Buffeted by the elements, pitching her voice against the roar of rain, she felt like the trapped wild creatures he had mentioned earlier. She noticed her hands were gripping the lapels of his coat.
“I’m not ruined,” he said, “but what I have done for far too long is make decisions that satisfied my duty, but not my personal integrity. The two are not always the same, I found.”
She should step back. She should let go.
He raised a hand to cover hers, and his energy surged through her like an electric current, and her heart thumped its first beat in a week. She might as well try to let go of a lifeline.
“The queen will be furious,” she managed.
He nodded. “She is. I was at the palace before coming here.”
“But what about Montgomery Castle?”
His face shuttered. “It’s lost,” he said softly. Lost. She sensed a sadness, resolve, but no regrets.
Had he known she’d be in the gallery today?
Through a veil of rain, she saw a small crowd gathering at a safe distance away. They were causing a scene, standing so close, the duke sopping wet, and she realized she was not wearing her coat, either. Water ran down her back like a river.
“I’m going to France for a while,” Sebastian said conversationally.
“To France?”
“Yes. Brittany. I remember it is nice in spring.”
So he would be a country, not a county away. Her foolish heart twisted with anguish.
“How about you?” he asked. His hand had wandered up along her arm and slipped around her back. Not much was missing for an embrace. “Have you accepted your professor’s proposal?”
“No,” she said dully.
His hand urged her a little closer into the shelter of his body. “Why not?” he murmured.
The rain had made his dark lashes spiky. How she wished she could be immune to his unlikely charms.
“Lucie made me an offer,” she said, “to help her with a new women’s journal.”
“And that is why you didn’t accept Jenkins?”
“He is a good man. He might not think he needs it, but he should be with a woman who truly loves him.”
A faint smile tilted Sebastian’s lips. “And you don’t truly love him?”
His other hand slid around her waist, and she stood in the circle of his arms, quivering like a doe ready to bolt. Too late.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t love him.”
His mouth, smiling and damp from the rain, held her transfixed, and remembering how it felt, both firm and soft, made her want to feel him against her lips. It mattered not that half of Westminster was watching now. Nothing mattered but feeling him again, absorbing the tender gleam in his eyes as he looked down at her. God help them, the pull of attraction between them had not eased, and probably never would, and the restlessness never ceased until they were close. Two halves of a soul, reunited, knowing they would be parted again in minutes.
She raised her grave eyes to his.
“I’m in love with you,” she said. “I love you so much that I’d rather be on my own than with another.”
He gently brushed a sodden curl back behind her ear.
“Come to France with me,” he said.
“Please. I don’t have the strength today to resist you.”
“Then don’t,” he said. “I understand my eligibility is much diminished. My ancestral seat is lost, I’m persona non grata at court, and there are going to be very unflattering cartoons about me in the press for the next year or so. Also, as a divorcé, I cannot marry you in a church. But all I have left would be yours, Annabelle, if you will have me like this.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I’d have you with nothing but the clothes on your back.”
He held himself very still. “Is that a yes?”
The sensation of balancing on the edge of an abyss gripped her, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. One word, and she’d take a mighty plunge. She had thought it took all her courage to build a life of her own, and now, swaying on the precipice, she understood she had to be even braver to give herself, heart and soul, into the hands of another and build a life with him.
Sebastian’s arms tightened around her ever so slightly, and she gave a strangled laugh. Come what may, this man seemed ready to catch her.