But something inside her had shifted. She was beginning to understand.
“Again, tomorrow?” He cocked a brow in a not-quite-challenging way.
Beatrice straightened at once. “Absolutely.”
Gideon’s mouth curved faintly as he shoved his arms into the sleeves of his coat. “Good,” he said. “Because you need to practice if this is going to work.”
And with just three days until the next ball, she was going to need to learn fast.
Three more days of lessons, four in total.
The next day, for her second lesson, Gideon insisted on going over everything she’d learned in the first lesson.
He corrected her stance. Adjusted her grip. Showed her, with infuriating calm, how easily her balance might be compromised—and how to recover it.
She resented him for it. The repetition. The fact that she needed it.
The third lesson was more interesting.
There was less correcting. More doing. His hand at her wrist. At her shoulder. At her waist. Guiding. Steadying. Entirely too close.
Closer than any waltz had ever required. But it was all necessary.
The fourth?—
The fourth stretched on until both of them were thoroughly spent.
But she no longer flinched at the contact. She moved more surely. Thought more quickly.
And when he gave the smallest nod of approval, a ridiculous little bloom of pleasure opened in her chest.
Which was absurd.
When he criticized her, she argued. Naturally.
More than once, the argument ended with them both on the floor—her triumphant, him unrepentant—and, on at least one occasion, laughing.
She hadn’t laughed like that in a very long time.
The realization alone might have undone her.
These lessons, Beatrice found herself thinking more than once, were far better than the ballroom lessons she'd been forced to endure with Dash years before.
Far more useful.
Far more dangerous, if she allowed herself to notice the wrong things, such as the strength of his hands and the warmth of his chest and the weight of him over her and the startling, treacherous pulse low in her body whenever he had her pinned beneath him–
No.
She would not let her thoughts veer.
The lessons were useful.
When Beatrice entered Lady Longstaffe’s ballroom beside Lark three evenings after her first lesson, she was not afraid.
She was… eager.
Lark caught on immediately, pulling Beatrice to a stop just inside the doorway as she adjusted her gloves.
