Page 65 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The realization moved through her before she could name it: warmth beneath the ribs, involuntary, the kind that arrived in the body before the mind had any say in the matter.

She looked away.

But only a moment later, he found her. She felt it without looking, the way she had felt it in the breakfast room and the corridor and across every distance they had managed to put between them: the weight of his attention arriving, specific and directed, like sunlight through a lens.

She turned.

He crossed the room toward her, leaving Jonathan behind.

“You look—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. He looked at her dress, her hair, her lips, and his eyes darkened. Then he cleared his throat. “The dancing has started.”

“It has.”

“The first set is nearly over.” He extended his hand, palm up, in the way of a man who had decided something and saw no virtue in theatrics. “The second will be a country dance.”

Alice placed her hand in his. The contact, even through her glove, sent a current from her fingertips to the inside of her wrist.

She followed him toward the dance floor.

Standing at the edge of the floor with the other couples assembling around them, she forgot to be nervous. She was so occupied with him, with the breadth of his shoulders and the warmth of his hand, that the nerves waited politely at the edge of her attention until the music began and then arrived all at once.

Her feet followed the steps she had counted a hundred times in the darkness of her room, and the muscle memory carried her through the first bar before she had consciously decided to trust it.

Kenneth moved with her. He was, she discovered, an excellent dancer. Precise and controlled in the way he was precise about everything, his hand firm on her waist when the figure required it, his steps even and unhurried.

They separated for the crossing figure. She moved down the line and acutely felt the weight of the room’s attention.

This was different from a garden party, from a dinner table, from any of the smaller social stages she had navigated since the wedding. This was two hundred and fifty people watching the Duchess of Bearmoor dance for the first time in public. They were watching the way audiences watched high-wire acts—with the anticipation of spectators who would prefer to see a success but would not be entirely dissatisfied by the alternative.

She completed the crossing figure and did not stumble. She turned to find Kenneth waiting at the opposite end of the line, and his gaze when it found her held something she had no name for yet. It was not approval, which was too small and too impersonal, but something attentive and particular and very warm.

She advanced toward him. He advanced toward her. The figure brought them close, his hand on her back, her hand on his shoulder, and they moved together in the tight spiral of the promenade.

“Stop counting,” he said, his voice pitched beneath the music.

She looked up at him. “I am not counting.”

“You are. Your lips are moving.”

She pressed her lips together. He almost smiled.

“You are doing very well,” he praised.

“I’ve been practicing.”

“I know.” He guided her through the turn. His hand on her back was steady and warm and entirely appropriate for a country dance, which made it more difficult for her to think clearly than she would have liked. “I heard you.”

She missed a step, recovered. “At what hour?”

“Early. Before the household was up.” He said it without emphasis, as though this were ordinary. “I go to the study early. Your room is two floors above.” His hand shifted slightly on her waist, and her pulse fluttered in response. “The floorboards creak.”

Alice kept facing ahead, focused on the line of dancers. The knowledge that he had heard her practicing even after they had danced together so easily settled into her chest and lodged there, warm and inconvenient.

“You might have said something,” she told him.

“You would have stopped.”

She had no answer to that because it was true. She would have stopped. She would have been mortified, and she would have dressed it in composure, and she would have stopped.