Page 12 of The Lady Knows Best

Practically a noble gesture, for him—and one Miss Burke clearly regarded with distrust.

“In fact, I’m given to understand that some gentlemen will no doubt find Miss Grey’s conduct admirable,” he went on. “Something about casting aside the devil to make way for a saintlier suitor, I think it was? In any case, I can assure you that her heart was not broken.” He’d never seen the slightest sign of affection from his former betrothed. Releasing Miss Burke’s hand, he laid his palm on his chest. “So, if anyone is suffering here tonight, it is I.”

Under cover of the dance’s next formation and the scalloped hems of her skirts, she stepped boldly toward him—and trod squarely on his foot. When he yelped, she smiled. “Fortunately for you, wounded pride is rarely fatal.”

“You fancy me proud, do you?” Miles demanded after he’d shaken the feeling back into his toes.

She weighed either the question or her answer. “Arrogant, unquestionably. And vain, I suspect. Frankly, I’m surprised you were willing to partner me.” And then, in another clearly calculated move, she spun in the wrong direction, disrupting the swirl of couples moving around them. “I might have embarrassed you by being a terrible dancer.”

“I knew better,” he gritted out as he wrangled her back into position, “or I should not have asked.”

“How could you know any such thing?” she scoffed. “And I almost never dance at these sorts of affairs, so you needn’t lie and claim to have been admiring me from afar.”

“I know, Miss Burke, because there is music in your voice, and a certain something in your—” He paused to drag his gaze over her, head to toe, intending to provoke a blush.

But somehow, he found himself provoked instead. The stiffness of her spine and the quickness of her breath had thrust her bosom into prominence. His pulse, which he’d managed to steady, ratcheted up again, although a moment before he would have been willing to swear she was hardly even pretty.

“Something in your . . . figure,” he finished, with more sincerity than he’d begun.

She did oblige him by blushing, at least. Though as a becoming shade of pink swept down her throat and spread across her decolletage, drawing his eye to the very edge of her bodice, a place it ought not linger, he questioned the wisdom of his efforts.

“I am not sure those are gentlemanly observations,” she said primly.

“Whoever said I was a gentleman?’

“True. You are a rake.” Her voice rose on the last word, as if she were testing to see whether those around them were still listening and if so, how they would react.

If she were hoping the neighboring couples would be scandalized by her declaration and turn to stare at him, she was destined to be disappointed. His rakish reputation was nothing new to anyone in the Clearwaters’ ballroom.

Instead, she’d managed with her outrageous performance to draw the ballgoers’ curious eyes to her. All along the two lines of dancers, people had been sending looks and pointing. At either side of the room, he spied ladies whispering behind fans.

Miss Burke did not yet seem to realize that her plan had gone awry, but he felt certain she was not the sort who would relish the attention.

“Yet in full awareness of that fact,” he reminded her, steering her out of the set as smoothly as he’d led her into it, “you agreed to partner me.”

And he still wasn’t sure why. Had she thought to enact some revenge on behalf of poor Miss Grey? But surely no one was innocent enough to imagine squashed toes and a few snickers sufficient punishment for his sins.

Good manners dictated that he return her to her chaperone after a dance. But Miles had never been one to worry much about etiquette. And anyway, their dance wasn’t done.

Determined to make sense of her behavior, he pointed their steps in the opposite direction.

“Do you wish to know what I think, Miss Burke?” he asked as they walked.

“Not in the slightest.”

“I don’t suppose you’d find it much to your liking,” he conceded. “Shall I tell you what you’re thinking instead?”

“Party tricks, Lord Deveraux?”

“You think you know me, my failings. You think I deserve to suffer a far greater indignity than a broken betrothal and a lost wager. You agreed to dance with me with the sole intention of humiliating me. If I’d let you carry on back there, you would have shouted about what a scoundrel I am for making a wager involving a lady—just in case someone in this ballroom hasn’t yet seen the latest issue of Goode’s Guide to Misconduct.”

“Don’t call it that.”

“Why not? Does the truth sting?” he hissed.

To his surprise, she sucked in an alarmed breath through her nostrils and searched his face with narrowed eyes. “What a strange turn of phrase, my lord,” she said when she’d recovered some of her aplomb. “It almost makes me wonder whether . . .” Then she broke off with a brisk toss of her head and a forced laugh. “No. Surely a gentleman would not waste his time reading a magazine for young ladies.”

Try as she might, she could not firm her lips into a prim enough line to disguise their plumpness. When she spoke, he watched her mouth and caught himself wondering, in true rakehell fashion, what it would be like to kiss her.