A Night Like This (Smythe-Smith Quartet #2)(67)

But the joke was on her. He already had it. She’d gone and done the most foolish thing imaginable. She had fallen in love with a man she could never have.
Daniel Smythe-Smith, Earl of Winstead, Viscount Streathermore, Baron Touchton of Stoke. She didn’t want to think about him, but she did, every time she closed her eyes. His smile, his laugh, the fire in his eyes when he looked at her.
She did not think he loved her, but what he felt must have come close. He had cared, at least. And maybe if she’d been someone else, someone with a name and position, someone who didn’t have a madman trying to kill her . . . Maybe then when he had so foolishly said, “What if I married you?” she would have thrown her arms around him and yelled, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
But she didn’t have a Yes sort of life. Hers was a series of Noes. And it had finally landed her here, where she was finally as alone in body as she had been for so many years in spirit.
Her stomach let out a loud groan, and Anne sighed. She’d forgotten to buy supper before coming back to her boardinghouse, and now she was starving. It was probably for the best; she was going to have to make her pennies last as long as she could.
Her stomach rumbled again, this time with anger, and Anne abruptly swung her legs over the side of the bed. “No,” she said aloud. Although what she really meant was yes. She was hungry, damn it, and she was going to get something to eat. For once in her life she was going to say yes, even if it was only to a meat pasty and a half pint of cider.
She looked over at her dress, laid neatly over her chair. She really didn’t feel like changing back into it. Her coat covered her from head to hem. If she put on some shoes and stockings and pinned up her hair, no one would ever know she was out in her nightgown.
She laughed, the first time she’d made such a sound in days. What a strange way to be wicked.
A few minutes later she was out on the street, making her way to a small food shop she passed every day. She’d never gone inside, but the smells that poured forth every time the door opened . . . oh, they were heavenly. Cornish pasties and meat pies, hot rolls, and heaven knew what else.
She felt almost happy, she realized, once she had her hands around her toasty meal. The shopkeeper had wrapped her pasty in paper, and Anne was taking it back to her room. Some habits died hard; she was still too much of a proper lady to ever eat on the street, despite what the rest of humanity seemed to be doing around her. She could stop and get cider across the street from her boardinghouse, and when she got back to her room—
“You!”
Anne kept walking. The streets in this neighborhood were so loud, filled with so many voices, that it never occurred to her that a stray “You!” might actually be directed at her. But then she heard it again, closer.
“Annelise Shawcross.”
She didn’t even turn around to look. She knew that voice, and more to the point, that voice knew her real name. She ran.
Her precious supper slipped from her fingers and she ran faster than she would have ever thought herself capable. She darted around corners, shoved her way through crowds without so much as a begging of pardon. She ran until her lungs burned and her nightgown stuck to her skin, but in the end, she was no match for George’s simple yell of—
“Catch her! Please! My wife!”
Someone did, probably because he sounded like he’d be ever so grateful, and then, when he arrived at her side, he said to the man whose burly arms were holding her like a vise, “She’s not well.”
“I’m not your wife!” Anne yelled, struggling against her captor’s grasp. She twisted and turned, smacking his leg with her hip, but he would not be swayed. “I’m not his wife,” she said to him, trying to sound reasonable and sane. “He’s mad. He’s been chasing after me for years. I’m not his wife, I swear.”
“Come now, Annelise,” George said in a soothing voice. “You know that’s not true.”
“No!” she howled, bucking against both of the men now. “I am not his wife!” she yelled again. “He’s going to kill me!”
Finally, the man who had caught her for George began to look unsure. “She says she’s not yer wife,” he said with a frown.
“I know,” George said with a sigh. “She has been this way for several years. We had a baby—”
“What?” Anne howled.
“Stillborn,” George said to the other man. “She never got over it.”
“He lies!” Anne yelled.
But George just sighed, and his duplicitous eyes brimmed with tears. “I have had to accept that she will never again be the woman I married.”
The man looked from George’s sad noble face to Anne’s, which was contorted with rage, and he must have decided that of the two, George was more likely to be sane, so he handed her over. “Godspeed,” he said.
George thanked him profusely, then accepted his aid and his handkerchief to combine with his own to form bindings for Anne’s hands. When that was done, he gave her a vicious yank, and she stumbled up against him, shuddering with revulsion as her body pressed up against the length of his.
“Oh, Annie,” he said, “it is so nice to see you again.”
“You cut the harness,” she said in a low voice.
“I did,” he said with a proud smile. Then he frowned. “I thought you’d be more seriously injured.”
“You could have killed Lord Winstead!”
George just shrugged, and in that moment he confirmed all of Anne’s darkest suspicions. He was mad. He was utterly, completely, loonlike mad. There could be no other explanation. No sane individual would risk killing a peer of the realm in order to get to her.