“No.” She stopped an arm’s length away, close enough that he could smell the lavender in her hair, could see the rapid flutter of her pulse at her throat. “If I’m to find someone respectable, I suppose I should practice. Dancing, I mean. Properly.”
The suggestion hung between them, weighted with meanings he didn’t dare examine too closely. He should refuse. Should claim fatigue, suggest they retire to their separate chambers like sensible people.
Instead, he heard himself say, “Then let me help you.”
Her eyes widened fractionally. “Tobias?—”
“I’m perfectly qualified.” He stepped closer, closing that final distance, and extended his hand. “Despite my reputation, I did attend dancing lessons as a boy. Occasionally, I even paid attention.”
She stared at his outstretched palm as though it were something dangerous. Forbidden. Her fingers trembled when they finallytouched his, and the contact—skin against skin, warm and real and devastating—sent electricity racing up his arm.
“There’s no music,” she whispered.
He drew her closer, his free hand settling at her waist with a lightness that cost him everything. The curve of her body beneath his palm, separated only by layers of silk and propriety, threatened to undo him completely.
“Then listen to the silence,” he murmured.
They began to move.
Awkwardly at first—her steps uncertain, his too careful, both of them acutely aware of every point of contact. But gradually, as the silence stretched and the candles flickered their dancing shadows across the walls, something shifted.
Their bodies remembered what their minds denied. His hand tightened fractionally at her waist, guiding her through a turn. Her fingers curled more securely against his shoulder. Their steps found rhythm—not the precise, rigid movements Edward would have demanded, but something more natural. More real.
More dangerous.
“You’re doing beautifully,” he said softly, and meant it. “See? You didn’t need lessons at all.”
“I had an excellent teacher.” Her voice had gone breathless, and when she looked up at him through lowered lashes, something in his chest cracked wide open. “Though I suspect he’s rather more patient with me than he was with his actual instructors.”
“You have no idea the torments I inflicted upon poor Monsieur Dubois.” He guided her through another turn, closer now, propriety forgotten in the hushed intimacy of candlelight and silence. “I once convinced him I’d gone deaf. Spent an entire lesson pretending I couldn’t hear the music.”
Her laugh was startled, genuine—the first real sound of joy he’d heard from her all evening. “You did not.”
“I absolutely did. Daniel and I had a bet to see who could drive their instructor to resignation first. I believe I won by default when Dubois declared me ‘unteachable’ and refused to return.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“I prefer ‘creatively resistant to authority.’”
They were barely moving now, swaying more than dancing, caught in the spell of firelight and proximity. Her scent wrapped around him like opium smoke.
As though they’d always belonged this way.
When she looked up, he was already watching her. Had been watching her, he realized, since the moment she’d turned toface him. Perhaps since the moment he’d first seen her all those months ago, standing in Edward’s garden with sadness in her eyes and strength in every line of her body.
His gaze held hers, steady but charged with everything he couldn’t say. Everything he’d spent six months trying to deny.
I care for you. I care for you far more than propriety allows. And finding you another husband is killing me by degrees, but I’ll do it anyway because you deserve better than your brother-in-law’s scandal-tainted affection.
The words lodged in his throat, unspeakable. But his body betrayed him anyway—his hand tightening at her waist, his thumb tracing absent patterns against the silk, his head lowering fractionally until their faces were mere inches apart.
They’d stopped dancing entirely.
Her breath ghosted across his lips, rapid and shallow. Her eyes had gone dark, pupils blown wide in the candlelight. And there—written across her face with devastating clarity—was the same longing that had been eating him alive for months.
She felt the pull between them, too.
She cared for him, there was no denying it. It was as blatant in her eyes as he knew it was in his own, and yet he could not say it out loud—could not ask it, could not say a thing, for the sake ofpropriety. For the fear that he misread the look in her eye, that it was gratitude that he saw and mistook for…
