Banishing that memory, taking a deep breath and willing every part of his body back into stillness for now, Dorian decided that they would not be staying late at the Carforth ball that night.
“May I have the honor of this dance?” the Duke of Ravenhill asked his wife with a formal bow, as murmurs went around the ballroom that the next measure was to be a waltz.
Rose turned her radiant smile upon him and laughed as she put her hand into his. She seemed happy to be here tonight, despite any earlier nerves.
Her entry into the Carforth ballroom had been every bit as dazzling and striking as Dorian could have wished. On their first circuit of the room together, he had detected only murmured comments on Rose’s beauty, and his own. The congratulations they received on their marriage were sincere, if sometimes envious.
“Of course you may,” she answered simply. “As my husband, you are entitled to all my dances, I believe.”
“Still, I want only those you choose to bestow,” Dorian laughed back. “I seem to remember that you refused me, on the last occasion I invited you to waltz.”
Rose’s face looked distant for a moment as she recalled that final, fatal ball at Ashbourne Castle. Then she squeezed his hand and they walked together to the dance floor.
“I believed myself very sensible in refusing you at the time,” she told him. “We were different people then. How long ago it all seems and yet it is barely more than a month!”
“Sensible?” questioned Dorian with amusement, stroking Rose’s cheek gently because he could and because he enjoyed the small sigh she gave at his touch. “Do you still think it was sensible?”
“Well, Edwin would not have approved. I also thought you wanted to dance with Lady Lepford more than you really wanted to dance with me,” she explained herself further. “When I saw you waltzing with her, I knew it.”
Dorian shook his head firmly as he placed his hand on Rose’s back for the waltz and the music began.
“I never wanted to dance with anyone more than I wanted to dance with you, Rose,” he admitted. “Lady Lepford is an old friend and we were both in need of…company that night. You know what came of that in the end.”
His wife’s large blue eyes regarded him with some unreadable emotion as they spin and twirled. Perhaps he should not have let her lead him into talking of Lady Lepford. It was never a good idea to talk intimately of one woman with another. Then her gaze resolved into a kind of understanding.
“If I had danced with you, I likely would not have ended up in the gardens at all,” Rose remarked. “I would have been on the dance floor with you when Lord Gillingham left the party and likely would not have spoken to him. Then I would not have been upset and rushed outside.”
“Lord Gillingham?” repeated Dorian, his skin prickling in an unfamiliar way. “What has that small-minded bore to do with anything?”
Rose looked surprised at his reaction, but then, he was surprised himself. Dorian had not particularly liked the man, and Lord Gillingham was not generally popular, but he was not the kind of person to inspire strong feeling.
“Everyone told me not to, but I approached Lord Gillingham and tried to make him ask me to dance. He refused and called me a simpleton,” Rose confessed, clearly chagrined at the memory. “I had some fantasy that he was shy like me, and that we would have some sweet romance like in a novel. When he rejected me so cruelly, I ran away into the gardens.”
Dorian snorted with derision for Lord Gillingham overlaid by other less familiar emotions, his hand tightening on Rose’s waist.
“Gillingham is a social menace,” he stated rather shortly. “Men like him do far more damage than men who actually like women. You would have been safer dancing with me that night. I would never have hurt you.”
“I did not know you then,” Rose pointed out. “You were only a handsome and charming man that others warned against – the Wolf of West London…”
Again, this nickname was normally something that made Dorian laugh, but tonight, from Rose’s lips, it cut him in some way.
“And now?” he demanded as the music wound down, leaving them on the edge of the dance floor, still holding one another close. “Do you know me now?”
“What do you mean, Dorian?” Rose asked, her beautiful face in confusion. “What is wrong?”
It was a very good question and not one that Dorian felt able to adequately answer with words alone. His blood was pulsing with tangled instincts and emotions.
“Come with me,” he told her, drawing him with him towards the conservatories. “We must talk privately.”
The Duke of Ravenhill marched through the first glasshouses, past the various resting elderly dowagers and chaperoned young lovers, and into the unlit rooms beyond, hoping to find warmer chambers, perhaps an orangery or tropical room.
The half-moon shining in through the glass ceiling covered Rose in silvered shadow and glinted on the diamonds adorning her pale throat and the rounded bosom beneath. How very beautifulhis wife appeared in this light – his wife, Rose, the Duchess of Ravenhill.
“Dorian, what is it?” asked Rose’s voice again, soft, warm and womanly in tone. “Why are we here?”
Acting on impulse, he took her into his arms in reply and kissed her passionately, her initial gasp of surprise becoming a sigh of enjoyment.
How dare Lord Gillingham insult his duchess! That cold and mannerless man did not merit the attention of any woman, never mind a woman like Rose. Gillingham was the kind who could not know any human being intimately and ought to remain among his antique books.
