Sin looked back and forth between them.
Then, understanding dawned. Freedom from Sin. “On second thought, I do,” Prudence blurted. “A drink. A refreshment. I am parched. Punch would be splendid.” Champagne would be far more splendid.
Sin narrowed his eyes on his wife and then wordlessly folded his arms at his chest.
At her brother’s skeptical look, Prudence feigned a cough.
Her sister-in-law looked torn between throwing her hands up in despair and laughing. Juliet took one of her husband’s hands and gave it a squeeze. “Two glasses of punch.” She coughed into her other hand. “I am afraid with the crush, I, too, am parched.”
Her brother lowered his head close to Juliet’s. “Are you trying to be rid of me, love?”
“Perhaps, but just for now.” A soft smile played on her lips, and the look that passed between them was full of such potent emotion Prudence dipped her gaze away from that terribly intimate moment, feeling like the very worst sort of interloper.
Jealousy snaked through Prudence once more; a longing to know even just a hint of that connection to another. Unbidden, her gaze wandered back to where the marquess remained still locked in conversation with the lovely young woman.
“Your brother,” Juliet said, calling Prudence’s attention back. “He’ll return shortly because he’ll fear we’re scheming.”
Unless Juliet could formulate a plan to extricate Christian from the unfairly lovely dark-haired lady, then there really wasn’t a scheme she cared to discuss.
“You are sad,” Juliet quietly observed. And accurately.
Prudence let her silence serve as her answer.
Then, her sister-in-law, since she’d entered their family as a governess, had been uncannily wise in so very many matters. She saw all it would seem. Juliet looked across the ballroom to where Prudence’s attention remained locked. “So the man whose captured your regard is the very same gentleman Sin warned you away from?”
If she were a true coward, she could pretend she’d failed to hear that whisper. For the scandal that had come in her wedding Sin and her undeserved sense of guilt for Patrina’s failed elopement with her brother, Juliet was now nearly as devoted to avoiding all hint of scandal as Prudence’s mother.
Mustering a smile, Prudence ripped her gaze away from the marquess and said, “And knowing how undaunted you are by my brother, you know all the details pertaining to Chri…that is, that gentleman.”
Juliet worried the flesh of her lower lip as she periodically stole glances across the ballroom. “I do not want to see you hurt.”
Except, she had already been hurt. Through decisions that hadn’t been her own. For scandals that had occurred when she’d been just a girl. And for that, Prudence stood on the sidelines while couples waltzed, and the occasional rake leered, and the peers gossiped.
“I am so very sorry,” Juliet whispered.
…I am not one who would hold another’s missteps against you. Nor would I fault you for any you yourself might have made…
“Do not be,” Prudence said, shoving aside her self-pity. She found Christian briefly again in the crowd, still conversing for an endless time with that young lady. Blast, why could he not have sneered and jeered the way she’d come to expect from all members of the ton? Then, she’d not feel this viselike pressure squeezing her chest at the mere sight of him speaking to another. “What have you to feel sorry for? For a decision made by your brother? How could I hold you to blame for your brother’s actions, while condemning Society for holding me guilty in a like manner? I would not do that,” she said with an emphatic shake of her head. Then in an attempt to drive back the self-recrimination and regret she still saw in Juliet’s expressive eyes, Prudence waggled her eyebrows. “Perhaps my younger, more miserable self would be so very contrary and rude. But not the woman I’ve become.”
“Oh, Pru, you have grown up,” Juliet murmured softly. There was a wistfulness to her expression.
From over her sister-in-law’s shoulder, she spied Sin, taller than most gentlemen present, cutting a path through the crush of guests. “Now, if you would only remind my brother of that detail.” It was deuced hard to live one’s life with a meddling, overprotective brother about.
A bark of laughter escaped Juliet, earning censorious stares from those nearby. Alas, they’d long become accustomed to those unkind gawkers.
Sin came to a stop before them and frowned. “What is it?”
Prudence inclined her head. “It is your wife. She wishes to dance.” For didn’t all young ladies wish to dance? Especially with a gentleman so hopelessly in love as her brother was with his wife. She rescued the two cups of punch from his hands. “Now, go dance. I will be fine,” she said with a stern frown when they remained rooted to the floor eying her as though she were a child they were about to abandon at a London orphanage. “Go,” she demanded again. “I will enjoy my punch.” Or in this case her two glasses of punch. She held up one in display.
Her brother hesitated a long moment, but as the strains of the waltz spilled through the ballroom, he held out his elbow and escorted Juliet to the dance floor.
Prudence sighed, grateful when an attentive servant hurried over to relieve her of the punch. She placed both untouched glasses upon the liveried servant’s tray and gave him a smile. Prudence detected her mother scanning her intent gaze over the crowd from where she stood in conversation with the hostess, no doubt in search of the daughter she sought to protect from scandal at all costs.
A black curse she’d heard Sin utter on more scores than she could count slipped through her mind. She ducked behind the nearest column. The only aspect worse than being a gossiped-about, lonely wallflower, was being a gossiped-about as a lonely wallflower who only had her mother for company at these infernal affairs. Prudence pressed her back to the wall and slipped through the ballroom. As she moved past column after column, the twirling dancers would shift within her focus and then disappear as the next column hid the fortunate ones who at least had the pleasure of dancing at a ball. She made to duck behind another column.
“Lady Prudence.” A deep baritone she now recognized in her sleeping and waking moments froze her mid-step. “Never tell me you are escaping the evening’s entertainments.”
The tip of her slipper hovered in the air. Until she reminded herself to complete that step. Her heart thudded wildly. “You are here,” she blurted.
He tipped his head. “Should I be somewhere else other than my own ball?”
“Not here, but here,” she corrected and then embarrassed heat immediately blazed over her body. As in he was no longer kissing the hand of that proper, likely scandal-free young lady. “What I intended to say was good evening, Chri—Lord St. Cyr,” she swiftly amended.
The ghost of a smile hovered on his hard lips.
Prudence told her brain to tell her lips to move. “I was slipping away,” she confided with a shocking truthfulness that would have had her mother tossing her hands in the air in despair over her indirect acknowledgement to their host that she found the event tedious.
The marquess studied her a moment the way he might take in an exhibit of a never before seen treasure. “I have not met a woman as forthright as you,” he said, bemused.
She absently skimmed her fingers along the tall, white column. “My mother says too much honesty is not a good thing.” Her mother’s disapproving visage flashed to mind. “Particularly in matters of courtship,” she mumbled under her breath. Why, the dowager countess would suffer an apoplexy if she discovered anything about this particular exchange.
Something dark and tortured glinted in Christian’s eyes. “Your mother is wrong.” The harsh adamancy of that protestation gave her pause, chasing away worries over her mother.
Unnerved by the turbulent emotion reflected in his gaze, she resumed her distracted movement. “I am—”
“You are spirited,” he put in. Pleasure stirred within her. He continued in a gruff voice. “Society admires colorless
, emotionless creatures. That is not you…” Christian’s words trailed off as he shifted his gaze to her distracted movements.
Prudence looked about in search of what had driven him to silence. She followed his stare where it lingered upon that back and forth pattern she traced over the pillar. All the breath left her lungs at the desire in his eyes. Her mother, brother, and sisters might see her as the innocent child who’d brought havoc to the Tidemore household but she was a woman, and even with the lack of worldly experience, she knew by the narrow-eyed gaze he trained upon her every moment, that this man desired her. It was a heady sensation.
“Dance with me?” His gruff words contained a commanding strength.
Emotion stuck in her throat. He was a man who did not care about the gossip or what Society said or saw, or believed they saw in a person. Prudence placed her fingertips upon his outstretched arm and allowed him to escort her to the dance floor, guiding her past the rabid stares, and positioning them along the outer perimeter of the ballroom so they’d not interfere with the other waltzers mid-set. A smile hovered on her lips as he guided her through the one-two-three steps.
“You enjoy dancing,” he commented, adjusting his hold on her waist when she tripped.
“I do.” A little sigh escaped her as they turned in dizzying circles.
“And sketching.”
Christian spoke as though he collected details of her, intending to keep those shared intimate pieces someplace safe. “And sketching,” she needlessly confirmed. “What of you, my lord? You know so much of me and yet I know nothing of you.” Prudence missed a step and he quickly righted her.
“I enjoy reading.”
An image came to mind of him closeted away in his library with a roaring fire in the hearth on a winter’s night, with her curled up at his side. Warmth unfurled inside her; a hungering so strong for that moment to be more than a mere wisp of a dream. “Do you?” How long had she dreamed of knowing that closeness with a man who loved her?
“Are you surprised?” The right corner of his lip quirked up.
“No,” she confessed and she wasn’t. A man who could see beyond the artifice of the glittering world in which he lived was surely a good deal more clever than all those lords and ladies who cared more for the cut of their fabric than anything of real import. “What are you reading now?” Horribly impolite and improper, there was still a hungering need to know more of him.
He winged an eyebrow upward. “Now? I am not reading. I am dancing.”
His teasing words pulled a startled laugh from her, attracting more stares. She ignored the notice directed their way. “Oh, hush,” she scolded. “You know what I meant.” What were a few additional gawking looks? “When your festivities end this evening,” his lips twitched at the slight emphasis she placed on that particular word, “what book awaits you?” She took him for one who read those Greek classics of bold, powerful warriors.
“The Bride of Lammermoor.” He righted her as she stomped on his toes.
It was a good thing she was not the wagering sort. She’d have lost everything on that silent wager. The work of Sir Walter Scott is what this man read. Those tales of unrequited love and great strife? How unexpected of a man who’d disavowed anything and everything romantic.
“You are surprised,” he observed with a wry grin.
“I’d not taken you as one to read of romance,” she conceded. “Not a gentleman who has spoken so emotionlessly about love and hope.”
He dipped his head closer so that their breath mingled. Oh, God. No man had a right to smell as he did. The faintest hint of chocolate and brandy filled her senses. She missed another step and this time her stumble had nothing to do with her dreadful lack of rhythmic timing. “And I would take you as one to see romance in Sir Walter Scott’s work.”
Except, those words spoken in that faintly supercilious way, were not spoken as a compliment. She bristled, far preferring him charming and grinning to condescending. “Isn’t it a work of romance?” she shot back.
“You have read it?” he asked with something akin to surprise, which only further rankled.
“Are you surprised I read?” she turned his earlier charge on her.
Christian stilled and then tossed his head back on a laugh. “Brava,” he said and her heart kicked up again with that bothersome tendency of racing too quickly at his quips and smiles. He ran his gaze over her face. “You are an Incomparable.” Those words were spoken, more to himself.
“I am not,” she said matter-of-factly. “I wear white gowns and have the requisite hideous ringlets.” As though to highlight that particular point, an ever bothersome strand her maid could not tame tumbled over her eye. “Furthermore, Incomparables always have dance partners.”
“But you have a dance partner, madam,” he pointed out. He swept thick, golden lashes downward, hooding his gaze, but not before she saw that earlier glint of desire she’d noted before. “You have me.”
Oh, dear. Her lips parted. There, in the middle of the crowded ballroom, a small sliver of her heart slipped free and landed at his feet, forever his.
The orchestra’s set drew to a close and Christian and Prudence stopped on the edge of the ballroom. Polite applause went up from the dancers as they then shuffled off the floor. She and the marquess remained, lingering a moment.
“My lady,” he said quietly, bowing over her hand.
I do not want this moment to ever end. “My lord.”
“Prudence.”
She bit the inside of her cheek as her blasted, overprotective brother’s furious tone cut into this magical moment between her and Christian. Prudence followed his gaze to the towering, furious figure just beyond her shoulder. Blast!
“St. Cyr,” her brother greeted the other man with an icy grin that could have frozen the Thames.
Christian stiffened, and then with a smile she’d come to learn in just a handful of days was his carefully crafted empty grin, he greeted Sin. “Lord Sinclair, a pleasure.” Then in a blatantly dismissive gesture that sent her brother’s eyebrows shooting to his hairline, he presented his shoulder to Sin. “Thank you for the honor of this dance, my lady. I bid you good night.”
With that, he turned on his heel and marched off, leaving her the misery of only her brother, and Society’s cruel eyes for her company. She stared after him. His words whispered around her mind, as they’d been spoken in that husky, gruff tone which called to her. You have me… A little sigh escaped her.
“You are woolgathering,” her brother bit out. “With Society staring on.”
If only she did have him in all the ways that she’d dreamed of having an honorable, good gentleman. Another sigh slipped past her lips. “That would be splendid.”
“Are you mad?” her brother’s whisper cut into her fanciful musings. “Or are you speaking in jest?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say that it really had been more a matter of her not attending him, but then wisely closed her mouth. As she moved alongside her brother, back toward where Juliet stood in waiting, tension poured off Sin’s taut frame. The strands of the orchestra’s quadrille filled the ballroom. He shot a deliberate gaze around the crowd and then he narrowed his eyes. He drew her to a stop beside a nearby pillar. “What is it?” she asked quietly when he did not speak.
“You would make more of the gentleman’s intentions than are there. He is not honorable.” She tightened her mouth, prepared to flay her brother to ribbons for tearing down a man he did not know. “He is, as I said previously, a fortune hunter. And if there was any doubt of that particular point, his dancing this set with Lady Beatrice should be testament of that.”
Incapable of feigning indifference, she swung her gaze out to the neat circles of dancers and found him in short order. Christian and the young woman, Lady Beatrice, cut a striking pair—both tall, golden, and regal in their bearing. And the sight of the woman’s hand twined with his ravaged her foolish heart.
“Prudence,” Sin began.
She
withered him with a look. “Do you seek to break me down before Society? Or do you wish to wound me and have me speak of matters that really should not be discussed before the ton?”
Shock contorted his face and she shoved aside the niggling of guilt. This angry, overprotective man who’d judge another and inadvertently wound her bore little trace of the brother she knew. Prudence tipped her chin up. “Your wife is calling and I have torn my hem.” It was a blatant lie. Well, the latter part was, anyway. He need but glance down at her perfectly intact hem to verify as much.
“Prudence,” he began.
Not permitting him a discussion that had no place before prying eyes, she turned on her heel and made her way through the ballroom. All the while she skirted the edge, studiously avoiding looking at him. And his partner.
All gentlemen who attended polite ton functions danced with ladies. Why, he could hardly dance more than a set with her without that being interpreted for far more. And yet… She came to a stop beside a pillar at the end of the hall. She used the enormous, white structure to shield herself from Society’s focus and search about for Christian. Drat, it was as though he’d simply disappeared. She wrinkled her nose. Which was a good deal better than his dancing another one of those perfectly pretty and not at all scandalous ladies about his marble ballroom floor.
It mattered not. It didn’t. Why, it was as she’d said to Sin—she’d shared nothing more than a waltz with the man. One dance did not constitute a thing. Anyway, not on the gentleman’s part. Then there had been a chance encounter, which had by no means been any coordinated meeting between them.
You are a horrid liar, Prudence…and in this instance, she suspected her governess turned sister-in-law would forgive that overused portion of Prudence’s vernacular. She made to continue on when the whispers and giggles reached her ears. Again.
“No one would dare wed her. A sister who eloped. A brother who wed the family’s servant.”
Prudence tried to meld her frame into the massive Doric column. For the span of a heartbeat, she entertained the idea of popping out from behind it and correcting the ladies’ erroneous knowledge of the situation. Juliet had been a governess, which was more a respected member of the family than servant.
Lords of Honor-The Collection Page 27