Chapter 16 #2
Lady Rosenhall said something low near her ear. Annabelle’s shoulders settled by a fraction. She handed her glass to Helena and crossed to the bench.
Dominic did not move from the far wall, even as his entire body thrummed with the energy of ten thousand nervous men.
She sat. Arranged her hands on the keys without ceremony. A brief stillness during which the nearest conversations dropped in volume, then stopped.
Then she played.
What she played was unhurried and unshowy. It moved through its phrases with the ease of a piece she had lived with long enough to stop thinking about, the melody going where it intended to go without announcement.
The room absorbed it the way rooms absorb things better than they expected. The man beside Miles closed his conversation.
She looked up once, toward the middle of the room, and their eyes met.
He had three seconds, possibly four, during which her hands did not falter, and her face in the low candlelight was open and looking directly at him, and he did not look away, and neither did she, and the melody went on under her hands with no break in it at all.
Then she looked back at the keys, and the moment was broken. But then…
So was he.
The piece ended on a clean, quiet chord. There was one breath of stillness. Then the applause came from every corner at once.
Miles said something, but Dominic did not hear it.
She did not know why she had held it for that long.
Annabelle had been watching the keys, and then she had looked up, and three seconds was three seconds too many, and yet her hands had not stumbled, which was the only reasonable thing she had to say in her own defense.
The lords came in succession afterward, each with something to say, and Annabelle heard every word and replied with warmth and smiled at the right moments.
Hartwell was among them: he said she had been right about the afternoon’s worth of argument, and she thanked him, and he made a remark about acoustics that was genuinely funny, and she laughed again with the same ease as before.
She was aware, without looking, that Dominic was not among them.
After the fifth lord complimented the piece in terms that were really compliments to himself for recognizing it, she touched Helena’s arm and said she needed a moment.
And she slipped through the glass doors at the far end and out into the garden.
The air was cool after the warmth of the house. The smell of the flower beds came up from the east, something late in bloom, faint and persistent. The window light spilled across the path stones and fell short of the bench at the garden’s far end, which was where she went.
She put one hand on the back of the bench and stood there, listening to the distant music through the glass.
She had played beautifully tonight. She knew this without vanity, because she knew the difference between a correct performance and one that was actually right, and tonight had been right, and the eye contact had been something she was not going to examine in the garden at a party where forty people were ten yards away on the other side of a pane of glass.
The door handle moved.
“You should not be out here alone,” Dominic said.
She had known it was him before he spoke. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll go back.”
“I won’t keep you.” He closed the glass door, and the sound of the room fell away. He stopped at the edge of the light, hands behind his back, the formal distance intact. “I only wanted to say—you played beautifully.”
She had braced for irony, for the armored version. This was neither. He had simply spoken the unvarnished truth as he felt it.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I mean it.” He insisted, continuing his approach, one measured step at a time.
“I know.” She held his gaze. “I thought you would leave when Harcroft asked you.”
“I’ve left every room with a piano in it for the better part of twenty years. The sound…the sound finds something, and stays there.” He looked at the path between them. “Tonight… it didn’t. Your playing.” He stopped. “It was different. I don’t have a better word for it.”
She studied his face in the window light: the line of his jaw, the way he was looking at the stone path rather than at her, and the steadiness it cost him not to look.
“I’m glad,” she said.
He looked up then. He held it for a moment and then seemed to recollect himself, because he straightened slightly. “Have you settled on anyone? Tonight. Hartwell—”
Annabelle looked away swiftly, her cheeks heating as she considered the view below. “Oh…Hartwell…well, he’s… he is very good company.”
Dominic hummed and, as if he couldn’t help himself, he said, “He reads. His consignment losses in Bristol—”
At that jab, Annabelle turned to level a glare at the shameless Duke standing beside her. “He told me about the consignments himself.”
Dominic’s mouth curved as he continued, “He told you what he tells people in drawing rooms.”
Annabelle harrumphed and said, grumpily, “Lord Ainsley’s hands wander.”
“They wander, and his accounts are worse.” He paused and then added with far too much cheek, “I had a report.”
She looked at him.
“For Ainsley.”
She waited.
“And Hartwell,” he said.
“Dominic. You offered to help me find a husband. What you have done since the start of this season is ensure that no one gets close enough to try.” She stepped forward, because she was not having this conversation at party distance.
“You are keeping me from a husband while… While expressing far more interest than a family friend does. I would like you to tell me which part of that you believe is fair.”
He was looking at her with the expression she had first seen on a balcony at Lucien’s masquerade, the one stripped of all composure even as he struggled to hold on to the ghost of it.
“I’m keeping my end of the bargain,” he said. “You’re Lucien’s sister, you deserve to marry well—”
“Is that all I am to you?” Her voice broke. “Lucien’s sister? James’s piano teacher?” She took another step, closing the distance to six feet. “Is that what you were thinking when you stood at the back of that room and watched me play?”
He went still and, in that moment, found that all his defenses had been stripped absolutely bare by those questions thrown at him. He did not know when he opened it, but when he did, the word that came out of it was, “No. No, that is not…that is not what you are to me.”
Annabelle swallowed, unwilling to look away as she pushed, asking, “Then what?”
He crossed the remaining distance, stopping close enough that she had to look up at him, and his face in the half-light of the garden was not controlled.
“The truth,” he said, “is that I have spent every week since James barged into your house convincing myself that… That there is some version of this in which I can feel and still be a man who hasn’t ruined everything.
” His voice was low enough that the garden held it.
“I’ve stood in your doorway and told myself it was duty.
I’ve watched several men talk to you this season and deluded myself into thinking it diligence. But the truth…the truth is that I…”
“What?” she asked.
He sucked in a sharp breath, cheeks fevered with sudden passion, “I want you. I want to savor you. I want to pull you into the dark and find out if you taste the way you’ve haunted my dreams every night since James stepped into that house.
I am consumed by you, utterly and hopelessly.
I am telling you this now because you asked.
And because I am done pretending to possess control in front of you when you already know exactly what is under it. ”
The east beds were dark behind her, the flower smell faint and persistent. She could feel the warmth radiating from his body. She did not step back.
He raised one hand and touched her face, his thumb slowly grazing her cheekbone.
“Annabelle,” he said. “Did you hear what I just said?”
“Yes,” she said, a shudder wracking her frame…
And Dominic’s control was shot straight to hell.
He kissed her.