They parted, rejoined, hands glancing. Adrian leaned close again. “You are happy, Nancy?” He said it so low she almost missed it.
“What manner of question is that?” She attempted to keep her voice light. “Of course I am happy.”
He smiled, but it faded quickly. “You are not a woman who can be hidden, Nancy. I worry he knows this, and resents it.”
The music shifted, the couples turning in a spiral that brought Nancy and Adrian together again.
She tried to shift the topic. “Why should he resent it? I am the easiest part of his life.”
Adrian’s laugh was soft. “No one has ever called you easy, Nancy. But that is why I admire you.” He held her hand a beat longer than necessary. “If I could—well. It is not for me to say. But you deserve better than to be left on the edges of things.”
She could not answer, so she fixed her gaze on the floor, counting steps. When she looked up, her eyes went straight across the ballroom and collided with Oscar’s.
He was not smiling.
In fact, he looked as if he might murder the next man who so much as breathed in her direction.
Adrian’s hand tightened. “He is jealous, you know.”
“He has no cause to be jealous,” Nancy replied. “I belong to him, in every sense that matters.”
Adrian’s gaze darkened, and for a moment, she wondered if he might say something reckless. Instead, he led her through the final set with a showy grace, as if determined to prove a point.
At the end of the dance, Adrian bowed, then straightened, eyes flicking to a spot just over her shoulder. “You had better go to him,” he said, softer than before. “Before the room is engulfed in flames.”
Nancy turned, and found Oscar striding through the crowd, his every movement radiating fury so contained it was almost a work of art.
She tried to steady herself. She tried to remember that she was the one with the advantage, that he could not touch her, not really.
But he came to her side, took her hand—harder than necessary—and without a word, led her away from the floor. Adrian watched them go with an expression that was unreadable.
Oscar pulled her into a side hallway, where the noise dropped to a murmur. “Is this your idea of merriment?” he demanded, voice so flat it could have cut glass.
“My idea of fun?” She pulled her hand free, though the mark of his grip lingered. “You left me alone in a ballroom full of sharks. What did you expect me to do?”
“Not dance with Eastmere.”
She laughed, but there was no joy in it. “Would you rather I have stood against the wall and wilted? You know me better than that.”
Oscar’s mouth was a hard line. “He is not to be trusted.”
“Neither am I,” she shot back. “That is why you married me, isn’t it?”
He fell silent. Then, suddenly, he took her arm and steered her back toward the main hall. “We are waltzing.”
She dug her heels in. “Oscar?—”
But he was already pulling her onto the floor, where the first notes of the waltz had begun to swell.
He did not ask. He simply took her in his arms, holding her closer than was strictly proper, and began to move.
The air between them crackled. Nancy tried to match his steps, but he danced with a force she had never seen before, as if daring her to keep up or be left behind.
He did not look at her. He kept his eyes fixed somewhere just over her shoulder.
They spun, circled, whirled through the crowd, and Nancy could feel the eyes following them, the whispers mounting.
When he finally spoke, it was so quiet she almost missed it. “You are too easy with him.”
