“I beg your?—”
“Now,” Dominic said, evenly, in a low tone. “And if it goes there again, I will detach it from the rest of you at a joint I haven’t decided on yet.”
The man removed his hand. He looked at Dominic: at his height, at his mask, at whatever he found in the set of his jaw, and made a rapid calculation that arrived at the correct answer. Quickly mumbling about a pressing errand elsewhere before the next figure began, he turned and was gone.
Annabelle turned and found Dominic in his place.
“You did not need to do that,” she said.
“He was being inappropriate with you.”
“I was handling it.” She insisted, and he audibly scoffed at her.
“You did not have to. In fact, you must never need tohandlesuch a situation ever again.” He held out his own hand as the orchestra struck the first bars of the waltz that followed.
It was not precisely a request, and she looked at it and then at him with the expression she wore when she was deciding whether the argument was worth the energy.
She took his hand.
The waltz settled them face to face, with his hand at her waist and hers in his, the distance between them smaller than any distance they had maintained in a room full of other people without an immediate disagreement to justify it.
“You made a scene,” she said, trying not to let that scoff from earlier raise her hackles.
“I made a quiet, private statement that no one overheard. That is not a scene.”
“You threatened a man on a dance floor.”
“I gave him information. Whether he finds it threatening is his own concern.” He moved her through the opening turn, and she followed the step with the ease of someone for whom music was a native language, and he kept his hand where the dancerequired it and his attention where it had been all evening. “No man touches you like that. Not while I’m in the room.”
“You are not my keeper.”
“I am aware of that.”
“You are not my brother.”
“And of that.”
“Then on what?—”
“Lucien is not here,” he said. “You are his sister, in his absence, at an event I am also attending. That is basis enough.” He turned her through the next figure, and her back arched very slightly with the movement. “If you’d prefer I stand at the other end of the room in future?—”
“You’d still be watching,” she said.
“I’d be watching the room.”
“You’d be watching me and we both know it.” She said it with her eyes on his face, without coyness, the way she said most things — directly, because she saw no productive advantage in saying them any other way — and then appeared faintly annoyed to have said it.
He held her gaze. “What were you going to say just now? When you stopped.”
She looked past his shoulder at the room. “We’re dancing,” she said.
“So we are.”
He let it stand.
The second half of the waltz passed, and he was aware of her hand in his and the warmth at her waist and the olive wreath at her crown that had stayed level throughout.
Annabelle did everything with that quality of composed intention. Even dancing, even wearing a goddess’s costume at a masquerade, even looking at him as though she was always three thoughts ahead of whatever she was willing to say.
