliament know it, and that matters very much in brokering legislation.” He straightened, dusting his hands together. “But . . . I am not as powerless as I once was, and so I take hope in that.”
He’d always been driven for greater goals, for the greater good. Even with all the time that had passed and everything that had changed, he had not. Not really.
“You’ve not yet let them see how daringly bold you might be, Wayland.”
His mouth tightened, harsh creases forming at the sides. “That daringly bold person got himself . . . and others . . . into more trouble than was ever wise or safe.”
Peterloo whispered there in the air, in veiled words from his lips that really weren’t all that veiled. It was an event they had never spoken of . . . for the simple reason that, after that day, their relationship had been severed.
A breeze stole through, and she rubbed at her arms. To ward off the slight chill as much as the whisper of memories stirred with the most innocuous of words.
“Yes, well, I prefer ‘daringly bold’ still, Wayland.”
She braced for his pompous condemnation. What she wasn’t prepared for was the slight softening of his features, or the wistful smile that brought his hard lips up at their corners. “You always were the braver of our pair.”
And she knew the moment between them had come to an end. She felt it in the air, and perhaps it was that speaking about the past with her former friend and lover, whom she’d not truly spoken to in years, that accounted for the emptiness that swept through her as he stood. “I should return,” Wayland said.
First.
“Oh, yes. It wouldn’t do for us to be spotted returning together.” Annalee reached for her slippers, and when he still hovered there, she gave him a wave. “Go. I’ll be along. I’m not one to break my word.”
“I didn’t say you would.”
“You didn’t need to.”
Wayland lingered still. “It was . . .”
“It was,” she said quietly. He didn’t need to complete his sentence. This had been nice, and . . . missed.
Dropping a bow, Wayland left.
With him gone, she set to work tugging on her slippers.
You always were the braver of our pair . . .
“A pair,” she murmured, tasting those words on her tongue. That had been precisely what they’d been. No two had been closer than they, as friends and lovers. Everything, however, had changed.
Everything.
Hisssss.
Annalee’s entire body recoiled, and she whipped around, her skirts snapping noisily about her. She searched frantically for the source of that whistling.
A bright glow lit up the sky, transforming night into day.
Her pulse hammered loudly in her ears. What was . . . ?
Booom!
She gasped as the errant echo of that forceful explosion ricocheted, rocking the ground under her feet, and she was jolted to another moment. Another time.
“Chaaaarge . . .”
The thunderous command shouted above the cries of the crowd slipped in.
Biting her lower lip hard, Annalee shoved her fingertips into her temples and frantically rubbed, trying to tamp out memories fighting their way forward—dark thoughts threatening to suck her back to that long-ago day.
Don’t let it in . . . You are here . . . You are in London . . . alone. Not in Manchester. You are not about to be overcome by a sea of stampeding men and women fighting their way to freedom.
Breathing heavily, Annalee fixed her gaze out on the expanse of her mother’s gardens.
They are empty. No one is here. Just you.
No crowd.
No charging soldiers.
No bayonet blades.
No gun—
There came another loud sizzle, rapidly followed by a sharp pop, and once again the skies lit up brightly.
A panicky laugh gurgled in her throat, and she choked on that empty amusement.
Ah, yes, of course. There would be fireworks marking the occasion of her brother’s betrothal. A resplendent, garish display.
How ironic that she’d thought it safer to be away from the crowd, only to find herself thrown into the fire.
Pop-pop . . .
Boooom.
That enormous explosion shook the ground, the force of it so deep that she felt it all the way to her belly, and she was jolted once more from the now and back into the hell of that time long ago.
Frantic, her heart knocking erratically against her rib cage, she searched about for Wayland as the past converged with the present.
He was here.
She’d seen him.
Where was he?
No, that wasn’t right.
She didn’t want to see him. Not anymore.
Annalee fought through the fog of the past, and falling to her haunches, she clutched at her head again, yanking her hair free of its elegant coiffure.
Panting, she jerked a panicky gaze up, and unblinking, she looked around.
Wait, no, that didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. Her hair hadn’t been elegant that day. It had been casually plaited, a plait that had so worked against her.
Boom-boom-boom.
Grabbed by passing strangers rushing by her, threatening to pull her under.
She flung her head wildly, left and right, fighting free of the hold they had on her. The memories? Or wait . . . Were there actual strangers with their hands scrabbling in her hair, using her to leverage themselves forward to safety?
Annalee whimpered. Why can’t I get free? Why can’t I sort it out?
And then there they came, the distant thunder of approaching feet. Excited cries.
Or was that laughter? She knocked her head against a stone ledge. A fountain? Why would there be a fountain in the fields of Manchester. Or laughter?
The cries grew louder, closer, and gasping for breath, she lurched to her feet and stumbled around. Her knees caught the crude stone wall on the edge of the pasture.
But stone walls weren’t crude . . .
Then the ground was rushing up to meet her.
Nay, not the ground.
Water.
It closed over her head, swallowing her cry and flooding her mouth and nostrils that burnt, bringing her back to the moment.
Not Peterloo.
Through the glassy sheen of the ice-cold water, the fireworks marking the celebratory announcement of her brother’s betrothal filled the star-studded night sky.
Annalee propelled herself upright, breaking through the water, gasping for breath, her body shaking from the cold—
To find a wide-eyed audience staring back. Of course, they’d assembled to watch the display of fireworks, only to be treated to an altogether different spectacle—her.
Splendid. Just splendid.
She forced a cheeky grin and waggled her fingers at a long line of her brother’s betrothal guests, all straining for a glimpse of her, sprawled in her family’s fountain.
And then her smile faltered as it landed on a group of five breaking through that line: her parents, horror lighting their faces. Jeremy. His ashen betrothed.
And . . . Wayland.
What must he think?
And why, out of all those people present, did she focus on him first? Here, when she’d gone and made a spectacle of her brother’s big night. Her breathing hitched, shame and regret and so much pain making her heart squeeze. This was why it was best if she didn’t come ’round the respectable sorts. Her family included. Especially her family.
The quiet proved deafening, made all the more powerful by the intermittent booming of the fireworks. Those same blasted fireworks that had startled her into an inadvertent swim.
Annalee shivered. “Forgive me,” she called out into the shock of silence. “I’d invite you to join me. Alas, the water is a bit cold.” With that, she stood, her drenched skirts heavy, pulling her back. She faltere
d.
“Foxed again, she is,” a voice in the crowd murmured.
And then someone was immediately there with a hand to steady her.
Through the curtain of wet, sorry curls hanging over her eyes, she stared unblinkingly at the large, white-gloved fingers twined with hers.
Annalee lifted her eyes.
Wayland’s gaze met hers. And there was no condemnation or horror, just a gentle concern, and she, who didn’t cry as a rule, found herself blinking back the sting of tears as he helped her climb over the edge.
The guests found their collective voices in the form of a gasp as they all locked in on the sight of Annalee with her satin skirts clinging indecently to her body, putting everything on display and adding a layer of transparency to her burnt-orange ball gown, her nipples puckered and revealed by the damp dress. She shivered, folding her arms at her chest. It proved the wrong thing to do; her breasts bobbed up, the flesh climbing even higher over the already daringly low bodice.
A lady fainted with just a handful rushing to her rescue. All the rest stared goggle-eyed at Annalee.
There came a swift rustle of fabric, and a moment later, Wayland brought his jacket down around her shoulders, and she was enfolded in the thickest, most wonderful warmth.
“Not a single word, Annalee Elise,” her mother hissed. “In your father’s offices. Now.”
Oh, dear. She’d called forth the full, ridiculously paired names. This was certain to be bad. Not that Annalee would have expected anything else.
And with as much grace as she could muster, Annalee marched forward, the crowd parting to allow her to pass.
Chapter 4
The night had been ruined for Wayland’s best friend in the world. Lord Jeremy’s betrothal ball was certain to be consigned to gossip sheets for the whole of the Season, and maybe for Seasons to come.
Before it had been ruined, and scandal-borne, it had been . . . an unexpectedly good night for Wayland.
There’d been the first exchange with Annalee in too many years. Oh, they’d had cordial exchanges and greetings, with her inserting her usual banter and teasing. But they’d not spoken at any length. Until tonight.
Beside that fountain, for a brief moment it had almost been as it had always been between them.
Only to have the evening end so spectacularly awfully, with Annalee an object—once more—of Polite Society’s gossip. And he despised it with every fiber of his being. Because the sight of her there, with all the lords and ladies in attendance gawking at her like she was some kind of circus oddity while Annalee herself put on a brave show, knotted his muscles and filled him with a mix of hurt for her and rage for those who delighted in her scandals.
A Wanton for All Seasons Page 5