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’dknown 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 seemedjust 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.