“Ah.” The single soft syllable seemed to hold infinite sadness. “I understand. Now I understand. Perhaps in the future you will think differently and understand how it hurts me to be forced to keep it all. What will you do?”
“Avery is going to purchase a commission for me,” he said. “I don’t want him to, but he has made it impossible for me to enlist as a private soldier. It will be with a foot regiment, though. I am not going to have him kitting me out with all I would need as a cavalry officer. Besides, the officers of a foot regiment probably care less than cavalry officers do about having a nobleman’s by-blow among their number. I will not have Avery buying me promotions either. I will move up in the officer ranks on my own merit or not at all.”
“Oh,” she said, and Avery would wager she was smiling, “I do so honor you, Harry. I hope you end up as a general.”
“Hmph,” he said.
“Then I will be able to boast of my half brother, General Harry Westcott,” she said, and Avery knew she was smiling.
“I will excuse myself,” Harry said. “I have the devil of a headache. Ah. Pardon my language if you will, Lady Anastasia.”
Avery heard the drawing room door open and close. When he turned from the window, Anna was back at the fireplace warming her hands over the nonexistent blaze. And he realized—devil take it!—that she was weeping silently. He hesitated for a few moments until she raised a hand and swiped at one cheek with the heel of it. She had turned her head slightly so that he could no longer see her full profile.
“He will look quite splendid in the green coat of the 95th Light Regiment,” he said. “The Rifles. He will probably cause stampedes among the Spanish women.”
“Yes,” she said.
But dash it all. Damn it to hell. He closed the distance between them, drew her into his arms, and held her face against his shoulder just as though she were Jess. Whom she was not. She stiffened like a board before sagging against him. Unlike most women under similar circumstances, though, she did not then proceed to melt into floods of tears. She fought them and swallowed repeatedly. She was virtually dry-eyed when she drew back her head.
“Yes,” she agreed, smiling an only slightly watery smile, “he will look splendid.”
His mind reached for something to say in reply and found . . . nothing.
He kissed her instead.
Devil take it and a thousand and ten damnations, but he kissed her. He did not know which of them was the more startled. It was not even just a fatherly or brotherly or cousinly peck on the lips either. It was a full-on, lips-parted, head-slightly-angled, arms-closing-about-the-woman-to-draw-her-even-closer kind of kiss. It was a man-to-woman kiss. And what the devil was he doing trying to analyze it rather than lifting his head and pretending that after all it was just a kindly, cousinly embrace designed to comfort her?
Pretending? What else was it, then? That was exactly it, was it not?
While he pondered the matter, his lips continued to move over hers, feeling their softness, their moistness. It was surely the most chaste kiss he had indulged in since he was fifteen or thereabouts. Yet it somehow felt like the most lascivious.
This, he thought, his mind verbalizing the biggest understatement of its thirty-one-year existence, was a mistake.
“I will return you to the bosom of your family if you are ready to leave,” he suggested as he raised his head and released his hold on her. He was happy to hear his voice sounding thoroughly bored.
“Oh yes, thank you,” she said—the brisk, sensible schoolteacher. “I am ready.”
Ten
Anna prattled her way through dinner, telling Elizabeth everything there was to tell about growing up in Bath. She dared not stop.
“Is Joel your beau?” Elizabeth asked as they ate their dessert.
“Oh, not really,” Anna said, awash in nostalgia and regret. “We grew up together as the closest of friends. We could always talk upon any subject under the sun or about nothing at all. He was too close to become a beau. Does that make sense? He was more like a brother. And why am I using the past tense?” She felt a bit like weeping.
“Did he ever want to be your beau?” Elizabeth asked.
“A few years ago he fancied himself in love with me,” Anna admitted. “He even asked me to marry him. But he was just lonely. It happens when people leave the orphanage and have no family or even friends beyond its walls. I am sure now he is thankful I said no.”
“He is very handsome?” Elizabeth asked.