Chapter Eleven #2
“Mr. Dixon,” said Miss Eaton in such a light, elegant voice that Lucy darkly wondered if she practiced in the looking glass. “How pleasant to see you. And Lady Lucy.”
“Miss Eaton,” Lucy said, as brightly as she could manage as she bobbed a curtsey.
Well, it wasn’t exactly a death threat, but still. Bernard glanced at her for a moment before returning to his conversational partner.
Perhaps his dance partner.
Perhaps his partner in life. Miss Eaton was not the daughter of an earl, bound by the strictures of Society to marry someone within the nobility or at least with a fortune to offer in a noble birthright’s stead, Lucy pondered bitterly as the two beautiful people talked cheerfully of the delightfulness of the party and the glee in attending balls.
Miss Eaton could marry whom she pleased, and she came with a large enough dowry that she could supply any financial deficiencies in her partner.
She wondered if Miss Eaton would care about the man’s criminal past should she discover it.
Or if she’d boldly join the crowd of devotees who had shown up merely for a chance to see him paraded before a judge.
Why didn’t Bernard and Miss Eaton just announce their engagement and get it over with?
“Do you intend to dance, Mr. Dixon?” asked Miss Eaton enthusiastically, her clearly interested gaze flickering over the tall frame of the man before her as the musicians in the corner began to tune their instruments.
The gall of the woman, in essence being the one doing the asking. Lucy did her best not to glare; she really did. The trouble was, she was so focused on keeping her expression aloof that she’d stopped paying attention to her tongue. “Yes, he will be dancing with me. Come on, Mr. Dixon.”
Before she knew what she was doing, Lucy was dragging him to the center of the room, where a set was being made, the musicians striking up a merry tune for an old-fashioned country dance, performed in a line.
This was madness. Madness!
Young ladies couldn’t go about abducting young men from conversations with other, far prettier young ladies!
Yet when Lucy came to a halt and looked up at the gentleman still—just about—on her arm, it was to see not that he was irritated that he had been pulled away from a riveting conversation, but…a smile.
Bernard Dixon was smiling at her.
“Thank you,” he said with feeling. “I thought we would be stuck there for an age.”
Lucy blinked. “‘Stuck’? ‘Stuck there’?”
She must have misheard. That, or it was a piece of street slang utilized by criminals with which she was not familiar. Otherwise it rather appeared that Bernard was saying—
“As I told you before, she is vapid,” he continued in an undertone, giving a toss of his head. “I hope Miss Eaton is able to find a gentleman whose conversational requirements are significantly lower than my own.”
“‘Conversational requirements,’” Lucy said blankly as the dance began and all the other ladies stepped forward in unison. Except for her. She lurched forward just as the other ladies took a step back. “Lower than yours?”
Bernard’s eyes sparkled as he held out his hands and Lucy mutely took them. “You cannot think I would be so pathetic as to notice Miss Eaton’s beauty, but not notice that she has absolutely nothing to talk about?”
He’d insisted all of that to her once before, but Lucy still couldn’t help herself from feeling jealous the moment Miss Eaton had set her sights on Bernard again. Gentlemen liked beauty, didn’t they? They preferred beauty above all else. Wasn’t that right?
“No, if—when I am to fall in love,” Bernard said as they loosed their hands and waited for the couples either side of them to move in a circle, before continuing as they stepped together, “I hope it is with the conversation, the wit, the opinions—the very soul of a woman. That is what loves means to me.”
And Lucy’s breath caught in her throat.
He had to have meant her. After all, what gentleman would say such a thing in such a pointed manner if he did not intend to…
But Bernard Dixon was not a gentleman.
She had refined him, she knew… Well, he was an eager learner, and it all seemed to come to him naturally. But he had not been born a gentleman’s son, and so he would never be one himself.
Nonetheless, each time she stepped forward to take Bernard’s hands in the dance, she felt—oh, she felt a rush, and a pulse, and that pulse was quick but she could not tell whether it was hers or his own.
There was something between them. She could no longer deny it. She did not want to deny it.
How they could be together in the future, a man who was a criminal. Who refused to speak of his past.
A man who had no past could have no future, Lucy decided. And whatever his past, it made him ill-suited for an earl’s daughter. No, she would have to put her foot down.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry,” Lucy said hastily, cheeks burning as she watched Bernard hobble back to his place in the set. “Sorry. Mind elsewhere.”
He chuckled, though he had clearly been pained when she’d stamped on his foot. “That’s one of the things I like about you, Lucy. You’re always thinking, always planning. You’re never happy unless you’re moving forward.”
Lucy blinked. Is not everyone like that? “What is the point of me if I am not productive?”
She had not thought the words. They had just appeared, fully formed, in her mouth.
Bernard’s eyes widened as he stepped forward, placed his hands around her waist, and lifted her bodily with a twist—as the dance dictated, Lucy reminded herself, even if the moment felt strangely intimate.
“What is the point of you?” he repeated as he took one of her hands and snaked his other around her waist before they started to promenade slowly and sedately down the set.
“Lucy, you—you are the most precious, the most interesting, the most passionate woman I have ever met. To not know your own value…”
His voice trailed away and Lucy knew she should breathe, she had to. If she ever wanted to hear Bernard say another wonderful thing to her, she had to be alive to hear it—so why were her lungs so rigid and her chest uncooperative?
“You,” Bernard said quietly as they reached the end of the set, though he did not release her when he ought. “You are worth everything. You are the point of you. You could stop doing anything for anyone else right now, and you would still be worthy of adoration.”
All Lucy could do was stare in wonder. He… He truly feels that way?
“Besides, I do not think it is within you to stop helping others,” Bernard added in an undertone, his hand warm through his glove as he finally released her.
“And I suppose that is the paradox. Lucy, all those other women”—he gestured at the ladies in her line—“they are all self-centered. You… You are the one with real substance.”
It was difficult not to float after such pronouncements. Lucy knew she should probably say something—really, she should praise the man in turn—but it was all she could do to stand and follow the rigorous demands of the dance.
By the time it was over, she was panting, desperate for the night never to end, and desperately in love with Bernard Dixon.
All of which was moderately inconvenient.
“You stay here, I’ll procure drinks,” Bernard said brightly. “You look done in. Half a minute.”
It was not, Lucy reflected as she sat in a chair beside a large fern, perhaps the most elegant description—done in—but coming from Bernard’s lips, it was praise she would wish to hear every day of her life.
Every day of her life.
What was she going to do with him? Her mother had been right from the start. She could not keep him like a dragon; Bernard Dixon wasn’t a pet. He was a living, breathing man, and one she greatly wished she could kiss again.
But that meant she would have to make a decision about what to do with him. Would Zander’s factory need a foreman? Did Bernard have any experience with such a thing?