A Wanton for All Seasons

by Caldwell, Christi

  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.

  He ran a hand over the side of his face. Everything was confused in his mind. Why was it confused?

  Annalee. It was because of her.

  Annalee had always had the ability to challenge him and make him see angles of discussions he’d missed. That hadn’t changed.

  “I always respected you,” Annalee said sadly. “I admired you, because you wished to change the world. Where is that man?”

  And something within him snapped.

  He took her lightly by the shoulders, gripping her, his fingers curling into her arms. “And what did that get either of us?” he hissed. “Was the world made better? For you? For me? For anyone that day?”

  “The world is what we make it.”

  “You’d condemn me, but what did you make it? An Eden for you to sin all day long in.”

  Her lips parted slightly and moved, but no words were forthcoming.

  Oh, God. He recoiled from his own words. And he shook his head. “Annalee . . .” I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to have ruined your life that day . . . That was the apology she deserved, but that stuck in his throat.

  You’d condemn me, but what did you make it? An Eden for you to sin all day long in.

  Her chest . . . ached and throbbed. And for the oddest reason, at that. Wayland spoke words of truth before her, about her. He wasn’t wrong.

  After Peterloo, she had committed herself to her pleasures and pursuits, to bury the memories of that day. To feel again. To feel something that was different from the terror and agony that had consumed her.

  To forget him.

  Instinctively, she folded her arms around her middle and hugged herself hard, trying to ward off this pain.

  Perhaps this was merely a reminder that the wild life she’d dedicated herself to had been for naught.

  Annalee drew in a soft breath through her teeth, and letting her arms fall, she stepped away. This wasn’t about her . . . and him. They’d just made it so. “You might think the Mismatch Society is wicked, for no other reason than because of my involvement with it.”

  He tried to protest, but she touched a finger to his mouth, stifling that lie. For that was precisely what it was. Even if he couldn’t admit as much to himself. “You know nothing about us, Wayland,” she said through the pain knifing away at her still. “You read about how we are scandalous and challenging norms, and yet I would say to you, that is a good thing. You don’t know how we have helped women avoid marriages to men who would have beaten them.” Some emotion she couldn’t identify filled his eyes. Once she would have been able to make sense of it. Not anymore. “Or how we’ve helped other ladies once afraid to share their opinions to share them, and to do so proudly.” She pressed a finger against his chest. “There is good in what we do. And I’ll not have you besmirch my society.”

  They stood there, chests heaving, their gazes moving swiftly over one another’s faces. And then, Wayland’s eyes slipped, falling to her mouth. He lowered his head slightly, then drew back, but then—like that magnet she’d once observed the bluestocking member of the Mismatch Society, Brenna Kearsley, playing with—he was compelled forward, lowering his lips once more. His lashes swept low, and she proved her desire for this man would be forever greater than her pride.

  With a moan, she lifted herself up on tiptoe and kissed him.

  His hands were immediately on her buttocks, dragging her close to the hard ridge of his shaft tenting his trousers.

  Afire, she stroked her palms up and down the sleeves of his jacket, gripping those blacksmith’s muscles he’d not lost, that were as hard and large as ever.

  “Why am I mad about you still?” she rasped against his lips.

  He slipped his tongue into her mouth, and mated it against hers. Twisting and tangling with Annalee’s.

  He lusted after her, but he’d never want anything more. Why, he didn’t even want his sister near her. The sharp edge of that truth gave her the power to wrench herself free of his arms.

  “Is this some sort of test, Lord Darlington?” she taunted, adjusting the bodice of her dress.

  The color of his cheeks, flushed from their embrace, deepened. “Of course not.”

  “But it does feed your ill opinion, doesn’t it?” she purred. “Wicked, whorish Annalee.”

  “Do not call yourself that,” he said harshly.

  As though he were offended . . . for her. “Isn’t that what I am? To the world. To you?”

  He appeared stricken. “Never,” he whispered. The slight knob of his Adam’s apple moved. “I’ve never . . . seen you that way.” And by the force of the emphasis he placed upon that word, she . . . could almost believe him.

  But his opinions and his demands for her and his sister, Kitty, however, were proof enough.

  “But that is the way I am,” Annalee said gravely. “Men can bed who they wish freely, but the moment a woman does it, they cast all manner of hideous labels upon her.” With a sound of disgust, she stepped away from him. “I may be a sinner, but I’m not so bankrupt inside as to try to interfere in the lives of those I love because of a fear of what people who don’t truly care about anyone but themselves have to say about those I love.” She gripped him by the lapels, dragging his face close. It was a mistake; she faltered, his breath wafting upon her lips, and remembered the feel of his mouth. She wrestled through the pull he’d always have over her, and released him suddenly. Annalee gave him a long look. “And we are not a club. We are a society, Lord Darlington.” She grabbed up her slippers.

  “Annalee,” he said quickly.

  Not breaking stride, she lifted her finger in a vulgar salute and dashed off.

  She flattened her mouth.

  To hell with stuffy, overbearing, and oppressive brothers . . . and fathers. Nay, to hell with all men.

  More specifically, to hell with Wayland Smith, the illustrious Lord Darlington.

  With every step that carried her away from those gardens and down the halls of the duke’s carpeted corridors, her frustration and ire grew.

  Wayland, with his pompous, judgmental views on her Mismatch Society. A group he would have once fully supported and applauded, he should now condemn.

  Because of you.

  And she hated with every fiber of her being that his low opinion should cleave through her heart. That she was still weak for him.

  She stole a glance over her shoulder to be sure he’d not followed her.

  As though he would.

  Why, he was likely out of his mind, elated at being free of her company.

  And to hell with this fancy affair she had no part of and wished she’d never come to . . . not even to rehabilitate her reputation.

  To hell with it all.

  All of it.

  She wanted a drink, and she needed it.

  Her whole body hungered for the numbing satiation spirits brought.

  Annalee raced around the next corridor and crashed headfirst into a solid wall; the velocity of that collision expelled all the air from her lungs.

  Her slippers flew from her fingers, and she sucked in a silent gasp as she was flung backward.

  But firm hands were on her waist, catching her before she hit the floor, keeping her upright on her feet.

  Dazed, Annalee gave her head a slight shake, registering that she’d run into not any wall, but a leering lord.

  Lord Welles’s fleshy lips peeled back in a grin that was more smirk than smile.

  Bloody fabulous.

  “There you are, sweet,” he purred. All the while his hands remained firm at her waist.

  Oh, bloody hell. The absolute last wish she
had or thing she wanted was a run-in with a gentleman.

  I don’t have time for this, Welles, she wanted to screech. Except screeching would summon spectators, and spectators would spread salacious gossip. And that would mean more scandal, and . . . She gritted her teeth. No, she really did not have time for this. Annalee firmly disentangled his fingers from her person. “My lord, if you’ll excuse me?”

  Shock brought his fiery eyebrows shooting up.

  God, give her the confidence of a pale, doughy-faced man of the peerage.

  “Excuse you? When we’ve only just met up?”

  “Yes, yes. That is it. You have the right of it. Now if you—”

  A sudden understanding dawned in his eyes. “Ah, I see.”

  What exactly it was he thought he saw, she neither knew nor cared to know. All Annalee knew was the need to escape. Damning this night all over again, she stepped around him.

  He shot out a hand, catching her firmly by the arm, wringing yet a second gasp from her this night: outrage. It burnt like fire in her veins, and she glared at him. “Release me this instant, Lord Welles.” She’d almost been a victim before. Since that night of Willoughby’s arrival, she’d not found herself so accosted. Some of that was no doubt a product of the protection afforded her by her close relationship with Willoughby and Beckett.

  The baron sniggered. “You like the chase, do you? I heard as much. From Lord Gravens.”

  Lord Gravens, who’d spread stories of her wickedness during that, her first foray into the decadent. Her rejection, followed by her departure from that event with Lord Willoughby, had stoked the rumors of her sordidness.

  Until the myth became the legend, and she was a whore forevermore to Polite Society.

  She fixed another glare on him. “Step aside, Welles. As it is, I bed men, not pathetic, begging boys,” she taunted, and wrenching her arm free of his grip, she hurried around him.

  He proved quicker than she’d expected. But then, when they had assault on their minds, there was little to slow them down.

  He cut her off once more.

  And this time, his tenacity recalled the past terror. It came raging back. That feeling of helplessness, once experienced, was one a woman always recalled. It never left one, and always reared its head. Briefly crippling, a paralysis of the mind and body that slowed one’s flight and cast one further into peril. Annalee shoved off that fear, a useless sentiment that saw no person saved.

  This was not one of the wicked affairs she preferred to frequent, where everyone in attendance had the same expectations of debauchery and there wasn’t a risk of ruin. “The duke and duchess would hardly appreciate your engaging in such scandal in the middle of the only ball they throw,” she said coolly.

  His smile widened, revealing two rows of crooked teeth. “I trust one such as you is better at clandestine trysts.”

  “Better than whom? You? Certainly. But my first rule is always a willing partner. Of which I am decidedly not.”

  Like a child denied a treat, he stomped his foot. “Ah, it is simply that you’ve met someone else,” he whined, his already nasal tones pitching a decibel higher. “I was too late to scratch your itch, was I? I’ve also heard that,” he jeered, scraping a stare over her, one that sought to strip her of her dignity. “That you’ll take anyone between your legs when you’re foxed—”

  A roar of primal beasts thundered around the hall, bringing Welles spinning around. Wayland launched himself at Welles.

  Several stones heavier, and several inches taller, he easily took the wiry man down.

  Annalee gasped. “Wayland.”

  But it was as though he didn’t hear. And mayhap he didn’t. He was a man possessed, pounding the other man again and again. Blood sprayed from Welles’s nose, staining Wayland’s brown cravat with crimson drops that turned the fabric black.

  Grabbing Welles by his lapels, Wayland dragged the shorter man up until his feet dangled several inches from the floor. “Say it again,” Wayland snarled in the other man’s face. “I dare you to say a single goddamned word about her.”

  “But everyone kn-knows what sh-she is,” Lord Welles blubbered, tears and snot and blood painting his already purpling face into a hideous mask. The baron glanced to Annalee. “T-tell himmm.”

  “Tell him that I’m a whore? I’d rather not. Even if I was, I was never meeting you,” she spat.

  “She’s lying! You lying wh— Ahhhh,” Welles cried out as Wayland knocked the man’s forehead with his own, a veritable battering ram.

  His lips drawn back in a snarl, Wayland had the look of a medieval warrior come to life, eager to end the life of the man before her. In all the years they’d known one another, she’d seen him many ways, but never . . . like this.

  “You will not go near her.” Propelling the smaller man hard so that his back collided with the wall behind him, Wayland stuck his face in Welles’s. “You will not speak an unkind word about her. In fact, you will not speak her name. Am I clear?”

  Sobbing, Welles nodded, the tears falling down his cheeks converging with the blood dripping from his bulbous nose and turning into a sanguine river that emptied onto his powder-blue cravat and waistcoat, staining those silk articles. And then Wayland punched the other man hard in the stomach. All the air exhaled from the baron’s swollen lips, and he slid slowly to his knees.

  Annalee stood motionless, shocked into immobility. He would do this . . . for her? This volatile show went against the gentleman he’d become, who didn’t display emotion. She didn’t want this for him. And certainly not because of her. “Wayland,” she said quietly. “Wayland,” she repeated, this time more insistently. He brought his arm back once more, and she caught it between both of her hands, gripping him tightly in a bid to break through whatever insanity now gripped him. “Stop.”

  He glanced back, his gaze locking on her fingers upon his elbow.

  His eyes glinted with a half-mad sparkle, and then he blinked slowly, and she knew the moment she’d penetrated whatever murderous rage had so consumed him. “He insulted you,” he said on a furious whisper.

  “A lot of people have.”

  His eyes frosted over all the more. “I’ll kill them all.”

  And she caught the inside of her lower lip hard at that defense—an undeserved one. “Oh, Wayland. You need to stop. You’ll kill him, Wayland.”

  “And happily.” Because of her. When no one, not even her own brother, had believed her honor was worth defending.

  At their feet, Welles curled his arms over his head and rolled into a fetal position.

  “I don’t want that,” she whispered. “It is not worth it. He is not worth it.” I am not worth it. All held true.

  She’d ruined so much in her life. She’d brought unhappiness to so many. Her parents. Her brother. His betrothed. Her friends. She could not see Wayland and his family added to that list of those to whom she brought hurt.

  In the end, it appeared it was her lot to bring scandal and shame.

  Footfalls came quick, and murmurs and cries of horror grew louder, as a sea of the duke and duchess’s guests converged upon Wayland, Welles, and Annalee.

  “My gawwwwd,” someone in that crowd cried out.

  Annalee briefly closed her eyes. When she opened them, she found some ten or twelve guests around them, most familiar. Several not. And from the ranks of that audience, Wayland’s mother shouldered her way through and staggered to a stop.

  “What is . . . going on here?”

  There was no doubting what opinions were already being formed. Which ones had already been formed.

  Bloody hell.

  Chapter 17

  The following morning, Annalee lay in her bed, sprawled on her back. She stared overhead at the lacy film canopy that draped across the four posters.

  Through that translucent, gauzy fabric, she remained fixed on the naked gods and goddesses painted there, locked in their own play.

  She’d always loved this particular rendering; it was one of the
reasons upon her arrival at Waverton Street that she’d asked Sylvia and Valerie if she might have this room. Because it was like a . . . homecoming of sorts. Not because she felt powerful like the gods. Far from it. Rather, she’d felt a kindred connection to this moment of hedonism they partook in. This wicked play they surrendered to made sense to her.

  He disapproved of her.

  He disdained her.

  It was what she’d always known.

  Nay, not always.

  Before all the sin and ugliness that had exploded like hell had been unleashed upon mankind—and womankind—in Manchester, he’d respected her.

  But then, what reason would a man like Wayland—a gentleman—have to respect you? a voice taunted. Over the years, she . . . had taken lovers. More specifically, in those first months following Peterloo, she’d attended orgies and other scandalous affairs.

  After a year of sinning, however, she’d tired of men who didn’t fill the void that existed within her. Instead, there’d been a greater thought to whom she bedded and why.

  And then there was the smoking.

  Granted, Wayland had been the one to teach her how to smoke a cheroot. He’d sneaked them from his father so that she and he and Jeremy might attempt it. They’d been children then.

  Wayland of now didn’t smoke. Or drink.

  And the one venture she was most proud of, the one thing she’d done with herself that actually felt purposeful and meaningful, he didn’t even approve of that. In fact, he was so horrified by it, and her efforts and what her society sought to accomplish, that he’d become one of those oppressive elder brothers who attempted to stifle their sisters’ wills and wishes.

  Because those honorable good girls, those respectable ones, had no place entering the household of Annalee Spencer.

  And last night? She’d gone and ruined him. Granted, he’d ruined himself by storming the corridor and fighting for her honor.

  Why? Why would he do that if he didn’t respect her or care about her anymore?

  A strained laugh gurgled up from her throat. But then, whatever of those sentiments had lived last evening had likely died after the scandal that had rocked London after she, Wayland, and Welles had been discovered.