And the Miss Ran Away With the Rake(30)

So she didn’t like her hometown curse being bandied about or mocked. Yet it was so perfect an opening . . .

“—leaving me in the demmed uncomfortable position of having to inherit,” he finished.

“You wouldn’t want the dukedom?” This surprised her, as it did most people.

“Heavens, no,” he shuddered. “I have other plans for my future.”

She didn’t ask what those were, and he didn’t elaborate.

He could imagine the delight she’d take in laughing at his desires for a comfortable, sensible life in the country, well away from London and the ton.

Speaking of his future, he glanced down at the tempting beauty in his arms and knew that sensible would never be a word attributed to her.

“Now whatever is the matter?” she asked, once again wiggling in his arms to gain some distance between them.

If only she knew what that did to a man—her breasts pressed against him, her hips moving to and fro.

Or perhaps she did.

“Your gown,” he said.

She glanced down at it. “It is the first stare of fashion. Why, there are three other ladies wearing very similar dresses—though I should complain to the modiste, for she said it was the only one like it in London.”

Henry laughed at her consternation. “You needn’t worry; you far outshine them. I doubt any man in the room noticed the others.”

Then he realized what he’d said. Confessed, really.

Her eyes widened and then narrowed as she regarded him warily. “If you are trying to charm me yet again—”

“I wasn’t trying to charm you before—”

“You weren’t? Whatever was all that you were doing?”

“A grave error,” he told her, growing a bit annoyed—mostly at himself.

Every moment spent arguing and bear-baiting with Miss Dale was just more time lost and with it his hopes of finding Miss Spooner before he was forced to hie off to the country for Preston’s house party and wedding.

It would be a good month before he returned to London, and where Miss Spooner would be then or if she would still be in Town, he knew not.

He had to find her tonight.

“A grave error?” Miss Dale repeated. “Dancing with me was a grave error?”

If he had been paying more attention, he might have heard the warning note in her voice. It was one that Norton Seldon had ignored and one Montgomery Seldon should have heeded . . . and saved ensuing generations of Seldons from wagonloads of grief.

“I’ll have you know, you should be honored,” she told him, thorns coming through the silk. “I haven’t trod on your foot, like that simpering Miss Rigglesford did—twice—and I’ve managed to hold up my end of this . . . this . . . conversation, unlike that tongue-tied nitwit Lady Honoria, who you seemed to find so amusing. No one finds her amusing, Lord Henry. No one. You, sir, have been lucky beyond measure to dance with me. Twice, I might note.”

“Lucky?” he sputtered. “As if this is some boon to me? To be cast with one of your lot?”

“One. Of. My. Lot?” she bit out.

“Yes, lot. Dales! Stubborn, prideful, braggarts,” he told her.

“Seldons!” she shot back. “I am too much a lady to give your gaggle of relations their due.”

“Are you sure about that?”

If ever there was a question a man wished he could take back, that was one.

Her eyes darkened with fury. No simpering gel like Miss Rigglesford, or rigidly dull chit like Lady Honoria, or like any other Bath-educated, perfectly mannered London lady.

Kempton-born, and Dale to the bone, Miss Daphne Dale wrenched herself out of his arms and went to leave him mid-dance, mid-turn, as everyone was executing a complicated step.

It was uncalled for, it was a cut direct. It was a ruinous move on her part.

But her timing couldn’t have been more perfect. For the ruin, it turned out, was to be all his.

For when she gave him the heave-ho, he wasn’t prepared for her flight and found himself floundering forward, his feet tangled and hung up.

He would have sworn he’d been tripped. Or perhaps he’d just trod upon her silken hem.

Not that the how mattered, for all of sudden, one moment she was there, and the next she was casting him off and he was falling, his hands flailing out to catch hold of something to keep him from toppling headfirst into the tight knots of dancers.

And find something he did. His outstretched hands came right into a lady. More to the point, the very front of a lady’s gown.