It Happened One Autumn
Page 51

As usual, a group of men and women had gathered around him. One of the women, a beautiful blond with a voluptuous figure, leaned closer to him, murmuring something that brought a faint smile to his lips. He coolly observed the scene, appraising the gently milling assembly …until he saw Lillian. His gaze flicked over her in swift assessment. Lillian felt his presence so palpably that the fifteen yards or so between them might not have existed. Troubled by her own gauzy sensual awareness of the man standing across the room, she gave him a brief nod and turned away.
“What is it?” Daisy murmured, coming up beside her. “You look rather distracted.”
Lillian responded with a wry smile. “I’m trying to remember everything the countess told us,” she lied, “and keep it all straight in my head. Especially the bowing rules. If someone bows to me, I’m going to shriek and run in the opposite direction.”
“I’m terrified of making a mistake,” Daisy confided. “It was so much easier before I realized how many things I have been doing wrong. I’ll be quite happy to be a wall-flower and sit safely at the side of the room this evening.” Together they glanced at the row of semicircular niches running along one wall, each sided by slender pilasters and fitted with tiny velvet-covered benches. Evie sat alone in the farthest niche in the corner. Her pink dress clashed with her red hair, and she kept her head down as she sipped furtively from a cup of punch, every line of her posture proclaiming a disinclination to talk with anyone. “Oh, that won’t do,” Daisy said. “Come, let’s pry the poor girl out of that niche and make her stroll with us.”
Lillian smiled in agreement and made to accompany her sister. However, she froze with a sudden breath as she heard a deep voice near her ear. “Good evening, Miss Bowman.”
Blinking with astonishment, she turned to face Lord Westcliff, who had crossed the room to her with surprising speed. “My lord.”
Westcliff bowed over Lillian’s hand and then greeted Daisy. His gaze returned to Lillian’s. As he spoke, the light from the chandeliers played over the rich dark layers of his hair and the bold angles of his features. “You survived the encounter with my mother, I see.”
Lillian smiled. “A better way to put it, my lord, is that she survived the encounter with us.”
“It was obvious that the countess was enjoying herself immensely. She seldom encounters young women who don’t wither in her presence.”
“If I haven’t withered in your presence, my lord, then I’m hardly going to wither in hers.”
Westcliff grinned at that and then looked away from her, a pair of small creases appearing between his brows, as if he was contemplating some weighty matter. After a pause that seemed interminably long, his attention returned to Lillian. “Miss Bowman…”
“Yes?”
“Will you do me the honor of dancing with me?”
Lillian stopped breathing, moving, and thinking. Westcliff had never asked her to dance before, despite the multitude of occasions on which he should have asked out of gentlemanly politeness. It had been one of the many reasons that she had hated him, knowing that he considered himself far too superior, and her attractions too insignificant, for it to be worth the bother. And in her more spiteful fantasies, she had imagined a moment like this when he would have asked for a dance, and she would respond with a crushing refusal. Instead, she was astonished and tongue-tied.
“Do excuse me,” she heard Daisy say brightly, “I must go to Evie…” And she sped away with all possible haste.
Lillian drew in an unsteady breath. “Is this a test that the countess has devised?” she asked. “To see if I remember my lessons?”
Westcliff chuckled. Gathering her wits, Lillian couldn’t help but notice that people were staring at them, obviously wondering what she had said to amuse him. “No,” he murmured, “I believe it’s a self-imposed test to see if I…” He seemed to forget what he was saying as he stared into her eyes. “One waltz,” he said gently.
Distrusting her own response to him, the magnitude of her desire to step into his arms, Lillian shook her head. “I think …I think that would be a mistake. Thank you, but—”
“Coward.”
Lillian remembered the moment she had leveled the same charge at him…and she was no more able to resist the challenge than he. “I can’t see why you should want to dance with me now, when you never have before.”
The statement was more revealing than she had intended it to be. She cursed her own wayward tongue, while his speculative gaze wandered over her face.
“I wanted to,” he surprised her by murmuring. “However, there always seemed to be good reasons not to.”
“Why—”
“Besides,” Westcliff interrupted, reaching out to take her gloved hand, “there was hardly a point in asking when your refusal was a foregone conclusion.” Deftly he pressed her hand to his arm and led her toward the mass of couples in the center of the room.
“It was not a foregone conclusion.”
Westcliff glanced at her skeptically. “You’re saying that you would have accepted me?”
“I might have.”
“I doubt it.”
“I did just now, didn’t I?”
“You had to. It was a debt of honor.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “For what, my lord?”
“The calf’s head,” he reminded her succinctly.