He led her onto the dance floor just as a quadrille struck up. Tittery, gossipy shock rattled the air around them, its silky sibilance ascending into a soft buzz, continuing to rise in volume until it crescendoed into a roar, excited and delighted. The music ceased on a jarring and discordant note, eliciting disgruntled rumblings from everyone eager for a little scandalous drama. What could be more delightful at a ball?
Two familiar-looking young bucks brandished what appeared to be a bundle of bank notes at the musicians. Next, a violin bow swept across strings, and the quadrille transformed into another waltz. Thetonwanted a show, and she and Jake were to provide it.
She moved with him on a wave of champagne bubbles. She’d never felt so light, so free, as when she placed her hand onto his shoulder, felt the sinewy flex of hardened muscle, and their feet glided into motion to the buoyant one-two-three rhythm of the waltz.
His warmth enveloped her in a cocoon at once safe and precarious, and she was absolutely lost. It was dangerous to be here with him, to expose her vulnerability to theton, but she couldn’t help herself. Her entire being pulsed with the particular joy that sprang up from one’s heart when its desire was fulfilled. She was powerless beneath its sway.
She should set her gaze over his shoulder. She should keep her posture rigid and her arms stiff. She should keep him at a proper distance. But, oh, how she didn’t want to be—
Safe.
The word jolted her out of this sugar-spun fantasy borne of want and ache and unbridled joy. What was she doing? This waltz, this night, would end, reality would reestablish itself, and what would she have done?
She had no business dancing the waltz the way Nick and Mariana had. A mortified blush crept up her décolletage, and she aligned her spine into an upright rod and set her arms at a stiff angle.
How close to the edge she’d come. How close she still wanted to come.
Oh. That sounded wrong.
And true. Oh, so true.
And wrong. Utterly wrong.
Champagne.
Tomorrow, she would blame it all on champagne, bubbly and bright, seductive and beguiling temptress.
Next to them, a couple danced too close and brushed Olivia’s skirts. A usual occurrence at a ball. It was somewhat odd, however, that this was the first such occasion during this dance. She glanced around, and her heart jumped into her throat. They were one of only four couples dancing. Of the two hundred or so guests, at least half formed a loose circle around the dance floor, watching . . .
Her and Jake.
How had she forgotten them?
Abandoning her arm’s length distance, her erect posture, and her stiff arms, she gathered into him, pressed full-length into his body, and strained toward his ear. “Do you see how they watch us?” she asked, keenly aware of thetonintently, delightedly observing Lady Olivia Montfort make a spectacle of herself with the Right Honorable Viscount St. Alban.
“Of course.” His warm breath tickled the fine hairs of her neck. “The haiku.”
How had she forgotten the haiku? She spoke her next words before they stuck in her throat. “They assume we are lovers.”
“Wearelovers.”
“Were,” was her automatic reply. But she wasn’t certain there was enough conviction in that word to give it the weight of truth.
As if scalded, she pushed away from him, their only points of contact where their hands rested on necessary stretches of clothed skin. She resolved to ignore the side of her that longed to luxuriate in the long length of him flexing and moving beneath his form-fitting superfine. He was long in more ways than one . . .
Oh. Where had that come from? She could blame it on the champagne, but it was no use.
Soon, not soon enough, she recognized the final bars of the waltz. It was finally, blessedly, coming to an end. She made to step backward, to separate from him, but he pulled her in, reducing her physical rectitude to bits. Again, his body pressed against hers, his mouth brushing her ear. “Meet me in the center of the Duke’s labyrinth thirty minutes hence.”
She opened her mouth to reply that she had other plans for the evening. Plans that involved at least two more glasses of champagne and no trace of him.
“Sayyes, Olivia,” he said, his voice low, raspy, a masculine rumble in his chest that sent shivers racing across her skin, down the length of her spine, threatening to reduce her to jelly right here in front of theton.
She couldn’t think of what to say, her mind wiped clean by him. So she nodded her acquiescence once, a light brush of her soft cheek against the rough stubble of his, imperceptible to the avid crowd hemming them in.
The music ended on a stirring flourish, and the two young bucks alone shouted a raucous cheer that the rest of the assembled indulged with rolled eyes and inflexible smirks.
Jake walked her to the edge of the dance floor, bowed, and strode in the direction of the billiard room. Refusing to give thetonwhat they wanted by watching him walk away like a love-struck girl, Olivia turned to seek out another servant bearing the nectar of the gods. Ever more and more champagne would be needed if she was to survive this night intact.
