This was not information he had any useful purpose for.
“You’re watching her,” Miles muttered in a sing-song manner at his elbow.
“I am watching the room.”
“You are watching a fixed point in the room that has been occupied by Lady Annabelle for the past quarter-hour.” Miles accepted a glass from a passing footman. “The toga has said something she finds charming. She’s giving him the pleasant smile.”
Dominic did not ask which smile.
He had spent the early part of the evening moving through the room in the way he always moved through rooms: easily, without urgency, conversant with the social arithmetic of a masquerade.
Lady Cartwright had been directly in his path near the supper room and had made her interest evident with elegant economy. He had been charming in return. He had meant to remain charming for longer than four minutes.
Then he had looked across the room and found Annabelle mid-conversation with the toga, and that had been the end of the charm.
Miss Drew had stationed herself at his side near the orchestra. She was dressed as Aphrodite, and said several things that he supposed were worth attending to, and he had conductedfive minutes of pleasant conversation while thinking about something else entirely.
He had excused himself before she finished whatever she was saying.
“You attempted to flirt with three separate women,” Miles observed, “and looked as though you were working through an accounting problem throughout.”
“I was not?—”
“Dominic.”
He looked at him.
“You have been watching her for over half an hour,” Miles said without the usual angle of amusement, nor with caution. “I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. I am telling you that other people in this room are capable of observation, and the longer you stand here watching her dance with other men and looking as though you’d like to remove them from the premises, conclusions will be drawn.”
“I am doing this for Lucien’s sake,” he said for what felt like the hundredth time.
“Yes. And Lucien’s sister is looking for a husband,” Miles said. “That is the arrangement. That is the whole of what this is.” Heglanced at Dominic’s face and looked away again. “As long as you know that.”
“I know that.”
“Good.” Miles lifted his glass. “Then you won’t mind that the toga has just asked for another dance.”
Dominic looked.
Indeed, Annabelle was placing her hand in Toga’s hand, her chin level, her expression composed and warm.
He watched the second set begin.
It was the fourth figure when it happened. The dance brought them to the far end of the set, a turn, and the man in the toga placed his hand at the small of her back in the way the figure permitted. Then the figure moved on.
But Toga’s hand did not.
Annabelle’s chin came up a fraction. She adjusted her frame, putting an inch of distance in without breaking the steps.
The hand pressed lower, sliding further down?—
Bastard.
Dominic set his glass on the ledge behind him and crossed the floor.
He came up at the man’s shoulder as the figure brought them together at the near end of the set, fell into step without disturbance, and said, quietly, at the man’s ear: “Take your hand off her.”
The man startled. He was younger than Dominic had expected, in the mid-twenties, behind a mask that had apparently given him ideas his sober judgment would not have endorsed.
