“Your brother sent me in search because he is worried,” he said gently, in those same tones he’d adopted with his own sister years earlier. Wayland also played upon the one thing or person to match her devotion to her elder sister . . . the girl’s love for and loyalty to her brother.
Indecision filled Harlow’s blue eyes. They were her sister’s eyes, putting him in mind of Annalee when he and she had been younger. She’d been a mischievous girl who’d slip under tables and tie the laces of his ancient boots together.
His chest constricted, and he shoved back those long-ago memories of yore.
“He’s not worried for Annalee,” she said sharply. “He’s worried about his betrothed.”
Ah, so devotion to her sister had come to take place above any loyalty to her brother. Alas, having a sister of his own, he’d learned such was the way of sisters.
Wayland stood. “He loves them both. Why can he not worry equally about Annalee and Sophrona?” he cajoled.
And then, with reluctance in her every movement, the girl stepped aside. “Because he doesn’t,” she said with sadness tingeing her voice. “No one really cares about Annalee anymore. Except me and her friends.” Fire lit Harlow’s eyes. “To loyal friends!” She unsheathed her rapier and pointed it in a salute toward the small crystal chandelier dangling overhead. With that, she stepped aside so he could pass.
Dropping another bow, he started forward.
He tensed his jaw. Were it anyone else, and not a child, speaking so passionately before him, he would have told her just what he thought of the company Annalee kept.
Those . . . loyal friends.
As in the Mismatch Society, a scandalous league of women who’d come together to challenge society’s structure and norms. The club, which met weekly, had become notorious and was also regularly written of and whispered about.
It was so very Annalee.
That was, this new version of Annalee. Annalee of old had spoken of marriage and love and been innocent in ways that she was now only jaded.
Harlow called out after him, stopping him in his tracks. “I don’t know why everyone is so unfair to Annalee.”
There was a wealth of sadness in the child’s tones, and confusion, and a host of so much emotion that he desperately wished to keep walking. To just get on with the task Jeremy had charged him with. A task that he wanted no part of but was helpless to refuse.
Alas, he was also helpless when it came to the misery and confusion there in Harlow’s voice.
With a sigh, he turned and headed back the length of the hall. “It is . . . complicated, Harlow.”
Harlow snorted. “That was what you came all the way back to say?” She dropped her voice to a deep, slightly nasally intonation. “It is complicated.”
He bristled. “I don’t—”
“Sound like that? You do. Like you’re trying too hard to sound like”—she nudged her chin in the direction of the doors leading to the ballroom—“them.”
Because he had spent years practicing so that he might fit into a world to which he’d not been born but always aspired.
He rubbed a hand over his forehead and got back to the initial statement that had brought him over. “The truth of it is, it is complicated.” This was really a conversation for the little girl’s parents or brother. “Life is sometimes—”
“Messy?”
“Yes. And—”
“There aren’t always answers that are sufficient to explain?” she correctly supplied.
“Yes. And—”
“And I think I have the gist of it,” Harlow said dryly.
The right corner of his mouth pulled up in a wry smile. “Yes, well, I think you have it even better than me,” he said, ruffling the top of her tangled curls.
Giggling, she swatted at his hand. “I know I have it better than you.”
Stumbling back in false affront, he slapped a hand to his chest, all the while walking backward in his retreat.
Harlow’s mirth faded as quickly as it had come. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted after him, “She is a grown woman and should be free to live her life precisely as she wishes to.”
Drinking. Smoking. Wagering. And . . . carrying on with wicked reprobates?
Was that what Annalee was doing even now, during Jeremy’s betrothal ball?
Fury sizzled through his veins. Perhaps the embers of those fiery sentiments weren’t wholly extinguished, after all.
That outrage was surely a product of her relationship to Jeremy and this family. It had nothing to do with anything Wayland and Annalee had shared in the past. They’d been children. So very different from one another. The chasm between them . . . Those differences had only become an ever-widening gulf as they each coped with Peterloo in very different ways.
“Darling?” Harlow called warningly.
He touched four fingers to his brow in salute. “Your concerns are duly noted.”
But not agreed with. He, however, had no intention of debating the child on all the reasons Annalee’s actions and behaviors were dangerous and unsuitable . . . not just for a woman, but for anyone.
Perhaps Harlow might help him find Annalee, and he could be done with this chore for the both of them. All of them. He called after her, “I don’t suppose you have any idea where I might find . . . ?”
Harlow, who’d already started her retreat, didn’t even turn around to face him. “I’m not doing your dirty work for you, Darling.”
So it appeared he was on his own in this, after all.
Bloody hell.
Chapter 2
Lady Annalee could puff out a perfect white circle of cheroot smoke with the best of the gentlemen.
She could drink most grown men under the table.
And she’d never lost a wager.
That was, as long as she’d been sober, she’d not lost one.
When she was drunk, she lost any number of them.
At this precise moment, however, she was certainly not foxed. Though she wished to be. Polite affairs tended to have that effect upon her. Add ones hosted by her prim-and-proper, always disapproving mother into the proverbial pot? And then, well, there wasn’t enough drink to get a woman through.
It was why, in the midst of her brother’s betrothal ball, with all the most powerful and respected members of Polite Society in attendance, Annalee happened to be . . . on the fringe of the festivities. She was well aware of the wagers that had been cast, and the coins that had been flowing, predicting she’d land herself in the middle of a scandal this night.
This time, however, it wasn’t an attempt to win a bet herself . . . but rather to keep from fulfilling the expectation the world had of her.
Not that she cared herself what they said about her. After Peterloo, she’d developed a whole new way of viewing everything. She’d not given two flying rats what the world said about her or how she conducted herself. She’d survived.
Since then, by both the respectable and the reprehensible, Lady Annalee was whispered about, and talked about, to a like degree.
Some whispered stories of wicked escapades, of which she was always the center.
Most spoke freely and frequently about the scandals she found herself in.
None of it, however, was gossip.
Gossip involved unconstrained conversations and included details that were not confirmed as being true.