“M’daughter, Miss Pease, Your Grace.” Sir Harold gestured awkwardly. “Penelope, His Grace, the Duke of Warwick.”
“Miss Pease.” Marcus reached out his hand to raise her to her feet. “What a pleasure it is to be reacquainted with you after all this time.”
“Your Grace.” Her eyes danced with impish glee. “Why, it seems only a moment.”
Oh, she was fine—as nimble and quick as a yacht.
Marcus took command of the deck. “Indeed, it has been so long since I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to you, I wonder if you would take pity on an old sailor and take a turn about the room, while we talk of old times?” He turned to her father with the uncompromising smile that had made naval lieutenants jump to do his bidding. “With your permission, of course.” Which he did not wait for, making off with his prize ship while he showed her father a clean pair of heels.
“Well done, Commander Beecham. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father so flummoxed, even after he’s had an argument with me.”
It was a pleasure to hear the familiar rank from her lips. “That is what we navy men call a cutting out expedition,” he explained before he steered the conversation back to her comment. “Happen often, those arguments?”
“Often enough. As I said, I am persona non grata, meant to be properly chastened. Which, by my very presence at your side, I am clearly not.”
Properly chastened for not marrying Caius—the thought was not to be borne. “The words ‘gloriously defiant’ come to mind.”
Pleasure pinked her cheeks, though she sailed on, as unruffled as a wine-dark swan. “Unrepentant will do.”
“Nothing to repent.” They reached the end of the room and turned back to face the barely concealed stares of the assembly. Their unrestrained interest put him on his mettle, determined to return fire with fire.
He abandoned his earlier plan of battle for a new strategy that Admiral Nelson would have approved—engage directly with the enemy. If his brother had ruined Penelope, he would un-ruin her. “Well, we’ve had a drink, and walked and talked and proposed marriage, so the only thing left, it seems, is to dance.”
Her answer came on a laugh. “That would give my father a satisfactory apoplexy.”
“Excellent.” Marcus offered her his hand. “Then let us do so, now.” While his blood and courage were high. “A set is just forming.” A waltz, thank the devil.
But she looked at the hand he had offered as if it were a species of ship rat—small but potentially lethal.
“I won’t bite, Pease Porridge.”
“Oh, Beech.” A smile—slow and impish and entirely teasing—spread across her lips as she looked up at him from under her lashes. “And here everything had been so promising.”
The bolt of awareness and pleasure that shot through him was stronger than hot brandy. Oh, she was more than fine—she was as sharp and well-aimed as a carronade. And he was ready to strike the slow match. “Still might be—if you dance with me.”
Definitely would be, if she married him.
“Beech.” Her smiled faded slowly into something too much like disbelief. “But what about— Can you really?”
Heat—embarrassment, shame and that ugly feeling of diminishment—broke out under his collar, but he would be damned if he would let it show. “I am not helpless. Some things, a man doesn’t forget how to do.” Some things a man knew in his bones, even if some of those bones were missing. “Dance with me, and I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER 6
PENELOPE LOOKED AT HIM—REALLY looked at him to see the man whom experience had tempered like a steel sword. The man who had so calmly and so casually proposed they marry.
A proposal she had been too stunned to accept.
“Come, Pease Porridge. Let’s give them something real to gossip about.”
She was still stunned by the calmly casual courage in him. “They’ll look askance at you for this, Beech,” she said, nodding toward the avid onlookers trying to eavesdrop upon their conversation. And she wasn’t just talking about the dance.
He smiled, unconcerned. “Let them. I have faced down the cannons of the French, my dear Pease Porridge.” He lifted her fingers to his lips. “I know how to survive.”
Her breath all but left her body. He was such a man. “I’m terribly glad you did, Beech.”
He squeezed her fingers. “Fortune favors the bold, my friend.”
“About time something did.” She let him lead her past the astonished lookers-on and was raising her right hand to take his before she realized—
“Right hand on my shoulder,” he instructed easily, as if she hadn’t nearly made an unforgivably unthinking blunder. “Left on your skirts.”
She circled her hand down to rest upon the precisely fitted coat of midnight superfine as if she had intended on doing exactly that. Beech slid his good hand into the small of her back, snugging his arm around her waist and drawing her so close she had to lean away to keep her bodice from brushing against his buttons. And then he spread his fingers so that his thumb aligned with the ladder of her spine and found its way through the subtle gather of fabric at the back of her high-waisted gown to brush against the edge of her short stays beneath.
Everything within her—every thought, every breath—stilled, suspended in time for one long, luxurious moment. And then the taut strains of the fiddles penetrated the silence, and Beech stepped forward into the deeper embrace of the dance.
She stepped back, away from the intimate interjection of his leg between her skirts, and they were dancing. The firm press of his hand in the small of her back guided her along, forward and back, side to side and around. Around and around and around, spinning into the swirl of the music, following the flow of the fiddles as if they were puppets led along by their heartstrings.
Penelope closed her mind to her doubts and fears—it was one thing to be silently unrepentant, but quite another to dance with the new Duke of Warwick with her father fuming like a chimney across the room.
She closed her eyes to the relentless stare of nosy neighbors and let the swirl of the music carry her troubles away. Let Beech lead her where he would.
Which was strange. She wasn’t the sort of girl who liked to be led. She liked to set her own course—witness her rejection of the arrangement made for her with the last Duke of Warwick. But Beech was…different. The press of his hand against the small of her back made her skin tingle with an awareness that went far deeper than the flirtation she had attempted with his brother. An awareness that was more than infatuation, more than mere physical attraction—this was an affinity for Beech, and Beech alone.
For the strength of his character. For the warmth of his embrace. For the calm surety that radiated from him like rays from the sun.
Penelope gave herself the gift of looking up at him, and was both surprised and elated to find him smiling down at her. As if he liked being with her, dancing with her, as much as she liked being with him, safe in his arms, whirling in deliriously delightful circles that would have made her dizzy if she hadn’t abandoned propriety and tethered herself to him with her arm around his neck.
It was heaven—he was heaven, this calm, assured man who looked like a glowing archangel, one of God’s warriors, armored against the sharp weapons of society with his heroism and honesty and dashing courage. Nothing could injure her while she was with him. She was free—to feel the heat of his chest seep through the intervening layers of her clothing until she was as warm as a flower in the sunshine. To feel awareness skitter across her skin until her chest began to feel tight with need. To feel the cool rush of the air on her cheeks as they twirled and twirled and twirled.