A weary sense of déjà-vu gnawed at Anya as she walked back toward Covent Garden. Going to the country was a sensible precaution, but she hated the thought of running away. It felt like cowardice. The fact that she needed to hide from Petrovyet againmade her blood boil with impotent frustration.
She kicked a flurry of leaves with her boot, startling a nearby pigeon. If she were a man, she’d have faced Petrov long ago on a dueling field. She’d have made him pay for his treatment of her, and for his treachery. Justice would have been served.
As a woman, she had no such recourse, nor did she have a male champion to stand on her behalf. How many more times would she have to disrupt her life to escape men like Vasili Petrov?
Chapter 8.
Benedict poured two generous tumblers of brandy and held them out. Alex nodded his thanks, but Seb barely roused from his gloomy contemplation of the fire.
“Alex, do you have any idea why our friend is frowning at my fireplace as if he wants to tear it apart?” Benedict poured himself a glass of amber liquid. “Did someone disparage the cut of his coat? Malign his cravat?”
Alex snorted in amusement. “It’s even worse than that, I’m afraid. The end of days is upon us. Seb’s finally met a woman who could resist him.”
“You don’t say?” Benedict slid sideways into his own leather wingback and hooked one knee over the armrest. “Tell me more.”
Seb shot them a disgruntled glare. They sat like two hefty, irritatingly good-looking bookends on either side of him. “Oh, bugger off.”
“That’s whatshesaid, I gather.” Benedict snickered. “Only rather more politely. Where did he meet this miracle?”
“At Haye’s,” Alex supplied. “Last week. Seb tried to engage her ‘services,’ but it turns out the woman was only a visitor, and not one of Haye’s infamous girls. Neither the prospect of five hundred pounds nor Seb’s devastating good looks could sway her.”
Ben opened his eyes wide in feigned astonishment. “But who could resist all that manly glowering? And the brooding. No one does dark and brooding like our Seb. Not even Byron.” He pursed his lips as he tried not to laugh. “She must have been blind as well as simple, Seb. You had a lucky escape.”
Seb sent him a poisonous glare. “Will you shut up, before I throw you out the window?”
“You can’t.” Ben chuckled. “This is my house. It would be unforgivably rude. And Georgie would kill you. She’s very much against defenestration. Especially when it involves her husband.”
“She’d forgive me. Eventually,” Seb said darkly.
Benedict laughed, uncowed. “Does this mystery lady have a name?”
“Anna Brown. Although if that’s her real name, I’m the fat Prince of Wales. She had a foreign accent, French mixed with something else. She certainly wasn’t English.”
The name Anna Brown was all wrong for her, Seb thought crossly. It conjured images of a dull, dried-up spinster, not a luscious blue-eyed beauty whose every gaze was a challenge and whose body called to his in the most sinful of ways.
“He’s been looking for her all week,” Alex continued, clearly relishing Seb’s discomfort. “And as you can tell from his expression, he’s had no luck.”
“It’s as if she’s disappeared into thin air,” Seb grumbled. “I asked the girls at the brothel, but none of them would tell me anything.”
No amount of bribery had worked, and in truth, he’d been astonished by their loyalty. He’d offered life-changing sums, but none of them had talked and they’d earned his grudging respect. In his experience, most people had a price at which they’d conveniently discard their morals and their so-called allies. But the whores had protected Miss Brown with silence.
She’d clearly earned their trust and affection. From his years in the army, he knew that inspiring such devotion was no small accomplishment.
It was difficult to find someone in a city with over a million inhabitants, but not impossible. When asking at Haye’s had failed, he’d enlisted his Bow Street resources and his contacts in London’s criminal underworld, confident they would succeed in unearthing “Miss Brown’s” true identity and location in no time.
They’d failed.
“We’re supposed to be the finest bloody investigators in England,” Seb growled to nobody in particular. “Our network of informants stretches from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. How can one small, extremely distinctive woman evade us? It beggars belief.”
Benedict took a slow sip of his brandy. “Why are you still looking for her, if she refused you? There are plenty more fish in the sea.”
Seb took a gulp from his own tumbler and tried to find words that wouldn’t make him sound like a raving lunatic. He could barely explain it to himself.
“There was just… something about her. I don’t know. She’s a mystery. An enigma. I want to know why she turned me down. I hate it when a case remains unsolved.”
Alex and Ben shared a knowing look that immediately raised his hackles. He finished his drink and crossed to the sideboard for a refill.
When he’d first seen Anna Brown at Haye’s, he’d almost lost the power of speech. He’d seen hundreds of beautiful women, had slept with plenty of them over the years, but none of them had made the world stand still, as she’d done that evening. He’d felt a gut punch of recognition, of connection. Which was clearly impossible, because they’d never met before. And yet his every sense had reached out, seeking her, wanting her. Byron, or Shelley, or another of those overly dramatic poets would have said his soul called out to hers, or something equally nauseating. Still, it had been the strongest reaction he’d felt for anything or anyone in a very long time, and he wanted to explore it further.
