Chapter 26
“You’re scowling at that pillar as though it personally offended you.” Thomas appeared at his elbow with a glass of. “Go and ask her to dance. You’re making the whole room uncomfortable, standing there glowering like a thundercloud.”
“I am not glowering.”
“You are doing a very passable impression of it.” Thomas glanced toward Anna. “Ask her. You almost choked a man to defend her honor. You owe her a dance.”
The Hartfield ballroom that Saturday night was overfull and overwarm, banked with hothouse flowers and candlelight and too much expensive perfume. Frederick had thoughtfully positioned himself near a pillar with the express purpose of being present but overlooked.
He saw her instantly. Anna stood at the center of a small, devoted crowd, Rachel beside her, both laughing at something one of the gentlemen had said.
Always laughing, always light. Such a change from all that had transpired just a year ago.
Anna’s dance card, Frederick happened to notice, was nearly full.
He happened to notice a great many things about Anna this evening that he had no business noticing, like the way her dress had been cut perfectly to her every curve.
“I haven’t the slightest interest in dancing,” he said finally.
“Glad to know you’re still in there.”
“I mean it.”
“No,” Thomas agreed amiably, “you’ve a tremendous interest in standing very still and watching her dance with other men, which strikes me as a considerably worse way to spend an evening, but you must please yourself.”
He wandered off toward Rachel’s corner of the room with a smile. Frederick was left alone with his thundercloud expression and his very bad evening, until a young woman approached him.
“Good evening, Your Grace,” she said as she curtsied. She was a bright young thing, no more than eighteen, with dark blue eyes and red hair. “I hope I am not disturbing you. My father is Lord Richard Trimble; we were introduced at the Bufton Musicale last year.”
“I do recall,” Frederick said, as he had always been a fan of Lord Trimble and remembered the encounter.
She had looked different then; the last year had been kind to her, but she did nothing for him.
She was pleasant, and surely kind, but all he could do was look over her shoulder to see where Anna was.
“… Are you having a pleasant evening?”
“Yes, my Lady,” he said flatly, unable to perform niceties for nicety's sake, even with so kind a young girl. “If you will excuse me,” he said gruffly and walked off.
She will find another man to speak with, I am sure of it. I did her a favor.
He found a lonely corner behind a plant and was unbothered then. He sipped a brandy and watched Anna dance with Carstairs, who held her half an inch too close.
He watched her dance with a baronet whose name he couldn’t be bothered to recall and laugh at whatever the man said. Despite his best efforts, Frederick discovered that jealousy had a particular flavor, bitter and metallic, that no amount of punch seemed to dissolve.
He was midway through composing several uncharitable opinions about the baronet’s dancing when he realized Anna was no longer on the floor at all.
Where could she have gone?
He scanned the room once, twice, with a thoroughness that surprised him. He hadn’t realized he’d memorized the exact auburn notes of her gown until he was searching for it among a hundred other gowns and not finding it. Rachel was still by the refreshment table.
Anna was nowhere.
Where in the devil is she?
The doors to the terrace stood open to the night air, and beyond them, the dark shapes of the garden. He told himself there was no reason for the unease tightening in his chest as he crossed the room and stepped out into the cool evening.
There was no reason at all, simply the ordinary brotherly concern he extended generously to his sister’s closest friend. He told himself this all the way down the terrace steps and along the gravel path and stopped believing it entirely the moment he heard her voice.
“…very kind of you to say so, my lord, though I think you flatter me rather more than I deserve.”
Anna’s voice, so light and easy, drifted from somewhere among the hedges. A man’s voice answered, too low for Frederick to make out the words, and Anna laughed in response.
It was not unkindly, not in distress. She was enjoying herself.
Frederick stood frozen on the path, like a man who has walked somewhere he very much should not have walked.
I should leave.
He told himself so plainly. She was a grown woman entitled to private conversation in a garden with whomever she pleased. His presence here, skulking in the dark like some jealous specter, was beneath him in every way. He could not make his feet move.
But then—
He heard Anna cry out.
It was high and frightened, then cut off as though a hand had been clapped over her mouth.
Frederick was running before he’d consciously decided to, gravel spitting beneath his best boots, his heart slamming against his ribs.
He found them in a small clearing beyond the hedge, moonlight falling cold and clear across the scene. Anna was pressed back against the trunk of an old elm, one hand braced against Lord Pemberton’s chest.
She was shoving with all her strength while his other hand was fisted in the silk of her skirt and his mouth descended toward hers despite her efforts. Despite the clear, desperate no she was trying to force past his encroaching weight.
Frederick did not remember crossing the clearing. He remembered only his hand closing on the back of Pemberton’s coat, hauling him backward with enough force to stagger them both. His fist connected with Pemberton’s jaw with a crack that felt like the single most satisfying thing he had ever done.
Pemberton went down hard into the grass, sputtering unintelligibly, one hand flying to his jaw.
“Touch her again, you scoundrel,” Frederick said, his voice low and entirely without mercy, “and I will not stop at your jaw. Get up. Get out of this garden, and if I hear so much as your name spoken in her hearing again, you will answer for it in a manner considerably less pleasant than this. Do you understand me?”
Pemberton scrambled upright and glanced once at Anna. She was standing rigid against the tree, breathing hard, her hand still pressed to her bodice where his grip had wrinkled it. Then, he fled without a word back toward the lights of the house.
Frederick turned to Anna and found her staring at him. Her face was filled with something between shock and a kind of dawning, uncertain wonder, as though she were looking at a stranger wearing a familiar face.
“Anna.” He reached for her, then stopped himself, unsure if she could bear to be touched just now by anyone at all. “Are you hurt?”
“No. No, I…” She pressed a shaking hand to her hair, attempting to impose some order it did not currently possess.
“He was perfectly civil, at first. I thought… Well, I supposed I didn’t think…
” She stopped, swallowed, and when she looked up at him again, her eyes were too bright. “I should like to go home, I think.”
“Of course.” He shrugged out of his coat and settled it about her shoulders before she could protest and did not allow himself to examine too closely why the sight of her in it made something in his chest ease. “Come. I’ll see you to your carriage.”
Anna did not argue when he handed her up into the carriage, though she opened her mouth to try but could not find the words.
“I’m coming with you.”
“Frederick,” she stammered. “I am fine… You needn’t—your own carriage—”
“Will manage perfectly well without me for one evening, left behind for Rachel. I’ll take a hackney back to the ball once you’re safely home to meet her.”
He climbed in after her and rapped on the roof before she could mount any further objection. The carriage lurched into motion, leaving the lights of the ball behind as the hooves echoed down the cobblestone street.
“Thank you,” she said as she sat, his coat still wrapped about her shoulders and her hands folded tight in her lap, staring at nothing in particular, and tried to feel ordinary.
It did not work. The coat smelled like him, pine and soap, just as she remembered.
She had no business remembering that so vividly, or being so taken by now.
Her hands were still not entirely steady, though she could not now have said with any certainty how much of that belonged to Lord Pemberton and how much to the man sitting across from her in the dark.
“It was nothing,” he said finally.
She knew well that the gesture was certainly not nothing. In her wildest dreams, which she had over the last year, she never fathomed the composed Duke was capable of such fury.
He was careful, dry, composed to the point of occasional maddening.
She had known him capable of warmth, though he rationed it as though warmth were a finite resource he didn’t wish to exhaust. She had not known him capable of whatever she had witnessed in that garden, the absolute, white-hot economy of it.
The way he had crossed the clearing without a word and hauled Pemberton off her as though the man weighed nothing, the way he had spoken afterward in that low, stripped voice.
Touch her again…
She was still turning it over when his face appeared in a flash of lamplight through the window, and she looked quickly back at her hands.
“How did you know where to find me?” she asked, because she needed something to say, and because she had been wondering it since the moment he appeared.
“What do you mean?”
“In the garden. No one saw me…”
He was quiet for a beat too long. In the intermittent light she could see his jaw set tight. She knew he was choosing his words with more care than usual.
“I noticed you’d gone,” he said at last, and the words came out rougher than she expected.
“You hadn’t so much as said good evening—”
“I find that I always notice where you are, Anna. I have done so all evening. I expect I have done rather longer than that, if I’m honest about it… Does that answer your question?”