Chapter Thirty-One
MR. MONROE HAD FORGOTTEN TO TEACH HARRIET PERHAPS THE most important part of dancing: how one behaved when it was over.
She would have allowed instinct to guide her, except instinct would have had her fleeing the duke.
Fleeing the ballroom. Fleeing the ton. Instead, she kept a smile pasted on her face, curtsied politely to Alexander’s father and took his arm when it was offered as he led her off the dance floor.
“Well” was the only word the duke spoke; Harriet couldn’t tell how short she’d come up in his estimation.
After all the dancing and counting in her head, she was too exhausted to care.
As they made their way back to the edges of the ballroom, her eyes landed—where else?
—on Alexander, standing against the wall with a gloriously handsome woman idling next to him.
Harriet trained her gaze on the floor, which admittedly had a pattern so garish as to be almost diverting.
Only when she was hauled to a stop by the duke did she look up again.
As if by magic, Alexander appeared in front of her.
Harriet startled and dropped the duke’s arm. She wondered offhandedly what had happened to the stunning woman, although the proximity of her even-more-stunning husband wiped the inquiry from her mind.
Alexander looked so handsome in his evening finery that she felt the urge to, in front of his father, in front of the entire ballroom, run her hand down his broad chest. Her fingers twitched with the desire to trace his jaw and her eyes refused to leave his face, even as John and Miss Holmes joined their small party.
Fortunately, she was staring directly at his lips as they formed the words “Can I have this dance?” for she couldn’t seem to hear over her heart pounding in her ears.
She nodded her assent, her tongue too busy fantasizing about what it would do to Alexander to be useful in speaking.
The duke, however, had no problem speaking up.
“A husband dancing with his wife? Highly uncouth. Dance with Miss Holmes instead. Give your wife a reprieve; she’s clearly quite unused to so much dancing.
Not entirely in shape yet, is she?” Harriet suspected the entire group heard the insult intended in his words, but she was finding the duke extraordinarily easy to ignore in favor of Alexander’s deep brown eyes, which were trained only on her.
He didn’t look away as he answered his father.
“If you ever attempt to insult my wife again, I will disembowel you and then spend the rest of my life gleefully rotting in Newgate for it. Miss Holmes, I must politely decline; however, while I have your ear, I feel compelled to warn you that my father will not marry you. Ever. He does not view you as a legitimate candidate; your hand doesn’t come with any land he might like to possess.
I advise you to spend your energies elsewhere.
Now then. I intend to dance with Lady Stirling; no one would begrudge me a dance with the most beautiful woman in the room, even if she is my wife.
If they do hold my poor manners against me, let’s mark it up to my being a base-born bastard, shall we? ”
Harriet took his proffered arm and did her best not to look back at the sputtering, cursing duke, who was no doubt even more red-faced than usual.
As Alexander led them to the relative safety of the dance floor, her thrill at the display waned.
She was now met with the uncomfortable reality of being alone with him.
Well, as alone as one could be in a room full of hundreds of people.
As they got into position, the strains of a waltz started to play. Harriet felt certain he’d known which dance he’d asked of her.
He gathered her closely in his arms, the feeling both foreign and familiar.
“Based on your distinct lack of blushing, you’ve taken my compliment to be insincere,” he whispered, leaning rather too close even for a waltz.
Of course, this achieved his desired effect and Harriet’s cheeks heated madly.
Her poor tongue was still useless, and Alexander was obviously delighted by having flustered her.
“You don’t believe me, do you? I am your husband and thus I must insist you defer to me—at least on the topic of your beauty. ”
The joke—or perhaps it was the feeling of being held by him, or how good he smelled, or how much she missed his smile—tripped her up. She couldn’t count one-two-threes in her head when she wanted to simultaneously throttle and lick the man in front of her.
Alexander was a good enough dancer to hide her stumble; he seamlessly guided them back into the rhythm of the dance and blessedly stayed silent long enough for her mind to settle.
“I didn’t think you the sort to insist on being husbandly,” she said, hoping it wasn’t too late to appear unaffected by him.
His face fell, which made her feel only a tiny bit guilty.
“Harriet,” he answered rather somberly, still guiding them effortlessly around the floor; Harriet’s counting proving to be quite unnecessary to the project. “How many more of your dances have been claimed?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Certainly he didn’t intend for them to dance together again, was he? Or was she so dismal a dancer that he aimed to prevent another man from enduring the experience?
“None,” she admitted.
His eyes grew wide in shock. “None?! The combined brains of every man in this room wouldn’t fill a cordial glass.”
As he grew more impassioned on her behalf—which Harriet felt was sweet, if overdone—he led them deftly off to the side of the dance floor.
“Present company excluded?” she teased from behind him.
“No, in fact, I’m the worst of them.” Alexander seemed unusually intense as he drew to a halt behind a potted ficus. A chill ran up her spine at the rather indecorous look in his eyes. She swallowed and tried to school her voice back into practiced nonchalance.
“Would you like a refreshment, my lord?” she asked. Harriet had already had enough lemonade to fill a small pond, but what else was there to do at a ball?
“No.”
“Do you … want to see the gardens?” She still wasn’t certain why their dance had been cut short and why his eyes were still boring into her. “I’ve heard they’re quite tasteless.”
“Vulgar beyond imagination,” he said, without breaking his stare.
Giving up on having discovered why they’d stopped dancing, Harriet finally grew silent.
She briefly glanced down at her feet simply to escape his study.
It was far too heating to endure for long periods of time; she felt certain she might incinerate.
“Will you come with me?” he asked, not at all clarifying his intentions.
“Are we leaving the ball? I didn’t think my dancing was that bad,” she joked.
That was the jest that finally got Alexander to loosen up a bit. His mask of fierce self-possession slipped.
“Harriet, I’m … I need to talk to you. I can’t do it here. I can’t … Frankly, I can barely think in the presence of that dress.”
“I could remove it for you?”
Harriet would remember this moment as her greatest triumph. Lord Alexander, behind a potted plant in a crowded ballroom, blushed. Had a woman ever made him blush? She felt brazen. Alive. So far from the pathetic creature she’d worried she’d be in his presence.
His lips twitched in the beginning of a smile, but he seemed determined to keep himself together. Rather unfortunate, that. She was enjoying the idea of him coming undone.
“I am sorry to cut your evening short, but would you come with me? Please?”
“Is … John all right alone? With your father?”
“If you knew my brother as I do, you’d be far more worried about my father.” Harriet chewed her lip, still unsure about abandoning him. “I’ll have the footman deliver a message to him on our way out,” he promised, eyes pleading.
“All right,” Harriet relented, taking the arm he proffered. In truth, leaving the ballroom suited her purposes.
Alexander would have paid an ungodly amount of money for his carriage to have been brought around faster. He understood how these things worked. He wasn’t trying to be rude to his driver, but God above, he wanted to get away from this place. To get away from his father. To get her alone. To go.
He had approximately 497 things he needed to tell her, and he wasn’t certain of the order.
In another life, a life he’d been living only a few months ago, he was an expert persuader.
The bulk of his fortune had come from knowing exactly what to say to convince someone to agree with him.
The person who had negotiated those land deals felt like a distant relative.
In fact, the concept of linear thinking felt outside his capabilities.
He’d been disoriented to begin with, but then seeing her in that gown and then her offering to remove said gown! Well, it was a wonder he was still standing, let alone forming coherent thoughts. Though in truth, he couldn’t quite swear he was doing the latter.
Finally, his carriage was brought around, and he helped her in, glad to touch her hand, a moment as grounding as it was destabilizing.
Alexander took the bench across from her for the sake of focus and because he couldn’t be certain she wanted him sitting beside her.
Though acquiescing to both a dance and a carriage ride suggested some amount of goodwill, did it not?
He was ruminating so much as the vehicle took off that he didn’t notice Harriet reaching down to the hem of her skirt.
It was only as she started to reveal her delicate ankles that he took notice.
Truly, it took a lot for him to tear his eyes away from her breasts most days, but her legs pulled off the stunt easily.
“What are you—?”Alexander asked dumbly as Harriet continued to raise her skirts and then crossed the cramped carriage and settled across his lap, her knees resting on the carriage seat, bracketing his legs.
“With all of your experience, I would have thought you’d understand, my lord,” she teased wickedly.