“What are you doing here?” Alexander asked the moment they came to a stop.
“Dancing,” she shot back.
The long look he gave her suggested he imagined otherwise. “I’m here with Elizabeth and her brother,” she added, exasperated.
“Nick and Elizabeth are here,” he said, not as a question.
“We’re celebrating Elizabeth’s birthday.” He examined her in a way that brought heat to her already flushed cheeks. “What?”
“You’ve been drinking.”
She bridled. “I am enjoying a night out with friends. Or Iwasenjoying it. What is the matter with you, Alexander?”
He didn’t reply, merely swiped a hand over his jaw. It was not clean-shaven, suggesting he’d not made the effort to prepare for an evening out, or he hadn’t had the time. She took in the rest of him. His dinner jacket did not fit him as well as it had before. It strained at his shoulders, as the rest of his suit jackets did. Hadn’t he said something about rowing after he’d returned from the Amazonian expedition?
Perhaps her scrutiny made him uncomfortable, for he took half a step closer to her, dropping his voice. “I’m sorry for being abrupt earlier. It’s just … I did not intend to introduce you to Adrian this way.”
Saffron grimaced. She obviously hadn’t made a very good first impression, interrupting his date so aggressively, only to babble like an idiot when he confronted her.
His expression matched hers. “Adrian does not present the best image of himself in … such circumstances.”
“Adrian was perfectly nice,” Saffron said, confused. There was something about him that tickled her mind, however, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Possibly she just found it odd that a man accused of murder was enjoying a night out.
She sighed, recognizing that some of the glow of the evening that had been lost was not going to be regained. “I’ll have to speak to himeventually, for the case. I’m afraid my involvement is not off to a good start. Inspector Green did not accept my offer of assistance.”
“Why not?”
“You know why,” Saffron said impatiently. “Conflict of interest. But it doesn’t matter, I managed to get some information to start with. Between the chemists helping with the inquiries and Lee looking at the autopsy notes, I—”
A gabble of male voices startled them as two waiters carrying trays of food and drink emerged at the end of the hall. Saffron and Alexander had to press themselves to the grimy wall, and the pair gave them amused glances as they passed.
Alexander frowned down at her. “Lee is helping?”
She returned his frown, silently daring him to make an issue of it. “Yes.”
“That is … decent of him,” he said, his tone leading to an unspoken question.
“It is. But friends do favors for friends, don’t they?”
He didn’t reply but gave her a thoughtful look that lasted only a moment before he was offering her his arm. “Enough of my interruption. You were here to have a good time. Let’s return you to it.”
Saffron thought Alexander had changed his mind about her spending time with his brother when they emerged back into the smoke and music of the club, since he did not immediately usher her toward her companions. Pleasantly surprised by his change of heart, for reasons she didn’t care to identify, she searched for the tall, gangly form of Adrian on the dance floor.
But Alexander twirled her, sending her tipsy head spinning, and she landed hard against his chest a moment later. When her eyes could see straight, she realized they were moving in time to the beat. He was dancing with her.
It was perhaps unfair to have assumed that because Alexander was rather a reticent man, and a scientist at that, dancing would not besomething he’d be good at. But he moved as if he’d taken to the dance floor as often as he scrutinized bacteria in a microscope.
A giggle bubbled up in her chest at the thought. Alexander looked down at her with a small smile.
“You can dance,” she said through a laugh.
“I can.”
“I’d never have guessed.” His smile faded somewhat, and the loss made her feel unexpectedly sad. “Odd, we’ve never had the opportunity until now.”
“Hopefully we will again.”
Saffron had taken dance classes growing up, the waltz and several other steps that she found she rarely even thought about, let alone used in the ballrooms she’d been expected to swan around in. Even if she hadn’t relocated to London, she doubted she’d have found herself often using them. The world had changed so much since she was a girl, standing up with the younger of Elizabeth’s two brothers, Wesley, to learn dances in the stuffy ballroom at Ellington. Grand estates with their monthlong house parties, grandiose balls, and tightly rehearsed teas were increasingly a thing of the past. Fortunes had been lost and made in the war, not to mention the shifts in society meant the world to which her grandparents belonged was dwindling. Saffron found, as she twirled the floor of a somewhat disreputable dance club in the arms of a man her family would likely not approve of, that she was rather glad not to belong to it any longer.
