The music swelled. Laughter rippled through the audience. Beatrice heard it all from a distance.
Her mind kept moving backward, searching for the moment Gideon had become something other than Dash’s friend.
The day he came to Beckman House and she nearly clipped him with a throwing knife?
Hatherleigh, and Gideon stepping between them?
The lessons. The garden party. The archery. The boat.
His hands. His voice. That almost-kiss.
He had always been kind. Overbearing at times—but kind.
This spring, though, he had been different.
As had she.
She was so thoroughly lost in the memory that when the curtain fell and the audience stirred to life around her, she started.
Intermission.
Already?
Beatrice blinked as the audience rose around her, the theater swelling with movement and conversation.
And almost without meaning to, she looked across to the opposite boxes. Then lower, to the crowded tiers below.
Only observing, she told herself. Only taking in the room.
Liar.
She knew precisely whom she was looking for.
And Gideon was, unfortunately, nowhere to be seen.
The disappointment was so unreasonable that she could not bear to sit there and feel it.
So she stood.
Lark, who had been attending to Lady Theodosia, glanced over at once, but Beatrice gave her a reassuring look and shaped the smallest silent promise with her lips.
I’ll return shortly.
Then, before she could reconsider the wisdom of wandering anywhere in search of a man she was absolutely not searching for, Beatrice slipped from the box and into the crowded corridor beyond.
It was not air she required, not truly. Nor even solitude.
What she needed was some sort of action she could take to alleviate her restlessness.
And then, as though the world was listening to her innermost thoughts, trouble appeared.
Colonel Fairleigh stood a little apart from the main flow of the crowd, his manner easy, his smile well-practiced.
He pressed a glass into the hand of a young lady Beatrice recognized only vaguely as Miss Barlow, one of this spring’s debutantes. She was fresh-faced, pale-gowned, and far too new to know how to escape a gentleman without appearing rude.
Fairleigh leaned nearer than propriety allowed.
Nearer than comfort allowed as well, judging by the way the girl’s shoulders stiffened and her body angled subtly away from him.
