children. The man now vegetated in a dump in Verona with the singer wife. And just now, in the alcove, with Annabelle’s soft curves and lips pressing against him, feeling her need . . . for a few mad seconds, he had understood why some men did it, risked everything.
The unlit cigarette between his fingers was trembling slightly.
He had nearly lost control—over a kiss.
Was that how disaster had begun for Bevington?
“Lovely creature.” Whitmore was leaning over the banister. For the past few minutes, the marquess’s lecherous stare had followed Annabelle around like a dog after a juicy bone.
“Good Gad,” Whitmore muttered, “behold those tits.”
The banister near cracked in Sebastian’s grip. He must not hit the man. He was an important political ally. “You are speaking about a lady.”
“Oh, I heard she’s just a country girl,” Whitmore said, oblivious of the imminent danger to his jaw. “Though it is a pity when a prime piece like that happens to be a pleb, is it not? Look at that poise—just think, the same girl would have been a diamond of the first water, had someone slapped a title on her father in time.”
“What a sentimental notion,” Sebastian said. The words emerged cold and flat.
“I’m not complaining,” Whitmore said, his belly quivering with a silent chuckle. “Who is her protector, do you know?”
Everything inside Sebastian went quiet. Like the quiet after a shot had been fired, when the birds had stopped singing and the wind held its breath.
He took the matches from his chest pocket and lit the cigarette.
“You are not going to be her protector, Whitmore.”
The older man gave a little start.
Older, younger, fellow duke or prince. He would have said it to any one of them, Sebastian realized. It was almost as if the words had said themselves.
“I, ah, did not realize that was the way of things,” Whitmore said.
“There is nothing to realize.”
Whitmore held up a pacifying hand. “Of course, of course, and I wouldn’t fancy trespassing on ducal property. That’s not what a clever chap does now, is it.”
He watched the marquess retreat, his muscles still taut with tension. Whitmore wouldn’t be the only man present who was laboring under misapprehensions where Annabelle was concerned. From his vantage point, he could see them circling her, restrained only by a flimsy fence of etiquette. But they would make inquiries. She might have callers all the way to Oxford.
The cigarette snapped between his fingers. Manners and honor be damned. He could not do what Bevington had done, but he could take the next best option.
He gestured for a footman, and one promptly detached from the shadows.
“A pen, and a card,” Sebastian said.
He had the card delivered to her room while she was chatting with Greenfield’s daughter and studiously avoiding his eyes.
Annabelle,
Meet me at the entrance of the evergreen maze at 2 pm.
Yrs,
M.
Chapter 16
A Mendelssohn matinée the day after a ball,” Julien Greenfield grumbled to his wife. “Only a sadist would devise such a program.”
It was one o’clock and groups of lords and ladies were trailing toward Claremont’s music room, all in various stages of fatigue. The ball had concluded around three in the morning after the consumption of copious amounts of champagne, cognac, and cigars. By the time the last couples had limped off the dance floor, the flower decorations had wilted and conversations had become slurred and inane.
Sebastian moved among his guests like a panther among sheep. He was wired, filled with an impatience he only knew before important negotiations, during that precarious stretch before he was finally in the arena doing battle.
“Montgomery.” Caroline moved away from a trio of ladies and fell into step beside him, and he reflexively offered her his arm.
“My lady. You had a good morning?”
“Quite,” she said, “but I’m of a mind to be cross with you. How do you do it? You are the only one to not look even remotely shattered this morning.”
Because I never sleep much anyway.
He glanced down at her upturned face. As usual, she was immaculately made up, but because he could never overlook a detail even if he tried he did notice the bags beneath her eyes.
He knew that if he were to meet her gaze directly, he’d see the question she’d never ask him: Why did you not come to my room last night?
He stared straight ahead.
God knew he needed a woman; unspent desire was crawling beneath his skin like a swarm of mad ants, and Caroline was everything he had come to appreciate—mature, sophisticated, and not