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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A nne was pleasantly weary as she drove the pony cart into the stable yard at Greenfield.

Her mind buzzed like sleepy bees making honey of all she had learned that day, and her muscles, too.

She hadn’t done this much walking since those long days outdoors with Gwen.

She looked forward to a quiet dinner and hearing how Hew had spent his hours.

Greenfield blushed rose in the mellow late afternoon light, the windows casting back silver gleams, the ivy on one wall green with life.

It was a house that had made peace with the land that held it, a lovely house, serene in symmetry and splendor.

Anne allowed herself, for the briefest moment, to imagine this was her home.

She was returning after a day spent—doing what, she couldn’t yet imagine.

Calling on the ill of Newport and nursing them with her remedies.

Delivering babies. Doing some good in the world.

And coming home at the end of it to a husband who would smile to see her.

Sit next to her in the parlor the way he’d sat beside her on the pony cart yesterday, his masculine body a thrill and a comfort at the same time.

They would spend the evening tending to their home and one another, and then retire to bed?—

She shook herself free of the fancies falling about her like the soft light of dusk. Her marriage to Hew was a charade. She didn’t want a marriage forced by custom or circumstance or threat of ruination. She wanted … something more.

He strode toward her across the packed earth of the yard as if he were a compass needle and she his true north.

As if he had been waiting for her. Lean and strong in his dark blue coat, legs flexing in his pantaloons, a hint of the military in his tall black boots and straight shoulders.

He was a man who commanded, a man with authority over himself and others.

The bolt of bald desire shocked her. Ladies were not to feel this kind of raw longing, or, if they felt, were not to heed but to deny.

She didn’t know how she was supposed to do that. A groom took the reins of the horse, and Hew came to her, his face a mask of courtesy, with a smolder beneath. He held up his hands, and Anne hesitated only a moment before tipping into them.

A wall of sensation sprang up around her, prickling heat and firm, warm flesh and the scent of the summer lake she had loved as a child.

She fought the reckless urge to press her face against the lapels of his coat, run her nose through the folds of his cravat and kiss the heated skin beneath.

He called up some strange craving within her, and like a sprout pushing its way out of the seed that encased it, everything in her reached toward him.

“You’ve time to change,” he said as he set her feet on the ground. “But not much more than that, I’m afraid.”

He didn’t release his hold on her waist, and she didn’t step away. She ought to.

“What has happened?”

“Mother is hosting a dinner party,” he said grimly.

“I know how to behave at dinner, Hew.” Did he suppose she didn’t? Of course, he’d seen little evidence of her behaving. That kiss this morning, in plain sight of his mother and half the servants—His gaze fell to her mouth, and his fingers clenched about her waist. Heat radiated from his fingers.

A delicate lady would not heat all over when a man touched her. A delicate lady did not crave.

Of course, a delicate lady wouldn’t have done most of the things Anne had been doing lately. That elegant shell her mother had tried so hard to cover over Anne was falling away, and the woman emerging beneath, raw and vital, bore almost no resemblance.

“She said she wishes to announce your engagement.” He seemed struggling to connect his thoughts. Because of her? Did she distract him, the way he turned her mind into seeds that scattered on the merest breeze? She smiled at that thought.

“That means,” he added, “everyone will want to know the wedding date.”

“Oh.” The smile fell away. She had thought to have time to decide, to plan. To tease out of the great burl of tangled emotion in her chest a clear apprehension of the future she wanted, and the way towards it.

“What shall we say to them?” She drifted her fingertips down his arms to his wrists, relishing the strength, the heft, the heat of him.

“That kiss,” he growled, his gaze hunting over every feature of her face. “I can think of nothing else.”

Anne chuckled and was amazed at the sound, husky, seductive. Was she the type to allure a man, now? Did the new Anne have this power?

He lowered his head and she tipped hers up to meet him. Apparently the new Anne was a harlot without shame. A wanton who wished to spend her days and all of her nights kissing Hewitt Vaughn.

“You wouldn’t be mauling m’sister in plain view, would you, Vaughn?” came Daron’s drawling voice from the direction of the house. “Had the decency to save it for the bedchamber, before.”

Hew lifted his head, his jaw tightening. “She is my affianced,” he said to Daron.

“Yet I would’ve sworn she was promised to y’r brother.”

Anne sighed. Her brother was a fool, to insult his host. Where did he think he could go if Hewitt turned him out?

The Suttons had been staying at Greenfield at the invitation of Calvin Vaughn, but Calvin was gone and Hewitt was here.

And Hew had said outright he was not a man to honor commitments merely on principle.

Daron looked a bit bosky already, his blue eyes glassy and his cheeks flushed. Whatever his doings with Darch, they had involved drink. Anne’s stomach clenched.

“So the trap is closing,” she said to Hew, her voice low. The trap she’d made and caught them both in. He’d come home for a reprieve from war, from fighting, and she’d merely built him another kind of prison, the very one she’d been trying to escape.

He unclasped his fingers, and cold curled around her waist as his hands fell away. Her lips tingled where his had briefly touched them.

“I don’t know how my mother intends to tell the story,” Hew said, “but it will be lions eating Christians in the Coliseum, once the gossips get hold of the news.”

Refuse to marry. His eyes had captured the twilight, that liminal space where magic happened. Anne studied the scar between his brow, that groove above his lip where she wanted to drag her finger across his mouth to the cleft in his chin.

“You might refuse me,” she said quietly. “This is all my fault. You shouldn’t have to bear the blame.” He was the prodigal son, the hero of Acre returning in all his glory, and she had robbed him of his triumph. Worse, she’d added to his disgrace.

He stared down at her as if she wasn’t some penniless, conniving girl who had tossed over his brother for him. He stared at her as if he could see all her fear and uncertainty and years of fruitless hopes, and he meant to offer her solid ground at last.

“I am not going to refuse you, Anne.” He stepped back. “Now change your frock. Hop to it.”

Anne paused before Daron, who lounged against a fence post of the stable yard. The groom and all the stableboys pretended to be about their business, putting the cart away and walking the horse, but Anne knew they were being observed.

“I hope you will do nothing to shame the name of our family,” she said, rather surprised at herself for finding the temerity to lecture her brother.

Daron returned a feral grin; he saw through her, as always. “Nanny’s going to scold me about better behavior? The wanton found in the bachelor’s bed? Rather too late for me to go about it, I’d say. You’ve torn the pride of this family in two.”

Head high, Anne went inside.

She’d face a hard road as a woman alone, she’d learned that today.

But a harder path lay ahead of the woman in a marriage for the wrong reasons.

Raising children alone while her husband spent their income the way Daron had tossed her dowry into the wind.

Being trapped, like Mrs. Gossett had been, with a man who spoke with his fists.

Better to find a trade and work her fingers to the bone at it, the way Dovey and the widows of St. Sefin’s toiled.

Better to pay her twenty shillings to the aldermen, as Mrs. Lambe had done, and find a means of employment.

The council of a town might tell her where she might live and where she could sell her goods and how often she must go to church, but a husband would have so much more power.

Of course, a woman in love happily handed over that power, as Gwen had, as Dovey had. But they had found men they trusted, and they knew their husbands well before they made that vow. Anne had known Hewitt Vaughn for mere days.

And he had offered his hand and his future to her, though he knew as little about her. The act of either a desperate man, or a very honorable one.

Or a man who did not believe having a wife would change much of anything, and he would simply go on as he always had.

Or perhaps a man in immediate need of funds to repair his family fortunes, who believed an heiress stood before him.

In her room, the young maid was pouring hot water into the basin of the washstand and laying out drying cloths.

“Can you fetch my cambric gown from the clothes press?” Anne wet a cloth and began scrubbing her face clean of the grime of the day. “The one with the scarlet panels in the bodice and the gold sunbursts along the hem. There’s a sheer tunic to go along with, and a matching veil for my hair.”

It was the most luxurious ensemble she had, her one gown made in the height of fashion, or what had been the height this spring when she and her mother went shopping in Shrewsbury.

Their strained budget had provided one new gown to prepare Anne for her journey south, the journey to secure Anne’s marriage to Calvin and Daron’s marriage to Gwen so that that the Sutton coffers might begin taking in money rather than bleeding it out.