Page 642 of From Rakes to Riches

“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.”

6

Penelope looked at him—really looked at him to see the man 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—and too ashamed—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.” He lifted her fingers to his lips. “I know how to survive.”

Her breath all but left her body. He wassucha 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.

But 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 ears to the relentless, scandalous chatter noisy 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—hewas 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.

---