“Often enough. As I said, I am persona non grata, meant to be properly chastened. Which, by my very presence at your side, I am clearly not.”

Properly chastened for not marrying Caius—the thought was not to be borne. “The words ‘gloriously defiant’ come to mind.”

Pleasure pinked her cheeks, though she sailed on, as unruffled as a wine-dark swan. “Unrepentant will do.”

“Nothing to repent.” They reached the end of the room and turned back to face the barely concealed stares of the assembly. Their unrestrained interest put him on his mettle, determined to return fire with fire.

He abandoned his earlier plan of battle for a new strategy that Admiral Nelson would have approved—engage directly with the enemy. If his brother had ruined Penelope, he would un-ruin her. “Well, we’ve had a drink, and walked and talked and proposed marriage, so the only thing left, it seems, is to dance.”

Her answer came on a laugh. “That would give my father a satisfactory apoplexy.”

“Excellent.” Marcus offered her his hand. “Then let us do so, now.” While his blood and courage were high. “A set is just forming.” A waltz, thank the devil.

But she looked at the hand he had offered as if it were a species of ship rat—small but potentially lethal.

“I won’t bite, Pease Porridge.”

“Oh, Beech.” A smile—slow and impish and entirely teasing—spread across her lips as she looked up at him from under her lashes. “And here everything had been so promising.”

The bolt of awareness and pleasure that shot through him was stronger than hot brandy. Oh, she was more than fine—she was as sharp and well-aimed as a carronade. And he was ready to strike the slow match. “Still might be—if you dance with me.”

Definitely would be, if she married him.

“Beech.” Her smiled faded slowly into something too much like disbelief. “But what about— Can you really?”

Heat—embarrassment, shame and that ugly feeling of diminishment—broke out under his collar, but he would be damned if he would let it show. “I am not helpless. Some things, a man doesn’t forget how to do.” Some things a man knew in his bones, even if some of those bones were missing. “Dance with me, and I’ll show you.”




CHAPTER 6




PENELOPE LOOKED AT HIM—REALLY looked at him to see the man whom experience had tempered like a steel sword. The man who had so calmly and so casually proposed they marry.

A proposal she had been too stunned to accept.

“Come, Pease Porridge. Let’s give them something real to gossip about.”

She was still stunned by the calmly casual courage in him. “They’ll look askance at you for this, Beech,” she said, nodding toward the avid onlookers trying to eavesdrop upon their conversation. And she wasn’t just talking about the dance.

He smiled, unconcerned. “Let them. I have faced down the cannons of the French, my dear Pease Porridge.” He lifted her fingers to his lips. “I know how to survive.”

Her breath all but left her body. He was such a man. “I’m terribly glad you did, Beech.”

He squeezed her fingers. “Fortune favors the bold, my friend.”

“About time something did.” She let him lead her past the astonished lookers-on and was raising her right hand to take his before she realized—

“Right hand on my shoulder,” he instructed easily, as if she hadn’t nearly made an unforgivably unthinking blunder. “Left on your skirts.”

She circled her hand down to rest upon the precisely fitted coat of midnight superfine as if she had intended on doing exactly that. Beech slid his good hand into the small of her back, snugging his arm around her waist and drawing her so close she had to lean away to keep her bodice from brushing against his buttons. And then he spread his fingers so that his thumb aligned with the ladder of her spine and found its way through the subtle gather of fabric at the back of her high-waisted gown to brush against the edge of her short stays beneath.

Everything within her—every thought, every breath—stilled, suspended in time for one long, luxurious moment. And then the taut strains of the fiddles penetrated the silence, and Beech stepped forward into the deeper embrace of the dance.

She stepped back, away from the intimate interjection of his leg between her skirts, and they were dancing. The firm press of his hand in the small of her back guided her along, forward and back, side to side and around. Around and around and around, spinning into the swirl of the music, following the flow of the fiddles as if they were puppets led along by their heartstrings.

Penelope closed her mind to her doubts and fears—it was one thing to be silently unrepentant, but quite another to dance with the new Duke of Warwick with her father fuming like a chimney across the room.

She closed her eyes to the relentless stare of nosy neighbors and let the swirl of the music carry her troubles away. Let Beech lead her where he would.

Which was strange. She wasn’t the sort of girl who liked to be led. She liked to set her own course—witness her rejection of the arrangement made for her with the last Duke of Warwick. But Beech was…different. The press of his hand against the small of her back made her skin tingle with an awareness that went far deeper than the flirtation she had attempted with his brother. An awareness that was more than infatuation, more than mere physical attraction—this was an affinity for Beech, and Beech alone.

For the strength of his character. For the warmth of his embrace. For the calm surety that radiated from him like rays from the sun.

Penelope gave herself the gift of looking up at him, and was both surprised and elated to find him smiling down at her. As if he liked being with her, dancing with her, as much as she liked being with him, safe in his arms, whirling in deliriously delightful circles that would have made her dizzy if she hadn’t abandoned propriety and tethered herself to him with her arm around his neck.

It was heaven—he was heaven, this calm, assured man who looked like a glowing archangel, one of God’s warriors, armored against the sharp weapons of society with his heroism and honesty and dashing courage. Nothing could injure her while she was with him. She was free—to feel the heat of his chest seep through the intervening layers of her clothing until she was as warm as a flower in the sunshine. To feel awareness skitter across her skin until her chest began to feel tight with need. To feel the cool rush of the air on her cheeks as they twirled and twirled and twirled.

Until the fiddles drew to a long, closing note, and it was everything she could do to let go and step back. And curtsey. And breathe.

“Thank you, Beech.” Her voice sounded small, as if it came from far away. “I’d forgotten how much I loved dancing.” And how much she was going to miss it when she was sent away.

“My dear Penelope, the sentiment is entirely mutual.” He offered her his arm. “I meant what I said before. You really must consider if you won’t mar—”

“Do introduce me, Warwick.”

Penelope felt all her warm pleasure wash away like a cold rain. In front of them was Lord Robert Maynard, the same damned impertinent fellow whose earlier attentions had driven her to barricade herself in the library.

On second thought, perhaps she ought to thank him. But Maynard gave her no chance. “Introduce me so I, too, may dance with the infamous Miss Pease.”

Beside her Beech stilled, which was not in itself an alarming thing. He seemed to conduct himself with a particular economy of motion—a sort of tensely precise awareness of where his body was in space. But in a man so still and watchful his eyes moved with a power and perceptiveness that was telling, and at the moment Beech’s dark scowl should have sent a cleverer fellow running for cover.

“I beg your pardon,” Beech said carefully. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Maynard appeared impervious to sense. “A friend of your brother’s, don’t you know?”

“I don’t know.” Beech’s tone was as precise and sharp as flint.

“This is Maynard, Your Grace—Lord Robert Maynard.” Her own tone was as cool as she could manage over the heat of her anger. “Though I haven’t been formally introduced to him either, that didn’t stop him from sending me a smutty valentine—did it, Maynard? No. You’re a credible enough pornographer, but not, I think, a tolerable enough dancer to tempt me.”

“Now, don’t be like that, Miss Pease. It’s all in good fun.” Maynard laughed and continued in a confidential aside to Beech, “It was a damn good, damnably smutty valentine.”

A sulfurous combination of rage and mortification gripped her as tight as a noose. “You insufferable—” Her throat was so choked she could not speak.

Mercifully, she did not have to.

“You sent a lewd valentine to Miss Pease—a woman to whom you had not even been introduced?” Beech’s question was everything calm and collected, but Penelope could hear the ominous warning in his darkening tone.

“Everyone knows her.” Maynard winked suggestively. “All about her. And your brother.”

Beneath her arm, Beech’s grip tightened, as if he feared she might strike the blighter. And she would have—if Beech had not looked so likely to do the honors for her.

“Maynard,” Beech instructed in a voice as calm and polished as a blade, “kindly remove yourself from my presence, and keep entirely out of Miss Pease’s, before I am forced to put a hole through that obviously vacant brain of yours.”

Maynard remained as thick as a doorjamb. “What? It’s all in good fun.”

“Good fun does not consist of taunting defenseless young women.” Beech began to speak slowly, enunciating each word in the deceptively calm tone that ought to have made Maynard’s cods shrink up into his body for cover. “Go. Away. Before. I. Do. You. A. Very. Great. And. Very. Precise. Violence.”

“I say, Warwick.” An unsure smile curdled Maynard’s cheeks. “Thinking of taking up where your brother left off, are you?”

In an instant, Beech had Maynard seized by the neck like a rag doll, his thumb pressed hard into the hollow of the blighter’s throat, cutting off his wind.

Maynard scrabbled at Beech’s hand to ease the pressure, but Beech held fast. “I will kill you”—Beech whispered so cool and low only she and Maynard could hear the lethal threat—“gladly and effortlessly, if you ever utter her name, or so much as look in Miss Pease’s direction ever again. Do you comprehend me?”

Maynard bobbed his mottled red face in frantic accord.

Beech let go and stepped back. “Remember that—and how hard it was to breathe—the next time you think to sully a lady’s name. Especially this lady.”

“But she’s not a la—” Maynard flinched, throwing up his hands to ward Beech off, before he obligingly scuttled away.

Beech made an infinitesimal adjustment to his coat. “My apologies. Where were we?”

“I hardly know.” Every idea was overthrown by Beech’s astonishing actions. Though he was as cool as a summer ice, she was very nearly shaking.

“Indeed.” Beech spoke into the silence that was the sound of every gossip within the room holding their breath in anticipation what might happen next. “Come, my dear Miss Pease. We need air to rid ourselves of that fellow’s foul stench.” Then he gave her his hand, to lead her away from the gaping assembly.

She went with him, her father and his apoplexy be damned. A reckless mixture of astonishment and gratitude filled her so full, she thought she might burst into tears. “You really are the bravest bloody man, Beech.”

“It is only a country ballroom,” he said in his wry way, “not the deck of a man-o-war.”

“That was more than a dance, Beech,” she insisted. “You must know that.” He had to know that the ballroom, and society in general, was a battlefield for her—that she had already lost upon such ground. “You must know what it meant to me. So, I will thank you for defending me. And for dancing with me.” She came up upon her tiptoes to press a hasty heartfelt kiss to his cheek.

“And you must know, I would give you more than a dance, my sweet Miss Pease.” His voice was low and all the more earnest because of his quiet. “I would give you the world.”




CHAPTER 7




“COME AWAY WITH ME NOW—WE’LL elope.” Marcus felt the strange, heightened calm before a battle, knowing he was doing the right thing and trusting himself to fate.

Penelope laughed as if such an idea were surely a joke. “Elope? You can’t mean to run off to Scotland?”

“Too far. And far too inconvenient,” he returned. “I find I’m a duke, and I ought to be able to persuade a bishop to write me a special license. We can be married tomorrow morning.”