She didn’t need a lord hounding her heels.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“How much more did I take off you? Fifty pounds and call it even?”
“Fifty pounds?”
“I know for a fact that I took more off the others, but I’ll be generous—fifty-five.”
That would leave her with seventy-nine pounds—and the ring.
His jaw tensed and released. “Did you know Sir Felix before tonight?”
She laughed—and she didn’t much like that laugh. It sounded wholly composed of bitterness. The sort of laugh that corroded from the inside. In her previous line of employment, she’d been acquainted with that laugh from the older strumpets.
Of a sudden, a loud, blustery voice that Tilly once knew all too well cut through the music and gaiety, “I knew I knew you from somewhere. By gads, I knew it!”
She felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her and her irritatingly intense dance partner to a full stop. The next second, she was face to face with Sir Felix. Though he was wearing a mask, there was no mistaking the mean glint in his eye that he used to get. And to think once she’d believed him the handsomest man in the world…
“Now,” he bellowed, his voice ripe with drunken belligerence, “what was your name again?”
Like that, the magic of the night vanished once and for all.
There would be no getting it back.
Tilly felt like an animal whose foot had been snared in a trap.
Run, urged the little animal being inside her. Run as fast as your legs can go…run!
And that was exactly what she did.
She shook off the hands of both of these men who each wanted something from her—nothing she felt inclined to part with voluntarily—and she let that little animal being take over and she ran, paying no heed to the bodies she muscled through and shouldered past…the rooms and corridors she dashed through that only a few hours ago had gobsmacked her with awe…the newly purchased cloak she was leaving behind… Nothing was going to stand between her and freedom.
Outside and through the garden lit by sporadically hung lanterns and the twinkling stars above, she made a series of lefts and rights through the Royal Pavilion’s grounds until she reached the street, then it was more lefts and rights down streets she didn’t know until she was certain she didn’t hear the heavy, rhythmic thud of male footsteps behind her. At last, she slowed her pace, her lungs struggling to catch her breath, her mind racing to gather her bearings.
And while she might not have the least idea where her feet had led her, a small cheer of triumph wouldn’t quiet down and she realized she was smiling.
Couldn’t stop, in fact.
The little animal being inside her had never failed her in the past, and it hadn’t tonight, either.
An amazed laugh erupted from her.
Sir Felix.
Well, wasn’t he a ghost from the past come to life?
And, oh, didn’t it feel just that good to have gotten something off him. A corrective balancing of the scales, as she saw it.
But her mind had no interest in tarrying on Sir Felix.
It was that other gent it wanted to linger over.
Now that she had a moment to properly reflect, what had been his angle?
With a little breathing room, she considered the possibility that she’d gotten it wrong back in the ballroom. That man hadn’t wanted the £100 vowel or the fifty-five pounds.
He’d wanted something else from her.
