in an odd, muffled voice, as the two men embraced. The chatter around them increased, and Griz tried not to stare. Vaguely, she was aware of him taking the lady’s hand.
“Who are they?” Anne Cordell wondered resentfully.
“Old friends, I imagine,” said her father, “newly arrived in London.”
After a few moments, the three of them began to walk, still exchanging low-voiced comments. Griz forced herself to look away, but moments later, she sensed Dragan’s powerful presence behind her and turned.
He encompassed everyone in his bow. “This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said warmly, “to be able to introduce my old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lazar, who have only just arrived in England. Lady Grizelda Niven, Mr. and Mrs. Worth, Dr. and Mrs. Cordell, who so kindly took me into their family.”
Everyone murmured civil greetings, and Mr. Lazar shook hands with Dr. Cordell and said in almost accentless English. “I met your brother in Vienna, I believe. I hope he still thrives?”
“Indeed yes, although he is a lot quieter these days! Are you also a doctor, sir?”
“No, I was a lawyer.”
“And a soldier,” Dragan added, “though you are out of uniform, Captain!”
“I thought you could strut for both of us.”
Dragan sighed. “My other coat just would not do, in the end. But I feel a fraud in this. I was not a good soldier.”
“Yes, you were,” Lazar said quietly with the flicker of a smile. He turned at some question of his wife’s to join in the larger conversation, and Griz and Dragan were left momentarily as good as alone.
To her surprise, he was smiling down at her, his eyes unnervingly warm. “You look very beautiful.”
“So do you,” she retorted before she could help it. Mostly, she spoke from disappointment because the men who said such things to her were trying to please her parents or her sister.
His eyes gleamed. “You think it base flattery and fortune-hunting?”
“I don’t have a fortune,” she said bluntly.
“Whatever little you have is a fortune to me.”
“It won’t be when you are a fashionable physician, charging outrageous fees to cure the imaginary ailments of the rich.”
“Ah, so that is why you flatter me? I have never been pursued for my wealth before.”
“I don’t imagine you have,” she murmured, considering his extraordinarily good looks. Then she blushed and added hastily, “I have never pursued anyone in my life.”
His lips quirked. “I don’t imagine you have.”
She eyed him uncertainly, looking for the joke. Somehow, they had moved as far as the wine table and, recklessly, she allowed him to fill her glass.
Mrs. Cartwright tinkled a spoon against a glass for silence, welcomed everyone to the event, and introduced a man whose name she didn’t catch.
He appeared to be an aristocratic gentleman, although by his wild hair and careless necktie, he seemed to be cultivating the look that came naturally to Dragan—who groaned in her ear. “Oh, no, I’d hoped to avoid this part of the evening! His verse is—"
“Hush,” Griz hissed, and he subsided while the poet declaimed in Hungarian.
Dragan supplied a running and irreverent translation. And yet, when the nobleman bowed and retired to polite applause, Dragan suddenly tensed.
His friend Lazar had stepped up.
Mrs. Cartright said, “Mr. Lazar will recite one of the poems of the late Mr. Sandor Petofi, the great poet of the Hungarian cause, who, sadly, died in that same cause.”
This time there was no groaning from Dragan, no translating, facetious or otherwise. He gazed at Lazar, unblinking. His eyes were as haunted as ever, and he held himself so tensely that he seemed about to break.
Worried, she glanced from him to Mrs. Lazar, who wiped surreptitiously at her eyes and pretended to polish her spectacles. Her husband spoke with animation, words Griz could not understand, though the emotion was palpable.
“You knew him,” she said slowly as Lazar stepped away, receiving many comradely pats on the shoulder as he passed.
By way of answer, Dragan caught her fingers, squeezed them once, and released her, already walking away.
But she could not let him go alone, not when he was distressed. On impulse, she started after him, following him out of the room in time to see the door to the outside staircase bang closed.
She slipped outside into the darkness, wondering if he had gone home. But a dark figure leaned his shoulder against the wall by the stairs, and by the light of the dim outside lamp, she knew it was him. Without a word, she moved and touched his elbow.