beside her.
And then, right before Harriet could go floating away on a cloud of sentiment, Lady Powlis said to the duke, “You look elegant in black, dear. Be a good boy and dance with Miss Gardner here.”
Harriet willed herself not to react. If she had obeyed impulse, she might have emptied her lemonade glass on her ladyship’s head for making such a preposterous suggestion.
The duke’s silence only intensified her annoyance. Another woman might have been mortified. Having shed her pretensions early in life, Harriet wondered why she felt the slightest humiliation. Lady Powlis, she decided, was not a woman to be pitied. She was a double-faced harridan who bedeviled others to alleviate her boredom. The duke, one assumed, had developed tactics to elude his aunt’s traps. Still, he was taking his sweet time to employ one if he had.
“Did you hear me?” Lady Powlis asked in a voice that rang across the room like a cathedral bell.
Harriet couldn’t bear it. She said, “I wouldn’t dream of leaving you by yourself, Lady Powlis.”
The duke gave his aunt a strained smile. “And why,” he asked evenly, “should I torture this innocent young lady by dragging her into that foray? What crime has she committed that I should punish her with my abominable clumsiness?”
Harriet’s lips curved in acknowledgment of such a gracious rejection. One could learn more from an uncaring adversary than from a devoted friend. Another young woman might have taken his refusal as a sign of modest character. The duke didn’t want to dance with her. And why should he? He could have his pick of anyone in the room.
“Do as I say, Griffin,” his aunt said again.
He leaned down to address her in a stern but respectful voice. “I came here tonight to please you and the rest of the family. Have you ever known me to participate in a public affair of my own volition?”
“You’re known well enough for participating in a few private ones,” Lady Powlis replied tartly.
Harriet finished off her lemonade. She enjoyed a lively quarrel as well as the next girl. In fact, she was debating which of the pair would come out the winner when the duke looked at her unexpectedly and said, “Dance with me, or we shall never hear the end of it.”
Almost immediately, a footman appeared and whisked her empty glass away. The duke reached down for her hand. She stood, vaguely aware that Lady Powlis had risen beside her. For a moment she wondered whether the three of them were going to dance together. She faltered. What the dickens was that dance called, anyway? Harriet couldn’t be expected to recall every minute detail of what she had been taught.
“I don’t waltz,” she said faintly.
Lady Powlis subjected her to an irate stare. “It is a Scotch reel, my dear.” She nudged Harriet in the ankle with her cane. “And it will be over before I talk sense into the pair of you.”
The duke took Harriet’s arm, almost protectively. “It is you, Aunt Primrose, who appears to have taken leave of your senses.”
“Don’t you understand?” she asked in a low, worried voice. “Edlyn has disappeared from the dance floor, and her partner has just walked off by himself.”
“Well, why the devil didn’t you say so?” the duke asked.
“And let everyone in London know?” she whispered.
Harriet glanced around. Now she understood. There wasn’t a lady in sight whose ears had not pricked up like Puck’s to eavesdrop on the conversation. “But I just saw her dancing right by the door to the supper room,” she said, straining to pick out Edlyn’s gray silk dress.
Griffin’s height gave him the advantage of looking down upon the assembly, whereas Harriet and Lady Powlis could barely see above the shoulders of the other guests. “She isn’t by the door now,” he said grimly.
“She might have run off again,” Lady Powlis said, gripping Harriet’s free hand. And then Harriet started to feel sorry for her all over again.
The duke gently pulled her toward him. Harriet’s nape tingled in pleasant warning. Submit? Disobey? Did she have a choice? Would she have denied herself this experience even if she could? His eyes smoldered with concern, if not with a justifiable anger. She wouldn’t want to be in Edlyn’s slippers when he found her.
Where had she gone, anyway? If something had upset her, she should have at least told the old lady. Her misbehavior as a student at the academy made Harriet appear negligent in a duty not entirely hers. Still, she felt a twinge of compassion for the girl. Edlyn had buried her father and gained the arrogant duke as her guardian. No wonder she acted unwisely. She’d lost her way in life.
Therefore, Harriet decided, she would sacrifice what small dignity was hers and dance with the duke. After all, she had acted unwisely often enough in the past, and the Boscastle family had guided her onto a better path.
At least, this was what she believed until the moment Griffin swept her into his arms and she lost her way all over again.
The moment he took her by the hand, Griffin knew he ought to have run for his life instead. The mistrustful look on her face suggested she felt the same way. If he followed the instincts that she had awakened in him, one of them-and he wasn’t sure whom-could very well end up ruined.
He placed his hand around Harriet’s waist to guide her between the vigorous figures swirling in every direction. She resisted, and rightly so. She wouldn’t have let herself be caught within a mile of him had she guessed how his body was reacting to being close to her again.
He inclined his head to hers. “I apologize for making you dance with me.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” she asked as they assumed their positions among the other dancers, neither of them in step. Another couple darted through the space between them. The duke frowned at this apparent breach of etiquette. Was he expected to emulate the intricate footwork of the other male dancers? He could barely hear himself breathe above the din. Worse, he practically required a horn to speak to his partner.
“No wonder my niece disappeared from the dance floor,” he said in a loud, disgruntled voice.
Harriet shook her head to indicate that she couldn’t hear him. He reached for her hand again and missed. He did, however, manage a few halfhearted hops to bring them closer together. Some overenthusiastic oaf bumped into Griffin’s back. He turned to address this insult, thwarted by the sound of Harriet’s uninhibited laughter. Suddenly he was laughing, too, moving toward her with a determination that impeded the progress of the dance.
Her hazel eyes shone with delightful mischief. “I don’t see her anywhere. Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Your niece. I don’t see her.”
“Neither do I.”
He knew he should insist she return to his aunt. He could damned well find Edlyn by himself. But he hadn’t felt this… alive, entertained, attracted… well, perhaps he had
“I owe you another apology, by the way,” he said.
“What did you say?” “I said-”
He wove her in and out of the formation with haphazard grace. The other dancers, at first offended by his presumptuous behavior, gradually appeared to realize that they had the scandalous Duke of Glenmorgan in their midst and attempted to follow his impromptu steps.
Harriet nudged him down the line. “I think you’d better sit this one out, your grace, before you cause an accident. What did you want to apologize for?”
“I was rude to you the day I arrived at the academy.”
The lively notes of the violin quartet rose dramatically as if to underscore his admission. The dance ended before Harriet could reply. He noticed the other guests drawing back to watch them. He was tempted to sit down in the middle of the floor to see how they would react to a ducal temper tantrum. Fortunately, Harriet turned toward the opened doors of the crowded candlelit supper room before he could act upon this impulse. His glance moved past the guests standing at the buffet table. A row of ladies and older gentlemen sat against the far wall, chatting and nibbling away. A raven-haired girl in a gray silk dress occupied a corner chair. She appeared to be listening attentively to a gentlewoman who stood with her back to the ballroom. Her dance partner was nowhere to be seen.
He felt a flash of guilty relief.
