Laughter, again. Alice found herself beside the instrument more by accident than design. A girl played a lively country piece as a gentleman sang a sentimental ballad without disgracing himself. When the moment came, as it always did, someone begged Alice for a song.
“I have not the voice,” she protested, smiling. “Only the nerve.”
“Then nerve will do,” Crispin said, merciless and fond.
She sat, because refusing would be making a fuss. Her hands were steady. A light tune, cheerful as a May morning. Halfway through the verse she altered the lyric by a hair—only a turn of wit, nimble enough to make the room catch up a beat later. Laughter rang, not brittle but clean. Alice’s shoulders loosened. Pleasure surged at bending the room’s mood to her will.
When she rose, a few people pressed her hands, and the girl with nimble fingers looked relieved. Alice retreated to the side, content.
“Your timing,” said a voice at her shoulder, low and even, “was excellent.”
She turned. Crewe stood there, not quite smiling, looking as if he had surprised himself by approaching at all. “And your pitch was true.” His tone sounded softer than she expected, and his gaze lingered just a fraction too long, as though he, too, wondered why he had spoken.
Praise from him, sounded like fact. It pleased her in a way that felt perilously like pride. Why his approval mattered more than others’ she could not say, and she did not wish to linger on the thought.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For the high praise,” she replied.
The ghost of amusement moved through him. “I am fond of well done performances.”
“Are you? I had you down for an advocate of early nights and accurate wording.”
“Even dull men,” he said, “are permitted a waltz.”
Clara, who missed very little, drifted by with praise for a shy girl’s harp solo and, in passing, laid the lightest hand on Alice’s arm. “Will you take some air in the corridor? It grows warm.”
It was both meddling and rescue. Alice nodded. “Indeed, it is.”
She slipped through the drawing room doors, leaving Crewe behind.
Moonlight striped the parquet in silver ladders. Alice moved to the window as Clara arched a brow. She pressed her palm to the cool glass and let her breath fog and fade.
“Was I in error to swear you away?” She asked.
“Perhaps, for I find myself enjoying Lord Crewe’s company,” Alice admitted.
Clara grinned. “I shall endeavor to let Crispin know.”
“Perish the thought,” the Alice said as Clara turned back to the drawing room.
Alone, she turned her attention back to the night sky. Clara would most certainly tell Crispin and he would use the information for his own amusement. Nonetheless, Alice could not bring herself to regret the admission.
The corridor beyond the drawing room lay in a hush of moonlight. A long paneled passage where sconces and windows alternated like lanterns along a quay. Music seeped beneath the doors, as Samuel Baldwin, Viscount Crewe, stepped from the warmth into the cool corridor and found Lady Alice already there,her palm against the glass, breath misting in rhythm. Reflections layered her—the ghost of a chandelier in her hair, the faint echo of her profile in the polished pane. He told himself to turn back.
He did not.
“Too warm,” he said, because anything else would have been too much.
She glanced over, not startled. “And a little loud. I like to hear myself think now and again.” She leaned a shoulder lightly against the frame, as though inviting him to share the view.
He joined her, leaving a polite interval of space. The lawns beyond were stripped of color by moonlight. The hedges black, terrace pale, the lake a band of pewter. For a moment neither spoke.
“Thank you,” she said at last, eyes still on the night. “For staying the matron’s tongue at dinner without making a scene of it.”
“It was merely exactitude,” he said. “Scandal grows best in the soil of imprecision.”
