If it was on the floor, I was certain I would have seen it. Christopher—at least in drag—is the sort of thing you notice.
“Look out,” Crispin said, and I instantly braced myself for a collision with another dancing couple. It didn’t come. Instead, a hand landed on my shoulder.
“Excuse me,” a voice behind me said—unfamiliar, but distinctly male, “would you mind if I cut in?”
“As a matter of fact,” Crispin began, with an icy glance over my head.
I moved my hand from his upper arm to put it against his chest. “Down, Georgina. He means me, I imagine.”
He looked down at me, shock in his eyes.
“He wants to dance with you,” I clarified.
“I got it, Darling.” He looked up at the gentleman behind me. “I’m sorry, sir. But we’re monogamous.”
“We’re no such thing…” I began, because how dare he, honestly? He’s the least monogamous person in England, and ought rightly to have been struck by lightning for telling a tarradiddle like that.
“Hush, Darling.” He had already taken steps to twirl us both to the edge of the dancefloor, away from the gentleman in the dinner suit, and now he wrapped a hand around my wrist and tugged me along behind him, between the round tables and up to the booth we had claimed for our own earlier. “Good Lord, if I had known that that was likely to happen, I never would have agreed to this.”
I sniggered. “Nothing happened, St George. A handsome, young man asked you to dance. You said no. Nothing at all happened.”
“He was neither handsome nor particularly young. Thirty, if he was a day.”
“And you all of twenty-three,” I jeered. “Today.”
He shot me a scowl over his shoulder. The four people in the first booth still assessed him openly as he stalked by. The couple in the second booth had come up for air now, and did the same. No one spared me a single look. “That was aman, Darling. Amanwanted to dance with me.”
“You’re dressed like a woman,” I pointed out. “What did you expect? Don’t you cut in and take other women away from other men on the dancefloor?”
“I amnota woman!”
He stopped in front of the booth as if he’d run into a wall. I ran into him, and knocked him forward a step. “Ooof!” he grunted when the edge of the table hit him somewhere sensitive. “Bloody hell, Darling…!”
“Sorry,” I said. “Why did you—? Oh.”
Our booth—‘our’ booth—had indeed been invaded and occupied by someone else in the time we’d been gone from it. A young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, this one quite close to our own age, was sitting at the back of it, nursing a glass of what looked like champagne. He was dressed like a woman, in a bobbed, brown wig and a burnt orange gown with beadwork around the neckline, but he was quite clearly a man in spite of it, and of the smear of lipstick he had added to his face.
Two more stemmed glasses were sitting on the table, empty, while a bottle of the bubbly waited in a bucket of ice in the middle of the tablecloth.
The young man—round-faced and impish-looking—smirked up at us, or more accurately at Crispin. “There you are, Astley. I thought that was you.”
There was a moment’s pause, one that stretched out for long enough that I wondered if the young man had mistaken Crispin for Christopher and now Crispin had no idea who he was.
But then— “Montrose,” Crispin said. “I didn’t recognize you for a second. It’s St George now, you know.”
“Of course it is.” The young gentleman nodded. “Congratulations are in order on that, I understand, although I’m sorry for your loss.”
He meant the death of His Grace, Duke Henry, of course, and not Crispin’s mother, but a shadow passed across his—Crispin’s—features nonetheless, at the reminder. “Thank you.”
Montrose gave him a brightly inquisitive look from behind the glasses. “I didn’t expect to see you in a place like this.”
“I’m not usually to be found in places like this,” Crispin told him dryly, “and certainly not dressed in my cousin’s clothes, but it’s my birthday today, and Darling and I decided to do something thrilling to celebrate.”
He pulled me forward.
“Thrilling?” The young man’s eyes, a clear hazel behind the lenses, fastened on me. “Darling?”
“Miss Philippa Darling,” Crispin said formally. “The Honorable Frederick Montrose. Technically, she’s my cousin Christopher’s cousin, my aunt Roslyn’s niece, but the cousin of my cousin is my cousin. Isn’t that right?”
