Without waiting for her reply, he set out merrily toward the dance floor, tugging her along after him. He strode through the crowd without a backwards glance.
“Lord Trevor!” she protested.
“Come, come, it’ll be fun.” He did not intend to give her a chance to refuse.
G
race was nearly ready to have an apoplectic fit as she hastened to keep up, trying not to trip.
“Lord Trevor!” she insisted, while his broad-shouldered frame plowed a straight path through the throng.
He ignored her halfhearted protests.
The man had all but kidnapped her! And the
women
who had been watching him all night certainly took notice. She hid her cringe as quizzing glasses were aimed at her from all directions.
“Ignore them,” he suggested as if he’d read her mind.
She let out a long-suffering grumble of a sigh. At least the jealous ladies’ scrutiny gave her a taste of the constant and clearly unwanted attention he’d been subject to all night.
No wonder he had sought a hiding place.
Then he guided her to her mark, steering her gently by the shoulders. “Stand,” he ordered. “There.”
She obeyed, her heart pounding.
Her cheeks burned, and her stays felt too tightly laced as she found herself in the midst of one of the most exclusive ballrooms in London, waiting across from a national hero for a country dance to start.
It had to be a dream. This sort of thing just didn’t happen to her.
Glancing around self-consciously, Grace felt both hot and cold, and slightly dizzy. She was sure she was going to make a fool of herself, forget the steps.
Then he smiled reassuringly at her, and somehow she could breathe again.
The music started, and Lord Trevor bowed to her on the beat, looking mischievously pleased with himself for this second coup, after learning her name.
Strangely willing to indulge him, Grace responded with a creditable curtsy.
“I’m glad your father isn’t the strict sort of churchman. The kind who don’t believe in dancing.”
His choice of subjects helped relax her. She smiled ruefully. “Oh, Papa’s a sprightly dancer. He never misses the quadrille in particular.”
His roguish smile widened; it made her feel like the only woman in the room. Then their dance began in earnest.
They were far enough away from the musicians that they were able to chat each time the movements of the dance brought them together in the center before parting again to their separate lines.
Grace was nervous. Lord Trevor’s full attention was fixed on her, while her own was split between her partner and the master of ceremonies. This august personage stood at the head of the room calling each new figure to be performed. She soon found it was easier simply to keep an eye on the other couples to follow what to do.
In:
They linked fingers up high and turned sedately.
Her partner looked altogether dashing with his other hand fisted behind his back. “So, your father is young Lord Brentford’s mentor,” he remarked discreetly.
Out again:
They retreated to their respective sides.
She hesitated, but answered the question when they returned for a similar turn in the other direction. “Lord Brentford ought not to gamble,” she admitted.
“The lad likes deep play from what I hear. Some people never learn their lesson.”
Out again.
As they parted, returning to stand across from each other, Grace could see that he had tensed. She looked at him in question from across the empty space.
He shook his head with a troubled smile, a veiled look in his eyes.
In:
“What is it?” she persisted when the third figure brought them back together for a sensual turn, his palms to hers.
“Ah, nothing.”
“Something,” she ventured.
He shrugged, then conceded, avoiding her gaze. “I had a friend like that, too. A gambling fiend.”
She noticed the taut look around his gray eyes. “I take it he ran into trouble.”
“He sold me down the river, more or less, trying to recoup his losses. Nearly got us all killed.”
“What happened to him?”
“Ended up in prison, and there he remains.” He shook his head in regret. “I hope your father can help that lad more than I could my unfortunate friend.”
Out once more:
They parted again and gazed at each other intently. Grace felt sorry for him and said so when they brushed close on the next figure, passing back to back.
“It doesn’t signify. I learned an important lesson.”
“What’s that?”
“You can’t trust anyone,” he said idly. “Even a friend, half the time.”
She frowned. “Nonsense, there are people you can trust.”
“Oh? Like who?”
“My father. Me. Plenty of people,” she assured him.
He smiled at her in amusement when they parted once more, as if she were some innocent child who had just said something adorably naïve.
She furrowed her brow, irked by his patronizing little smile, so knowing, so world-weary.
Still, the man was too handsome by half.
She forgot her annoyance in seconds as she moved with him. Athletically built, he was an excellent dancer, smooth and effortless. With his arm around her waist and his hand supporting hers in the next figure, he made her glide. Gazing up into his gray eyes, she felt dainty and beautiful with the way he watched her, the hint of a smile on his lips.
“I rather like you, whoever you are,” he murmured in a low, silken tone that echoed the one he had used upstairs when they had been alone. “I desire to know you better, Grace Kenwood.”
She blushed at his frank enticement. “Whoever I am? But you learned my name. Did you already forget it?”
“No, of course not, silly girl. It’s just that I find you a bit of a mystery. You’re not like anybody else here.”
She snorted at what she was sure was a charmer’s line. “There is nothing mysterious about me, I can assure you.”
“That’s precisely what intrigues me. You are exactly what you seem. You don’t seem to know how rare that is.”
And he released her.
As she stepped back to her side of the floor, she was trembling, struggling to wake up from this silken dream.
The wistful desire to know what it would be like for him to make love to her shocked her when she noticed the drift of her own musings.
Egads! What was wrong with her.
The lines switched as the figures moved along; he went to dance with the lady next to her, while she took a turn with the other woman’s partner. Who held no such appeal though he was young and good-looking and dressed in the first stare.
Grace barely noticed him, going through the motions.
All her awareness was fixed on Lord Trevor. Her heart pounded when they returned to each other.
“Have I upset you again? Was I too forward?” he breathed, ducking his lips closer to her ear.
She was half-seduced already and feared he knew it. “Don’t be silly. It’s just—I wasn’t expecting you to come back to the ball.”
“I had to apologize to you.”
“Nonsense, you already did.”
“ ’Twas insufficient, Miss Kenwood. I behaved like a marauding Hun with you. You deserve much better,” he whispered. “And I want you to know I truly am sorry. Not just words.”
She lowered her gaze, smiling, her body tingling all over. “Well, I
did
jab you with a hairpin.”
“Yes,” he breathed, smiling as his lips grazed her ear. “You are rather violent for a preacher’s daughter, aren’t you?”
She shot him a merry look. “You brought it on yourself.”
“Hmmm.” His eyes glowed.
S
he has no idea how beautiful she is.
Trevor found himself all the more deeply enchanted.
Miss Kenwood’s loveliness was beyond the physical. She was kind, modest, soft in all the ways that a man who had been too often cut by the world’s jagged edges could desire. But his recent betrayal was not so easy to forget, let alone escape.
Just as he finished the dance with Grace, bowed over her hand, and kissed it in respectful thanks, he turned with her to applaud the musicians, and spotted a familiar flash of golden hair on the other side of the ballroom.
Instantly, he tensed.
His smile faltering just for a heartbeat, he lowered his gaze, engulfed once more by the bitterness that had further hardened his already cold heart.
Laura and her idiot dragoon. Well, well. Grace’s charm must have, shockingly, got him to lower his guard a bit, but one look at Laura, and the cold fury, the stab in the back, the sense of abandonment . . . it all came flooding back.
Even more than he despised that feckless beauty, the truth was he blamed himself for ever relying on anything as weak as a woman in the first place.
No matter, he promised himself coldly. It would never happen again.
Unwilling to put Miss Kenwood in the middle of his silly Society dramatics or subject her to Laura’s haughty smirk, he chose to make his exit for the night.
Grace was still applauding the musicians when he took her gently by the elbow to say farewell.
If ever he needed reminding that women weren’t worth it, it was now. He made a mental note of it.
Grace Kenwood was more agreeable than most, a calm, steady presence peacefully content in who she was, she did not need to draw attention to herself. But whatever her appeal, he was not getting lured back in, ever, to the female trap.
This one, he feared, could make a slave of him—precisely because it would never enter her head to do so.
She was quintessentially
safe.
At least that was his assessment of her nature so far, professionally speaking. If he were still in the spy game, she’d be the perfect kind of mark, wide-eyed, naïvely unsuspecting. Devoid of cynicism, lacking vanity, obviously quick to forgive. The type who saw the best in everyone.
She should marry a country farmer, he thought dryly, who would never break her wholesome heart.
But it was true. She had a realness about her that threw him off his stride. Her lack of guile itself became a strange and foreign threat, at least to a man who had been betrayed twice by people close to him.
When Grace turned to him in question, Trevor bent closer to her ear. “Thank you for your company this evening, Miss Kenwood.” He chose his words carefully, wanting both to honor her and yet, to push her away. For both their sakes. “It was a welcome distraction. But I’m afraid that I must go.”
“Oh!” She looked at him in surprise, scanning his face. “Is something wrong, my lord?”
He gave her a formal smile and a middling lie, one not so much intended to deceive her, but a veiled and more courteous way of saying,
It’s none of your affair.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I just remembered something I have to do at home. I’m so sorry, but it’s an urgent matter of business that requires my attention before morning.”
“Oh, I-I am sorry to hear it. Very well.” She smiled brightly, but he saw doubts flickering in her eyes.
He saw that
she
saw he was lying, but God bless her, she chose not to press him.
She offered her hand for him to shake, another oddly genuine gesture. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Lord Trevor.”
“The pleasure’s mine.” He shook her hand gently. “Give my best to your father, Miss Kenwood. Good night.”
“Good night,” she echoed.
He took leave of her with a nod, ignoring the confusion in her fine blue eyes. Then he strode off without a backwards glance toward the opposite door through which the happy couple had arrived. By now, he had shrugged off his earlier petty scheme of making Laura jealous.
It was beneath him, and besides, at heart, he didn’t really give a damn.
He was beginning to think he had never really loved her. He had tried for a while, more or less. He’d told his friends many times over the years that he did, indeed, insisted on it, usually when he was drunk in some distant country, with a whore on his knee.
He had thought for a long time that they laughed at him simply because they were scoundrels who scoffed at love and used women freely—at least until most had wound up married and changed their tune. But he was beginning to understand now.
His brother agents had known that he was only fooling himself when it came to Laura; a planner, a dreamer, maybe it was only the vision in his head that he had been in love with.
An illusion that had never quite fooled his heart.
That being the case, why should he be surprised that the woman had finally jilted him? To be sure, the lack of feeling between them was mutual, if only he had cared to admit it before now. If only he had cared to quit denying that the two of them saw each other as a trophy, a prize.
They looked good together; their families approved of each other as excellent breeding stock, and any red-blooded man in his right mind would have loved to breed with Laura. Frankly, it was a wonder she had waited for him as long as she had.
But deep down, he supposed he had always known there was nothing really
there
between them.
Emptiness,
he thought. Perfect.
That was what he’d built his future on, and for that, he had no one to blame but himself.
A
distraction . . . So that’s what I was tonight,
Grace mused, a little stung by this callous revelation.
But off he went. Another mysterious exit.
Oh, well. At least he had bothered to say good-bye to her. He did not even acknowledge several other guests who hailed him as he marched off through the crowd and disappeared.
Something had obviously upset him. She hoped it wasn’t her; she was fairly sure she had not committed any blunders. No, it was more like he had seen something—or someone—across the room that he didn’t like.
She stood on her tiptoes, trying to get a look around at what it might have been, but just then, her father found her.
“Here she is! Look, Grace, I’ve found you a partner to dance with at last. My daughter’s been waiting to dance with you all evening, George, just as I said. Poor thing, don’t let her be a wallflower.”