Page 71 of When He Was Wicked
Yet Annabelle had worn it and met the man she was to marry. Annabelle had handed over the jewel to Henrietta being convinced the charm had worked for her in finding her duke.Perhaps it was a mere coincidence. That silent reassurancedid not make Henrietta feel any better. She felt a sensation of drowning creep upon her, and whirling around, she dashed inside the manor and ran up to her bedchamber. Once inside, she went over to the small vanity, opened the small jewelry box, and searched out the stone with trembling fingers. The attached chain slid through her fingers, startlingly warm to the touch when she’d anticipated it being cold.
Henrietta stared at it for a long time. The rose quartz was rather beautiful.
“This is just a stone…a piece of jewelry,” she said in the silence of her chamber.
Closing her palm around it, she pressed it against her chest and shut her eyes. What harm could there be in wearing it? Henrietta wanted marriage and children. A beautiful and happy family to call her own. That she could feel that hope slipping from her with each season felt unbearable. The reminder that at least she still had her paintings and a measure of security from selling them, provided little comfort against those hopes fading like ashes tossed away by the wind.
She took a deep breath, placed the chain around her neck, and fastened the delicate clasp. Henrietta felt the charm stone nestled against her decolletage. It was no longer warm but cold and mocking her silly romantic ideas. Blowing an annoyed breath, she started to take it off, but then the memory of Annabelle’s certainty wafted through Henrietta.
Smiling, she decided to leave it on and made her way outside. She did not join her cousins, who laughed and shrieked in the distance with her adorable Zeus. Instead, Henrietta walked along the park wall of the large estate, intending to visit the cottage in the woods where she did most of the works that she sent to Cousin Jeremy for sale. Thankfully there was no one about to question where she went, and Henrietta ambled along, thinking about the piece that Jeremy wanted her to replicate.She had refused, wanting each of her paintings to be unique, and was not interested in producing the same work several times. He had been adamant that a countess who saw her painting in another’s home wanted the same. Her cousin had offered an impressive sum of fifty pounds for the painting, but she still refused.
A low cursed grunt had her pausing to look around. There was no one behind her or before her on the woodland pathway. Henrietta wrinkled her nose, certain she had heard a noise. It came again, and she snapped her head upward to the towering willow tree. There was a fashionably arrayed gentleman on a branch peeking at her cottage.
An odd wariness rolled down her spine. She could not discern his identity from where she stood, but his mode of dress said he was a very wealthy gentleman. And Henrietta was certain he was staring at her cottage. There was nothing else in that direction of the woodland for miles. The cottage had been an old groundsman’s dwelling. His family had increased with a wife and two children, and her grandmother had bestowed upon him a larger cottage.
Henrietta had made this place another of her private retreats for the last two years, and her grandmother had allowed her to use it without any interference. The man shifted on the branch, and a soft gasp escaped her when she noted a telescope in his hands.
What was he doing?
Determined to see what he spied upon, she toed off her half-boots, grabbed onto the lower branch and hauled herself up. A sharp grunt came from her, and Henrietta almost groaned. It had been some years since she climbed another of her grandmother’s trees. Still, surely it was like dancing. One never forgot the steps. The gentleman was so intent on his outrageous spying that he did not hear her bumbling ascent. Henriettaeven stepped onto the same branch he perched on, and he did not shift his attention away from whatever he stared at. She followed his line of sight and saw her thatched- roof cottage in the distance with the small garden behind it which she tended. There was nothing else of interest, and she took a few seconds to scan the surrounding woodlands.
Henrietta cast a sideways glance at the gentleman. “Whatever is so intriguing about my cottage, sir?”
She could not adequately put into words the sense of astonishment felt when the gentleman jerked, evidently startled, and virulently cursed, “Bloody hell!” before slipping on the branch and then tumbling from the tree to land precisely on some shrubs with a muffledoomph.
CHAPTER TWO
Henrietta pressed her hand over her palpitating heart and stared down at the gentleman sprawled atop the shrubs. “Do not move, sir. I shall procure some help right away!”
Moving as fast as she could, she scrambled down from the tree. Panting at the exertion, she faltered when she realized he was standing and staring at her with one of the blackest scowls she’d ever seen on another.
Oh, dear.
Yet the beauty of his eyes robbed her of breath for a precious second. They were somewhere between blue and gray, a swirling mix that seemed to darken with ire the longer she stared at him. He had an aquiline nose, savage cheekbones, and hair as black as a raven’s feathers. This gentleman was appallingly handsome.
The man was impeccably dressed in dark breeches and a matching jacket, with a very fine apricot silk waistcoat and waterfall cravat. Unusually, despite wearing clothes more suitable for Town than the country, he was wearing knee-high boots, which Henrietta thought sensible if he was going to be climbing trees.
A dart of shock went through Henrietta as she recognized him. This gentleman was Lord Simon Barrington, Earl of Hardwick—one of society’s most notorious rogues and paradoxically one of their best catches.
What was he doing here?
She took a halting step toward him. “Thank heavens you are unharmed, my lord! You took quite a spill.”
“Fortunate for you, Miss Sutton, all my bones are intact.”
Her heart jolted and she blinked in astonishment. “I…. How do you know who I am, my lord?”
“We met a year ago at Lady Trembley’s ball.”
An odd pleasure prickled along her shoulders.And he noticed me?
A small smile touched his mouth, and his blue-gray gaze held hers. “No need to appear so surprised, Miss Sutton. One does not forget fine eyes like yours.”
Oh! Handsome and sought-after gentlemen did not remember wallflowers like her, supposedly, or considered their dark blue eyes as particularly fine. She was, for a singular moment, at a loss for words. Finally, she said, “Why were you spying on the cottage?”
His eyes gleamed. “Ah, yes, I now recall you claimed it to be yours; however, my reconnaissance says it belongs to the elusive painter, Mr. Henry Atwood.”
Hearing her pseudonym sent her heart racing. “You are looking for Henry Atwood?”
