“Ma’am?”
“Come in.” Anne recognized Spawling’s voice and turned eagerly. Jack might have returned.
“Pardon, madam”—the maid bobbed a curtsey—“but there’s some people downstairs what come to see you.”
“People?” A thrill of fear brushed her spine. Someone sent into the house to strike at her?
“Lord Strand.” Spawling’s brow beetled with concentration as she ticked off his name on her finger. “A Sir Pons-Burton and his lady, a Lady Dibbs, a Mr. North and Miss North, and a Miss Knapp.”
Hearing only familiar names, Anne relaxed. She’d forgotten about Sophia. Shame burned in her cheeks. “Please, tell them I’ll be down at once.”
The maid hurried off, leaving Anne to drag her hair up as best she could before splashing her face with water and straightening her gown. She started down the narrow hallway. Long before she reached the stairs she heard the murmur of voices.
“What a dreary little domicile.” Lady Dibbs. Anne’s footsteps faltered.
“Apparently Seward hasn’t pried the treasury keys from her yet,” Malcolm said, and laughed.
“Naughty, Father.” Sophia sounded bored.
“It’s only true,” her father protested. “Matthew left her filthy rich. Can’t imagine they’ll want to live like this when they could live in splendor.”
“What good is living in splendor if society won’t know you?” Lady Dibbs inquired dryly.
“What makes you think they won’t be acknowledged?” That was Lord Strand’s smooth voice.
“You think they will?” A vaguely familiar man’s voice spoke.
“I do hope so.” Dear Julia Knapp, Anne thought. So fretful and for no cause.
Whatever her future held, Anne had no intention of living in society again. Her value as Sophia’s confidante and guide had been virtually nonexistent. The girl held her in no esteem or affection—but if Anne were honest she would admit that Sophia had neither esteem nor affection for anyone—and openly resented her.
No, no one in society would miss Anne and she would not miss them, either. In fact, she realized as she started slowly down the stairs, she hadn’t had a friend, not a true friend, since before she’d married Matthew.
There had never been time for friendships. Matthew had filled her days with a whirlwind of activity and pursuits, with fetes and romps, with European travel and ocean voyages. He’d cocooned them in a world of sumptuous pleasure-seeking.
There’d been people, of course. Hundreds of people. She closed her eyes and she could see a sea of admiring faces. With each new season, with each new port of call, with each new city, the faces changed but the smiles, the looks of approval and—and envy stayed the same.
She frowned. The doorway to the tiny sitting room stood ajar.
“—blood runs true,” someone said.
Envy? Why did that word seem to hover around some yet to be perceived insight?
“I’m sure there were reasons for the elopement,” Julia said.
“Oh, my, yes!” Lady Dibbs’s vulgar trill of laughter drove Anne from her preoccupation.
She opened the door. Lady Dibbs and Lord Strand stood together before the mantel. Malcolm was pouring himself a drink from the sideboard while Sophia sat on the only couch beside Julia Knapp. They were speaking to a young horse-faced woman Anne recognized as Lady Pons-Burton. Her husband, a much older, pock-faced gentleman, stood behind them.
Julia spotted her first and swiftly rose, coming to meet her.
“Dear Mrs. Wilder—” Her eyes lowered modestly. “But it’s Mrs. Seward now, isn’t it? I do hope this isn’t an imposition. I had thought there would only be myself and Sophia but—”
“Not nearly the imposition that leaving me unchaperoned during the beginning of the season might have been.” Sophia spoke from the couch.
“I’m so sorry, Sophia,” Anne said earnestly.
Julia captured Anne’s hands and squeezed tightly. “I so wanted to wish you happy, my dear.”
“Oh, you needn’t turn that alarming shade of red, Anne.” Sophia’s haughty tone drowned out Julia’s soft voice. “It appears I won’t need you anyway. Or anyone else for that matter. Tucked away in all this”—she waved her hand disparagingly about the shabby room—“connubial bliss as you’ve been, I’m sure you haven’t read the papers. Let me tell you myself. Lord Strand has announced our engagement.”
“Lord Strand?” Anne said. The man had always been most amiable to her and if his wit was sometimes too sharp for her taste, he’d always been a gentleman. Unkindly, the thought flashed through her mind that Strand deserved better than Sophia.
But perhaps he would curb her impulsive nature. Perhaps she would teach him compassion. Perhaps cows would fly.
“Yes, Mrs. Seward.” Strand stepped forward. “I have that honor.” Mrs. Seward. The name brought the blood rushing to her cheeks.
Julia, darting a nervous glance at him, melted back.
“Quite the coup, eh?” Malcolm crowed, rocking proudly back and forth on his heels, the ruby port sloshing over the edges of his glass. “Er. For Strand, that is.”
Strand’s expression grew sardonic.
“My congratulations, Lord Strand,” Anne said. She turned her head toward Sophia. “I wish you happy, Sophia.”
“I intend to be.”
“Oh, news abounds in society these days.” Lady Dibbs had apparently had enough matrimonial felicity. “Little Sophia here catches the perennially eligible Lord Strand, you run off and elope with the enigmatic Colonel Seward, and I—” She paused and looked around to see whether she had the room’s attention. “I am set upon in my own boudoir by Wrexhall’s Wraith.”
“Really?” Anne asked.
“Yes.” She managed to shiver. “A huge brute of a creature. I fear Jeanette Frost is wrong. There was nothing refined about the primitive brute in my room. He was more like a … warrior.”
“Oh?” Anne said lightly.
“Yes. But then, some women have the misfortune to rouse those baser elements in the male of the species. Through no fault of their own.”
“I’m sure,” Anne remarked. “You weren’t offended by this beast, were you?”
“I …” Lady Dibbs touched the back of her hand to her forehead. “I don’t wish to talk about it.” A little sigh escaped her mouth. Lord Pons-Burton broke from his torpor and shuffled quickly to her side. Lady Dibbs waved him away with an impatient flap of her hand.
“But we’ve come to wish you well, Mrs. Seward, and, dare I say it?” She cast a flirtatious glance around the room. “Steal a march on the rest of society. We’re all simply dying to hear your fabulously romantic tale. You must have been more captivated by the forbidding Colonel than I’d suspected.”
Forbidding? Though she’d applied the word to Jack herself, she disliked hearing it from another. “I do not find Colonel Seward forbidding,” she said gravely. “Everything about him recommends itself.”
His severity. His grace. His bravery. It wasn’t that she mistook him for a fairy-tale hero. She knew full well that he had indeed done terrible things, and yet he was not a terrible man. Perhaps—the thought came with a rush of urgency and power and hope—perhaps she was not terrible, either. A feeling like her soul was sighing rose in her.
“But I mean, who would have expected it?” Lady Dibbs continued. “I cannot envision a man less like your former husband. Can you, Miss Knapp?”
“Perhaps the colonel is a private gentleman,” Julia offered doubtfully. She plucked at her lace mittens as her expression grew distant. “Few men are as open, accommodating, and genial as Matthew.”
“I should say so!” Lady Dibbs said with a laugh. “He accommodated any number of ladies in their belief that he was a demigod.”
Sophia joined her laughter. “How true.”
Julia’s face lifted. “That’s unfair. Matthew never sought adulation. He sought only the happiness of others. He did not seek adulation,” she repeated.
“He would stand for nothing less,” Sophia said in genuine surprise.
“I’m sure you are wrong.” Julia spoke through tight lips. Her usually gentle face was set in stubborn lines.
Sophia and Lady Dibbs traded knowing glances. Anne should have come to Julia’s rescue, but she was transfixed by the conversation. For the first time, she heard Matthew spoken of with less than veneration. Or, she thought, perhaps for the first time she listened.
“My dear,” Lady Dibbs said calmly, “we all loved Matthew quite well. But we watched him work his way through several fields of adoring young debutantes. He made a career of being worshipped. Only Mrs. Wi—Mrs. Seward here gave him a proper run for his money.”
Lady Dibbs cast an appraising glance at Anne. “Yes. She proved quite a challenge to Matthew. She wouldn’t fall on her knees like the rest of us—of you—did. I shudder to think what Matthew would have done had Anne refused his hand. It would have quite put his nose out of joint.”
“I’m sure you believe your impressions of Mr. Wilder correct, Lady Dibbs,” Julia said in as cold a voice as Anne had ever heard her use. “But I, who was acquainted with him his entire life, can assure you that he had no such sense of himself. And it offends me that you should taint his memory with such talk. As it does, I am sure, Mrs.… Mrs. Seward.”
But it didn’t offend her. It startled and confused her. She was so used to thinking of Matthew as perfect and pure-hearted, that now to hear Lady Dibbs accuse him of consciously encouraging women’s infatuations …
“If you say so, Julia,” Sophia said flatly, and turned her attention to Lady Pons-Burton. The others in the room shifted about uneasily and returned to their private conversations.
“I say, Strand.” Malcolm beckoned his future son-in-law to his side. With a rueful twist of his lips, Strand left Anne with Lady Dibbs.
Casually Lady Dibbs linked her arm through Anne’s and drew her aside. Anne eyed her warily. The woman wanted something.
“I think we ought to call a truce, Mrs. Wilder, I mean Mrs. Seward.”
Anne kept her face ironed of expression. “Are we at war, Lady Dibbs?”
“We might be. Warning shots have been fired. Now we must be careful. Let me be frank. Wars are often costly. I’m sure neither of us want to beggar ourselves unnecessarily.”
Lady Dibbs’s presence here finally made sense to Anne. Lady Dibbs was afraid.
Three days ago, Lady Dibbs had held the upper hand. She’d known that she’d only to exert her influence to damage Sophia’s chances of a brilliant match or to spread her theory that one of Anne’s charity cases was Wrexhall’s Wraith, a rumor that would have economically ruined the Home. But now Lord Strand, far and beyond her social superior, was marrying Sophia, and Anne, too, had wed a powerful, if base-born, man. Lady Dibbs had lost her leverage.
In spite of her bravado, she did not want her name being made the object of derision. She would not willingly bear the ignominy of being mocked by her peers as a common piker.
“I’ll see my pledges carried out,” she said in a low voice, “but you must not on any account mention how long it took for me to honor them.”
Anne studied the gorgeous woman. Her pride had suffered mightily. She hated this interview, hated having to seek anything from Anne at all. Her face betrayed her loathing of the obsequious role she played and the tension she felt awaiting Anne’s answer. She licked her lips. “Just tell me when you want the money deposited and it will be done.”
Lady Dibbs, by freeing Anne from her belief in Matthew’s saintliness, had pointed Anne toward a future. True, she’d done so unwittingly, but that didn’t matter. The future had never been anything but a bleak, endless black tunnel. Today Anne thought she just might find her way out of the shadows.
And Lady Dibbs, Anne thought, had nothing. She was married to a man she never saw, spent money she didn’t have, lived in a house she didn’t own, took lovers who didn’t wake in her bed. Everything else that mattered to her had been bartered away for her position in society. It was all she had left.
Anne took pity. “I’m sure that anything you arrange will be satisfactory.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jack heard the strangers’ voices when he opened the front door to the town house. It was an unfashionably late hour. The afternoon sun had long since melted into the horizon, leaving only a thin slice of magenta light behind.
He faced Griffin, standing a few feet behind him, and pressed his index finger to his lips. His heart thudded in his chest. He entered the house and listened.
A burst of male laughter drifted down the narrow hallway, followed by its feminine counterpart. From the sounds of it a half-dozen people occupied the sitting room. No one posed a threat to Anne then. He did not relax completely, however.
An assassin would have to be bold to visit the house of his victim, but what better way to scout the area and look for weaknesses? Were Jack in a similar situation, he would certainly consider doing the same.
Quietly Jack shrugged out of his coat and moved to the door. Unseen by those within, he tallied the names of the guests: Pons-Burton and his young wife, Malcolm North and Sophia, Julia Knapp and Lady Dibbs.
And Strand.
Like sudden impact on a bruise he didn’t know he owned, Strand’s presence hurt. Jack smiled bitterly.
It was so bloody logical. Indeed, it was obvious that Strand had been sent by Jamison. But Anne’s culpability had doubtless been obvious, too. Indeed, to one not so involved, her duplicity probably would be stunningly clear and her lies would be as blazingly apparent as Strand’s function as Jamison’s spy. Just because he couldn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there.
Jack could see only the back of her head. A lock of hair had escaped a thick plaited coil and trailed down her back. Such a small thing to stir him. A rueful smile turned the corners of his mouth. He’d gained too much knowledge last night. He knew the texture of that soft mass, the cool brush of it against his chest as she moved above him.
For the thousandth time he cursed himself for a fool. Despite what he knew, he wanted to believe in last night’s passion. He had wanted to hear honest desire and, damn him, something more in Anne’s haunted voice as she’d begged him to be with her in those shattering moments of ultimate surrender.
It was senseless to wonder at the vagaries of his heart. It didn’t matter. He wanted to believe in Anne. He wanted to believe Strand was his friend. Well, he’d once wanted to believe in a benevolent God, too.
He had other matters to concern himself with now, the most important being how to put the current situation to the best use.
If Strand was Jamison’s agent, Jack could send a clear message of warning to Jamison. Or to anyone else who threatened Anne.
“Good evening, ladies.”
Jack entered the room tugging his gloves from his hands. He looked about with a polite smile, as if he’d expected them. Which, Strand conceded, he may well have. The man’s intuitions were uncanny.
I wonder if he intuits that I yearn after his wife? Strand thought, schooling his face to an attentive expression as Lady Dibbs droned on in his ear about some triviality. But then less than two months ago I told him I lusted after her. Not the sort of thing a man forgets.
But lust is not the same as pining, is it? he asked himself. Really, he thought, I must desist from revealing so much, especially to myself.
“Have you been fed?” Jack asked, smiling like the perfect host into the uncomfortable miens of the Pons-Burtons. He wandered to a position behind Anne. “May we offer you dinner?”
The Pons-Burtons hastily muttered their thanks and refusals. Obviously they’d not expected the husband to arrive home while they were still busily gathering the sweetmeats of gossip.
One look at his future bride and Strand knew to whom this piece of misinformation could be attributed. Sophia did not look in the least disconcerted. She looked amused. His little darling exhibited the most unusual sense of humor.
“At least let me ring for some refreshment,” Jack suggested, for all the world as if this was a palace rather than a second-rate rented town house and he its luxury-loving potentate, rather than a hardened soldier.
The man’s élan was alarming, Strand thought admiringly. He—
The thought died as it was formed, because as Strand watched, Jack reached down and lifted that damned loose lock of Anne’s hair. Idly he toyed with it. Strand’s mouth went dry. The intimacy and ownership implicit in the gesture was unmistakable. He willed himself to breathe evenly. She was his wife, after all. She was his.
“I must apologize for having stolen Anne from you, Mr. North,” Jack said easily, looking past North directly into Strand’s eyes.
Damn the man for a mind-reader.
“I hope you do not find yourself unduly inconvenienced?” Jack asked.
North squeaked, his eyes riveted on Jack’s hand caressing Anne. He coughed and tried again. “No. No. We were just telling Annie here the happy news. Lord Strand has announced his engagement to my dear little Sophia.”
“Dear little Sophia’s” eyes narrowed on the sight of Jack’s dark fingers amid Anne’s shimmering tresses. The tip of her tongue peeked out and wet her lips. Strand almost pitied her. She wanted that hand on her.
“Ah. My congratulations, Lord Strand.” Jack’s eyes were like coins on a dead man’s eyelids: flat and unrevealing. “I know you will be as”—he paused tellingly—“satisfied in your marriage as I am in mine.”
The others in the room were making a halfhearted and ill-fated effort to drag their gazes from the private bed play being enacted. Jack brushed Anne’s hair away and caressed the skin at the nape of her neck with his thumb. His fingers curled lightly around the front of her throat and began proprietarily massaging the tender skin.
The color fled Anne’s face. She lifted her chin bravely.
“I am sure I will be,” Strand answered stiffly.
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