Page 15 of The Trouble With Dukes
“I expect so. They’ve had a dancing master coming around for the past three years. Expensive little shi—blighter.”
“Then let’s be about it,” Lord Nancy Pants said. He wore as much lace as a French colonel intent on impressing the ladies, but had a good set of shoulders too. “Ladies, if you’d choose your partners, the entertainment portion of the afternoon is about to begin.”
Edana took the heir, Rhona made her curtsy to the big fellow cousin, and Hamish was left …
“You’re not wearing your specs,” he said as Miss Megan rose from a graceful curtsy.
“The year I made my come out, they went sailing off my nose in an energetic turn and landed in the men’s punch bowl. I haven’t worn them on the dance floor since. Shouldn’t you bow, Your Grace?”
She offered her bare hand—this was a practice dance, after all—and Hamish executed the requisite gentlemanly maneuver.
“Now what?”
“Now Lord Valentine will play the introduction….”
God above, the nancy bastard knew his way around a keyboard. This was not the tortured thumping Hamish associated with country dances and overheated ballrooms, this wasmusic.
“Slower!” Miss Megan called, and the speed of the music calmed, though the melody acquired more twiddles and faradiddles along the way. “We’ll need a lengthy introduction as well.”
“More introductions?” Hamish muttered.
Her eyes were truly lovely without the spectacles, large, guileless, the blue of the Scottish sky over high pastures in spring.
“The waltz is in triple meter, like the minuet,” Miss Megan said. “One-two-three, one-two-three, and all you need to do is feel the downbeat.”
Scotsmen were born to dance. They had no particular defenses against being handled by determined women, though. Miss Megan put one hand on Hamish’s shoulder and grasped his hand with the other.
“Your free hand goes above my waist, toward the middle of my back, but not quite. You want it where you can guide me. Your Grace, it’s customary to assume waltz position when contemplating the waltz.”
Hamish longed to touch her—to assume this genteel, slightly risqué, elegant dance pose with her—and he didn’t dare.
“I might knock ye over,” he said, hoping the twiddles and faradiddles kept his words from her cousins’ notice.
“You cannot possibly. I’ll simply turn loose of you and step back should your balance become questionable. The simplest way to learn the waltz is to pattern your steps like a square….”
Hamish’s balance had become questionable back in Hatchards bookshop, when he’d heard Pilkington sneering and strutting through a conversation with a lady. He’d lost his balance all over again at the dress shop, and pitched it into Moreland’s prize rose bushes in the ducal garden too.
Miss Megan nattered on, all the while the other couples twirled and smiled around them, the music lifted and lilted, and Hamish wanted to kill Sir Fletcher Pilkington. The ability to flirt in triple meter had seen the younger son of an English lord elevated to the point where he got good men killed, and men only half-bad flogged nearly to death.
“You look so fierce,” Miss Megan said when they were on their second lurch about the room. The lady, fortunately, was more substantial than she appeared, and determined on Hamish’s education.
“I’m concentrating. Anything more complicated than a march and a fellow gets confused.” Her perfume was partly responsible, half spice, half flowers. Not roses, but fresh meadows, scythed grass, lavender and …
He brought the lady a trifle closer on a turn, the better to investigate her fragrance, and between one twirl and the next, Hamish’s instructress became his every unfulfilled dream on a dance floor. She had the knack of going where a fellow suggested, as if she read a man’s intentions by the way he held her.
Megan Windham made Hamish feel as if spinning about in his arms sat at the apex of her list of delights, the memory she’d recount in old age to dazzle her great-nieces and granddaughters. She danced with the incandescent joy of the northern lights and all the feminine warmth of summer sun on a Scottish shore.
To her, he was apparently not the Duke of Murder or the Berserker of Badajoz. He was simply a lucky fellow who needed assistance learning to dance. The relief of that, the pleasure of shedding an entire war’s worth of violence, was exquisite.
For another turn down the room, Hamish wallowed in a fine, miserable case of heartache, for this pleasure was illusory—he had killed often and well—and the lady could never be his. Worse yet, she apparently belonged to that walking hog wallow of dishonor and guile, Sir Fletcher Pilkington.
The sooner Hamish waltzed his own titled, homesick arse back to Scotland, the better for all.
The Duke of Murdoch was all grace and power, and his protestations about not knowing how to waltz must have been for his sisters’ sakes. Soldiers could be shrewd like that. St. Just, Westhaven, and Valentine would surely beg a set from the ladies as a result of this informal rehearsal, and Murdoch had probably known as much.
“A couple usually converses during a waltz,” Megan said as they started on another circuit of the music parlor. “How do you find London, that sort of thing?”
Murdoch’s sense of rhythm was faultless, but he’d apparently misplaced the ability to smile—at all.
