her wide, birthing hips, but there had always been the chance.
She closed her eyes for a moment, almost in mourning. She was already thinking as if the marriage was a
fait accompli.
She’d been telling herself that she might still refuse, but that was just the desperate corner of her brain trying to assert itself. The practical part of her had already accepted it.
So there it was. She really would marry Lord Newbury if he asked. As repulsive and horrifying as it was, she’d do it.
She sighed, feeling utterly defeated. There would be no Rome for her, no romance, no a hundred other things she couldn’t even bring herself to think about. But her family would be provided for, and as her grandmother had said, perhaps Newbury would die soon. It was a wicked, immoral thought, but she didn’t think she could enter the marriage without clutching onto it as her salvation.
“You seem rather pensive,” came the warm voice from beside her.
Annabel nodded slowly.
“Penny for them.”
She smiled wistfully. “Just thinking.”
“Of all the things you need to do,” he guessed. Except it didn’t sound like a question.
“No.” She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “All the things I’m never going to get to do.”
“I see.” He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “I’m sorry.”
She turned suddenly, shaking the fog from her eyes and settling on his face with a frank gaze. “Have you ever been to Rome? It’s a mad question, I know, because I don’t even know your name, and I don’t
want
to know your name, at least not tonight, but have you ever been to Rome?”
He shook his head. “Have you?”
“No.”
“I have been to Paris,” he said. “And Madrid.”
“You were a soldier,” she stated. Because what else would he have been, seeing such cities at such a time?
He gave a little shrug. “It’s not the most pleasant way to see the world, but it does get the job done.”
“This is the farthest I have ever been from home,” Annabel said.
“Here?” He looked at her, blinked, then pointed his finger straight down. “This heath?”
“This heath,” she confirmed. “I think Hampstead is farther from home than London. Or maybe it’s not.”
“Does it matter?”
“It does, actually,” she said, surprising herself with her answer, because obviously it
didn’t
matter.
And yet it felt like it should.
“One can’t argue with that kind of certainty,” he said in a smile-tinged murmur.
She felt herself grin. “I very much enjoy being certain.”
“Don’t we all?”
“The best of us, perhaps,” she said archly, getting into the spirit of their game.
“Some say it’s foolhardy to be so eternally certain.”
“Some?”
“Oh, not me,” he assured her, “but some.”
She laughed, deep and true, all the way from her belly. She was loud, and uncouth, and it felt
wonderful.
He chuckled along with her, then asked, “Rome, I assume, is on your list of things you’ll never get to do?”
“Yes,” she said, her lungs still quivering from merriment. It no longer seemed so sad, that she would never see Rome. Not when she’d just laughed so hard and so well.
“I’ve heard it can be dusty.”
They were both facing forward, so she turned, her profile lined up over her shoulder. “Really?”
He turned, too, so they were looking straight at one another. “When it doesn’t rain.”
“This is what you’ve heard,” she stated.
He smiled, but just a little bit, and not even with his mouth. “This is what I’ve heard.”
His eyes … oh, his eyes. They met hers with the most startling directness. And what she saw there … It wasn’t passion, because why would it be passion? But it was still something amazing, something hot, and conspiratorial, and …
Heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking. Because as she stared at him, at this beautiful man who might as well have been a figment of her imagination, all she could see was Lord Newbury’sface, florid and flaccid, and
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