“One Waltz With Me and You’ll Be My Wife,” the Cruel Duke Said—He Hadn’t Danced in Eleven Years, Until a Penniless Girl Laughed at Him and Turned His Reckless Joke Into a Scandal the Whole County Believed

PART 1

“One waltz with me, and you’ll be my wife.”

He said it to see what she would do. He had a hundred cutting things ready to hand — they came to him the way sums came to a clerk — and instead, apropos of nothing, apropos of the arch of one eyebrow at a countess mincing past in ostrich plumes, that was what came out of him.

He had not expected her to laugh.

Sidwell Glennville laughed the way water laughs over stones — easy, bright, entirely without fear — and the Duke of Foscliffe, who had not been laughed to his face in eleven years, found himself absurdly, unaccountably charmed.

“You are very bold, sir,” she said, pressing two gloved fingers to her lips to steady the mirth. “To promise a woman marriage on the strength of a waltz you haven’t yet danced. Suppose you tread on my hem.”

“Suppose I tread on yours. Shall we still be wed by supper?”

“I do not tread on hems,” he said.

“No,” she agreed, looking him over with a candor that would have made a bishop cough. “I dare say you’d consider it beneath you.”

Around them, the ballroom of Harwick Hall blazed with a thousand candles. The cream of the county turned upon its own axis in silk and satin, and every head in the room had, at some point that evening, angled itself toward the tall, dark figure by the eastern pillar — to see whether the Duke of Foscliffe would deign to dance at all.

He had not danced in eleven years. It was one of the many things whispered behind fans and behind hands. That the Duke did not dance. That the Duke did not smile. That he had a heart like the cliffs his house was named for — all gray stone and cold spray, and nothing living upon it.

They called him cruel. He had let them. It was a useful thing, a reputation. It kept the mothers at bay and the fortune-hunters at a decent distance, and it meant a man might stand at a ball with a glass of untouched claret and be left entirely, blessedly alone.

Except that tonight, he had not been left alone. Tonight his grandmother had come.

The Dowager Duchess had spent the better part of an hour steering a parade of eligible young women past his pillar the way a farmer drives geese to market, and he had repelled each of them with the flat gray courtesy that had earned him his name. He had thought himself safe. Then the last of the geese scattered, and in the gap left behind, he saw a young woman standing alone by the long windows — plainly dressed in pale green, holding a cup of negus she clearly had no intention of drinking — watching the whole glittering circus with an expression of such frank, private amusement that he had crossed the floor before he knew his feet had moved.

He had meant to say something cutting.

What he’d said instead had gotten him a wife. Or the promise of one, in front of two hundred witnesses, though neither of them knew that yet.

“You needn’t look so wounded,” Sidwell told him now. “It was a very good line. I shall remember it when I am a wrinkled old woman — I shall tell all the young ladies that a duke once had to marry me across a bowl of negus. And they shall none of them believe me. And I shall not care in the least.” She set the cup down on the sill with the neat efficiency of a woman well accustomed to putting things away. “There. Now you may return to your pillar.”

“You have been very brave,” the Duke observed, “in speaking to me. You are not going to swoon.”

“I have never swooned in my life. It seems a great deal of trouble, and someone always has to carry you.” She tilted her head. “Is that what usually happens? You say your terrible sentence, and they swoon, and you feel gratified?”

“They usually,” he said slowly, “go quite white, and find they are wanted urgently by their mothers.”

“How lonely for you.”

She said it lightly. The two words dropped into him like a stone into a deep well, and he heard them go all the way down.

For a moment he simply looked at her — the clear gray eyes, the unfashionable freckle high on her cheekbone, the way she stood with her weight easy on both feet, like someone who expected to have to stand a long time — and he was seized by a want so sudden and so unfamiliar that he did not at first recognize it as want at all.

He wanted her not to walk away. That was all. It was a small thing and an enormous one.

So he did a foolish thing — the first genuinely foolish thing he had done since he was seven-and-twenty.

“Dance the waltz with me,” he said. “If I am to be laughed at, I may as well earn it.”

Sidwell hesitated. He saw the flicker, the calculation. She was not a great heiress — that much was written all over her sensible gown and her mended glove. A girl like that did not dance with a duke and walk away unmarked. There would be talk. There was always talk.

Then something quick moved behind her eyes — some appetite for the ridiculous that matched his own buried one — and she smiled. Not the laughing smile now, but a smaller, warmer, more dangerous one.

“Very well, your grace.” She laid her hand in his. “One waltz. And when it is done, and I am somehow not your wife, you shall have to admit you are all bluster and no bite — and I shall have that to comfort me in my old age as well.”

He led her onto the floor.

What he remembered afterward was the moment his hand settled at her waist and hers came to rest on his shoulder, and how she looked up at him with the laughter still living in her face — and how, God help him, he smiled back. He felt the thing in his own face that had been rusted shut for eleven years give way. It must have altered him profoundly, because he saw her startle, saw her laughter check, saw her look at him as though a gray cliff had, without warning, put out a single improbable flower.

“There,” she breathed. “You do have a face after all. I had begun to wonder.”

He said nothing. He could not. He was dancing, and he had forgotten how much he had once loved to dance, and the woman in his arms answered every turn before he made it, as though they had done this a hundred times in some other life.

He was aware, distantly, that the crowd had thinned at the edges of the floor. That fans had stilled. That a low murmur was building beneath the music like surf under wind.

The Duke of Foscliffe was dancing. The Duke of Foscliffe was smiling.

It would be, he understood without caring, the only thing anyone in three counties spoke of for a fortnight.

He did not know yet how right he was. Nor how much worse.

The final chord came. He turned her once more, slowly, and brought her to a stop directly before the eastern pillar — directly, as it happened, before his grandmother.