“I’ve been distracted.”
She wondered how much she should say, and then decided to speak her mind. “You didn’t sleep at home last night.”
“I was—disassembling a project.”
She smiled. “You lost track of time.”
“No—it wasn’t that.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “It went all wrong. I took it apart. Chopped it. I tried to burn it but the wretched thing wouldn’t light. I went back today to try to finish the job.”
He actually looked shaken. She put her hand on his wrist. “Tobias?”
His mouth formed a hard line, and he looked down at his hands. “It’s all right. I simply had a look down a path I can’t follow. There was a price there I wouldn’t pay.”
A small, selfish part of her wanted to say this wasn’t the right conversation for her first ball. She wanted romance, flowers, and celebration. She swallowed back the feeling, counting it as selfish. “I don’t understand.”
He gave a quick smile. “I’m glad to be here, with you, in the bright lights. In the end, that’s all there is to it. Really.”
Evelina squeezed his wrist and let her hand fall away. Any other comfort was hard to give when she didn’t comprehend the problem. “Tonight is for music and dance.”
Tobias recovered himself, affecting a semblance of his usual manner. “Have you any openings left on your card? If there are, I will have them all. And I
Her heart skittered beneath the lace-covered sheath of her bodice, stopped midbeat by the seriousness in his gray eyes. The effect was more striking than mere mischief. In an eye blink, Tobias had introduced a new element: what was between them hadn’t been a game for a while, but the stakes had somehow been raised.
Evelina stood pinned by his gaze, unsure of herself and yet desperately certain she wanted him. She wanted to believe that desire so plain on his face.
She cleared her throat, reaching for the lemonade. “I’m afraid Captain Smythe has already claimed the waltz,” she said.
His finely sculpted mouth turned down. “I shall have to call him out for pistols at dawn. I am a crack shot, you know.”
“Is that a wise plan, Mr. Roth? Crack shot or no, I should remind you that he is a military man.”
“Mr. Roth? So formal? You cut me to the quick.”
“I think an element of formality is called for when a man proposes to get himself killed in such a harebrained fashion.”
He lifted a brow. “You call the field of honor harebrained?”
“Yes, I do when the cause of the fight is three minutes of Johann Strauss at his most relentlessly cheerful.”
He plucked the dance card from her wrist. “Then what time do you have left for me, Evelina?”
For a moment, a flutter in her stomach interfered with her wits. Then she snapped herself back to reality. There were dark circles under his eyes, strain around his mouth. Tobias sometimes looked ragged from carousing all night, but this went much, much deeper. The events of the last week were telling on him, too. He needed a night of light and laughter as much as she did. The least she could do was be entertaining.
She tilted her head. “What time do I have? I think it is received wisdom not to use words like
His mouth quirked. “Speaking as a young man, allow me to correct you. Absolutes have a dread fascination. The question of how much dread and how much fascination depends entirely on the speaker.”
He carefully penciled his name against the remaining dances and ceremoniously slipped the ribbon loop over her glove. Her heart began to speed. It was not the Done Thing for a young man to ask for so many dances in a night, much less write his name over another’s. It was rude, unheard of, and coming from Tobias, the next best thing to a proposal.
Through the soft fabric, she could feel the strength in his long, clever fingers as he replaced the card. Then he raised her hand to his lips, his gaze never leaving hers. “Let’s test the absolutes of anytime and always.”
Her pulse raced like an overwound clock. She touched the icy glass of lemonade to her cheek to cool her flaming skin. “You are being selfish, Mr. Roth. I see Alice Keating, for one, casting a longing look your way.”
“I don’t want anyone but you. You are light and life, and I have been in a very dark place.” He took the glass from her hand and set it on the side table as the orchestra began a medley of Chopin’s waltzes. “Shall we?”
Evelina floated to the dance floor beside him, conscious that she was fulfilling all those fantasies she had nursed since first meeting Imogen’s handsome brother years ago. Back then, Tobias had seemed more an untouchable godling than a real young man. All that awe came flooding back to her, giving the moment a solemnity that far outweighed the reality of a simple dance. She let him take her in his arms, and gave herself over to the sensual pull of the music. When his body commanded hers to lean into the first turn, for the first time in her life she was tempted to swoon. It was quite delightful. Evelina Cooper never had the luxury of being giddy, and she rode the feeling for all it was worth.
But of course, she didn’t faint dead away in his arms. Nor did she curse when the last cadence rose like mist into the torrid ballroom air, though she was sorely tempted. It was intermission, and Tobias went in search of something cold for them to drink. A mechanical orchestra started up, filling the place of the live musicians with a pitch-perfect but utterly lifeless Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche. No one even tried to dance to it.
The dreadful music brought her back to reality, and her extravagant happiness abated a little. She wasn’t sure what had got into Tobias, but she was going to have to restore her dance card to good order. The Duchess of Westlake wouldn’t thank her for precipitating a scandal at her ball.
She then realized Mouse hadn’t reappeared since her arrival. She looked around anxiously, searching the floor for the familiar gray shape.
“Is something the matter, Miss Cooper?” asked Michael Edgerton, who was passing by.
Evelina started. “I, er, believe I dropped a button.”
“What color is it?” he asked helpfully, staring at the floor intently.
“All right then,” he said dubiously. “As long as you’re sure.”
“Absolutely,” she said brightly. “Thanks so much.”
Edgerton took his leave with a slight shake of his head. She’d handled that badly, and heaven knew what he was thinking, but Evelina was too uneasy about Mouse to care. A twinge in her stomach said something was amiss.
She looked around for Tobias, who was still in search of refreshments. The room where they were set out would be mobbed—he wouldn’t be back soon. That gave her time to look around for Mouse. With a last look around at the floor, she slipped through the door that led away from the dancing and toward the games room, where fortunes were lost and regained in an evening by the turn of a card or a toss of the dice. She could just see the doorway to that chamber, and the corner of a table with three or four young men clustered around. Halfway down the passage, she passed a room where men lounged around a low table, drinking and laughing. Some had cigars, and tiny clockwork hummingbirds whirred around the room, driving the smoke toward an automatic ventilation unit. Then came a room where two young girls, giggling and groaning in equal parts because they had danced so much that night, had taken off their shoes to wiggle their toes. They were so much like Evelina and Imogen, she stared for a moment, jealously wondering why they weren’t sharing a similar moment. Life had become too serious all of a sudden.
She shook off the thought and kept moving. Other doorways, most standing open, led to rooms with less defined uses. Evelina began to walk past the doorways, searching for Mouse with her senses as well as her eyes. She was sure the little creature was somewhere nearby, and the feeling grew stronger as she moved farther from the dancing. It was there, a bright spark ahead and to her left, but there was something in the way, like a line along the floor that Mouse could not cross to get to her.
