The music ended, but he didn’t release her at once. They remained suspended in the posture of the dance, and she felt the weight of a hundred stares.
“Kiss me,” she said quietly.
For the first time since she’d met him, he actually blinked. “What?”
“Kiss me,” she repeated, softer this time. “On the hand.”
A faint, unmistakable colour touched his cheekbones—gone almost before it appeared, but she saw it. He straightened, as though schooling himself back into composure.
“I thought you meant…” He stopped, jaw tightening.
“What?” she pressed.
“Nothing,” he said too swiftly, recovering his equilibrium like a shutter snapping closed. “It is merely—”
“Unexpected? Unmanageable?” Her chin lifted in challenge. “Everything you despise?”
His eyes flashed—something like irritation, something like something else entirely.
“Very well,” he said, voice dropping to a low, controlled register.
He reached for her gloved fingers, and she felt the slightest tremor he tried to hide. Slowly—almost reverently—he lifted her hand. And as he brought his lips to her knuckles, he did not look at her hand.
He looked ather.
The kiss itself was perfectly proper. The eye contact was not.
A ripple went through the ballroom—fans fluttering, whispers blooming like wildfire.
He released her hand with the barest brush of his thumb. “There,” he murmured, voice rougher than she’d ever heard it. “Scandal enough for you?”
Before she could answer, he was leading her off the dance floor, past the shocked and delighted faces of the ton, to a relatively quiet corner where champagne and whispered commentary flowed in equal measure.
“That was...” she began.
“Necessary,” he finished, accepting two glasses from a passing footman and offering her one. “Observe.” He inclined his head subtly toward the ballroom. “We have given them precisely what they craved—romantic spectacle, a hint of passion, the suggestion that beauty has succeeded in taming the Beast.”
She glanced around. Everywhere she looked, faces were turned toward them—not with hostility, but with avid interest, envy, speculation. The story they’d just told was already taking root.
“Is that what this is?” she asked. “You being tamed?”
“Hardly.” He sipped his champagne. “If anything, you’re the one being domesticated. Wearing the jewels I selected. The dress I recommended. Dancing to my lead.”
“I chose to wear them.”
“Did you?” he countered mildly. “Or did you simply recognise the wisdom of my guidance?”
She wanted to argue—but the truth was complicated, tangled somewhere between autonomy and strategy. She had worn the blue silk. She had worn his sapphires. But none of it had felt like surrender.
“His Grace, the Duke of Rothwest.” A smooth masculine voice intruded. “And the enchanting new Duchess, Lady Rothwest.”
Celine turned to find Lord Ashworth approaching—the same Lord Ashworth who had once written her abysmal sonnets.
“Ashworth,” the Duke said, his greeting cool enough to frost glass.
“I must congratulate you both,” Ashworth continued, eyes lingering on Celine with a familiarity she disliked. “Though Iconfess I’m astonished. I had no notion Lady Rothwest preferred matches of… such drama.”
“Preferences evolve,” the Duke said mildly, though his hand settled at Celine’s waist with a definitiveness that brooked no argument. “As do standards.”
