“I see,” he murmured. “Do you like dancing?”
“I do enjoy it,” Rosilee answered, though her dancing usually consisted of drifting along alone in the library or in the garden while snipping roses. “However, all the noise, the stares...” Even this dress. “It’s all much more than I expected.” Not even to mention the fact that it would have been her first official dance, and she hesitated to give it away so easily to a stranger.
“I understand.”
“You feel the same?” she asked him.
“I do.”
She nodded. “And what about dancing? Do you enjoy dancing?”
A small pause. “I haven’t danced with anyone since my instructor attempted to teach me when I was a boy.”
“Attempted?”
“I was not a good student.”
Rosilee chuckled. “Well, now I am glad I did not ask you to dance.”
His steps hesitated. “You were planning on asking me?”
“It was Mrs. Prune’s suggestion if no one approached me.”
He snorted. “Well, that was never going to happen.”
“I do believe that was another grumble.” She laughed at his stiffened posture, walking with him from the ballroom. The stares no longer made her skin prickle or set her heart in disarray.
Yet prickles still ravaged her skin, and her heart still beat out of rhythm.
All because of one man.
Him.
The memory of their kiss resurfaced, vivid and breathtaking. She could very well kiss him again right now. The thought should have brought her up short, but it did not. Instead, it made her pulse quicken. She felt an attraction to this man she’d been denying, or rather, shelving it in favor of attending to her circumstances. But she couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to have this man all to herself in all possible ways. How would it feel to make a choice for herself that didn’t include obligation or necessity? How would it feel to be selfish for once?
Dare she find out?
“Where are wegoing?”
Blake wondered the same thing as he led them to the tree that would always bind them together. Or rather, he wondered not where they were going so much as what the devil he was doing. All he knew was he didn’t want the night to end yet.
He glanced upward. The moon hung high in the sky, casting a soft glow over the garden. The echoes of that fateful night no longer bounced around his head. All that remained was her.
Always her.
And he felt he might die if he did not dance with her.
They stopped beneath the tree, and he held out his hand. She glanced at it and back at him. “What are you doing?”
“Would you do me the honor of this dance?”
She blinked at him before glancing around. “There is no music.”
“Oh, but there is,” Blake murmured, staring as the same moonlight that illuminated the garden danced upon her. “In our imagination.”
She cocked her head. “Didn’t we both admit to being terrible dancers?”
“All the more reason to dance where no one can see us.”
