Page 643 of From Rakes to Riches

Nothing could injure her while she was with him—she was free.

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.

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 Pease, the sentiment is entirely mutual.” His voice was low and just as quiet—Intimate, even. “I meant what I said before. You really must consider if you won’t marry?—”

“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, maydancewith 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.

Sharp enough that Penelope decided some compromise was in order. “This is Maynard, Your Grace—Lord Robert Maynard.” Her own tone was as cool as she could manage over the heat ofher 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.”

The worm didn’t even have the good grace to be embarrassed. “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 my particular friend, 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 smoldering warning in his darkening tone.

“Everyoneknowsher.” 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’scods 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.

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