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Their movement broke up the small party, as Harriet knew it must. Wynford, in his heliotrope waistcoat, turned to follow the marchioness. Harriet turned to find a place near Lady Hardwicke when her hand was seized and Wynford whispered, “Do not forget. You owe me a waltz.”

* * * *

Harriet did not know how the time passed until Wynford came for her. He bowed and led her into the circle of dancers forming in the center of the room. Harriet’s drawing room dances with her charges as they learned their steps had not prepared her for placing her left hand on Wynford’s right arm and feeling his arm slide around her. With each touch she yielded her arms, her waist, her hands. She could not deny the energy that passed between them as their gloved palms met, closing them in position, her skirts swishing up against his trousers like the foam of a wave touching a shore.

The musicians took preliminary passes at their strings, and there seemed to be no way to hold her head that did not invite intimacy, Wynford looking down into her eyes, his mouth inches from her lips, his breath against her curls.

He raised his left brow in the tiniest question. She realized that his face, so often controlled, was open to her in its smallest changes.

“What?” he asked.

“I was merely thinking about Faraday and electromagnetism.” She would think of science and steady her racing pulse. In her head she could see a diagram of Faraday’s theory of the flow of energy between magnets.

“Are we poles that repel or attract?” he asked.

She laughed. “I am being foolish about this, aren’t I? Agreeing to dance with you is...a mere nothing, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s everything.”

Then the music started. Her grip tightened on his arm as he sent her back into the dipping motion of the dance. Up they came, turning, moving together. With a hand at her waist he assumed control, sending them into a world apart, governed by the music until the room around them disappeared in a whirling blur and there was only Wynford. She smiled and laughed up at him with a kind of freedom she had never known.

As the dance came to an end, he whirled her into a corner of the ballroom where the candles in the sconces had not been lit. The music stopped. He did not release her, but pulled her close against him in the dark. Her head rested on his chest. His heart beat under her ear.

They stood that way until a wry laugh shook him, as if there were some joke. “Will you marry me, Harry?” he asked.

She pulled back in his arms and lifted her gaze to his, ready to question his sanity, but he laid a finger on her lips.

“Does it seem mad to you? A man in a purple waistcoat asking for your hand? Then don’t answer yet,” he said solemnly. He reached up and broke off a sprig of mistletoe hanging from the darkened wall sconce. “If you find that you can say yes, wear this in your hair.”

He handed her the sprig and leaned down to kiss her, their lips meeting in the lightest touch that changed instantly to a desperate clinging of mouths. He pulled her closer against his sinewy length. Her hands slid around his shoulders, reaching up to hold his head to hers. Her body strained against the barriers of linen, silk, and whalebone, the lightest and most absolute of barriers, like propriety itself. Her heart began a glad hammering. Shooting stars of sensation went streaking through her, and she was lost in the kiss, falling upward into the depths of the night sky, when she thought she heard a voice calling from a great distance.

“Wynford.”

She pulled back in his arms.

“Perry?” Wynford replied, his gaze still on Harriet, his hand firm on her back.

“Thank God I found you. No time to lose,” said Perry. He halted in front of them, his gaze going from one to the other. “Oh, hello, Harry. Sorry to intrude. Wynford proposing, is he? Matter of national importance. Need to borrow Wynford for a moment.”

“What is it?” Wynford asked.

“It’s Ashton. He’s in the card room. We must get to him before the marchioness does.”

“Coming, Perry.”

Wynford turned to Harriet, his face masked to her now, his thoughts elsewhere. “Find Octavia,” he said. “Stay with her.”

“Of course,” she said, a woman of sense and steadiness returning to herself from the madness of the moment.

* * * *

Perry led Charles to a card room where gentlemen not inclined to dance had gathered around five green baize tables intent on various forms of play. Ashton, in black evening clothes, lounged back in his chair, a glass of claret in hand, apparently bored with the play at his table. He was well past forty, but his hair remained thick and dark. From the straining of his white damask waistcoat over his middle and the blurring of the features of his once-handsome face, he appeared to be a man given to indulgence. The folds of his chin met the folds of his neckcloth.

Perry stepped up behind him and spoke a discreet word in his ear.

The man looked up under heavy lids, his gaze catching Charles standing opposite.

“May we have a word?” Charles asked.