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.”