His voice reached her, calm and certain, and Diana’s stomach dipped. “Duchess.”
Diana turned. He was standing too close. His eyes were on her face, steady and intent, and the waltz music seemed to thread itself through her ribs.
Emma’s posture stiffened beside her like a protective wall.
“Will you grant me the first dance?” he asked, his voice a low, velvet command that vibrated through her spine.
Diana’s mouth went dry.
The ballroom felt suddenly, blindingly bright, a shimmering trap of gold leaf and judgmental eyes. Diana could feel the weight of a hundred gazes pressing against her skin, the dowagers leaning forward like vultures scenting a change in the wind.
Behind them, Lady Salford appeared at Alexander’s shoulder, a triumphant sprite in silk and lace.
“Oh, yes,” the Dowager beamed, her eyes shining with the success of her meddling. “Go on, you two. The orchestra is beginning the waltz. Show them.”
Alexander didn’t look at his grandmother. His focus was a singular, burning point of contact that pinned Diana where she stood.
“Diana.”
The sound of her name in his mouth sent a treacherous, liquid heat pooling deep in her abdomen, making her knees feel dangerously soft beneath the layers of her silver skirts.
She forced herself to nod, her breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches that made her corset feel like a vice.
“Yes,” she whispered, the word barely a ghost of a sound. “Very well.”
She reached out, and as her fingers met his, Alexander didn’t just take her hand; he gripped it, pulling her toward him until she was forced to step into the radiating heat of his body.
The orchestra struck the first, sweeping chord of the waltz, and the room seemed to fall away into a blur of meaningless color.
CHAPTER 7
“Do you remember how to waltz, Your Grace, or shall I prepare to be trampled?” Diana did not look at him when she asked it.
She kept her chin lifted, her smile composed for the benefit of the watching ton, even as the first sweeping notes of the waltz unfurled across the ballroom like a silken snare. The chandeliers blazed overhead, casting gold upon polished floors and eager faces, and she could feel every gaze pivoting toward them as though drawn by gravity.
Alexander’s hand tightened at her waist. “With you in my arms,” he murmured, bending his head so that his breath warmed the curve of her ear, “I suspect everything will return to me.”
Her pulse stuttered. The scent of him filled her lungs, and she hated that her body responded before her mind could marshal its defenses, hated that the mere suggestion of his arms made heat unfurl low and treacherous inside her.
“You are dangerously confident for a man with a fractured memory,” she whispered. Her voice lacked its usual bite, sounding instead like a ragged, breathless plea for him to stop.
Alexander didn’t stop. He moved into her space, a slow, seductive glide that forced her to tilt her head back to meet his gaze. “I have excellent instincts,” he replied, his voice dropping to a velvet rasp that hummed against the sensitive skin of her temple. “Especially when it comes to my wife.”
My wife.
He said it with dark, heavy hunger, already tasting the victory.
The orchestra swelled, a sudden, violent surge of violins that signaled the start of the dance.
He moved, and for a terrifying second, Diana forgot the mechanics of her own lungs.
There was no hesitation. No stumble. His body took hers with a terrifying, unhurried grace. It was as if his muscles possessed a memory his mind had discarded, a primal, rhythmic knowledge of how her waist dipped beneath his palm and how her weight shifted when he led her.
Her body, a traitor to its core, answered him instantly.
He did not allow distance. He ignored the polite few inches of air dictated by decorum, pulling her flush against him until thehard planes of his chest crushed the delicate lace of her bodice. As they spun, the world outside the circle of his arms dissolved into a meaningless smear of gold and white.
“You are dancing too close,” she gasped, the friction of his thighs against her silver skirts sending a liquid, humiliating heat through her belly.
