A Bride Unveiled Page 7

  “Dear God, Violet,” he said in an undertone. “How could I not have realized it was you in the hall? You look much the same, but you’re so beautiful—”

  “Meaning that I wasn’t beautiful before?” she asked, her voice amused.

  “Not in the way you are now,” he said, his eyes drifting from her face over her curvaceous form. “And I never thought about you like that before.” But he did tonight, God help him. The sight of her was going to feed another decade of dreams.

  “You’re quite handsome yourself,” she said with a quick smile.

  He shook his head. “It might be a good thing I didn’t recognize you right away. I probably wouldn’t have been able to perform. I would have impaled someone on my sword if I’d known you were watching.”

  She laughed at that. “I doubt it. You controlled that sword as if it were part of your arm. I admire you more than I can say. You’ve come a long way, Kit. From a workhouse in Monk’s Huntley to a mansion in Mayfair.”

  “It doesn’t feel like it right now.” He still wanted to be the center of her attention. “What are you doing in London?”

  She sobered. “Getting married.”

  He glanced across the ballroom, his face disapproving. It couldn’t be. “Not to the haberdasher?”

  She frowned. “That isn’t very nice.”

  Neither was the haberdasher. And now Kit had another reason to dislike him. “Isn’t that what he is?”

  “He started out as a haberdasher,” she said. “But he owns the entire emporium and plans to buy another arcade.”

  “Well, joy to the world,” Kit said. “That’s just what it needs.”

  Violet arched her brow. “I can see someone still has a little of the wicked left inside him.”

  “That might be true,” he admitted. “But God knows I’m better than I was before.”

  “After what I saw of you tonight, I’d have to agree. How did it happen?” she asked in a whisper. “When I last saw you, I wasn’t sure how you were going to end up.”

  “That’s a kind way to put it. What you mean to say is that you weren’t sure I wasn’t going to come to an end.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “We all thought that I was done for, Violet.”

  “I was half convinced your departure would be the end of me, too,” she confessed.

  “Well, thank God it wasn’t,” he said with passion.

  “You’ve turned out finer than anything I could have hoped for.”

  He wished his heart would stop racing. There had never been anyone else like her in his life. “If you give me a chance, I’ll tell you more after the dance ends. That is, if it ever—”

  The chamber music built to a majestic swell and broke across the ballroom before Kit could finish. Footmen lowered candles in the outer girandoles and escorted onlookers to chairs. Gentlemen discarded their dress swords at the last instant and handed them off for the safety of the other dancers.

  Kit shook his head and moved closer to her, realizing that the other dancers were lining up for him to lead. Meeting Violet on the night of his grandest benefit almost made him believe in destiny. He wasn’t sure whether she ought to view it as good fortune or not. Or whether she’d want anything to do with him after this.

  Careful.

  Watch your opponent.

  Parry.

  Save your best move for the last moment.

  Except that she had saved him a decade ago. She was anything but an opponent. Every fight he’d won since then was dedicated to her. He didn’t want to engage her in a duel—he wanted to engage her in another kind of battle, one that didn’t have to come to a bad end, or end at all. This was a night for charity. Could he plead that he needed her again?

  “Do you remember the ‘Bleeding Idiots’?” she asked.

  He pretended to look puzzled. “Is that a division of the infantry?”

  “Pardon me,” she said so softly that he had to lean toward her to listen, and his chin grazed the lush hair that her pearl comb could barely tame. “I must have mistaken you for another misfit.”

  He glanced up, staring around the ballroom as if he were vaguely bored, detached, when every thread that held him together was stretched tight in restraint. “There is no mistake,” he replied at last. “I am, indeed, the misfit you made a pact with. But I think we’re going to have to dig a little deeper into our history than the last day we were together.”

  “Oh?” she asked, intrigued.

  He nodded. “I think we should relive the first one, when I took you hostage.”

  The dance began.

  If Violet had never before appreciated all the dance lessons her aunt had given her, she did now. She needed to rely on craft or Kit would break her concentration. He was a physical man, unaffected and compelling in his mere presence. She would have been awed by his masculinity even if he weren’t the friend she had never forgotten. But their friendship added a secret intimacy, a whisper of spice to their reunion. She wanted, wickedly enough, to touch him. To stare into his eyes.

  How was any privacy possible in a crowded ballroom?

  They crossed hands and swirled through the line. Violet glimpsed the surprised faces of the guests they passed. She felt sorry for them. It was all she could do to keep up with her partner herself. “I have a feeling we aren’t doing this dance properly,” she said breathlessly. “What is it patterned after?”

  He skipped back a few steps, made a bow, and turned the other way. “The last duel I fought in Paris.”

  “It isn’t.”

  He looked at her, lifting her hand for the arch. “No.” He grinned. “It was in Spain. I had just gotten my first sword and I thought I could fight anybody. Needless to say, I lost the duel and had to learn a Gypsy dance as part of the deal.”

  She laughed, catching her breath. “Do you know what is most amazing about tonight?”

  “That we didn’t recognize each other in the hall right away?”

  “No. That your swordplay draws a crowd and that you started out practicing with a hoe.”

  “I’m good at improvising,” he said with a rueful grin.

  “I think you must have a metronome hidden in you somewhere.”

  “You don’t seem to have any trouble keeping up,” he noted.

  “I can control my motions,” she said, “most of the time. It’s one thing to anticipate music heralding a change in a direction when it’s an established dance. But it’s another to be able to follow your lead. In what direction, if you don’t mind my asking, are you trying to lead me?”

  “Out of the ballroom, if I can.”

  “With everyone lining up behind us?”

  He broke into a laugh. “I didn’t consider that.”

  “You opened the dance.”

  “Does that mean I can decide when to end it?”

  “No,” she said quickly, afraid he was capable of anything. “Don’t do that.”

  He gave her a hard stare. “Not even if I start another one right away?”

  She stared back at him, his face caught in the prisms of the crystal chandeliers. She was tempted to say yes. “And then what would happen?”

  “Another dance?”

  “Until we wear through our shoes?”

  “Doesn’t time stop on a night like this?”

  “Not unless you can make it do so.” And if anyone could, she thought, it would be him. He teased her senses into a tempest. A flurry of emotion, of hope and loss, rushed through her. He made her forget who she was supposed to be, the lady she had become. He’d left his mark on her heart, and it had never healed.

  He was Kit, and yet he wasn’t.

  She had looked at him before through a young girl’s eyes and had seen the champion she had needed to see. She hadn’t known until it was too late that he had needed her, too.

  He had been abandoned, beaten, and abused, and become valued in the shallow world. She searched his face. She thought she saw a few remnants of boyish hope beneath his attractive ve
neer of cynicism.

  It was overwhelming to look at him all at once. It hurt to think of how much he’d survived and how well he hid it. A decade had darkened his fair hair to ash. The angles and hollows of his face had filled out with a man’s character, giving it a chiseled strength. He had to have become strong inside, too. But he’d always been strong.

  And he’d earned the right to his cynicism.

  “Well,” he asked, the devil lurking in his eyes, “am I still menacing enough to scare away crows?”

  She felt warmth tingling through her veins. “After what I saw of your dashing show tonight, you’re impertinent to ask. The ladies flocked to you.”

  “You didn’t flock to the chair I saved,” he said, staring into her eyes. “I kept it empty for you until the last moment.”

  His voice weakened her. She would have loved to fling herself against his solid chest and have him alone for these few moments. But the world had discovered him for the wonderful treasure he was. Her handsome friend.

  There had never been anyone like him in her life. And if he kept staring at her she wouldn’t be able to dance another step. But at the same time she knew all eyes were on them and she must maintain her respectability.

  She peered over his shoulder, desperate to break the tension between them. “Where is your bride now, by the way? Did she run off with someone else already?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve waited for ages to see you again. I don’t want to waste what’s left of our dance talking about anyone else.”

  “London fell in love with you tonight—”

  “How long will you be here? I’m not interested in the rest of London right now.”

  She needed to slow their pace, to deflect the intensity between them, to drink lemonade. Her heart was beating too fast against her stays. “All this time,” she said, “I was afraid that you had been misused by the man who bought you, or that something worse had happened. I hoped you’d be treated well—”

  “Who told you I wasn’t treated well before? I lived in a palace, didn’t I?”

  “I didn’t understand, Kit.”

  “Why should you have?”

  “I do now.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You were good to me.”

  “You were a demon, and you broke my heart when you went away.”

  His smile pierced her composure. “I didn’t have a choice. I was a wretched little beggar, and things could have turned out worse. I was adopted. And I was given an education. Can’t you tell?”

  She smiled up at him with sudden affection. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you. It was the polish.”

  His lips curled into a provocative smile. “Then it wouldn’t shock you if I really did lure you off to have you to myself?”

  “It wouldn’t shock me, but Godfrey would probably get the vapors. As would my aunt.”

  He blinked. “Your aunt is here?”

  “Yes, she’s watching us, too.”

  “Then I’ll have to change my plan.”

  A couple wove around them, laughing helplessly, out of time; Kit and Violet laughed, too, as they went down the dance, ladies on one side, gentlemen on the opposite, until Kit arrived at the top of the line.

  “You dance well,” he said to Violet, releasing her hand to exchange partners.

  She took a breath. She danced well enough, but fencing had rendered him as flexible as a ballet dancer. It took vigor to perform the intricate figures and patterns as well as he did.

  She knew the names of each step—glissade, chassé, the jeté, and assemblé. But it didn’t matter. His energy surpassed hers. He made his living with his physical prowess. She saw Godfrey wave at her once, then gallop off in another direction. Her aunt was perched, appraising, on the edge of her chair, and goodness only knew what she thought.

  Violet was with Kit, and a wonderful disbelief overwhelmed everything else.

  He was healthy, vital, confident. To think she had cried herself to sleep for weeks worrying about him.

  Did he remember all their adventures? To look at his fine figure she couldn’t imagine that he’d ever been flogged. He was a master-at-arms. How had it happened? He had become Master Christopher Fenton.

  “My uncle died two years ago,” she said, and thought he could not hear her.

  He missed a step, recovered, and wove back in the line without anyone being the wiser. “I’m sorry. I suspected as much but was afraid to pry. I went back to Monk’s Huntley for the first time only two months ago. There was a caretaker at your house, but he was hesitant to talk to me.”

  “We left after Uncle Henry was buried,” she said, and offered no further explanation. She wouldn’t ruin this moment by revealing that her friendship with him had given her aunt and uncle a raging fit. How could she admit that her guardians had found their secret association so appalling that they were afraid to let her out of their sight? Or that Ambrose had confessed everything to his mother? Violet had felt ashamed for disappointing them, and guilty that Miss Higgins had been sent away. Yet here she was dancing with the forbidden boy who had become a fencing master, with not only her aunt but her betrothed as their audience.

  Even now she couldn’t reveal that she and the dashing Fenton had kept company in their youth. And yet if she could, she would have happily followed him on another misadventure—and not cared whether she made it home in time for tomorrow’s tea.

  But she wouldn’t. She bent to the rules now. Her aunt had made sure that she had not fallen into a wicked rake’s hands. And she was all her aunt had left in the world. Her aunt had tamed violet’s unladylike inclinations. Until tonight.

  Chapter 7

  Kit had not earned his diploma in Paris without learning to master his emotions. He hadn’t impressed his professors by thrusting at the first insult. No one in the ballroom would have guessed from watching them that his dance partner had kept alive the spark of humanity that had survived his workhouse years.

  For all his proficiency with weapons, Violet had gotten through his guard. No duelist alive could have struck him such an unseen blow.

  It was a fairy tale in reverse.

  To hold her, however briefly, in his arms, forbidden to acknowledge their past, tested everything he had learned. Ten years had separated them.

  Enough time to realize how much she had meant to him. She’d made him feel he was capable of anything at the lowest point in his life.

  He had so many questions to ask her, so much to explain, but a dance didn’t last forever, no matter how complicated he made the steps seem. She danced with expression. Her arms floated with the grace of angels’ wings. The fold of her elbow took on an eroticism that would keep him awake the rest of the night.

  She mirrored him move for move. Their bodies pressed back-to-back. His blood surged at the fleeting contact.

  Touch. Tease. Withdraw.

  The quick nudge of her shoulder against his hinted she hadn’t become as demure as she appeared. It required all his concentration to stay ahead of her.

  She bent her arms in an arc, staring up at his face. She flowed from one step into another. Pliant but straight. Erect from the waist to the shoulder.

  A dangerous exuberance coursed through his veins. If they moved this well together during a dance, he thought they would set any bed they shared on fire. It was a shame he would never know.

  Her eyes shone in the candlelight. He wanted to pull her into his arms and ask everyone else in the ballroom to go away for a few hours. He wanted to ask her what had happened to Eldbert and Ambrose, and did she know that Miss Higgins had settled down here in London as a seamstress and that she and Kit often reminisced about Monk’s Huntley?

  But he realized that the dance was ending and that another man was waiting to claim her in the formation of dancers. He stepped closer to Violet, hoping to keep her to himself for just a little bit longer.

  He reached for her shoulder and stopped.

  She looked up again. What could he say? He could hardly whirl her of
f the floor and into his half world.

  “I had hoped you wouldn’t grow up to be a rogue,” she said quietly.

  “Which implies that I wasn’t one before. But I was.”

  “No, you weren’t. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But it’s true,” he said, grinning. “I was on my best behavior around you. What I did at the workhouse is—Well, those aren’t stories for your ears.”

  “I don’t think you were ever that bad.”

  “I stole Ambrose’s trousers. I lied when I said I had found them in the grass. I deceived you the day we met. You defended a liar. And I let you.”

  Violet’s expression did not change. In fact, Kit questioned whether she’d even heard his confession, until she shook her head and smiled. “They looked far better on you, anyway,” she said, and a moment later another dance began around them, couples taking their places in the line. They drifted to the edge of the floor. “Fine, then. You always were a rogue. I knew you had stolen the trousers all along.”

  “But you liked me anyway?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Why?”

  “You were alone like me, and adventurous, and even though you didn’t want it to show, you had good in you.”

  He stared at her, his smile impudent. “Is that why you flirted with me in the hall before you recognized me? For the good in me?”

  She flushed. “Not exactly. The way I remember it, you flirted with me first.”

  “But you flirted back,” he retorted. “And I could have been anyone, for all you knew. I had a mask on. You didn’t.”

  She shook her head. “No. There was something different about you. I couldn’t think what it was. It didn’t occur to me that I might know you.”

  “You do know me.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, we could renew our friendship in private, if you’re willing.”

  She smiled reluctantly. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re tempted. I can tell.”

  “Maybe I am. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, or that I will act on it. My aunt has a positive phobia of rogues.”