Aware of eyes on their exchange, Alice carefully chose her words as she looked to Lyman and Mitchell, hoping they would get her hint. ‘Yes, I would like a dance.’
‘Then let’s begin,’ Hugh said, taking her hand in a sure grip.
His hand shouldn’t have felt possessive, nor familiar, and she almost yanked it away. It wasn’t that she wasn’t above making a scene when it came to Hugh. She had done so many times in the past. However, tonight was her only chance to search Lyman’s house, and she couldn’t argue or have more delays.
So she allowed his hand to stay, and it held hers longer than the dance provided. The dance that she knew well, but for the first time somehow didn’t know at all.
It was because Hugh was holding her hand. His palm pressed to hers, their fingers tangling, his callused fingertips brushing her wrist. The fact that he drew her closer as they joined the other dancers.
It was a polite dance, with simple steps, but the revelry had started long ago and drinking had blurred the lines of formality. Already the dancers were bumping into each other, and parts of the circle were too tight. But Hugh arranged them in a space, and Alice attempted to concentrate on the other dancers and not the man still holding her hand.
But for every step she took he was there beside her. For every nod and smile to the dancer on her left, she had to give a nod to Hugh. And while one movement was mere polite formality, the other felt like something else. A dance, surely, but one she didn’t know the steps to.
And with every precise turn of the bodies within their large circle she became all the more aware of every precise step that she took with him. As if she did two dances. One with the circle of people around her, and one that encompassed only him.
‘You talk much with Mitchell,’ Hugh said, inclining his head in order to be heard without shouting.
‘As you know, there is much for us to talk about.’
Alice turned, released Hugh’s grip, turned again and he took her hand.
‘The barn restoration is on your property.’ Hugh stepped forward again. ‘And yet you spend a lot of time in each other’s homes.’
They kept their voices low, and this wasn’t a conversation she wanted heard by anyone. It seemed the dance agreed with her, for the music and the circles changed.
Hugh released his hand and crooked his arm with hers. Locked as they were, their swaying brought them closer. She felt the pull of his sleeves against hers, his scent, the warmth of his body. The pressure and strength of his arm linked with hers. With the raising of their right arms, his left tightened to hold her for the turn. She knew the deadly strength in his arms, felt the keening need to know more.
The turn was successful, and she released her breath and her arm.
He had sounded almost jealous—but he’d sounded like that before, in the garden. When he’d followed her there to find information regarding the King.
‘You are following me.’
‘It’s a small town,’ he said.
Which made her all the more suspicious.
‘One you’ve returned to though you have no ties here.’
He locked his arm with hers again, tensing it more than required by the dance steps. It brought her closer to him.
‘No, I wouldn’t have ties to themerchantshere, now would I?’
What did the merchants have anything to do with anything? He was from nobility, and far above her station.
‘Your father was a knight.’
This time he purposely brought her closer. ‘Do you think I’m an outcast and should have remained one? I wasn’t born here, so therefore don’t belong?’ A quick turn of their bodies and their backs were to each other before he was at her side again. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but I have a right to be here as much as you.’
She stumbled. His arm linked with hers and supported her until she matched his step again. He didn’t say any more and neither did she.
She couldn’t. It hadn’t mattered to her that he wasn’t born here. But it was clear it mattered to him.
All those years he’d helped his father, fought the boys in the town who had made fun of his poverty, of his father’s drunkenness.
She had only seen it as heroic, had only ever seen the decency and the goodness in him. Never had she seen his childhood and his actions as a source of shame. And yet his words cut with embarrassment, with pain.
Run away, Alice, before you do something you’ll regret.
