What was she to do now?
Return to Inverness?
Run away to the Continent?
Under no condition could she flee to Ireland; wild horses could not drag her onto that island thathegoverned.
To the colonies?
India, perhaps. They said the weather was nice and hot there.
Viola groaned and splashed water onto the wooden floor.
Stay in London anyway?
Assuming she stayed… Maybe, maybe it wasn’t for the worst.
He must be staying in the family residence on St James’s Square.
But she was here. Not nearly far enough away as she would have liked, but maybe that was not a problem.
For they never, ever needed to meet again. Not if she was clever and took particular care not to meet him. She could hide in her guise as a spinster cousin and stay with Georgiana and Lily. No one would even notice her.
She’d have to stay far away from Parliament, of course. Make a detour about St James’s Square.
The hard, icy knot inside her eased somewhat. That seemed doable.
And she was fairly certain Sebastian would never visit the anatomy school, nor Newgate prison.
She would avoid Almack’s like the plague from now on, as well as other balls. She didn’t need to attend any ball ever again, or other social events. In fact, she could just wall herself into her house on Bird Street and never set foot outside until she finished her novel.
That was what she had come here to do, after all.
It had been nine years.
Nine dreary, long years.
Where had the time gone?
It had flitted away as if it were nothing at all.
Deep inside, she still felt like the gauche seventeen-year-old who’d fallen so deeply, hopelessly, desperately, painfully in love with him, from the moment she’d climbed that crumbling tower and seen him stride into her life out of nowhere at all.
A sad smile crossed her face as she remembered that fateful day.
A well-dressed, neat and trim young man, tall and handsome, the stuff of every girl’s dream, had wandered into her life just like that. He’d set a foot on a stone and looked pensively over the land that spread out before them. He looked vulnerable. Lonely. She’d blinked and rubbed her eyes and leaned out of that tower window to catch a better view of that miraculous creature, and then her foot had slipped, and she’d lost hold and stumbled, right out of that window and down to her doom.
Right into his arms.
And when he’d caught her so efficiently and their eyes had locked—much like they had today, and a shiver ran down her spine as she remembered it—she thought she’d drowned in a sea of molten blue-green.
Then he’d tossed her into the nettles.
Viola snorted.
Lord, how he had detested her from the very first.
She rubbed her arms in a half-hearted attempt at washing herself. She couldn’t really blame him. She’d done her best to make him notice her, to be a thorn in his side. But there was something about him that always drew out the worst in her. He made her so nervous she kept stumbling, falling, spilling, spitting, and who knew what else whenever he was around. She had followed him around like a lovelorn puppy, attempting to be in whatever room he occupied in that vast mansion.
