He was vapid and smelled like he’d bathed in aftershave. I can still taste it.” She made a face.
His wry sound of amusement seemed to distress her, and her pacing quickened, her gestures becoming animated.
“I know I’m being selective. But I want what is in the novels. I want to be struck by lightning and shaken by thunder. I want to put my heart in a man’s hands and know he’ll keep it safe. I couldn’t abide a useless lord who would while away my fortune as I sat and watched and withered into a bitter old woman. Is it too much to ask to not only share love with a man, but admiration and respect, as well? To find someone who makes this world better for being in it? Sometimes I feel like I’m this endless abyss of unfulfilled desire and I— I can never ask for what I need. I can never find it. I don’t have the courage.”
She flopped against one of the columns, resting her head against it with aggrieved antipathy. “And so here I am. Hiding in the garden like I always do.”
A hollow ache lodged within as he watched her bare her heart to the night.
He knew the longing she felt, acutely.
Except, he’d already found the lightning, it struck him breathless each time he saw her.
He wished to be the answering thunder.
But he was nothing like the man she’d described. Feeling raw and exhausted and more than a little bleak, he drifted to the pergola steps, putting space between them.
“I… take it you’re done dancing for the evening, then?” he said hopefully. “Should I call for the carriage?”
She nodded, casting a longing glance back toward the ballroom. “If I had my druthers, I’d dance until my legs gave out. I love it so much, losing myself to the rhythm, focusing only on the music and what my feet are doing… It’s the only time my thoughts are truly quiet. Usually, I’m Nora and Mercy’s bespectacled little sister. No one of consequence. But tonight, I could feel everyone watching and I… I forget how to dance.” She pushed a breath through her lips, puffing them out. “There are days I hate who I am.” Her little fists clenched, and she shook with an emotion other than fear. He watched the war on her features with a helpless compassion.
Without thinking, he stood and went to her, offering his hand. “No one is watching now.”
She blinked up at him in confusion. “You said you didn’t dance.”
“I know the basics, I suppose.” He lifted a shoulder. “You can lead. I’ll follow. I’m a quick study.”
“Me lead?” She looked around the private garden as if he’d said something scandalous. “You won’t feel… I don’t know… emasculated?”
At that a true smile touched his lips, one he couldn’t suppress if he wanted to. “Miss Felicity, if my manhood could be threatened by learning something from a woman, then I wasn’t much of a man to begin with.”
His words seemed to please her so much, she unclenched her fingers before sliding her glove into his. “Indeed not.” The smile she granted him had lost its brittle edge.
She stood across from him, glittering like a moonbeam, and set her hand on his shoulder, moving into the circle of his arms. Her fingers disappeared into his as she stretched their hands away from their bodies to adopt the waltzing posture.
Gabriel stood still and solid, worrying that she’d change her mind. That somehow, she’d recognize him.
He knew it was gauche to look at her, that their necks should arch away to avoid the intimacy of eye contact.
But she never broke her gaze from his as she stepped one way, and then— encouraged by his effortless follow— she stepped again. And again.
Gabriel’s body attuned to her every gentle cue, to the nearly imperceptible nudges of her hands. The soft wisp of her slippers as they kissed his shoes, urging him in time to the music. This waltz was a slow one, thankfully giving him time to adjust. He’d watched her dance once before at the disastrous Midnight Masquerade and marveled at the change in her. The confidence she’d possessed when she’d drifted out of her mind and into her body.
Just as she did now.
The temptation to join her in that place was undeniable, and before long, Gabriel became lost in the rhythm of their movement and her breath and his thrumming heart.
“You, Gareth Severand, are either a liar or a natural,” she said after a while,