Until the fiddles drew to a long, closing note, and it was everything she could do to let go and step back. And curtsey. And breathe.
“Thank you, Beech.” Her voice sounded small, as if it came from far away. “I’d forgotten how much I loved dancing.” And how much she was going to miss it when she was sent away.
“My dear Penelope, the sentiment is entirely mutual.” He offered her his arm. “I meant what I said before. You really must consider if you won’t mar—”
“Do introduce me, Warwick.”
Penelope felt all her warm pleasure wash away like a cold rain. In front of them was Lord Robert Maynard, the same damned impertinent fellow whose earlier attentions had driven her to barricade herself in the library.
On second thought, perhaps she ought to thank him. But Maynard gave her no chance. “Introduce me so I, too, may dance with the infamous Miss Pease.”
Beside her Beech stilled, which was not in itself an alarming thing. He seemed to conduct himself with a particular economy of motion—a sort of tensely precise awareness of where his body was in space. But in a man so still and watchful his eyes moved with a power and perceptiveness that was telling, and at the moment Beech’s dark scowl should have sent a cleverer fellow running for cover.
“I beg your pardon,” Beech said carefully. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
Maynard appeared impervious to sense. “A friend of your brother’s, don’t you know?”
“I don’t know.” Beech’s tone was as precise and sharp as flint.
“This is Maynard, Your Grace—Lord Robert Maynard.” Her own tone was as cool as she could manage over the heat of her anger. “Though I haven’t been formally introduced to him either, that didn’t stop him from sending me a smutty valentine—did it, Maynard? No. You’re a credible enough pornographer, but not, I think, a tolerable enough dancer to tempt me.”
“Now, don’t be like that, Miss Pease. It’s all in good fun.” Maynard laughed and continued in a confidential aside to Beech, “It was a damn good, damnably smutty valentine.”
A sulfurous combination of rage and mortification gripped her as tight as a noose. “You insufferable—” Her throat was so choked she could not speak.
Mercifully, she did not have to.
“You sent a lewd valentine to Miss Pease—a woman to whom you had not even been introduced?” Beech’s question was everything calm and collected, but Penelope could hear the ominous warning in his darkening tone.
“Everyone knows her.” Maynard winked suggestively. “All about her. And your brother.”
Beneath her arm, Beech’s grip tightened, as if he feared she might strike the blighter. And she would have—if Beech had not looked so likely to do the honors for her.
“Maynard,” Beech instructed in a voice as calm and polished as a blade, “kindly remove yourself from my presence, and keep entirely out of Miss Pease’s, before I am forced to put a hole through that obviously vacant brain of yours.”
Maynard remained as thick as a doorjamb. “What? It’s all in good fun.”
“Good fun does not consist of taunting defenseless young women.” Beech began to speak slowly, enunciating each word in the deceptively calm tone that ought to have made Maynard’s cods shrink up into his body for cover. “Go. Away. Before. I. Do. You. A. Very. Great. And. Very. Precise. Violence.”
“I say, Warwick.” An unsure smile curdled Maynard’s cheeks. “Thinking of taking up where your brother left off, are you?”
In an instant, Beech had Maynard seized by the neck like a rag doll, his thumb pressed hard into the hollow of the blighter’s throat, cutting off his wind.
Maynard scrabbled at Beech’s hand to ease the pressure, but Beech held fast. “I will kill you”—Beech whispered so cool and low only she and Maynard could hear the lethal threat—“gladly and effortlessly, if you ever utter her name, or so much as look in Miss Pease’s direction ever again. Do you comprehend me?”
Maynard bobbed his mottled red face in frantic accord.
Beech let go and stepped back. “Remember that—and how hard it was to breathe—the next time you think to sully a lady’s name. Especially this lady.”
“But she’s not a la—” Maynard flinched, throwing up his hands to ward Beech off, before he obligingly scuttled away.
Beech made an infinitesimal adjustment to his coat. “My apologies. Where were we?”
“I hardly know.” Every idea was overthrown by Beech’s astonishing actions. Though he was as cool as a summer ice, she was very nearly shaking.
“Indeed.” Beech spoke into the silence that was the sound of every gossip within the room holding their breath in anticipation what might happen next. “Come, my dear Miss Pease. We need air to rid ourselves of that fellow’s foul stench.” Then he gave her his hand, to lead her away from the gaping assembly.
She went with him, her father and his apoplexy be damned. A reckless mixture of astonishment and gratitude filled her so full, she thought she might burst into tears. “You really are the bravest bloody man, Beech.”
“It is only a country ballroom,” he said in his wry way, “not the deck of a man-o-war.”
“That was more than a dance, Beech,” she insisted. “You must know that.” He had to know that the ballroom, and society in general, was a battlefield for her—that she had already lost upon such ground. “You must know what it meant to me. So, I will thank you for defending me. And for dancing with me.” She came up upon her tiptoes to press a hasty heartfelt kiss to his cheek.
“And you must know, I would give you more than a dance, my sweet Miss Pease.” His voice was low and all the more earnest because of his quiet. “I would give you the world.”
CHAPTER 7
“COME AWAY WITH ME NOW—WE’LL elope.” Marcus felt the strange, heightened calm before a battle, knowing he was doing the right thing and trusting himself to fate.
Penelope laughed as if such an idea were surely a joke. “Elope? You can’t mean to run off to Scotland?”
“Too far. And far too inconvenient,” he returned. “I find I’m a duke, and I ought to be able to persuade a bishop to write me a special license. We can be married tomorrow morning.”
“Beech, you can’t be serious.” She gaped at him. “And anyway, tomorrow it’s going to snow.” She turned to the darkened window. “See, it has already begun to fall.”
Now that he had made up his mind, he would allow no obstacles to block his path. “Snow or no snow, I mean what I say. I always mean what I say.”
But she was unsure—of him, surely, and probably of herself. “Beech. We dare not.”
“Why not?” He set himself to convince her. “Where is the girl who never refused a dare? Where is my old friend, the girl who went first, jumping off the old bridge into the Avon that summer afternoon?”
“That girl was thirteen and a monstrous hoyden.”
“Nothing about you was monstrous. You were magnificent—daring and bold and everything I admired.”
“That was a long time ago.” Her low voice was full of emotion he could not quite fathom. “We aren’t children now. We can’t jump off bridges or go rushing out into the snow.”
“Why not? What are you afraid of?”
“Afraid it will make everything worse,” she whispered.
“How? I thought you were about to be banished to the hinterlands? How much worse could it be?”
That put the wind back in her sails—the color rose in her cheeks. “You have a point.”
“Don’t go to the maiden auntie,” he pled. “Come away with me into the dark and snow and make me happy—as happy as I promise to make you. Please.” He wanted it so badly he ached.
He ached for her affection. He ached for her simple kind touch.