Chapter Seven
It was the jerk to her arm that did it.
“What have you stopped for?” Irene asked her brother, looking in the same direction he was staring with a great deal of curiosity. “What is it?”
It was unlike Michael to make such a point of stopping to look at something.
His attention always meandered past things like oil and water, never quite connecting.
But now he had stopped dead in the middle of the path in Sydney Gardens and was causing a small stir as other pedestrians enjoying the brisk midafternoon air had to walk around him.
“Michael!”
“By Jove,” Michael said, his voice incredulous. “Is that—Aynor?”
“Wilfred?” Irene turned her back to her brother with a snort of laughter. “Do not be ridiculous. Wilfred told me he had a matter of urgent business to attend to this afternoon. Do you think that I would be walking with you if he were free?”
“No, it’s definitely Aynor,” said her brother. Much to Irene’s surprise, there was a strange sort of delight in his voice. “Look.”
Rolling her eyes and wondering why on earth she bothered to put up with him, Irene looked.
And her lips parted.
It was Wilfred. At least, it looked like a kind of Wilfred.
The Wilfred she knew, her Wilfred, did not wear a top hat like that. He did not choose a silk scarf to wear along with his greatcoat—her Wilfred always wore a woolen scarf. All the better to keep warm with.
But this Wilfred was wearing a silk scarf. The ends fluttered most pleasingly in the breeze, and the woman who was walking arm in arm with him smiled as he said something Irene could not hear.
Her pulse skipped a beat. The woman who was walking arm in arm with him?
No. No, she had to be seeing things. This wasn’t possible. Oh, she had teased the man about a lady love and she had believed it at the time, but she hadn’t believed it. She hadn’t actually thought Wilfred had given his heart away to some woman she did not know.
And yet there she was. Tall, almost as tall as Wilfred, stunningly beautiful with radiant blonde hair that seemed to glow from the meager sunlight Sydney Gardens was enjoying this day. And she was smiling. Smiling at Wilfred. As though he had said something charming.
The twist in Irene’s stomach was most discomforting. The man has never said anything charming in his life. What on earth could he have said to that woman to make her smile like that?
“Ah, I thought it was him,” came a voice from a long way off.
Irene blinked. She and her brother were still standing in the middle of the path, still staring at the figure of a gentleman thirty or so yards away.
And it was Wilfred…but it did not make sense. Everything she knew about him railed against the sight before her eyes.
It was not possible. Wilfred, with another woman?
With a woman, Irene corrected hastily in the privacy of her own mind. It was not as though she had any claim on him. Not at all. He was Wilfred. She did not own the man.
Not really.
But where would he have even met her? How could he keep this secret from the person he insisted was his best friend all this time? Irene did not recognize the woman, and she thought the Chances were acquainted with just about everyone in Society who came to Bath this time of year.
“How delightful to see him so happy,” said Michael cheerfully.
Irene swallowed. Why did these words stick in her throat? “Yes. Yes, how delightful.”
“I always think that when a man is happily in love, he is happy in all things,” her brother said, his tone conversational. “Don’t you?”
Happily in love. Happily in love? With that woman? “Yes. Yes, I am sure you are right.” Irene blinked, her gaze sharpening. “Not that you would know about such things, Michael. What on earth are you talking about? You’re—You’re not in love, are you?”
She would have been suspicious, if her brother had not guffawed so loudly that he dropped her hand from his arm.
“You truly are ridiculous sometimes, you know,” said Michael easily, shaking his head. “In love, honestly! No, it’s Aynor who’s utterly lost in love. Look at him.”
Much against her better judgment, Irene did just that—and the unpleasant tug of pain in her stomach returned as she saw the way Wilfred looked at his companion.
As if… As if she were everything. Everything in the world.
It is not jealousy, Irene told herself firmly as she stared at Wilfred and the woman, whatever her name was. It could not have been jealousy because she had no claim to—there was no possibility of… He was not hers, after all.
Wilfred was not hers. He was, but he wasn’t.
And yet seeing him there with that harlot—
Irene immediately stopped herself there. She was not like that; she did not drag other women down merely to pull herself up. It was not this woman’s fault that she had not been introduced to the people who really mattered in Wilfred’s life, was it? No. It was Wilfred’s.
And with that in mind…
“Reeny—Reeny, where are you going?”
Irene ignored Michael’s question entirely. “Do not call me ‘Reeny,’” she said as she marched forward, leaving the path and making straight for Wilfred and his…his lady friend.
“But—”
“No buts,” Irene said, shrugging off Michael’s clasping hand and barreling forward. “I want to meet this person who has such a hold on my—on our Wilfred’s heart.”
“But if he hasn’t already introduced you, perhaps you best leave them be.”
“Wilfred!” Irene called out, ignoring the stares of others and flushing slightly at the outrageous thing she was doing. Shouting a man’s given name in public, across a park? Her mother would be furious if she found out. She would just have to hope she wouldn’t. “Wilfred!”
Wilfred had stopped. There was pink in his cheeks too, though Irene could not possibly think why, and the woman beside him—
The woman beside him had leaned close to him, whispered something in his ear, and Wilfred nodded.
The woman smiled.
Irene almost stopped up short altogether. It was so disorienting, the ground spinning like this and the sky shaking, that she almost did not know how she was still standing.
The intimacy between them…the way the woman was looking at her. What had she asked? What question had Wilfred nodded to?
It did not matter that she could no longer take any steps forward; Michael had reached her and silently offered a steadying arm, and Wilfred and his lady were now approaching them.
But no—the lady had unlinked her arm and was now walking in the opposite direction.
Irene’s eyes watched her go. So, she was not even going to be given the honor of meeting the woman who had captured Wilfred’s heart, was she?
Why not? Was he ashamed of her? Was he ashamed of his own foolish behavior, that kiss that Irene had most certainly not thought of every hour of the day since, and far too much at night?
“Chance. Reeny,” said Wilfred as he reached them.
“Irene,” Irene said automatically. “Who was that?”
Her eyes were still following the woman out of Sydney Gardens. She received a few curious glances from others, too—but then she would, being so handsome.
And where was her chaperone? Wilfred was—at times—so concerned about Irene being seen without one, but there was this beauty, parading through the park first with a man, and now alone.
Unless she was one of those gorgeous, rich widows some men seemed to fancy. She’d put up with one presumably ancient man and now Society deemed her free to parade through parks with a much younger, higher-ranking, and good-looking specimen.
Wilfred was good-looking, Irene had to admit to herself. But the sudden focus on his fine features, the breadth of his chest…
Irene thought she was going to be sick. This is ridiculous! She had never felt like this before, never, and where these sensations had come from, she had not the faintest idea. It was madness. It was ludicrous. It was going to turn her insides out.
“Oh, no one,” said Wilfred lightly.
Irene’s attention snapped back to her best friend. “What do you mean, no one? Everyone is someone.”
“She’s just a…a friend,” Wilfred said, now tangled in his words.
“And at this point, I leave you,” said Michael cheerfully, letting go of Irene’s hand and nodding to Wilfred. “I won’t tell Mama I didn’t escort you home, Reeny. Good afternoon, Aynor.”
For a moment, just a breathless moment, Irene rather thought her brother did the most unaccountable thing and winked at Wilfred—as if they shared a secret.
But that could not have been right. For a start, Wilfred was not the sort of man to have a secret with anyone except her. And anyway, she must have dreamed it. She was so full of…of not quite fury and not quite jealousy that she had evidently supposed something that was not there.
The instant her brother was out of earshot, Irene said in a rush, “So who is she?”
“Who is who?” Wilfred said, clearly baffled.
She frowned. It was not very gallant of the man to forget the woman he had quite literally been walking arm in arm with not five minutes ago. “Her! That woman! The woman you were walking with!”
You know, Irene wanted to say. The beautiful one. The elegant, tall one. The one who whispered in your ear as though she had known you for a thousand years.
“What, her?” Wilfred’s face was blank, as though he had forgotten the woman yet again as soon as the words had escaped his lips.
Resisting the urge to physically shake him, Irene attempted a laugh. It sounded very false. “Yes, her! The woman you were walking with.”
“Oh, she is…she is…she is Miss Fletcher,” said Wilfred lamely.
Irene tried not to think desperately about every single woman she had ever met, and whether any of them had ever mentioned a Miss Fletcher. The name was unfamiliar, though it had a sort of familiar ring to it. Perhaps her father knew Irene’s father?
And “Miss,” then? So not a widow? Where was the outcry when she appeared in public without a relative, a servant, or a nosy, old woman watching over her every move?
Irene fought back the urge to stomp her foot. “And she is?”