A Night Like This (8 page)

“She’s quite fetching, too,” George said, ambling closer to her. He smiled, and it turned her stomach to see that it was the same smile he’d used when he’d seduced her before. He was a handsome bastard, and he knew it. “But I doubt,” he murmured, letting one of his fingers tickle down the length of her cheek, “that she will be as wicked a romp as
you
were.”

“No,” she tried to say, but his mouth was on hers again, and his hands were everywhere. She tried to struggle, but that seemed only to amuse him. “Oh, you like it rough, do you?” he said with a laugh. He pinched her then, hard, but Annelise welcomed the pain. It woke her from whatever shock-filed stupor she’d descended into, and from the center of her being, she roared, thrusting him away from her.

“Get away from me!” she cried, but he only laughed. In desperation she grabbed the only weapon she could find, an antique letter opener, lying unsheathed on Lady Chervil’s desk. Waving it in the air, she warned, “Don’t come near me. I’m warning you!”

“Oh, Annie,” he said condescendingly, and he stepped forward just as she waved wildly through the air.

“You bitch!” he cried, clutching his cheek. “You cut me.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I didn’t mean to.” The weapon fell from her hands and she scooted back, all the way to the wal, almost as if she were trying to get away from herself. “I didn’t mean to,” she said again.

But maybe she had.

“I will kill you,” he hissed. Blood was seeping through his fingers, staining the crisp snowy whiteness of his shirt. “Do you hear me?” he screamed. “I will see you in hel!”

Annelise shoved her way past him and ran.

T
hree days later Annelise stood before her father, and George’s father, and listened to them agree on oh-so-many points.

She was a trolop.

She could have ruined George’s life.

She might very well still ruin her sisters’ lives.

If she turned out to be pregnant it was her own bloody fault and she’d better not think George had any obligation to marry her.

As if he should have to marry the girl who had scarred him for life.

Annelise still felt sick about that. Not for defending herself. No one seemed to agree with her on that, though. They all seemed to feel that if she’d given herself to him once, he was right to believe she’d do it again.

But she could still feel the awful jolt of it, the wet, meaty resistance when the blade had plunged into his flesh. She had not been expecting it. She’d only meant to wave the thing in the air, to scare him away.

“It is settled,” her father bit off, “and you should get down on your knees to thank Sir Charles that he has been so generous.”

“You will leave this town,” Sir Charles said sharply, “and you will never return. You will have no contact with my son or any member of my family. You will have no contact with your family. It will be as if you never existed. Do you understand?”

She shook her head in slow disbelief. She did not understand. She could never understand this. Sir Charles, maybe, but her own family? Disowning her completely?

“We have found you a position,” her father said, his voice curt and low with disgust. “Your mother’s cousin’s wife’s sister needs a companion.” Who? Annelise shook her head, desperately trying to folow. Who was he talking about?

“She lives on the Isle of Man.”

“What? No!” Anne stumbled forward, trying to take her father’s hands. “It’s so far. I don’t want to go.”

“Silence!” he roared, and the back of his hand came hard across her cheek. Annelise stumbled back, the shock of his attack far more acute than the pain. Her father had struck her. He had
struck
her. In all her sixteen years, he had never laid a hand to her, and now . . .

“You are already ruined in the eyes of all who know you,” he hissed mercilessly. “If you do not do as we say, you will bring further shame upon your family and destroy whatever chances your sisters still have at making any sort of marriages.”

Annelise thought of Charlotte, whom she adored more than anyone else in the world. And Marabeth, to whom she had never been close . . . But still, she was her sister. Nothing could have been more important.

“I will go,” she whispered. She touched her cheek. It still burned from her father’s blow.

“You shal leave in two days,” he told her. “We have—”

“
Where is she
?”

Annelise gasped as George burst into the room. His eyes were wild, and his skin was covered with a sheen of sweat. He was breathing hard; he must have raced through the house when he heard that she was there. One side of his face was covered with bandages, but the edges had started to wilt and droop. Annelise was terrified they would simply fall away. She did not want to see what lay beneath.

“I will kill you,” he roared, lunging at her.

She jumped back, instinctively running to her father for protection. And he must have had some shred of love for her left in his heart, because he stood in front of her, holding up one arm to block George as he surged forward until Sir Charles puled his son back.

“You will pay for this,” George railed. “Look at what you have done to me. Look at it!” He ripped the bandages from his face, and Annelise flinched at the sight of his wound, angry and red, a long, diagonal slash from cheekbone to chin.

It would not heal cleanly. Even she could see that.

“Stop,” Sir Charles ordered. “Get a hold of yourself.”

But George would not listen. “You will hang for this. Do you hear me? I will summon the magistrate and—”

“Shut
up,
” his father snapped. “You will do no such thing. If you call her up before the magistrate, the story will get out and the Hanley girl will cry off faster than you can say please.”

“Oh,” George snarled, waving his hand before his face in a gesture of grand disgust, “and you don’t think the story is going to get out when people see
this
?”

“There will be rumors. Especialy when this one leaves town.” Sir Charles shot another scathing glance at Annelise. “But they will only be rumors. Bring in a magistrate and you might as well put the whole sordid mess in the paper.”

For several moments Annelise thought that George might not back down. But then he finaly yanked his glare away, snapping his head so fast that his wound began to bleed again. He touched his cheek, then looked down at the blood on his fingers. “You will pay for this,” he said, walking slowly toward Annelise. “Maybe not today, but you will pay.”

He touched his fingers to her cheek, slowly drawing a slash of blood in a diagonal, from cheekbone to chin. “I will find you,” he said, and in that moment he almost sounded happy. “And it will be a fine day when I do.”

D
aniel did not consider himself a dandy, or even a Corinthian, but it had to be said—there was nothing like a wel-made pair of boots.

The afternoon post had brought a missive from Hugh:

Winstead—

As promised, I visited my father this morning. It is my opinion that he was genuinely surprised, both to see me (we do not speak), and also when he
was informed of your misfortune yesterday eve. In short, I do not believe that he bears responsibility for your attack.

I concluded the interview with a reiteration of my threat. It is always good to be reminded of the consequences of one’s actions, but perhaps more
pertinent was my delight at watching the blood drain from his face.

Yours and etc.,

H. Prentice (alive as long as you are)

And so, feeling as assured of his safety as he supposed he ever would, Daniel headed out to Hoby’s of St. James’s, where his foot and leg were measured with a precision that would have impressed Galileo himself.

“Do not move,” Mr. Hoby demanded.

“I’m not moving.”

“Indeed you are.”

Daniel looked down at his stockinged foot, which was not moving.

Mr. Hoby’s face pinched with disdain. “His grace the Duke of Welington can stand for hours without moving so much as a muscle.”

“He breathes, though?” Daniel murmured.

Mr. Hoby did not bother to look up. “We are not amused.”

Daniel could not help but wonder if “we” referred to Mr. Hoby and the duke or if the famed bootmaker’s self-regard had finaly expanded to the extent that he was forced to speak of himself in the plural.

“We need you to hold still,” Mr. Hoby growled.

The latter, then. An annoying habit, no matter how lofty the personage, but Daniel was inclined to put up with it, given the blissful perfection of Mr. Hoby’s boots.

“I shal endeavor to do your bidding,” Daniel said in his joliest voice.

Mr. Hoby displayed no signs of amusement, instead barking for one of his assistants to hand him a pencil with which to trace Lord Winstead’s foot.

Daniel held himself completely still (outdoing even the Duke of Welington, whom he was quite sure
did
breathe while being measured), but before Mr. Hoby could finish his tracings, the door to the shop burst open, hitting the wall behind it with enough force to rattle the glass. Daniel jumped, Mr. Hoby cursed, Mr. Hoby’s assistant cringed, and when Daniel looked down, the outline of his foot sported a baby toe that jutted forth like a reptilian claw.

Impressive.

The noise of the door slamming open would have attracted enough attention, but then it became clear that it was a
woman
who had come into the bootmaker’s establishment, a woman who appeared to be in distress, a woman who—

“
Miss Wynter
?”

It could be no one else, not with those raven locks peeking out from her bonnet, or the incredibly long sweep of eyelashes. But more than that . . . It was strange, but Daniel rather thought that he had recognized her by the way she moved.

She jumped a foot, probably more, so startled by his voice that she stumbled into the display shelves behind her, the ensuing cascade of footwear halted only by the quick thinking of Mr. Hoby’s beleaguered assistant, who leapt past her to save the day.

“Miss Wynter,” Daniel said again, striding over to her side, “come now, what is the matter? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” She shook her head, but the movement was too jerky, and much too fast. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I . . . ah . . . There was . . .” She blinked and looked about, as if only just then realizing that she had run into a gentleman’s shop. “Oh,” she said, more breathing the word than anything else. “I’m so sorry. I-I appear to have come into the wrong storefront. Ehrm . . . If you’ll all excuse me, I will just . . .” She peered out the shop window before putting her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be going now,” she finaly finished.

She did turn the doorknob then, but she did not actualy pull open the door. The shop went silent, and everyone seemed to be waiting for her to leave, or speak again, or do
some
thing. But she just stood there, not so much frozen as paralyzed.

Carefuly, Daniel took her arm and led her away from the window. “May I be of assistance?” She turned, and he realized it was the first time she looked directly at him since she’d come in. But the connection was fleeting; she quickly returned her attention to the shop window, even as her body seemed to instinctively cringe away from it.

“We will have to continue another time,” he caled out to Mr. Hoby. “I shal be seeing Miss Wynter home in—”

“There was a rat,” she blurted out. Quite loudly.

“A
rat
?” One of the other customers nearly shrieked it. Daniel could not recall his name, but he was a most fastidious dresser, complete with a brocaded pink waistcoat and matching buckles on his shoes.

waistcoat and matching buckles on his shoes.

“Outside the shop,” Miss Wynter said, extending her arm toward the front door. Her index finger wagged and shook, as if the specter of the rodent was so grotesque that she could not bring herself to identify it directly.

Daniel found this curious, but no one else seemed to notice that her story had changed. How was it that she had gone into the wrong shop if she’d been trying to escape a rat?

“It ran over my shoe,” she added, and this was enough to make the pink-buckled man sway on his feet.

“Alow me to convey you home,” Daniel said, and then more loudly, since everyone was watching them anyway: “The poor lady has had a fright.” He deemed that to be explanation enough, especialy when he added that she was in the employ of his aunt. He quickly donned the boots he’d come in with, then tried to lead Miss Wynter out of the shop. But her feet seemed to drag, and when they reached the door, he leaned down and said, quietly, so that no one could hear, “Is everything quite all right?”

She swalowed, her lovely face drawn and taut. “Have you a carriage?”

He nodded. “It is just down the street.”

“Is it closed?”

What an odd question. It was not raining; it was not even the least bit cloudy. “It can be.”

“Could you have it brought forth? I am not certain I can walk.”

She did still look shaky on her feet. Daniel nodded again, then sent one of Hoby’s assistants out to fetch his carriage. A few minutes later they were ensconced in his landau, the canopy puled up tight. He gave her a few moments to compose herself, then quietly asked, “What realy happened?” She looked up, and her eyes—such a remarkably dark shade of blue—held a touch of surprise.

“That must have been quite a rat,” he murmured. “Almost the size of Australia, I should think.” He hadn’t been trying to make her smile, but she did, anyway, the tiniest tilt of her lips. His own heart tilted, and it was difficult to understand how such a small change of expression on her part could cause such a large burst of emotion in his.

He had not liked seeing her so upset. He was only now realizing just how much.

He watched as she tried to decide what to do. She wasn’t sure whether she could trust him—he could see that much in her face. She peered out the window, but only briefly, then settled back into her seat, still facing forward. Her lips trembled, and finaly, in a voice so quiet and halting it nearly broke his heart, she said, “There is someone . . . I don’t wish to see.”

Nothing more. No explanation, no elaboration, nothing but an eight-word sentence that brought forth a thousand new questions. He asked none of them, though.

He
would,
just not yet. She wouldn’t have answered him, anyway. He was astonished that she’d said as much as she had.

“Let us leave the area, then,” he said, and she nodded gratefuly. They headed east on Piccadily—absolutely the wrong direction, but then again, precisely what Daniel had instructed the driver. Miss Wynter needed time to compose herself before she returned to Pleinsworth House.

And he was not quite ready to relinquish her company.

A
nne stared out the window as the minutes roled by. She wasn’t sure where they were, and honestly, she didn’t realy care. Lord Winstead could be taking her to Dover and she wouldn’t mind, just so long as they were far, far away from Piccadily.

Piccadily and the man who might have been George Chervil.

Sir George Chervil, she supposed he was now. Charlotte’s letters did not arrive with the regularity Anne craved, but they were breezy and newsy and Anne’s only link to her former life. George’s father had died the year before, Charlotte had written, and George had inherited the baronetcy. The news had made Anne’s blood run cold. She had despised the late Sir Charles, but she had also needed him. He had been the only thing keeping his son’s vengeful nature in check. With Sir Charles gone, there was no one to talk sense into him. Even Charlotte had expressed concern; apparently George had paid a call on the Shawcrosses the day after his father’s funeral. He had tried to paint it as a neighborly afternoon cal, but Charlotte thought that he had asked far too many questions about Anne.

Annelise
.

Sometimes she had to remind herself of the person she’d once been.

She’d known there was the possibility that George might be in London. When she’d taken the position with the Pleinsworths, it had been under the assumption that she would remain in Dorset year round. Lady Pleinsworth would take Sarah to town for the season, and the three younger girls would spend the summer in the country with their governess and nurse. And father, of course. Lord Pleinsworth never left the country. He was far more interested in his hounds than he’d ever been in people, which suited Anne just fine. If he wasn’t absent, he was distracted, and it was almost as if she were working in an al-female household.

Which was
wonderful
.

But then Lady Pleinsworth had decided she couldn’t do without all of her daughters, and while Lord Pleinsworth pondered his bassets and bloods, the household packed up and departed for London. Anne had spent the entire trip reassuring herself that even if George did come to town they would never cross paths. It was a big city. The largest in Europe. Maybe the world. George might have married the daughter of a viscount, but the Chervils did not move in the same lofty circles as the Pleinsworths or Smythe-Smiths. And even if they did find themselves at the same event, Anne certainly would not be in attendance. She was just the governess. The hopefuly invisible governess.

still, it was a danger. If Charlotte’s gossip was true, George received a generous alowance from his wife’s father. He had more than enough money to pay for a season in town. Maybe even enough to buy his way into a few of the top social circles.

He’d always said he liked the excitement of the city. She remembered that about him. She’d managed to forget many things, but that she remembered. That, along with a young girl’s dream of promenading in Hyde Park on her handsome husband’s arm.

She sighed, mourning the young girl but
not
her foolish dream. What an idiot she had been. What an abysmal judge of character.

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” Lord Winstead asked quietly. He had not spoken for some time. She liked that about him. He was an affable man, easy in conversation, but he seemed to know when not to speak.

She shook her head, not quite looking at him. She wasn’t trying to avoid him. Wel, not
him
specificaly. She would have avoided anyone at that moment. But then he moved. It was just a small thing, realy, but she felt the seat cushion adjusting beneath them, and it was enough to remind her that he had rescued her this afternoon. He had seen her distress and saved her without so much as a question until they’d reached the carriage.

He deserved her thanks. It did not matter if her hands were still trembling or her mind was still racing with every dreadful possibility. Lord Winstead would never know just how much he had helped her, or even how much she appreciated it, but she could, at least, say thank you.

But when she turned to look at him, something else entirely popped out of her mouth. She’d meant to say,
Thank you.
But instead—

“Is that a new bruise?”

It was. She was sure of it. Right there on his cheek. A bit pinkish, not nearly as dark as the ones near his eye.

It was. She was sure of it. Right there on his cheek. A bit pinkish, not nearly as dark as the ones near his eye.

“You hurt yourself,” she said. “What happened?”

He blinked, looking rather confused, and one of his hands came up to touch his face.

“The other side,” she said, and even though she knew it was terribly risqué, she reached out with her fingers and gently touched his cheekbone. “It was not there yesterday.”

“You noticed,” he murmured, giving her a practiced smile.

“It’s not a compliment,” she told him, trying not to think about what it might mean that his face had become so familiar to her that she noticed a new splotch amidst the aftermath of his fight with Lord Chatteris. It was ridiculous, realy. He
looked
ridiculous.

“Nonetheless, I can’t help but be flattered that you noticed the latest addition to my colection,” he said.

She roled her eyes. “Because personal injuries are such a dignified thing to colect.”

“Are all governesses so sarcastic?”

From anyone else she would have taken it as a setdown, a reminder to remember her place. But that wasn’t what he was about. And he was smiling as he said it.

She gave him a pointed look. “You’re avoiding the question.”

She thought he might have looked a little embarrassed. It was difficult to say; any blush that might have touched his cheeks was obscured by the current topic of conversation, namely, the bruises.

He shrugged. “Two ruffians attempted to make off with my purse last night.”

“Oh, no!” she cried, completely surprising herself with the strength of her reaction. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“It was not as bad as it could have been,” he demurred. “Marcus did more damage the night of the musicale.”