Three hundred people at minimum. The orchestra was playing a cotillion, the floor was crowded with dancers, and the matrons were arranged along the east wall in their customary formation: fans moving in coordinated half-beats, every entrance tracked, catalogued and filed away for tomorrow’s morning calls. They had elevated the observation of other people’s behavior to a competitive sport, and they were very good at it. Mrs Alderton was nearest the door, her lorgnettealready rising. Lady Pembleton sat beside her, leaning forward in her chair. Mrs Hartwood herself, the hostess, alert at the far end of the row, a woman who had spent three thousand pounds on a ball and intended to get her money’s worth in gossip if she could not get it in gratitude.
He did not glance at any of them. He cut straight across the ballroom floor between two sets of dancers, rude by any measure, and past the refreshment table without stopping, ruder still. He came to a halt in front of the small cluster of chairs near the south windows where Imogen Goodall was seated beside her aunt and her sister and, three chairs to the left, Bethany Mercer.
The room noticed. The room always noticed when the Duke of Ravenhurst moved with purpose, and tonight his purpose was visible from the back of the gallery. He was aware of heads turning behind him, of the cotillion faltering for half a beat as two dancers lost their place watching him cross the floor, of Mrs. Alderton’s lorgnette swinging to follow his path. He did not care about any of it. He cared about one thing, and that was looking up at him from a gilt chair with her gloves buttoned to the elbow, her face perfectly composed and her dark eyes carrying a question she was not going to ask aloud.
“Miss Goodall.” He made his bow. “I should like the supper waltz.”
The supper waltz. Not a country dance. Not a reel. Not even a regular waltz tucked safely in the middle of the evening’s programme. The supper waltz was the most intimate dance of the evening, after which the gentleman was expected to escort the lady to supper and sit beside her for the meal. No unmarried lady of good reputation accepted it from a duke unless she was prepared for every gossip in London to have an opinion about it by breakfast.
Aunt Margery made a small alarmed sound, audible at three paces, that landed somewhere between a gasp and a hiccup. Itcontained, in its brevity, an entire sermon on the subject of ducal presumption and what it meant for a family’s standing when a gentleman of that rank asked one’s eldest niece for a dance that would constitute, in the eyes of every matron in the room, a declaration of serious intent. Cassie’s eyes went round. Her programme slipped half an inch in her lap before she caught it.
Bethany Mercer, from her chair beside the matrons, rose an inch from her seat as if she were going to stand and intervene, held the position for a quarter of a second, her spine rigid, her fan still in her hand, and sat down again. Her face did not change but her knuckles, wrapped around the fan, went white.
Imogen looked up at him. She was wearing the deep ivory gown she had worn to the Marchmont, let out slightly at the waist where someone with careful hands had added a panel of matching silk that was almost invisible unless you were looking for it. But he was looking for it, because looking for the small signs of her poverty had become something his eyes did without consulting him first. Her hair was pinned simply, a few loose curls at her temples, and the small freckle at the base of her throat was visible above the neckline, and he was looking at it before he could stop himself.
She laid her gloved hand in his without speaking.
The silence of the gesture was louder than any answer she could have given. The room heard it. Three hundred people in a Mayfair ballroom watched Imogen Goodall, fourth-season wallflower, daughter of a dead baronet, place her hand in the Duke of Ravenhurst’s palm as if she had been placing her hand in dukes’ palms her entire life and had simply been waiting for the correct one to present itself. There was no flutter. No blush. No downcast eyes or prettily bitten lip or any of the performance that other women deployed when a duke asked them to dance. She placed her hand in his, then met his eyes; and the placingand meeting were so steady and so unadorned that he heard Mrs. Alderton’s lorgnette snap shut from across the room.
He led her to the floor.
The waltz was the new Anglicised form, slower than the German original, the figures longer, the turns more deliberate, the whole construction designed to give two bodies maximum time in proximity while maintaining the fiction that the proximity was choreographic rather than personal. His right hand settled at her waist. Her left hand came to his shoulder. Their other hands met between them; his fingers closing around hers, and the contact arrived through two layers of silk and cotton and settled into the base of his spine and stayed there, a low steady warmth that had no intention of leaving.
The orchestra began. The first notes were a slow descending phrase in three-quarter time, and they started moving. For the first four bars he concentrated on the mechanics of the thing because it was the only way to avoid concentrating on the fact that Imogen Goodall was in his arms and the entire ton was watching and his body was already responding to her proximity with a directness that the mechanics of waltzing could not disguise.
He had waltzed before. He had waltzed with courtesans in private ballrooms and debutantes at public ones, with widows who wanted to be seen with him and married women who wanted to be suspected with him. But the dancing had always been a performance, the steps executed while his mind was elsewhere, his body going through the motions of proximity while his attention floated somewhere above the chandelier and waited for the music to end.
This was not that.
The first turn brought her close enough that her perfume reached him, something light, not expensive, something that smelled of lavender and clean linen and the faintest trace ofsoap, and the simplicity of it went through him in a manner he had not been prepared for. The expensive perfumes he was accustomed to, the heavy French fragrances that his mistresses had worn and that Aurelie’s girls applied by the bottleful, those he could dismiss. He had been dismissing them for years. But this small, clean, honest scent that belonged to a woman who could not afford expensive purchases and who smelled instead of her own skin and her own soap, this was something his body did not know how to dismiss, and it was not trying to.
The second turn brought the edge of her bodice against his waistcoat, a brush of silk against wool that lasted less than a heartbeat and that he registered in every part of his body that had been paying attention since the corridor at the Montford. The memory of the corridor arrived without his permission, bright and specific, the taste of her mouth and the sound she had made when his thumb found her through the muslin. He also remembered the bewildering heat of her kissing him back with her hands fisted in his lapels, and the memory settled into the waltz and made every turn of it dangerous.
The third turn brought her eyes level with his, and she met them, held them, and did not look away.
The room began to soften at the edges. The candles blurred. The faces of the matrons along the east wall became indistinct, and the other couples on the floor became shapes in his peripheral vision, moving, turning and receding until the only steady point in the room was the woman in his arms. The only sound that mattered was her breathing, steady and close, and his own pulse, which had settled into a rhythm that had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the pressure of her hand at his shoulder and the impossible nearness of her face.
His thumb moved against the back of her hand. The silk of her glove was thin enough that he could feel the ridge of her knuckles beneath it, the small bones, the warmth of herskin through the fabric. She did not pull away. Her fingers, if anything, pressed slightly closer against his, and the press sent something down through his wrist and into the pit of his stomach and further down, where his body was beginning to have opinions about the waltz that the waltz was not designed to accommodate.
He was aroused. Standing on the floor of the Hartwood ballroom with three hundred people watching, the most visible man in London holding the most invisible woman in London in his arms, and his member was stiffening slowly and inevitably against his breeches, something that could not be reasoned with or wished away. The fact of it was absurd. He had sat in the laps of courtesans without stirring. He had received the most practiced attentions of the most skilled women in London without more than a polite physical acknowledgement. And now, here, in a public ballroom, fully clothed, separated from Imogen Goodall by two sets of gloves and the careful geometry of the Anglicised waltz, his body was behaving as if the quarter-inch of air between her bodice and his waistcoat were the most provocative thing it had ever encountered.
He adjusted his position slightly, leading her into the next turn with a subtle shift of his hips that disguised, he hoped, the state of affairs below his waistcoat. She followed the lead without hesitation, and for a moment her hip brushed against his thigh, and the contact sent a jolt through him that nearly made him miss the next count.
By the second turn he had stopped pretending the waltz was a waltz. His thumb had found the place at her waist where the boning of her stays met the softer fabric at her side, and he pressed there, slowly, a drag of his thumb against the seam that no one watching could have seen but that registered in her body. Her breath caught, a tiny skip in the steady rhythm, and herfingers at his shoulder tightened for a fraction of a second before she smoothed the grip and continued.
Her stays. The thin wall of whalebone and stitching that sat between his hand and her body, between his thumb and the curve of her waist, between what the ballroom permitted and what the corridor had started. He wanted to put his hand beneath them as he had at the Montford. He wanted to feel her skin under his palm without fabric between them. He wanted to press his mouth to the freckle at the base of her throat and feel her pulse jump under his lips. He wanted, and the specificity of the wanting was beginning to concern him, to know what sound she would make if his mouth found her breast, not through muslin this time but against her bare skin, and whether the sound would be the same sound she had made in the corridor or something new, something only he had heard, something only he would ever hear.
He wanted to know what she looked like underneath the ivory gown. Not abstractly, not in the generalised manner of a man who had undressed enough women to know approximately what lay beneath a gown, stays and shift. Specifically. Her specifically. The particular shape of her body when the fabric was gone, the exact curve of her hip that he could feel through the silk, the real color of the skin at her throat where the freckle sat, whether the flush that climbed her neck when he said something charged would extend below her neckline; how far it would travel and where it would stop.
He kept his face still and his hand at her waist. He kept his eyes on hers, because looking away would have broken something that neither of them was willing to name, and the looking continued through the final rotation, the final turn and the final slowing of the orchestra. When the music stopped, and they stood together on the floor in the sudden silence, with three hundred people watching them stand half a breath apart, heunderstood with a cold quiet clarity that had nothing to do with his body and everything to do with the foreign feeling that had taken up residence behind his ribs since the morning room.
He did not know when it had stopped being the wager. Somewhere between the potted palm and the corridor. Somewhere between the middling tea and the sound she had made when his thumb found her through the muslin. Somewhere in the accumulation of small revelations that had no business being revelations at all: her composure, her wit, her French novels, her refusal to flutter and the quiet certainty with which she had placed her hand in his tonight, as if placing it there were the most natural thing in the world and required no more explanation than breathing.
He released her waist, and she released his shoulder. Their hands remained clasped for one beat too long; his thumb resting against her knuckle through the silk. Then she let go, and the air between them was air again: ordinary, insufficient. The ballroom rushed back at once: loud, hot, and full of people who had witnessed something they would discuss for the remainder of the season, and very likely into the next.
He escorted her to supper and sat beside her. The supper room was smaller than the ballroom, the tables dressed in white linen, the candles lower, and the intimacy of the arrangement was deliberate, designed to give couples who had waltzed together the excuse of proximity over cold chicken and aspic. He poured her champagne. She drank half of it, set the glass down and looked at the tablecloth, and he saw her hand tremble once, briefly, before she folded it in her lap and steadied it.
“You are trembling,” he said, quietly enough that only she could hear.
