And the Miss Ran Away With the Rake(13)

“You don’t mean—” he began to stammer.

“Yes, I fear we do,” Hen replied with the air of one who’d stepped into something while exiting her barouche. “Preston insisted she be invited to the ball tonight and . . .” His sister looked to be attempting to swallow the words lodged in her throat. Instead, they came out in a rush. “And the house party.”

“Noooo!” Henry gasped, rounding on the duke. Head of the household be damned, this was beyond the pale. “Preston, you cannot—”

But apparently Preston could. And then the rest of the truth had come tumbling out. She was Tabitha’s dearest friend—and here Henry had thought the vicar’s daughter quite respectable. Then worse yet, the news that this Dale chit was standing up with Tabitha at the wedding.

“Which means . . .” Preston began, slanting another guilty glance at Hen.

As if she might help him. Instead, Hen made a loud, indignant “harrumph” and washed her hands of the entire affair.

“I have to dance with her,” Henry had ground out. Oh, there were many things Henry was not, at least in the eyes of his Seldon relations—a rake of the first order was one of them—but he was an expert on Seldon family history and tradition.

And even now, all these hours later, Henry knew he was bound by honor to do as he was asked.

That didn’t mean he had to like it.

Looking across the ballroom at Preston and Hen, Henry frowned. He had no choice but to dance with this Miss Dale. But to his benefit, he still had two hours in which to find his Miss Spooner, her recent words luring him into the crowd.

Do you ever look across a room and wonder if I am there, so close at hand, and yet unseen?

Henry paused and turned to search the faces of the sad little array of leftover wallflowers lining the ballroom walls, but none of them seemed to fit the image he’d fixed in his mind.

Miss Spooner, where the devil are you? he thought as he waded into the crush, her words swirling through his thoughts.

Do you think we will ever truly meet? Do we dare? Mr. Dishforth, I want ever so much to meet you, yet . . . I fear you might be disappointed in me. . . .

Yes, he understood that sentiment. For while their correspondence had been of a sensible nature—favorite books, taste in music, current politics—it had been easy to put off a face-to-face meeting. For all he knew he could be exchanging letters with one of Roxley’s maiden aunts . . . or Roxley himself, given the earl’s perverse sense of humor.

Yet in the last sennight everything had taken a decidedly different turn.

One that could hardly be deemed sensible.

I laid awake last night and wondered how we might meet.

He hadn’t meant those words as anything other than a passing comment, until she’d replied.

I too. In the wee hours before dawn, I found myself drawn to the window, parting the curtains and wondering which roof might be yours. Under which eaves you slept. Where I might find you . . .

The very vision of this intriguing minx searching him out in the last hours of darkness had left him with more than just a restless night.

He’d written her specifically about his attendance at this ball. That he wanted to see her wearing red (for she’d professed it her favorite color) and that he would find her.

Glancing over at Preston again, buttonholed as he was by Hen, he decided not to rescue his nephew after all. Instead he began his search for Miss Spooner.

If he found her before the supper dance, this wretched Miss Dale could go hang for all he cared. Tradition or no.

All he had to do was hope that Miss Spooner—whatever her real name—had been invited, though it seemed that every member of the ton still left in London was crammed into their ballroom.

But all too soon he realized his search might not be as simple as he’d once thought. For as it turned out, it seemed half the ladies in the ton had taken his suggestion “to wear red.”

Red muslin. Red silk. Even a red velvet. Red in every hue.

“Good God!” he muttered. Then again, how was he to have known red was the most popular color of the Season? That was what came of having a sister who was perpetually in widow’s weeds. A man had no sense of fashionable colors save black, gray, and her current choice of mauve.

He continued through the room, nodding in greeting to friends and acquaintances alike, rather amused that not a month ago most everyone in this room had turned their backs on the Seldon family over Preston’s antics.

Now the duke’s engagement to the very respectable Miss Timmons had erased years of misdeeds in the eyes of Society.