in the ballroom below as a ship’s captain watched an approaching gale.
“You needn’t worry that Chastain is here,” Della said as they advanced toward the steps down to the ballroom. “His father has hauled him off to Sussex, where he’s to bide until the nuptials take place.”
Nick glanced down at her, his smile faltering. “How do you know that?”
“I just do.” Della’s lady’s maid was friends, cousins, or formerly employed with half the lady’s maids in Mayfair. They formed an intelligence network that would have shamed Napoleon’s best spies.
The herald announced the Earl of Bellefonte and Lady Delilah Haddonfield, and the tide of conversation in the ballroom below ebbed to a trickle, then fell silent.
“A new experience,” Della said, taking a firmer hold of Nick’s arm. “I have rendered all of Society speechless.”
She tipped her chin up when she wanted to crawl away on her hands and knees. What stopped her was the certain knowledge that she deserved exactly the reception she was getting, and that only after she’d endured this penance would her family allow her to slink off to Kent.
“Tresham is here,” Nick murmured, offering her a smile that did not conceal the worry in his eyes. “George is beneath the minstrel’s gallery. Worth Kettering and his lady are right outside the cardroom, and I do believe that’s my own dear Valentine Windham beaming at us from near the punchbowl.”
Windham was a duke’s son and a composer and pianist of some renown. His show of tolerance would be remarked—also seen for what it was, a kindly display toward an old friend’s disgraced sister.
“He’ll dance with you,” Nick said. “If I have to beggar myself commissioning damned string quartets from him, he’ll dance with you.”
By design, Della had arrived too late for the opening promenade. Lord Valentine led her out for the world’s longest minuet. Nick stood up with her for a gavotte. All the while, gossip, talk, and tittering whispers followed her around on the dance floor.
Della was about to excuse herself to run the gauntlet of the ladies’ retiring room—the sooner that was dealt with, the better—when Mr. Travis Dunwald approached.
“Lady Della, might I have the honor of leading you out for the quadrille?”
Dunwald’s tone was cool. He looked down a patrician nose at Della, as if she were something malodorous stuck to his riding boot. This overture had all the earmarks of a drunken dare made late at night in one of the less reputable gentlemen’s clubs.
“She would be honored,” Nick said far too heartily. “Wouldn’t you, my lady?”
Della saw nothing but disdain in Dunwald’s eyes. If she declined, the gossip traveling around the ballroom with the speed of a brushfire would turn into an inferno, and there was all six and a half feet of Nick, trying hard to look cheerful—and harmless.
“I would be honored,” Della said, placing her hand on Dunwald’s arm.
The quadrille was a long, complicated dance, and in its course, Della came face-to-face with every smirking, leering, cold expression a man’s features might wear. She had expected the antipathy of the women. A lady who fell from grace was like a house of contagion, to be avoided by all decent women lest the taint of dishonor spread by association.
But Della had not anticipated the particularly virulent contempt aimed at her by the gentlemen. Their hands grazed the sides of her breasts, their eyes frankly stripped her naked. Her partner for the allemande pretended to stumble such that he happened to get in a bruising squeeze to her derriere.
She did not dance every dance—far from it—but when James Neely-Goodman approached her before the supper waltz, Della had had enough.
She liked James. He was of only average height, and they often danced together because he partnered her well. His father was a baronet, and the family’s wealth was vast and respectably ancient.
Even James, though, regarded her as if she’d betrayed him personally.
I can’t do this. The thought landed in her mind with the solid substance of irrefutable truth. I cannot be handled and disrespected and all but spit upon by men who lined up to partner me at cards last week.
“Lady Della.” James bowed shallowly and he did not take her hand. “I beg leave to pay you the honor of asking for your supper waltz.”
Pay you the honor. The words were wrong, the tone was wrong. Utterly indifferent, not even contemptuous.
“Alas,” said a smooth male voice to Della’s right, “you are too late, Neely-Goodman. Her ladyship’s supper waltz is spoken for.”