Chapter Two
“You cannot hide behind shrubbery for the entire season, Imogen. Someone will notice.”
“Nobody has noticed for four seasons, Cassie. I see no reason the foliage should fail me now.”
Cordelia Goodall gave her elder sister a look that combined genuine affection with the particular exasperation of a younger sibling who had recently discovered she was the more socially capable of the two.
She wore her best muslin, white with a narrow ribbon of pale blue at the hem that Imogen had stitched herself the night before.
She looked exactly like a girl whose first season ought to go well, and Imogen swallowed a sharp, complicated pride.
“I am not hiding,” Imogen added, adjusting the angle of her reticule against her lap. “I am reading.”
“You are lurking behind a potted palm and reading. It is hiding with additional steps.” Cassie leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
“Miss Drayton has asked me to join her. If I leave you here with nothing but a scandalous French novel for company, Aunt Margery will wake up and blame me for abandoning you.”
“Aunt Margery is not going to wake up before dinner,” Imogen said. She glanced at the small, upright figure two chairs to her left, whose chin had settled against her collarbone approximately one quadrille ago. “Go, join Miss Drayton. I am perfectly content.”
“You will not move?”
“I have established a reliable post. I should hate to surrender the territory.”
Cassie hesitated, caught between sisterly duty and her excitement.
The excitement won, as they inevitably did when one was eighteen.
She pressed Imogen’s hand once, whispered a quick warning about getting palm fronds in her hair, and disappeared into the bright, spinning center of the Marchmont ballroom.
She moved easily, a confident girl who did not yet know that ballrooms could be unkind.
Imogen tracked her sister’s progress through the crowd.
The complicated pride settled into a quiet sensation tight against her ribs.
She turned back to the small leather-bound volume smuggled inside her reticule, handling it carefully.
Crébillon’s Le Sopha was not appropriate reading material for an unmarried lady at a ball.
Appropriate reading material had ceased to matter somewhere around her second season.
The Marchmont ballroom, like every gathering before it, would continue to ignore her regardless of her gown or her conversation.
If she was destined for invisibility, she preferred to experience it with good French prose.
The potted palms in the east corner were large, well-maintained, and positioned at precisely the angle required to block the sightline from the dance floor.
Four years of consistent irrelevance had earned her this territory, and she read there now, quietly satisfied.
The ballroom moved around her in its familiar patterns.
Cassie’s white muslin flickered past at intervals.
The low, steady hum of conversation broke occasionally into laughter, the scrape of chairs, and the bright crash of an elbow finding a champagne flute on the wrong table.
The orchestra began the opening bars of something expensive-sounding.
Beside her, Aunt Margery breathed in the slow, deep rhythm of a woman who had given up pretending she was awake and had committed fully to sleep.
Imogen turned a page. Crébillon was being outrageous, as Crébillon tended to be.
The scene involved a sopha that was also a man enchanted into furniture by a vindictive fairy, exactly the sort of literary conceit that made her feel slightly less alone at events where no one spoke to her.
She was halfway through a sentence about the sopha’s observations on the private behavior of young women when a shadow fell across the page.
It was no passing servant or matron seeking a seat. This shadow arrived and settled, making itself entirely comfortable across her text.
She raised her head.
The Duke of Ravenhurst occupied the small gilt chair beside hers, uninvited, unannounced, and entirely too close.
He had folded himself into the seat as if no one had ever told him a chair was not available to him.
One long leg crossed over the other, his gloved hand resting on his knee, his face turned toward her with an expression she could not immediately read.
Half the ballroom turned at the same moment.
He had crossed her path before, naturally.
Everyone had seen the Duke of Ravenhurst. The ton discussed him in the same breath as the weather, a permanent feature of the season that arrived every April, departed every July, and left a trail of broken betrothals in his wake.
His black hair was worn slightly longer than fashion dictated, suggesting he could not be troubled to visit the barber at the same interval as other men.
A small white scar marked the corner of his mouth.
She had noticed it exactly once, two seasons ago, from across the Worthington dinner room, before returning to her book.
He was closer now. Close enough that she could see the fine weave of his cravat, expensive and tied carelessly on purpose.
Close enough that she caught a faint, clean scent beneath the ballroom’s general cloud of wax and rosewater.
It smelled of soap and crisp linen, a sharp contrast to the perfumed air, and it drew her attention in a way it ought not to have done.
His eyes were the palest color she had ever encountered at close range, a shade somewhere between silver and nothing at all.
They were fixed on her face with an intensity that made her acutely, inconveniently aware of every place where her gown did not quite fit.
“I wonder,” he said. His voice pitched low, slipping beneath the noise of the ballroom so the words belonged only to them. “Whether the book is more diverting than my company, or whether you are simply too polite to say so.”
Her fingers tightened briefly on the leather binding, but she forced them to relax.
“I have not yet had your company, Your Grace. I have had your shadow, which fell across my page without invitation, and your chair, which you commandeered without asking whether it was occupied. The book, at present, is winning.”
Something moved in his face. It was not quite surprise. He looked more like a man who had bitten into a piece of fruit expecting sweetness and had found a sharp, dark tartness instead, and was not yet certain whether he liked it.
“A harsh judgment,” he murmured, leaning a fraction closer. The proximity shifted the air in her narrow, palm-shaded corner, replacing the draft of the ballroom with the solid, radiating heat of his body. “Perhaps I should offer a defence.”
“I doubt you have ever had to defend your presence to anyone,” Imogen replied, her voice remaining perfectly level, even though she was suddenly hyper-aware of the scant inches separating his knee from hers.
“True.” His gloved hand shifted on his own knee. Very slowly, deliberately, his thumb brushed along the back of her hand where it rested on the edge of her reticule.
The touch lasted barely a breath. The glide of his leather glove dragged across the silk of hers, pressing into the ridge of her knuckles, a movement hidden entirely by the draping fronds above them. No one in the ballroom could have seen it, and no one would have believed it if they had.
Her hand went absolutely still, and the point of contact flared. The warmth sank through her skin, spreading up her wrist and along the inside of her forearm, making her briefly and furiously angry at herself for reacting to such a calculated, tiny movement.
He studied her. His eyes had not moved from her face since he sat down. The attention in them was steady and unhurried, as if he had nowhere else to look and no particular interest in finding somewhere.
“The unobserved ladies of the ton usually sit on the other side of the ballroom,” Imogen said. She kept her tone crisp, ignoring the lingering heat on her knuckles. “If you are lost, I can point you toward them.”
“I am not lost.”
“Then you are confused.”
A laugh escaped him.
It was not the practiced laugh she had heard him deploy across half a dozen ballrooms, the amused sound of a man always in on his own jest. This was shorter, and unguarded.
It broke free before he could shape it, the surprise of it visible for a fraction of a second before he caught it and tucked it away.
“I am not looking for the unobserved, Miss Goodall,” he said softly, his gaze dropping to her mouth before rising slowly to meet her eyes again. “I am looking for a country dance and a waltz. And I would like both of them with you.”
“You are aware,” Imogen said, keeping her voice pitched to the exact polite disinterest she employed for Aunt Margery’s parsnip soup, “that asking a lady for a waltz or two dances in one event, in front of half the ton, is tantamount to a declaration.”
“I am aware of very little else,” the Duke of Ravenhurst replied.
Across the ballroom, three separate matrons ceased speaking at precisely the same moment.
The sudden absence of their chatter carried its own distinct weight, hot and focused, settling directly against the nape of Imogen’s neck.
Dukes did not venture into the unlit corners of the Marchmont.
Dukes certainly did not commandeer small gilt chairs to study fiercely irrelevant spinsters, their pale eyes missing absolutely nothing, the curve of their mouths suggesting a private, devastating amusement.
“I will give you the country dance,” she offered, shifting her reticule to hide the sudden, treacherous heat in her knuckles. “The waltz is unavailable.”
“Is it promised to another?”
“It is promised to myself. I find I am excellent company, and I have no desire to be the subject of Mrs. Dalrymple’s morning calls.”