“If I Were Younger, I’d Ask You to Dance,” the Duke Teased — “Who Said No?” Replied the 38-Year-Old Woman Everyone Ignored. Then the Duke Who Hadn’t Danced Since Waterloo Took Her Hand, and the Entire Ballroom Fell Silent.

PART 2 

“You’re serious,” Arthur said, low.

“I rarely joke about my feet, your grace.”

He exhaled — one long breath, as if he’d been holding it since 1814. The stiffness went out of his shoulders. The heavy resignation that usually clung to him like wet wool simply evaporated, and something sharper, more alive, rose up to take its place.

He stepped out of the shadow of the fern.

He didn’t bow. He extended his gloved hand, bare and unceremonious, into the light where anyone could see it.

“Then, Miss Trent,” he said, stripped of all his usual armor, “would you do me the honor of walking into the fire with me?”

Her pulse roared. She placed her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers — warm, solid, no hesitation at all — and he led her out onto the polished floor before she could think better of it.

The reaction was instant. A ripple of whispers tore outward from them like a stone dropped in still water. Fans froze mid-flutter. Heads turned so fast that pearl combs slipped loose from careful coiffures.

The Duke of Westford — reclusive, notorious, a man who had not danced in twelve years — leading the spinster aunt of the Colgate family onto the floor for a waltz was a scandal of exact, seismic proportions, and every soul in that ballroom understood it in the same instant.

Arthur didn’t so much as glance at them. He stepped into her space, his right hand settling firm at her waist. The heat of his palm bled straight through the thin silk of her gown.

Sybil set her hand on his shoulder, feeling the solid line of muscle beneath the wool.

“Ignore them,” he murmured, already moving into the first turn.

“I already am,” she said back.

And as he pulled her into the waltz — his bad knee holding, barely, against the strain — the cynical walls they’d spent five years building around themselves cracked straight down the middle, right there, in front of everyone who had ever decided they didn’t matter.

Somewhere near the punch bowl, a glass of claret hit the floor and shattered. No one so much as turned to look at it.

Because Lady Agatha’s fan had gone still against her chin. Lord Croft — who had not spoken a single word to Sybil Trent in a decade — was staring at her as if seeing her for the very first time.

And Sybil, spinning in the arms of a man who had once told her he smiled in 1814 and found it overrated, understood with sudden, dizzying clarity that whatever happened next, there was no walking back into that fern. The music was not going to end kindly. Somewhere in the next four minutes, one of them was going to have to decide what this was — and neither of them, watching each other’s faces in the candlelight, looked ready to be the one who let go first.