Page 38 of Tempting Fate
But he was nothing like the man she’d described. Feeling raw and exhausted and more than a little bleak, he drifted to the pergola steps, putting space between them.
“I… take it you’re done dancing for the evening, then?” he said hopefully. “Should I call for the carriage?”
She nodded, casting a longing glance back toward the ballroom. “If I had my druthers, I’d dance until my legs gave out. I love it so much, losing myself to the rhythm, focusing only on the music and what my feet are doing… It’s the only time my thoughts are truly quiet. Usually, I’m Nora and Mercy’s bespectacled little sister. No one of consequence. But tonight, I could feel everyone watching and I… I forget how to dance.” She pushed a breath through her lips, puffing them out. “There are days I hate who I am.” Her little fists clenched, and she shook with an emotion other than fear. He watched the war on her features with a helpless compassion.
Without thinking, he stood and went to her, offering his hand. “No one is watching now.”
She blinked up at him in confusion. “You said you didn’t dance.”
“I know the basics, I suppose.” He lifted a shoulder. “You can lead. I’ll follow. I’m a quick study.”
“Me lead?” She looked around the private garden as if he’d said something scandalous. “You won’t feel… I don’t know… emasculated?”
At that a true smile touched his lips, one he couldn’t suppress if he wanted to. “Miss Felicity, if my manhood could be threatened by learning something from a woman, then I wasn’t much of a man to begin with.”
His words seemed to please her so much, she unclenched her fingers before sliding her glove into his. “Indeed not.” The smile she granted him had lost its brittle edge.
She stood across from him, glittering like a moonbeam, and set her hand on his shoulder, moving into the circle of his arms. Her fingers disappeared into his as she stretched their hands away from their bodies to adopt the waltzing posture.
Gabriel stood still and solid, worrying that she’d change her mind. That somehow, she’d recognize him.
He knew it was gauche to look at her, that their necks should arch away to avoid the intimacy of eye contact.
But she never broke her gaze from his as she stepped one way, and then— encouraged by his effortless follow— she stepped again. And again.
Gabriel’s body attuned to her every gentle cue, to the nearly imperceptible nudges of her hands. The soft wisp of her slippers as they kissed his shoes, urging him in time to the music. This waltz was a slow one, thankfully giving him time to adjust. He’d watched her dance once before at the disastrous Midnight Masquerade and marveled at the change in her. The confidence she’d possessed when she’d drifted out of her mind and into her body.
Just as she did now.
The temptation to join her in that place was undeniable, and before long, Gabriel became lost in the rhythm of their movement and her breath and his thrumming heart.
“You, Gareth Severand, are either a liar or a natural,” she said after a while, her eyes twinkling in the dim light of the garden lanterns. “I can hardly believe you’ve not done this before.”
“A liar,” he confessed ruefully. “My mother did teach me a bit before she died.”
“Oh?”
A pang lanced his heart at the memory. His lovely, young, ebony-haired mother trying to teach an impatient boy of eight a new waltz. “That was very long ago. I hardly thought to remember.”
“It sounds like the memories of your mother are good ones.”
“All of them,” he murmured.
“And your father?”
The last thing he wanted in this conversation, in this moment with this woman so close to his body, was the intrusion of his father.
“None of them.”
Observant as she was, she seemed to accept discussion on that account was closed.
They were silent a moment, lost in the steps. In their thoughts.
“Do you really not have a sweetheart?” she ventured. “I think that’s an awful shame.”
Lord, but did she think to poke every bruise his soul possessed?
“No. I do not.”
