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Darby met the avid eyes of Frescobaldi and Landow and knew that his carefully nurtured reputation for exquisite calm was shattered. A muscle was beating in his cheek. He was near to roaring. And he didn’t give a damn either.
“I think you underestimate your inability to dance.” The musicians had just begun a waltz. Before his wife could move, he pulled her up and away from the gentlemen, into his arms, and onto the dance floor.
Henrietta was too shocked to react at first. He read it in her body, poised stiffly against him, and the way she held back. But he knew her. He knew her body as intimately as he did her own. She was hardly limping tonight. There was only the merest hesitation when she walked. She could dance, God damn it. She could dance with her husband. He splayed his hand around her slender waist and swept her into the waltz. It was no more than walking, after all. Walking to great gorgeous sweeps of music, walking in a rhythm that reminded him of their bed.
For the first few minutes he didn’t even look at her. He just carried them, thigh to thigh, circled and swept, drawn in circles down the room by the music. When he finally glanced down at his wife, her cheeks were pink and her eyes luminous—not with anger, but with awe.
“I’m dancing,” she whispered, and that shaken little breath touched his heart.
He took her into a breathtaking series of circles as the music curled in the air around them.
“Oh Simon, I’m dancing!”
The music quieted to a languorous One, Two, Three; One,Two Three. “You have spent too much time believing what people tell you,” he said. The truth of it put a fierceness into his voice. “You listened to people who said you’d never marry and said you’d never dance.”
“I am married—”
“To me,” he said, breaking in. “You’re married to me. You Fool for Love
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are mine, Henrietta. And I am yours. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“You cannot simply throw me back into the stream, like a trout you no longer want,” he said, his voice rasping. “We are one, Henrietta. It’s too late. Don’t you see?”
He couldn’t read her expression.
“I’m not—I’m not a man who would ever betray his wife,”
he said. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m not—” And then suddenly he saw that her eyes were shining with tears.
“I’m a fool, Simon.” Her hand touched his cheek. “Forgive me?”
He nodded. For a moment they drifted together, lapped in music so delicate that it sweetened the air around them.
“They said you would never marry, Henrietta. You are married.”
She nodded, just a tremulous wobble of her chin.
“They said you would never dance. We are dancing.”
There was a spark of hope in those blue eyes. He could see it.
“And they said you would never give birth. But I know you. I know you want this baby. We’ll go to every doctor in England if we have to. We can find someone who will save the baby. And you.”
“I feel as if you read my heart,” she whispered. He looked at her, dark hair tumbling over his brow, as beautiful a man as ever walked the earth. “Can’t you read mine, then?”
She swallowed, caught by his eyes, afraid she didn’t understand.
“I love you.”
The music drew to a close, and they stopped dancing, although he kept his arms around her.
“I love my wife,” her husband said, his eyes as urgent as his voice. “And, Henrietta—
“I love you,” she said, her voice breaking with it. 338 Eloisa
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