Later that night

She couldn’t marry him. Oh dear God, she couldn’t.

Annabel dashed through the darkened corridor, not caring where she was going. She had tried to do her duty. She had tried to behave as she ought. But now she felt sick, her stomach churning, and above all she needed air.

Her grandmother had insisted they attend Lady Trowbridge’s annual affair, and after Louisa had explained that it was a bit out of town, all the way in Hampstead, Annabel had been looking forward to it. Lady Trowbridge kept a splendid garden, opening right up onto Hampstead’s famous heath, and if the weather was fine, she’d likely put out torches and decorations, allowing the party to move out of doors.

But before Annabel could explore beyond the ballroom, Lord Newbury had found her. She had curtsied and smiled, acting for all the world as if she were honored by his attentions. She had danced with him—twice—making no comment when he stepped on her foot.

Nor when his hand had moved to her bottom.

She had drunk lemonade with him in the corner, trying to engage him in conversation, hoping and praying that something—anything—might prove to be of more interest than her breasts.

But then he had somehow maneuvered her into the corridor. Annabel didn’t quite know how he had done so. Something about a friend, and a message that needed to be relayed, and then before she knew it, he had her in a darkened corner, pressed up against the wall.

“Good Lord,” he groaned, grabbing one of her breasts with his beefy hand, “I can’t even fit my fingers around it.”

“Lord Newbury,” Annabel cried, trying to twist out of his grasp. “Stop, please—”

“Wrap your legs around me,” he ordered, slamming his lips against hers.

“What?” She tried to say it, tried to scream, but she could barely even move her mouth against the pressure.

He grunted and shoved against her, his arousal hard and angry against her belly. One of his hands grabbed at her bottom, trying to move her leg the way he wanted it to go. “Lift up your skirt if you have to. I want to see how wide you can go.”

“No,” she gasped. “Please. I can’t.”

“The morals of a lady and the body of a harlot.” He chuckled and squeezed her nipple through the thin fabric of her dress. “The perfect combination.”

Panic was rising in Annabel’s chest. She’d dealt with unwelcome advances before, but never from a peer of the realm. And never from a man she was expected to marry.

Did that mean he expected liberties from her? Before he even asked for her hand?

No, he couldn’t possibly. He might be an earl, used to having his every command obeyed, but surely that did not mean he thought he could compromise a respectable young lady.

“Lord Newbury,” she said, trying to sound stern. “Release me. Immediately.”

But he only smiled and tried to kiss her again.

He smelled like fish, and his hands were big flabby things, and she just could not bear it. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She hadn’t been expecting romance, or true love, or—Dear God, she didn’t know what she had been expecting. But not this. Not this awful man up against a wall in a strange house.

This couldn’t be her life. It simply could not be her life.

She didn’t know where she got the strength; he must have weighed nearly twenty stone. But she managed to wedge both of her hands between them, and then she shoved, hard.

He staggered backward, cursing as he hit a table and nearly lost his balance completely. Annabel had just enough time to yank her skirts up over her ankles and run. She had no idea if Lord Newbury gave chase; she didn’t pause to look behind her until she’d made it through a set of French doors and found herself in what had to be a side garden.

She leaned against the exterior stone wall and tried to catch her breath. Her heart was pounding, and her skin was now covered with a thin sheen of perspiration, which was making her shiver in the cooler air.

She felt dirty. Not inside. Lord Newbury could not make her doubt her own values and conscience. But on the outside, on her skin, where he’d touched her …

She wanted to bathe. She wanted to take a cloth and a fat bar of soap and erase every last memory of him. Even now, her right breast felt funny where he’d grabbed her. It wasn’t pain. It just felt wrong. Her whole body felt like that. Nothing hurt. There was an indescribable sense of wrongness.

In the distance she could see the light from the torches in the back garden, but here it was nearly dark. Clearly this part of the property had not been meant for partygoers. She shouldn’t be here, that much was obvious, but she could not bring herself to return to the party. Not yet.

There was a stone bench halfway across the lawn, so she walked over and plopped herself down, allowing herself an audible, “Ooof!” when she landed. It was the sort of unfeminine noise, accompanying the sort of inelegant motion, that she could not permit herself in London.

The sort of thing she did all the time when romping about with her brothers and sisters in Gloucestershire.

She missed home. She missed her bed, and her dog, and Cook’s plum tarts.

She missed her mother, and she really missed her father, and most of all she missed the solid earth beneath her feet. She knew herself in Gloucestershire. She knew what was expected of her. She knew what to expect from other people.

Was it so much to want to feel like she knew what she was doing? Surely that wasn’t an unreasonable wish.

She looked up, trying to make out the constellations. There was too much light coming from the party to find clarity in the night sky, but the stars were still twinkling here and there.

They had to fight through the pollution, Annabel thought, in order to shine. It was a pollution of light, of brightness.

Somehow that just seemed wrong.

“Five minutes,” she said aloud. In five minutes she would return to the party. In five minutes she would have regained her equilibrium. In five minutes she would be able to affix her smile back to her face and curtsy to the man who had just mauled her.

In five minutes she would tell herself that she could marry him.

And with luck, in ten minutes she might actually believe it.

But in the meantime, she had four more minutes to herself.

Four minutes.

Or not.

Annabel’s ears pricked at the sound of whispering, and with a frown, she twisted in her seat and looked back toward the house. She could see two people emerging through the French doors, a man and a woman, judging by their silhouettes. She groaned to herself. They must be sneaking outside for an assignation. There could be no other explanation. If they had sought out this side of the garden, and chosen that door, then they were trying to avoid detection.

Annabel did not want to be the one to ruin things for them.

She jumped to her feet, intending to find an alternate route back into the house, but the couple was advancing quickly, and there was no way she could go anywhere but deeper into the shadows if she wished to avoid them. She moved swiftly, not quite running but definitely doing something that was more than a walk, until she was at the hedge that clearly marked the edge of the property. She didn’t particularly relish the thought of pressing herself into the bramble, so she scooted off to her left, where she could see an opening in the hedge, presumably leading out to the heath.

The heath. The huge, wonderful, glorious space that was everything that London was not.

This was definitely not where she was supposed to be. Definitely, definitely not. Louisa would be aghast. Her grandfather would be furious. And her grandmother …

Well, her grandmother would probably laugh, but Annabel had long since realized she ought not base any of her moral judgments on her grandmother’s behavior.

She wondered if she might be able to find another way back from the heath onto the Trowbridge lawn. It was a huge property; surely there were multiple openings in the hedge. But in the meantime …

She looked out over the open expanse. How amazing to find such wilderness so close to town. It was fierce and dark, and the air held a crisp clarity she hadn’t even realized she’d missed. It wasn’t just that it was clean and fresh—that she’d known she’d missed, from the very first day she’d breathed in the slightly opaque gas that masqueraded as air in London. There was a bite to the air here, something cold, something tangy. Every breath made her lungs tingle.

It was heaven.

She looked up, wondering if the stars would be any more visible out here. They weren’t, not much anyway, but she kept her face to the sky nonetheless, walking slowly backward as she gazed up at the thin sliver of moon hanging drunkenly above the treetops.

It was the sort of night that ought to be magical. And it would have been, if she hadn’t been pawed at by a man old enough to be her grandfather. It would have been if she’d been allowed to wear red, which favored her complexion so much more than this pale peony of a pink.

It would have been magical if the wind blew in time to a waltz. If the rustle of the leaves were Spanish castanets, and there were a handsome prince waiting in the mist.

Of course there was no mist, but then again, there was no prince, either. Just a horrible old man who wanted to do horrible things to her. And eventually, she was going to have to let him.

Three times in her life she’d been kissed. The first was Johnny Metham, who now insisted upon being called John, but he’d been but eight when he’d smacked his lips on hers—definitely a Johnny.

The second had been Lawrence Fenstone, who had stolen a kiss on May Day, three years earlier. It had been dark, and someone had put rum in both bowls of punch, and the entire village had lost its sense. Annabel had been surprised, but not angry, and in fact when he’d tried to put his tongue in her mouth she’d laughed.

It had seemed just the most ridiculous thing.

Lawrence had not been amused, and he’d stalked off, his manly pride apparently too pricked to continue. He didn’t speak to her again for an entire year, not until he’d come back from Bristol with a blushing bride—blond, petite, and brainless. Everything Annabel wasn’t, and, she was relieved to note, quite a lot that she didn’t care to be.

The third kiss had been tonight, when Lord Newbury had ground his body against hers, and then done the same with his mouth.

Suddenly that whole episode with Lawrence Fenstone’s tongue no longer seemed so amusing.

Lord Newbury had done the same thing, trying to jab his tongue between her lips, but she had clenched her teeth together so hard she’d thought her jaw might break. And then she had run. She’d always equated running with cowardice, but now, after having taken flight herself, she realized that sometimes it was the only prudent action, even if it meant that she now found herself alone on a heath, with an amorous couple blocking her way back to the ballroom. It was almost comical.

Almost.

She let her cheeks inflate with air, then blew it out, still walking slowly backward. What a night this had been. It wasn’t magical at all. It wasn’t—

“Oh!”

Her heel connected with something—dear God, was it a leg?—and she tumbled back. And all she could think—as macabre as her outlook had become—was that she’d tripped over a dead body.

Or at least she hoped it was dead. A dead body would certainly do less damage to her reputation than a live one.

Sebastian was a patient man, and he didn’t mind waiting twenty minutes so that he and Elizabeth could make respectably separate reentrances to the ballroom. The lovely Lady Cellars had a reputation to uphold, even if he did not. Not that their liaison was anything approaching a secret. Elizabeth was young and beautiful, she’d already supplied her husband with two sons, and if Sebastian had it correctly, Lord Cellars was far more interested in his male secretary than he was in his wife.

No one expected Lady Cellars to remain faithful. No one.

But appearances had to be upheld, and so Sebastian happily remained on the blanket (smuggled in by an enterprising footman) and pondered the night sky.

It was uncommonly peaceful out here on the heath, even if he could hear the sounds of the party humming in on the wind. He’d not ventured too far past the border of the Trowbridge property; Elizabeth was not so adventurous as that. Still, he felt remarkably alone.

The strangest thing was, he liked it.

He didn’t often enjoy solitude. In fact, he almost never did. But there was something charming about being out on the heath, out in the open. It reminded him of the war, of all those nights with nothing over his head save for the canopy of a tree.

He’d hated those nights.

It didn’t make much sense that something that brought back memories of war would give him such contentment right now, but not much that went through his head made sense. There didn’t seem to be much point in questioning it.

He closed his eyes. The insides of his eyelids were a brownish black, not at all the same as the thick purple of the night. Darkness had so many colors. It was strange, that, and perhaps a little disquieting. But—

“Oh!”

A foot slammed into his left calf, and he opened his eyes just in time to see a woman tumbling backward.

Right onto his blanket.

He smiled. The gods still loved him.

“Good evening,” he said, scooching himself up onto his elbows. The woman didn’t reply—no surprise there, as she was still busy trying to figure out how she’d ended up on her arse. He watched as she attempted to maneuver herself back onto her feet. She wasn’t having an easy time of it. The ground was uneven under the blanket, and she had certainly been set off her equilibrium, if her rapid breathing was any indication.

He wondered if she, too, had an assignation. Perhaps there was another gentleman out here on the darkened heath, lurking in the background, waiting to pounce.

Sebastian tilted his head to the side, regarding the lady as she brushed off her dress, and then decided—probably not. She didn’t have that furtive look about her. Plus, she was wearing white, or light pink, or some other virginal hue. Debutantes could be seduced—not that Sebastian had ever done so; he did subscribe to a certain moral code, not that anyone ever gave him credit for it. But from what he’d observed, virgins needed wooing in situ. You certainly weren’t going to get one to walk herself across a lawn and into the heath for her own ruination. Even the stupidest of girls would come to her senses before she reached her destination.

Unless …

Now this could be interesting. Maybe his clumsy lady had already been deflowered. Maybe she was on her way to meet her lover. The enterprising gentleman would have had to have done a very good job of it the first time if he was getting a repeat engagement. Sebastian had it on the best authority that it was a rare girl who enjoyed her first time.

Then again, his scientific sample might be skewed. All of the women he’d slept with recently had had their first times with their husbands. Who were, almost by definition, bad in bed. Otherwise, why would their wives have sought out Sebastian’s attentions?

At any rate, as delicious as his ponderings might be, it was extremely unlikely that this young lady was on her way to meet a lover. Virginity was just about the only commodity allowed to the young and unmarried of the female persuasion, and they generally did not squander it.

So what was she doing out here? All by herself? He smiled. He loved a good mystery. Almost as much as a good melodrama.

“May I be of assistance?” he asked, since she hadn’t responded to his earlier greeting.

“No,” she said, giving her head a quick shake. “I’m sorry. I’ll be on my way. I really can’t—” She looked over at him then, and swallowed.

Did she know him? She certainly looked as if she recognized him. Or maybe she just saw him for what he was, something of a libertine, no one with whom she ought to find herself alone.

He could not fault her for that reaction.

He did not know her, of that he was sure. He rarely forgot a face, and he certainly would not have forgot hers. She was lovely in a wild sort of way, almost as if she belonged out here on the heath. Her hair was dark and probably quite curly; the few tendrils that had escaped her coiffure formed loose coils that brushed against her neck. She looked as if she were easy to laugh, with an impish mouth—even now, when she was clearly flustered and embarrassed.

Most of all, she looked … warm.

He found himself curious at this choice of adjectives. He couldn’t recall using it before, not about a complete stranger. But she looked warm, as if her personality was warm, and laugh would be warm, and her friendship, too.

And in bed … she’d be warm there, as well.

Not that he was considering it. For all her heat, she radiated virginity.

Which meant that she was very much off-limits.

Someone in whom he had no interest. None. He couldn’t even be friends with the virgins, because someone would undoubtedly misunderstand or misconstrue, and then there would be recriminations or worse, expectations, and then he’d find himself off at some hunting lodge in Scotland, just to get away from it all.

Sebastian knew what he ought to do. He always knew what he ought to do. The difficulty—his difficulty, at least—was in the doing it.

He could rise to his feet like the gentleman he was, point her in the direction of the house, and send her on her way.

He could, but what would be the fun in that?