Honeybees. Small golden honeybees, catching the light as she turned her head.
It could not be anyone else. It could not possibly be anyone but her.
The crowd shifted around him as he moved. Masked figures moved andturned, caught up in their own conversations and their own enchantments, paying no attention whatsoever to the tall young lord cutting a path through the dancers as though every other person in the room had simply ceased to matter.
Because they had.
She was walking toward him too, small, careful steps, holding the skirt of her gown, lifting her chin in that particular manner that told him she was nervous and determined at the same time. And then they were standing before one another, and the music and the voices and the glittering enormity of the ballroom receded to a distant hum, and there was only her.
Her eyes, warm hazel behind the mask. The rise and fall of her breathing. The honeybees at her temples, glinting gold.
“You came,” he said, and his voice was not entirely steady.
She smiled up at him. “You asked,” she said simply.
Something broke open in his chest. A breath he had held since writing that letter and spending every hour afterward wondering whether she would come, whether she would choose this, whether she would choosehim—released all at once.
“I did.” He swallowed. “And I … you are …” He gestured, vaguely and unhelpfully, at the whole of her. “That is—you look—I am trying to tell you that you are beautiful and I appear to be making rather a mess of it.”
A breath of laughter escaped her. “You are doing better than you think.”
“I am quite certainly not.” He dragged a hand through his hair, then immediately made himself stop, because this was a formal ball, and that sort of gesture was entirely inappropriate. “The gown is … I mean, the color, against your … and the—” He stopped. Closed his eyes briefly. “Lucie, you are the most beautiful person in this room and I have apparently forgotten how sentences work.”
She was smiling. “Thank you,” she said, and her voice had gone soft. Then the smile dimmed and her gaze dropped. “I … I am so sorry, Kazrian. For hurting you all those years ago.” Her eyes found his again, wide and earnest. “You are aware now, I am certain, that I was not … truthful. About the way I felt. I wanted you to think I felt nothing for you when instead I felt everything,everything, but I was so?—”
“Lucie.” He was already shaking his head. “You do not have to explain. I understand why you did what you did.”
She held his gaze, her eyes searching. “So you … accept my apology?”
“Of course.” The notion that he might possibly hold anything from their past against her was so utterly absurd.
She pressed her lips together, and something shone in her eyes as she gave him a small nod. “And … thank you for the letter. I have read it—Well. I have read it a rather unreasonable number of times.” A pause, and then, quieter: “It has been unbearable. Being parted from you. You wrote those words and I—I feel exactly the same.”
Something in his chest turned over slowly.
“Then I shall not waste any more of the evening being parted from you,” he said. “Will you dance with me?”
“Well,” she said. “The last time you asked me that, we were in a kitchen.” The corner of her mouth curved. “And there was considerably less room.”
“There was. And no music.”
“And no one watching.”
“And you refused me four times before you said yes.”
“I believe it was only three.”
“It was four. In fact, it may have been five.”
She laughed again, the sound of it threading through him like warmth. “I promise,” she said softly, “I will not make you ask more than once this time. For I have been longing for another dance since that first one three years ago.”
He extended his hand. She took it. Her fingers settled against his palm, and his other hand settled just below her shoulder blade, and it was as right as it had been the first time. As though three years and all their careful distance had simply folded away.
They began to move.
“Ah,” she said softly, as they turned, and there was a wicked little light in her eyes. “And so at last I am permitted to place my hand upon the shoulder I have spent the entire Season admiring.”
Kazrian very nearly trod directly upon her foot.
