Page 24 of The Sound of Seduction
The Earl of Langley’s voice, clipped and rife with tension, broke the glamour of the moment. “Stan, List hasn’t taken his eyes off us. What do you think he’s planning tonight?”
Stan followed Langley’s warning glance, the Baron’s cold smirk chiseling into his attention. List stood close enough to snuff the joy from the celebration like a billowing curtain dousing a bonfire. Discretion urged Stan to turn away, but fury niggled at his composure. “Andre and I are leaving,” he muttered to Langley, the words weighed against his unease. No sooner had he spoken than Andre approached his shoulder. Stan felt thankful for his friend’s calming presence—a mind so utterly practical that not even vipers like List could unsettle it for long.
“Why are you on the sidelines?” Alfie, the groom, laughed as he joined them. His conspiratorial tone roughly masked an attempt to bring levity amid tension. He bowed briefly to Stan but looked more earnestly at the other man.
“Just keeping the prince here company until we leave,” Andre replied smoothly, his grin polite but distant, as if his mind were already a thousand miles from the ballroom’s golden glow. He had perfected the art of being present without sinking too deeply into any interaction, a skill Stan increasingly envied. “It’s a beautiful celebration,” Andre added as Bea approached, her cheeks tinted with the blush of the newly wedded. Stan greeted her too, momentarily masking his internal storm with as much grace as he could muster. Still, his gaze flicked back to List, whose lurking presence loomed large in his periphery.
“He’s looking at us,” Stan said.
“As long as he’s just looking,” Alfie chimed in quickly, though palpable disdain curdled his words.
“He’s probably plotting his ne—” Andre began, but Bea’s laugh interrupted, slicing the moment cleanly, a gentle curtain between tension and celebration. She slipped her arm affectionately into Alfie’s, and the two radiated a complete happiness that felt invulnerable. Or maybe that was just the illusion love demanded.
Stan exchanged a glance with Andre, signaling they should leave the ball while discretion still allowed it. Perhaps, if Stan left, the Lists would also go, and the women would be safe at the ball. Together, Stan and Andre began weaving through the crowd toward the exit. The conversation shifted sharply as they moved, Andre muttering cold remarks about the Baron’s aura of malice. Though the dialogue hooked into his ears, Stan wasn’t truly listening. The closer they approached the carriages, the more one thought drowned out all others—the sweet nurse in the rose gown with golden threads.
By the time their boots struck the gravel outside, Stan’s thoughts had fully escaped his control. Wendy. Just a short while ago, her dress had shimmered in the ballroom’s light, her delicate smile igniting a dangerous yearning in him. She was a bloom he couldn’t touch. A woman who deserved a man with promises for the future, and not only his shadowed past. Wendy had a brother, Nick, who had proven that a man could seek both love and honor in the same dance with his aristocratic wife, Lady Pippa. But Stan? He felt burdened by his title, his obligations, and the dark pull of conflict. Love, if he even dared call it that, was his greatest risk. Anyone he dared love was a vulnerability. Wendy’s life couldn’t afford his dangers seeping in—yet that didn’t stop the pang of regret tightening in his chest as he stepped into the carriage.
Andre’s hand gripped his shoulder firmly, grounding him. “Stan,” he said in a low murmur, his tone both an anchor and a caution. “The Baron’s presence is no coincidence. But he wasn’t invited.”
Stan’s jaw tightened, but his gaze rested on the dark road ahead, and not back toward the man they were fleeing—or the woman he was leaving behind.
*
Wendy stood atthe edge of the ballroom, her gloved hands curled tightly around the golden fan that dangled from her wrist. The violins played another lively waltz, the music swirling with the laughter of elegant dancers twirling across the polished floor as though it demarcated another world entirely. A world she wasn’t part of—not truly, not when it came to her because she was only a nurse to the Ton, a guest of the Ton; not part of the peerage who could expect a second dance—or a third—from a prince.
Her gaze flitted to Nick and Pippa, who stood nearby, perfectly poised as they exchanged pleasantries with other guests. Pippa’s easy grace made her seem as if she’d belonged to this glittering crowd forever. And Nick—well, when had her brother become so comfortable here? To see him at ease in a world of dukes and viscounts beyond his treatment room simultaneously warmed Wendy’s heart and twisted something deep within her.
A flicker of movement caught her attention, pulling her thoughts elsewhere. Wendy glanced across the room, her breath catching. By the far wall, Andre and Alfie were speaking with the prince, their tones low but strained, their expressions taut. Alfie’s jaw worked as if biting back some retort, and Andre’s gaze was sharp enough to cut glass. Wendy frowned, a faint unease crawling up her spine. It wasn’t like Andre to wear his emotions so plainly—especially not in a public hall like this.
He must have been worried.
The unease grew colder when she noticed Baron von List at the edge of the shadows. He stood as if carved from stone, his dark, assessing eyes fixed on Andre and Alfie with unnerving intensity. Or was it the prince he’d made his target? Wendy couldn’t pinpoint what it was about List that radiated malice—the rigid stillness, the faint smirk, or the fact that it felt like he seemed to take in far more than one ought in such a setting. Whatever it was, it brought with it a chill that settled deep in her chest.
She couldn’t look at this man anymore.
Her gaze swept the room, searching almost unconsciously for the prince’s dark hair and commanding silhouette that had been so distinctive on the dance floor, but now… where was he?
Her pulse quickened, the fan dangling from her wrist swaying slightly as her fingers flexed. Andre was missing too, she realized.
Wendy rushed to Pippa who’d just refilled her glass with punch.
“Have you seen them?” The question slipped out before she could stop herself, the words as quiet as the flutter of her fan. Pippa blinked at her, tilting her head curiously.
“The prince and Andre,” Wendy clarified, her voice catching slightly. “I don’t…” She trailed off, aware of how silly she sounded. Why would their whereabouts matter to her? Yet the question burned anyway, the silence between their last dance and now seeming far too vast.
Pippa’s lightly lilting voice broke the spell. “The prince? Oh, Bea and Alfie went to say good-bye. He left just moments ago,” she said, answering a question Wendy hadn’t even realized she’d asked aloud. “Andre went with him, back to London.”
The words landed harder than Wendy had expected, pulling her thoughts sharply away from Baron von List. “He… left?” Wendy echoed, voice taut with effort. Her fan snapped open with too much force, trembling fingers betraying more than she wished. “Andre and Prince Stan left together?”
“Yes, dear,” Pippa managed with a gentle squeeze of Wendy’s wrist before she nodded in Bea’s direction and made her way through the crowd near the perimeter of the dance floor.
Right, it was a ball.
One of those events Bea and Pippa knew to maneuver, but not Wendy.
She swallowed hard.
Prince Stan had gone. Without a word.
