“As scandalous as it is, I suggest we do a waltz.” With a wickedly daring grin, Mr. Oswald motioned to the pianist. “Shall we be so nefarious, Miss Crayford?”
She giggled and blushed and nodded, and everyone else murmured enthusiastic agreement.
But before Mr. Oswald could take one step in Georgina’s direction, Simon was already next to her, pulling her up.
“My arm—”
“I will be gentle.” He guided her hand to his shoulder, slipped his own to the small of her back, pulled her next to him and swayed her to the rhythmic beat of the music. Had he ever danced with her before?
They had been so young when he left. Too young for balls and house parties.
He would not have danced with her then, even if he could have, she imagined. Why did he dance with her now?
She tried to force her limbs to remain rigid. She urged her face to show no signs, though everything within her wanted to relax against him and melt into the glory of being this close to him. She smelled oil paints on his clothes. She smelled the summer air and horses and grass and leather carriage reins—
“I found the driver.”
The sobriety of his words splashed her, like cold water in her face, drowning away the imagined scents. How ridiculous she was. How pathetic. Shouldn’t she have known he only wished to tell her the news? Not dance with her?
“I found him in a village tavern, drinking away the last of his payment.”
“Payment?”
“For almost seeing us dead.”
Coldness raced up her spine. “What was your course of action upon discovering him?”
“Suffice it to say he gave me no answers. Despite strong persuasion.” Simon danced her farther from the others, though his voice remained low. “He is jailed for now, but with little evidence, I suspect he will be released. He claims the reins got away from him.”
“I see.” She lowered her gaze, focused on her slippers moving in step to his boots. A moment more and this would be over. She would return to her town house, as she should have done before, and be finished with any entanglement to Simon Fancourt—
“I wish it had been me.” His voice caught.
Startled, she glanced up at his face, certain she had imagined the hitch of emotion in his words.
But his eyes echoed the sentiment, for they glistened in the candlelight with the most surprising tears she had ever witnessed in her life. With the next blink, they were gone. “I wish my arms had been broken instead.”
“Do not say such a thing.”
“I will put an end to this.”
“Simon—”
“I will stop such a beast, and you will never hurt at my hand again.” He seemed to mean more than the carriage accident. He seemed to mean twelve years ago and the goodbye he never said and the promise he broke.
She pulled herself away, wincing at the pain beneath her sling. She felt she should say something, anything, to acknowledge the passion he’d just exhibited.
But the only thing she could think to do was escape.
She fled without saying a word.
Someday, he would paint tonight.
Simon had departed the suffocating drawing room not long after Miss Whitmore and wandered back out to the Hollyvale porch. Blackness filled his view, save for the distant lantern lights from the stables and the faint stars overhead.
They were nothing like the stars back home.
Somehow, from the harvest fields, with mountains towering on either side of him, they glistened brighter and seemed so bountiful he could not have counted them if he tried.
