Alice looked at his cravat.
“Eyes on me, Lady Alice.”
She glanced up. She glanced down. She glanced up again. “Your Grace, I cannot?—”
“Eyes on me.” He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He had a way of saying a thing as though it had already been settled, and she felt the saying of it at the base of her spine. “We are to look as though we have been waiting for this dance for two years. We will not achieve that effect if you keep staring at my neckcloth.”
“I am not staring at your neckcloth, Your Grace. I am trying not to.”
He laughed.
It was a small thing. It was almost nothing. It was the briefest exhalation through the nose, and his shoulders moved with itjust once, yet every nerve in her body registered that the Duke of Langton had laughed at something she had said. She might never in her life recover from it.
“Look at me, Alice.” He had dropped her title.
She looked at him.
It was a mistake. She had known it would be a mistake. She had known from the carriage, from the front steps, from the moment she had decided she would write him the letter that what she was doing was going to require her to look at him and that looking at him was the part she had not adequately prepared for.
He was looking down at her. He was not smiling. His face had gotten, since she had last seen it two nights ago at his dining table, no softer, and he was looking at her with a particular attention that was not the attention he had given any other person in any other ballroom in the two years that she had known him. She could feel it like a hand at her throat.
“Better,” he said softly.
“Your Grace?—”
“You are doing well. Keep looking.”
They turned. He guided her through the figure easily, the way a man who had been taught to dance well at the age of twelve guided everything. Her own feet knew the figure perfectly whichleft her with nothing whatsoever to think about which was a catastrophe.
“You are very quiet, Lady Alice.”
“Am I?”
“You are usually less so.”
“You usually deserve it.”
“I am sure I deserve it now. Tell me what you are thinking.”
“I am not thinking, Your Grace.”
“Then think of something and tell it to me, or else the room is going to begin to suspect that we have nothing to say to one another.”
She drew a breath. The breath caught somewhere in her chest. He felt it. She saw him feel it. She saw the small twitch at the corner of his mouth, the small darkening behind his eyes. He had felt it, and he was pleased about it, and that was, she decided, intolerable.
“Your Grace,” she said carefully, “you are very pleased with yourself.”
“I am not.”
“You are. You are looking at me as though I am a horse you have just bought at Tattersall’s.”
“That,” he said, “is a very expensive comparison, Lady Alice.”
“You shall pay it, Your Grace, if you keep looking at me like that in front of three hundred people.”
“I shall look at you exactly as I please.” His hand on her waist tightened briefly. “And you shall look at me. And in twenty minutes, when this dance and the next have ended, you shall make a small excuse to your mother, and you shall go through the door at the left of the orchestra into the small terrace beyond it, and you shall wait for me there for exactly four minutes, and then I shall come and find you.”
She did not stop dancing.