“Oh, very well,” Harlow said with a feigned reluctance Annalee allowed her. “If you insist.” With an excited little wave, her sister stood and darted to the front of the room.
Harlow paused briefly at the Jacobean-style oak door that led from the conservatory to the hallway, before letting herself out.
Annalee’s sister closed that panel behind her with a firm and damning thwack.
The moment she’d gone, Annalee let her eyes slide shut. All her muscles clenched and twisted at the loss of Harlow. When it came to how she’d lived these past years, Annalee regretted little. What would hurt her until she took her last breath, however, was that her decisions also happened to be the reason she was kept apart from her youngest sibling.
Her fingers shaking, Annalee grabbed a cheroot from the pocket sewn along the inside bodice of her gown, and withdrew the scrap. She touched the tip to a candle; the corners curled black and then red as, with a little sizzle, it was lit.
Resting on her elbows, she turned her head and brought a hand up, taking a pull from the cheroot. The first time she’d taken a draw, she’d choked and gasped and fought to see through tears.
With time, the little scrap had come to have a soothing effect. In this moment, however, it didn’t help.
Click.
Ah, it had been inevitable.
She’d been found.
The footfalls that drifted closer were as determined as a military man’s, marking her guest as one who moved with purpose.
Only one man moved like that.
Then he was there. Stopping above her, his broad blacksmith’s frame blotting out the moon’s glow that had previously poured through the crystal roof.
Tilting back her head, Annalee raised her cheroot for another puff and then exhaled a perfect cloud of white toward him.
“Tell me, have you taken to subterfuge, stooping to following little girls, Lord Darling?” she drawled from where she lay.
She’d ask Wayland if he stooped to following little girls? “Of course not,” Wayland sputtered indignantly. “I—” He caught the little glimmer in Annalee’s crystalline eyes. She was teasing.
Ever so slowly, she pushed herself up from that almost perfect recline she’d been in, and held out her cheroot for him.
He eyed the loathsome scrap a moment and then gave his head a terse shake. “I’ve not come to smoke with you, Annalee.”
“The loss is yours.” With a little shrug, Annalee took one more puff before tamping that noxious piece out on her mother’s stone floor. She did not, however, make any attempt to rise. “It does beg the question, Darrrling,” she purred. “Why have you sought me out?”
Unbidden, his gaze slid lower. With her burnt-orange skirts rucked up high as they were, her graceful limbs were put on perfect display. Those long, delicately contoured legs, encased in crimson lace stockings.
He swallowed hard.
Get in quick. Get out faster.
That had been the mantra rolling around Wayland’s head from the moment he’d been tasked with finding Annalee Spencer.
The part he’d not added on had been, With the lady in tow.
Because that would be the decidedly tricky part.
“Unless”—Annalee let her thighs part slightly, the satin shifting in a hedonistic rustle—“there are other more enjoyable reasons you’ve come, Darling.” She enticed like the Eve she’d always been to him.
Lust bolted through him. Of its own volition, his gaze lingered there . . . on well-muscled thighs, ones that had gripped him hard about the waist as she’d urged him on to completion.
A coy smile on her lips, Annalee caressed a hand over the tops of her lacy garters. He swiftly averted his gaze. But it was too late; the image of her had seared his brain and would remain.
You are as much a bastard as you always were where this lady is concerned.
He slogged his way back to a place of propriety, which had been a near impossible task when they’d been younger and she . . . innocent. Now, with her this siren of sin and seduction, it was a labor not even Hercules would have undertaken. “Of course not,” he said gruffly.
Annalee pouted, her lush, crimson-rouged lips forming a perfect moue that put all manner of different, but no less wicked, thoughts in his head. “Oh, come; you weren’t always a prude.”
“I’m no prude.”
“Splendid. You’re still bedding young ladies of the ton,” she purred, and from any other woman there would have been resentment and stinging inflection. Not Annalee.
Even so . . . shame tightened his gut. “I don’t bed young ladies of the ton,” he said tersely. She’d been the only one. And those exchanges hadn’t been born of just passion, but love.
“That is a shame,” she said in those sultry tones. There came a slight rustle, and unbidden, his gaze slipped lower, and she let her legs part wider, an invitation to sin and decadence and—
She chuckled, a full, throaty sound that sent blood rushing to his cock.
Shifting, Wayland discreetly hid the bulge there.
Annalee hopped to her feet with the agility of his favorite childhood cat, Stew. Yes, think of Stew. Thoughts of Stew are safer. “You have lost your ability to detect a jest,” she said, her voice laden with humor, which also proved how unaffected she was. “I was jesting, Wayland.”
Wayland.
Since he’d been granted a title, she was the only one who referred to him by that moniker of his birth.
That was, when she called him anything. Invariably, they were moving in different directions.
“Forgive me for not finding such matters amusing.”
She pouted again. “My, you are a prude.”
Once impetuous and careless and given to thrills and excitement, he’d ultimately seen the price paid for such flaws in his character. He prided himself on the man he’d become. As such, the lady’s genuine disappointment shouldn’t matter. And it didn’t. Yet, oddly, it grated.
It also brought him back to the matter at hand. Wayland glanced down at the bottle of champagne, the pair of glasses—one empty, the other half-full—and then looked to the rumpled lady before him. He tightened his mouth. Once, it had also bothered him that Annalee Spencer had been linked to any number of disreputable gentlemen. So much so that he’d believed the rumors to be rumors. Until at a family gathering—the most awkward of family gatherings, at that—she’d confirmed the veracity of those stories.
Reclining against the oak worktable with her elbows propped upon it, she eyed him knowingly. “You’re passing judgment, Darllling.” The extra syllable she tacked on to that husky drawl transformed his name into an endearment.
“I’ve said nothing,” he said tightly. “I don’t have an opinion of you and your actions, one way or the other.”
She trilled a laugh, and then pushing away from the table, she strolled sleekly over, very much the cat he’d likened her to moments ago.
He automatically backed up a step, but his legs collided with a work stool behind him, and he tumbled onto it. At eight inches past five feet, the lady was taller than most men; being seated as he was, however, managed to put them nearly at eye level.
It was a dangerous place to be, where Lady Annalee Spencer was concerned.
By the coy smile on her rouged lips, she knew it, too.