said. “Not the least of which is risking the eternal ardor and devotion of Miss Bevan-Clark in order to get the two of them to see sense.”
He smiled.
How had she gone her entire life not knowing a man’s smile could cut her in two, Delilah thought. In the sweetest way.
“They are twits. But it’s often easier to know how much you value something when it’s about to be taken from you. Child’s play compared to some of the conflicts I’ve dispensed with in my career.”
“It was a kindness. I know the extraordinary sacrifice you made in instigating a musical evening.”
“It was a kindness to myself, mostly. They were a distraction and I would never be able to read at least three more pages of my book.”
A year ago, she would not have described happiness as dancing a waltz amidst shabby furniture with someone who patently wasn’t a gentleman in a room that included her husband’s former mistress, the worst lady’s maid she’d ever had, a loud gassy salesman, two runaway twits from the country, and two meek, astonishingly homely women of whom she felt quite protective.
If it wasn’t happiness, she wasn’t quite sure what to call it. But it was a fine thing, and it felt wonderful, and bore so little resemblance to her previous days with Derring that they scarcely seemed part of the same life.
All at once something had captured her dancing partner’s attention, however. She could immediately feel a sudden, alert tension in his body.
She followed his gaze.
“Isn’t that funny?” she said. “Both Miss Gardners are trying to lead and they are getting nowhere.”
Tristan said idly, “It looks a little bit like vertical, drunken wrestling.”
It seemed he could not, in fact, take his eyes from it.
“Perhaps no one has ever before danced with them,” she said wistfully. “Don’t frown so at them, you’ll frighten them.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Later that night Tristan lay on his blue counterpane listening to Delacorte snoring on the floor below.
For some reason he was almost glad to hear it.
Gordon was running up and down the hallway.
He suspected Gordon of playing as much as he was hunting.
He was glad to hear that, too.
And as he listened to a veritable roll call of creaks and sighs as the house settled down for the night, he realized he hadn’t heard that strange, loud thunk again. The one that made it seem as though the house was struggling to digest something.
Not since the night he’d seen Miss Margaret Gardner on the stairs.
When he’d insisted upon the Gardner sisters joining the dancing this evening, it was not for the charitable reasons Delilah likely suspected. It was because a suspicion, begun as unease the first time he’d laid eyes on them, was now germinating. He would tell Massey about it tomorrow.
Massey was probably lying awake dreaming about his sweetheart.
Suddenly Tristan realized he’d closed his hand around a fistful of his counterpane, as if it were Delilah’s hand and they were waltzing again. He released it at once. Abashed.
“Sweetheart,” he said aloud. Sardonically.
How on earth did Massey say that word so easily? It was such a gentle word, one that evoked blue skies and lambs and meadows filled with flowers.
Like daisies, perhaps.
None of Tristan’s feelings—not the desire that kept him rigidly staring at his ceiling right now; not his ever-deepening admiration for her, or his yearning toward her kindness; not the desperate tenderness he’d felt when she sat there, trembling, his coat over her shoulders; not even the weakness that overcame him when he touched her, or even so much as looked into her eyes—were soft or gentle. They were deep as an ocean trench. They were spiky and stormy and unmanageable. Perhaps from disuse. He apparently possessed them, but they’d been left to run amuck, grow wild and leggy.
He’d once courted a superior officer’s daughter, a pretty, fluttery flirt of a girl who had sought and lapped up his attentions like a kitten, and he’d been flattered and smitten. But she’d been genuinely astonished to learn he might have matrimony in mind.
“But . . . you’re not a gentleman! I mean . . . I couldn’t possibly!”
It was all for the best. They would have made each other miserable, and he’d only courted her because it was the done thing for a man his age. Still, his pride had taken a glancing blow, and it had left him wiser and warier.
He frankly could not imagine being anyone’s “sweetheart.”
“Spikeheart,” perhaps.
This was simply who he was, perhaps in part due to the forces