“Dance with me.”
Mary blinked. “What?”
“Dance with me. The orchestra is playing, and you are spiraling, and the best remedy for both is a waltz.” He held out his hand. “Unless you would prefer to stand here and count the minutes until we can leave?”
Surprise crossed her face, then warmth, then a smile that was not polished or composed or designed for theton. It was real, and it was for him, and it nearly knocked the breath from his lungs.
“I would like that,” she said.
Evander led her onto the floor.
CHAPTER 20
“You are full of surprises tonight, Your Grace.”
Evander’s hand settled at her waist, warm and steady through the sapphire silk, and Mary placed her hand on his shoulder and let him lead her into the waltz.
The orchestra played something slow and elegant, and the ballroom spun in a blur of candlelight and silk, and for the first time all evening, Mary felt the knot in her chest loosen.
“I was not aware that asking one’s wife to dance qualified as a surprise,” Evander said.
“It does when the husband in question has spent six weeks treating conversation as an act of war.” Mary let him turn her, and the skirt of her gown swept across the polished floor in a wash of blue. “This is the first time you have touched me in public.”
“I am correcting an oversight.”
“Is that what this is?”
Evander’s grip tightened at her waist, barely perceptible, and he pulled her a fraction closer than the waltz required. “That is what I am calling it.”
Mary smiled. The room continued to turn around them, faces and gowns and glittering chandeliers, and none of it mattered because Evander was looking at her the way he had looked at her in the carriage, as though the rest of the world had been reduced to background noise, and she was the only signal.
He leaned closer. His mouth near her ear, close enough that his breath stirred the loose strands of hair at her temple. “I have a lead on the Italian woman.”
The shift from intimacy to investigation should have surprised her. It did not. This was how Evander operated. He opened a door, let her glimpse what lay behind it, then redirected before either of them could dwell.
“How?” she asked.
“Godfrey has contacts in the Italian community near Clerkenwell. There are not so many Italian women in London, and one who frequents a pleasure house in Hampstead doesn’t go unnoticed. A name, an address, a connection to Richard. Any of those would narrow the search.”
“You sound very optimistic.”
He turned Mary through a corner of the floor, his hand firm at her waist. “This is the best lead I have had so far. If I can trace the woman, I can trace Richard. And if I can trace Richard, I can find Charlotte.”
Mary’s smile held. She willed it to hold.
“And then Tommy goes to his parents,” she said.
“That has always been the plan.” Evander guided her through the next turn. “Richard and Charlotte will marry. I’ll ensure that Tommy is made legitimate. The scandal will be resolved.”
“And everything goes back to how it was.”
“Everything gets set right.”
Mary let the words settle.
The waltz carried them past Isabella, who raised her glass, and past Lord Langham, who was pretending to listen to Lady Heathcote, and past three hundred people who saw the Duke and Duchess of Blackholm dancing together and assumed it meant the marriage was solid, the scandal was managed, and the story had a shape they could understand.
None of them could see what Mary felt breaking apart beneath the sapphire silk.
