Chapter Five #2
The first turn brought her close enough that her perfume reached him, something light, not expensive, something that smelled of lavender and clean linen and the faintest trace of soap, and the simplicity of it went through him in a manner he had not been prepared for.
The expensive perfumes he was accustomed to, the heavy French fragrances that his mistresses had worn and that Aurelie’s girls applied by the bottleful, those he could dismiss.
He had been dismissing them for years. But this small, clean, honest scent that belonged to a woman who could not afford expensive purchases and who smelled instead of her own skin and her own soap, this was something his body did not know how to dismiss, and it was not trying to.
The second turn brought the edge of her bodice against his waistcoat, a brush of silk against wool that lasted less than a heartbeat and that he registered in every part of his body that had been paying attention since the corridor at the Montford.
The memory of the corridor arrived without his permission, bright and specific, the taste of her mouth and the sound she had made when his thumb found her through the muslin.
He also remembered the bewildering heat of her kissing him back with her hands fisted in his lapels, and the memory settled into the waltz and made every turn of it dangerous.
The third turn brought her eyes level with his, and she met them, held them, and did not look away.
The room began to soften at the edges. The candles blurred.
The faces of the matrons along the east wall became indistinct, and the other couples on the floor became shapes in his peripheral vision, moving, turning and receding until the only steady point in the room was the woman in his arms. The only sound that mattered was her breathing, steady and close, and his own pulse, which had settled into a rhythm that had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the pressure of her hand at his shoulder and the impossible nearness of her face.
His thumb moved against the back of her hand.
The silk of her glove was thin enough that he could feel the ridge of her knuckles beneath it, the small bones, the warmth of her skin through the fabric.
She did not pull away. Her fingers, if anything, pressed slightly closer against his, and the press sent something down through his wrist and into the pit of his stomach and further down, where his body was beginning to have opinions about the waltz that the waltz was not designed to accommodate.
He was aroused. Standing on the floor of the Hartwood ballroom with three hundred people watching, the most visible man in London holding the most invisible woman in London in his arms, and his member was stiffening slowly and inevitably against his breeches, something that could not be reasoned with or wished away.
The fact of it was absurd. He had sat in the laps of courtesans without stirring.
He had received the most practiced attentions of the most skilled women in London without more than a polite physical acknowledgement.
And now, here, in a public ballroom, fully clothed, separated from Imogen Goodall by two sets of gloves and the careful geometry of the Anglicised waltz, his body was behaving as if the quarter-inch of air between her bodice and his waistcoat were the most provocative thing it had ever encountered.
He adjusted his position slightly, leading her into the next turn with a subtle shift of his hips that disguised, he hoped, the state of affairs below his waistcoat.
She followed the lead without hesitation, and for a moment her hip brushed against his thigh, and the contact sent a jolt through him that nearly made him miss the next count.
By the second turn he had stopped pretending the waltz was a waltz.
His thumb had found the place at her waist where the boning of her stays met the softer fabric at her side, and he pressed there, slowly, a drag of his thumb against the seam that no one watching could have seen but that registered in her body.
Her breath caught, a tiny skip in the steady rhythm, and her fingers at his shoulder tightened for a fraction of a second before she smoothed the grip and continued.
Her stays. The thin wall of whalebone and stitching that sat between his hand and her body, between his thumb and the curve of her waist, between what the ballroom permitted and what the corridor had started.
He wanted to put his hand beneath them as he had at the Montford.
He wanted to feel her skin under his palm without fabric between them.
He wanted to press his mouth to the freckle at the base of her throat and feel her pulse jump under his lips.
He wanted, and the specificity of the wanting was beginning to concern him, to know what sound she would make if his mouth found her breast, not through muslin this time but against her bare skin, and whether the sound would be the same sound she had made in the corridor or something new, something only he had heard, something only he would ever hear.
He wanted to know what she looked like underneath the ivory gown.
Not abstractly, not in the generalised manner of a man who had undressed enough women to know approximately what lay beneath a gown, stays and shift.
Specifically. Her specifically. The particular shape of her body when the fabric was gone, the exact curve of her hip that he could feel through the silk, the real color of the skin at her throat where the freckle sat, whether the flush that climbed her neck when he said something charged would extend below her neckline; how far it would travel and where it would stop.
He kept his face still and his hand at her waist. He kept his eyes on hers, because looking away would have broken something that neither of them was willing to name, and the looking continued through the final rotation, the final turn and the final slowing of the orchestra.
When the music stopped, and they stood together on the floor in the sudden silence, with three hundred people watching them stand half a breath apart, he understood with a cold quiet clarity that had nothing to do with his body and everything to do with the foreign feeling that had taken up residence behind his ribs since the morning room.
He did not know when it had stopped being the wager.
Somewhere between the potted palm and the corridor.
Somewhere between the middling tea and the sound she had made when his thumb found her through the muslin.
Somewhere in the accumulation of small revelations that had no business being revelations at all: her composure, her wit, her French novels, her refusal to flutter and the quiet certainty with which she had placed her hand in his tonight, as if placing it there were the most natural thing in the world and required no more explanation than breathing.
He released her waist, and she released his shoulder.
Their hands remained clasped for one beat too long; his thumb resting against her knuckle through the silk.
Then she let go, and the air between them was air again: ordinary, insufficient.
The ballroom rushed back at once: loud, hot, and full of people who had witnessed something they would discuss for the remainder of the season, and very likely into the next.
He escorted her to supper and sat beside her.
The supper room was smaller than the ballroom, the tables dressed in white linen, the candles lower, and the intimacy of the arrangement was deliberate, designed to give couples who had waltzed together the excuse of proximity over cold chicken and aspic.
He poured her champagne. She drank half of it, set the glass down and looked at the tablecloth, and he saw her hand tremble once, briefly, before she folded it in her lap and steadied it.
“You are trembling,” he said, quietly enough that only she could hear.
“I am not.” Her voice was level. Her hand in her lap was now perfectly still.
“Your hand, Miss Goodall.”
“My hand is my own, Your Grace. As I have told you before.”
He almost smiled. Almost, because smiling would have meant breaking the look on his face that he was using to keep everything else on his face from showing, and what was threatening to show was something he was not ready for three hundred people to see.
He poured himself champagne instead, and drank it, but tasted nothing.
They said very little during dinner. He asked her once whether the chicken was acceptable.
She told him it was, but the company was variable; the same word she had used at the morning call, and the repetition of it, the small private callback to a conversation only the two of them remembered, landed somewhere behind his breastbone, settled there and refused to move.
Bethany Mercer appeared at Imogen’s elbow as the supper plates were being cleared.
She had been watching from across the room for the past forty minutes.
Ash had noticed her, a still dark-haired figure at a corner table, her teacup untouched, her eyes moving between Imogen and Ash, steady, focused, cataloguing evidence for a case she intended to argue later.
Forty minutes had apparently been long enough, because she was here now, taking Imogen’s arm through hers and drawing her gently away from the table without looking at Ash.
He watched them go. Bethany’s back was straight, her grip on Imogen’s arm firm, protective, and she leaned close to Imogen’s ear as they walked and said something he could not hear but could guess the shape of.
Because Bethany Mercer’s face had not carried a smile all evening and the absence of it was its own sentence.
Something about dukes. Something about danger.
Something about how the entire ballroom was now revising its summer plans and how that revision was not necessarily kind.
Imogen did not answer whatever Bethany had said.
He could see her profile as they walked toward the supper room door; her face was very still, her eyes were very bright, and she was walking carefully, as if the floor beneath her were not entirely where she expected it to be.
As if the waltz were still happening somewhere inside her body and had not yet finished its final turn.
He sat alone at the supper table with a glass of champagne he did not drink, the ghost of her waist beneath his palm and a realisation that was settling into him, slow and inexorable and impossible to unfeel.
He had come to this ball to advance a wager.
He had asked for the supper waltz because the wager required visibility.
He had held her in front of three hundred people because the wager demanded public courtship.
None of that was true. Not one word of it.
He had asked for the waltz because he wanted to hold her.
He had held her because holding her was the only honest thing he had done in eight years.
And the wager, the five thousand, the chestnut and Devlin’s smile at Aurelie’s, was sitting in his memory like a piece of broken glass he had swallowed and was only now beginning to feel cut.
The champagne glass was still in his hand.
He set it down. Around him, the dinner room was thinning, couples returning to the ballroom for the final dances, chairs scraping, conversation rising and falling in the particular rhythm of people who had been sitting down for too long and were ready to stand.
A footman approached to clear his plate, hesitated when he saw the duke’s face, and retreated without clearing anything.
He thought about Devlin. Devlin would want a report.
He had been sending small enquiring notes for the past week, worded casually, friendly on the surface, each one containing a reference to the deadline or the chestnut or some detail of the wager’s terms that was designed to remind Ash that the game had scores and that scores required keeping.
He had answered one of them, three days ago.
A single line: Progressing. He had signed it with his initial, sealed it and sent it.
He sat in his study for ten minutes afterwards, turning the watch over in his hands and thinking about the distance between what the letter said and what was true.
He finished the champagne and left the Hartwood ball without speaking to anyone else.
His cravat was still badly done, his gloves still carrying the warmth of her hand, the watch ticking in his waistcoat pocket, keeping time against a body that had decided that it was no longer interested in being managed, and a mind that was beginning, very slowly and very reluctantly, to agree.
The carriage was waiting at the kerb. Collins had sent it ahead, because Collins anticipated things, and tonight what Collins had anticipated was that the Duke of Ravenhurst would leave the Hartwood ball earlier than expected and in a state that did not invite conversation.
The streets were quiet, and the watch ticked in his pocket.
In the dark of the carriage, he took it out and held it but did not open it.
He did not need to see his mother’s face tonight.
He already knew what she would have said.
She would have said that a man who waltzes with a woman he has been hired to ruin has forfeited the right to call it a wager.
She would have been right.