by Evie Dunmore
Bryson’s thin face tensed. “With all due respect, Your Grace, even if a young gentleman wears a disguise, he usually still sticks out like a sore thumb because of how he acts and speaks. And runaway noblemen inevitably stay on roads and seek the convenience of guest houses. It simply doesn’t occur to them to venture into the forests, build a shelter with their bare hands, and live off the land.”
Sebastian leaned forward in his chair. “So your investigation is based on the assumption that my brother is a milksop.”
Bryson frowned. “It is based on experience. The possibilities may be endless, but the mind is limited. People hardly ever contemplate options outside of what they know.”
Sebastian sat brooding at his desk long after Edward Bryson had left.
He finally made his way to his dressing room, where Ramsey had prepared his evening clothes.
A lost brother. An unwilling lover. A meddling queen. Any one of the three dilemmas would drive a man to drink. And since he didn’t drink, and since he was in London, he had decided to go out.
An hour later, he strode out the side door where his carriage was waiting to take him to the Royal Concert Hall.
* * *
The concert hall looked exactly as it always had—the stage below to the right of his ducal box, the four chandeliers, the ever-dusty red velvet drapes. And yet it was all completely wrong, because three boxes down toward the stage sat Annabelle.
She had been leaning over the banister, taking in the atrium with serious, wondering eyes. And when her gaze had finally met his, she had gone tense and motionless like a doe in front of his rifle.
He had not given her a nod, for if he had, it would be in the papers the next day.
He was still staring. She was not supposed to be here. The reality of Annabelle in his evening program was as bizarre as seeing two moons in the sky.
Frustration crackled through him. Was this how it was going to be—she would reject him, and he would try to move on, only for her to reappear again and again like some exotic malady?
Caroline, Lady Lingham, placed the tip of her fan onto his forearm.
“How curious,” she said. “I believe that is your charming country girl, there in the box of Wester Ross.”
He’d be damned if he’d take that bait. “How perceptive of you,” he said, “but it is hardly curious. Miss Archer is friends with Wester Ross’s daughter. As you can see they are seated next to each other.”
And he was ridiculously unable to look away from her. She wore a dress he did not recognize, something low-cut that revealed more than a hint of her milky-white cleavage.
He was about to force himself to pay attention to Caroline when a tall, lanky fellow appeared in Wester Ross’s box. He bent over Annabelle with easy familiarity to hand her a glass of wine. And Annabelle smiled up at him as if he had presented her with the Holy Grail.
Sebastian’s body went rigid at the unexpected bite of pain.
His eyes narrowed.
The man wore round glasses and a shoddy tweed coat; clearly he was the cerebral kind. Annabelle’s smile seemed to encourage him to keep hovering over her, no doubt sneaking glances down her bodice, and when he finally sat, the bastard stuck his head close to hers under the pretense of pointing out things around the theater . . .
“Well, well,” Caroline said, her soft voice intrigued. “She may be friends with Lady Catriona, but it seems she’s here as the companion of this fellow from the Royal Society. What’s his name? Jenkins, I believe.”
* * *
Annabelle kept her eyes on the stage, but the music reached her as a meaningless hum. She was more than aware of Montgomery’s eyes burning a hole between her bare shoulder blades.
She should have expected him to be here. Fine. Perhaps a part of her had expected him to be here. A part of her seemed to be waiting for him all the time these days. Perhaps that had been her real reason for spending a night painstakingly altering an old dress into a fashionable one. What she had not expected was that he would attend with the coolly attractive Lady Lingham by his side.
She curled her trembling fingers around the stem of her wineglass.
If we were of equal station, I would have proposed to you. She should treasure the sentiment and gracefully move on from things that could not be changed. Instead, his words haunted and angered her in turn. There had been no need to add tragedy to an already difficult situation.
On the stage below, the duo warbled on and on. Jenkins leaned closer now and again, murmuring something clever about the performance, and she remembered to nod when he did. Until the opening notes of “On Wings of Song” pierced her chest like a barrage of arrows.
She rose, her breathing coming in shallow gasps.
Campbell and Jenkins also came to their feet.
“Are you not well?” Jenkins asked softly as he took in her expression with a frown.
She shook her head. “I shall be back in a few minutes.”
Jenkins placed a protective hand on her elbow. “I will accompany you.”
“No, please,” she whispered. “I shall only be a moment, right outside the box.”
The professor relented. He pulled back the heavy drapes for her, and she hurried through the dark vestibule into the hallway.
She sagged back against the wall, her chest rising and falling hard. Air. She needed fresh air. The hallway came to a dead end to her right, but to her left, it followed the curve of the atrium to the main staircase.
She had not gone far when a man detached from one of the box entries and stepped into her path.
Her heart leapt against her ribs. “Montgomery.”
He had never looked less like a knight in shining armor; his eyes glittered as coldly as the sapphire on his finger.
“Do me the honor,” he said, and then his hand was on her back and she was deftly maneuvered through a door. They were in a dimly lit antechamber, its windows staring into the black of night.
She spun around to face him. “What is the meaning of this?” Her voice emerged low and tense. If they were found here alone together, she’d be ruined.
Montgomery leaned back against the door and surveyed her with hooded eyes. “What is he to you?”
Confusion creased her brow. “Who?”
“Your companion. The professor.”
She gasped. “I don’t believe I owe you an explanation.”
“He touched you,” he said, and he reached for her to idly brush two gloved fingers over her elbow.
The contact rushed over her skin like wildfire, hot and uncontrolled.
She all but jumped back. “You have no claim on me, Your Grace.”
Something savage flickered in his eyes, as if he were of a mind to lay his claim on her right there and then. “But he does?” he demanded instead.
Unbelievable! And then she nearly choked on her tart reply when she deciphered the dark expression on his face.
“My goodness,” she breathed. “You are jealous.”
Montgomery blinked. “It appears that I am, yes,” he said. His mouth twisted with slight disgust.
“But that’s absurd,” she said. “You are here with Lady Lingham.”
His brows lowered. “And that is relevant how?”
“I know you are—I know that she’s your . . . arrangement.”
He pounced, and his hands clamped around her shoulders.
“She’s not my anything,” he snarled, “not since I met you. And you seem to think that this is going according to some plan—it isn’t, none of this.”
He spun her round and she was pinned flush against the door, trapped between oak wood and one incensed aristocrat. Out of the two, the oak would yield more easily.
“Your Grace—”
He thrust his face so close, their noses were an inch from touching. Fire and ice warred in the depths of his
eyes.
“Do you think I planned it?” he said through his teeth. “Do you think I planned being mastered by my feelings?”
“I—”
His fingers closed around her nape and his lips slammed down on hers.
The kiss was rough, but it was frustration, not aggression she sensed in his hands, in the silky push of his tongue, the angry heat of his mouth, and in seconds, she was furious and desperate. Her hands pushed at his chest, futilely, because he was unyielding like a wall and her mouth was hungrily returning his kisses, matching every pull and slide and nip of his lips until a dull ache stirred between her thighs.
She jerked her head back and glared at him. “Am I in danger of being ravished against a door again, Your Grace?”
The primitive emotion burning in his gaze said it was an imminent possibility.
He dragged his thumb over her damp bottom lip. “Do you let him kiss you?”
She pushed his hand away. “Please don’t. Jenkins is an honorable man. He appreciates me for my mind.”
He gave an aggravating laugh. “If you think so. But know that I appreciate you for a lot more than that.”
“Truly?” she snapped. “I didn’t think you appreciated me much at all, given that you thought I’d gladly agree to be your whore.”
He reared back as if she had slapped him. “I did no such thing.”
His eyes had the bewildered look of a man genuinely affronted.
She threw up her hands. “Well, where I come from, that’s what they call a woman who makes free with her body for coin.”
“That is not how it is between us.”
“And pray, what exactly is the difference?”
His face had gone stark white. “You would be with me for me,” he said hoarsely, “not for my money.”
The hint of a plea beneath his imperious voice knocked the belligerence right out of her. For a long moment, they stared at each other, taking stock of the wounds inflicted.
They both had drawn blood.
She slumped back against the door.
“Even if I had no care for my own reputation,” she said, “in the arrangement you propose, any child we had would be a bastard.”
The mention of children seemed to take him by surprise. Of course. They never thought of that as a consequence of their pleasure.
“A ducal bastard leads a better life than the vast majority of the British population,” he said.
“In terms of worldly goods, yes. But one day, they would understand my role. And that they’d always come second to your other children.”
He gritted his teeth. “What do you expect from me, Annabelle? A bloody proposal?”
A proposal.
Marriage. To Sebastian.
The words reverberated through her very essence, raised a chorus of hungry whispers. She silenced them with a tiny shake of her head.
“I’m not expecting anything.”
He began to pace. “I can give you everything, everything except that, and you know it. My name has survived one scandal; it will hardly survive another. It would ruin my brother. It would taint my children. I would lose my allies. My standing, the Montgomery name—what sort of man would I be? I’d be no better than my father, at the mercy of his passions and whims.” He rounded on her, his body vibrating with tension. “Is that what you want? Would you have me change my place in history to prove how much I want you?”
The room seemed to close in on her: walls, ceiling, the floor, contorting.
She closed her eyes, trying to slow the flurry of words in her head. “This madness between us, it must stop,” she managed.
Silence.
“It’s not madness,” he ground out, “it’s . . .”
His face was grim. She watched him struggle, grasping for the right words. Naming it would make no difference. His name would always be more important to him.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “it will pass, if only you leave me alone.”
Chapter 22
The morning of the march on Parliament, Lucie gathered the suffragists at Oxford Station. A cold breeze swept over the platform and shrouded them in the suffocating plumes of black smoke that rose from the waiting train.
“Now, I cannot repeat this often enough,” Lucie said. “Much as it pains me, this must be an utterly peaceful demonstration, so no chanting, no accidental or purposeful obstruction of the entries to Parliament. No petitioning of passersby.”
Annabelle had informed Lucie that Montgomery was aware of their plans. Of course, Lucie had decided to go ahead. She seemed in an excellent mood this morning; the gleam in her gray eyes was positively rapacious. Ideological intoxication. Annabelle gave herself a mental shake. The sooner she stopped seeing and hearing Montgomery everywhere, the better.
“How about the banner?” asked Lady Mabel.
Lucie nodded. “It is being stowed in the luggage coach as we speak.”
“I hope so,” Lady Mabel said. “I’ve spent hours trying to space the letters evenly.”
“Should’ve used some math to do it,” muttered Catriona at Annabelle’s shoulder. Annabelle eyed her with surprise. It was very unlike Catriona to make biting remarks. Perhaps she was nervous, considering what lay ahead. Annabelle certainly missed Hattie’s unwavering cheerfulness, but everyone except Hattie had agreed that it would be best for her to stay in Oxford. No one wanted to bring the wrath of the mighty Julien Greenfield down onto their cause in case something went wrong.
Nothing will go wrong.
The train emitted a deafening whistle.
“Do you all have your sashes?” Lucie said. “I have some spare ones, just in case.” She patted her satchel, which hung heavy on her hip. No one stepped forward. The threat of a public dressing-down by Lady Lucie had seen everyone pack their sashes most diligently.
They split up as Annabelle made her way to third class. Ahead of her, a hooded figure in a voluminous gray cloak was moving slowly, causing a pileup of disgruntled passengers in her wake. At the train doors, the person stopped altogether and seemed to study the coach hesitantly.
Shoving and grumbling ensued.
“Apologies,” came a female voice from the depths of the cloak.
Impossible! With a few determined strides, Annabelle pushed past the woman and peered at her face.
“Hattie!”
“Hush,” Hattie said, glancing around nervously.
Annabelle pulled her aside. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“I’m going to London.”
Annabelle was aghast. “You can’t.”
“But I’m perfectly camouflaged, see?” She pointed at the woolen monstrosity that shrouded her.
“Camouflaged? Hattie, this cloak went out of fashion about five hundred years ago. You couldn’t look more conspicuous if you tried.”
Mutiny flared in Hattie’s eyes. “I’m going to London.”
“But what if someone recognized you? Your father would be furious; it would get us all into trouble.”
“This is my cause as much as yours. I have been to every meeting, I have done my research. I don’t want to stay behind like a namby-pamby prince while my friends are at the front.”
Goodness. “We all know you want to be there,” Annabelle said. “No one will hold it against you if you stay here.”
Hattie shook her head. “I have already escaped Mr. Graves. I can’t get the man in trouble for nothing.”
“Who is Mr. Graves?”
“My protection officer.”
Annabelle fell silent. She had never noticed a protection officer trailing Hattie.
Her friend gave a cynical little smile. “He is trained to be invisible. Would you feel comfortable walking anywhere with me if a grim man with a pistol were breathing down your neck? Well, I always know he’s there, whether I see him or
not.”
Taking Hattie to London was wrong; Annabelle knew it with the finely honed instincts of someone who had long had to watch out for herself.
A whistle rang, and station staff were waving at them, urging them to climb aboard.
“Fine,” she muttered, “just stay close. And don’t turn your back on the men or you’ll get groped or pinched.”
“Groped and pinched?” Hattie looked at her blankly.
Annabelle gave her a speaking glance. “You’re not in first class anymore.”
* * *
The Marquess of Hartford, present owner of Sebastian’s family seat, was a slow man, his pace impeded by his gout, and it lengthened each corridor of Parliament by a mile. They crept toward the chamber in unsociable silence, perfectly acceptable considering that a mutual dislike was the only thing they had in common.
“Gentlemen, you have to see this.” The Earl of Rochester stood at one of the hallway windows, his gaze riveted on something on the streets below.
Sebastian’s pulse sped up. He could guess what had attracted Rochester’s attention. Still, it hadn’t prepared him for the picture of the rapidly gathering crowd on the square below. Streams of women were converging from all directions, their green sashes glinting in the sunlight.
“I say,” Hartford said, “so the rumors were true.” He chuckled. “This should be entertaining.”
“It’s thousands of them,” Rochester said. His profile was rigid with disapproval.
“No matter,” Hartford said, “the police will soon put an end to it.”
“It has to be quashed hard and fast, else we can expect a circus like that every week. They should call in stewards for reinforcing the police.”
Sebastian looked at Rochester sharply. “Stewards are not trained for handling this.”
Hartford ran the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip. “If these women behaved in the first place, they’d have nothing to fear, would they?”