Elizabeth Boyle (51 page)

She glanced down at her aching toes and then looked up apologetically at Webb, her dancing partner
du jour
, whose pained expression barely hid his frustration at her failure once again in another important layer of her successful transformation into the elegant Adelaide de Chevenoy.

With single-minded determination, Lily had muddled her lessons on de Chevenoy history and proved a disaster at embroidery. Her practiced recollections of the vistas and virtues of Adelaide’s convent home on Martinique made the flowered paradise sound like a visit to St. Petersburg in the middle of January.

Each day’s progress, or lack thereof, was reported to Lord Dryden with a shake of the head and the urging that he reconsider using her.

But Lord Dryden wouldn’t listen and only instructed his top agents to try harder. The reports from France were grim indeed. They were in danger of losing too many agents if Henri’s journals were discovered before the British could retrieve them.

“Please, try harder to watch and listen to Monsieur Beauvoir,” Webb told her, echoing his father’s exasperated and oft-used phrase.

“I am,” Lily said quite honestly. She’d love nothing more than to glide about the room as elegantly as her aunt. But somewhere between the instructions and the music and the master’s pounding cane keeping the beat, she lost the rhythm, forgot left and right, and missed the timing of the steps.

Not waiting for the master to stop, Webb caught her in his arms and started moving her through the steps, slowly and surely, as if he were ordering a regiment into battle.

She didn’t dare as much as look at him. Between keeping up the pretense of her false engagement with Adam and staying one step ahead of Webb, who seemed to always be watching her, she wondered how she’d ever make it through the next twelve hours, at the end of which Lord Dryden would make his decision about the fate of the mission.

So far, Webb had been able to beg off from the dancing lessons, claiming that his other studies with Lily were enough. But this morning, he’d returned from his morning ride early and been caught.

He was also the last partner Lily wanted.

Dancing meant contact. So far they’d been able to avoid any further physical contact, neither of them raising the subject of the kiss in the garden.

But the memory of his kiss still haunted her, and when Adam placed his lips on hers, to continue their charade, he claimed, she found herself wishing it was Webb enfolding her in his arms.

She was foolish, she told herself. A man like Adam, loyal, steady, though a bit arrogant, was a good man. So why didn’t his kisses ignite her blood like Webb’s had.

M. Beauvoir, a martinet of precision and excellence, tromped back and forth across the floor in front of them. “Can you not count, milady? It is one, two, three, and then turn to your left. Your left, not your right!” His silver-tipped cane pounded on the floor, and the music came to an abrupt halt. “Tonight is your sister’s party, and I will not have you parading about like a wooden ox, ruining my reputation.” He turned his martyr’s wrath on Webb. “Monsieur,
s’il vous pla
î
t
, Mistress Copeland is not made of porcelain. She is a lady, a
desirable
lady,” though the way he said the word left little doubt in anyone’s mind that he found Lily’s ungainly trotting about anything but that. “You must hold her close, dance with her.” The man leaned closer to Webb and whispered loudly, “Dance with her as you would make love to a beautiful woman.” He turned to his patient wife and snapped his fingers.

“Bah, the English,” the man muttered. He held out his hand to Lady Larkhall. “Surely, milady, you must be French, for you move as if the music were born in your soul.”

Lily held her tongue, wishing she could pitch the insulting little man out the window. A dancing ox? That one stung. If only she could shed her widow’s weeds and tell the world she wasn’t the ugly dowd she’d worked so hard to become in the last fortnight.

Webb smiled gamely, and holding her close, they began to move to the music.

The last thing she wanted was
his
pity. Poor, unsightly Lily. Unfit for society.

Concentrating, she clung to his hand, which squeezed back with a reassuring and gentle grip. His body swayed with hers, pulling her along in time to the music. She glanced down at her skirts, matching her movements to his legs—masculine legs encased in riding breeches and black, polished Hessians, his muscles moving with steady grace. His arm wrapped around her waist, his hand cradling her. His fingers seemed to burn through her bombazine, the heat of his touch once again igniting her imagination.

She stumbled and his hand slipped upward, cupping her breast as he caught and steadied her.

The heat of his touch and the intimacy of it, kept her moving, kept her dancing, kept her looking forward to the next time they touched.

She tipped her head and glanced at him, forgetting herself in the witchery of the moment.

Like you are making love.

The master’s words teased her. With the romance of the music pouring out of the pianoforte and the powerful temptation of Webb’s body, Lily found she could almost dance.

One, two, three
, she counted,
and move to the left
. Webb grinned at her and immediately the memories of their kiss and the dreams that had haunted her for a fortnight assailed her. Try as she might to remember her next steps, she forgot they’d turned, and she frantically struggled to discern her right from her left.

Oh, Mercy and Mary
, she thought as she twisted her body to what she thought was her left, only to find that it was the wrong way. As she spun around, she slammed into Webb, their feet tangled, and this time, because of Lily’s momentum, they fell in a heap onto the floor.

Lucky for Lily, she landed atop Webb, his arms wrapped around her.

When she opened her eyes, she found herself face-to-face with him. At first she thought he was going to explode, his body shaking with what she assumed was anger, but suddenly he burst out laughing.

“I think you took his suggestion about making love a little too literally, hoyden.”

She looked at herself and found that she was straddling him, their legs wrapped around each other, her hips brushing against his, her breasts pressed to his chest. All that was missing was the deep feather mattress and soft sheets of her dreams.

“Don’t call me that,” she exclaimed as she struggled to get up, only to find her skirt pinned beneath him.

It seemed they were trapped.

“Monsieur, Madame!! This is unsightly, unseemly. I do not allow such frolics in my lessons,” the master lamented over their prostrate forms.

Webb laughed again, and this time, Lily found herself joining in.

“This is not amusing,” monsieur admonished them. “It is an affront to my sensibilities. If anyone were to see you, I would be ruined, utterly ruined.”

“I think it’s too late to avoid that. It appears we’ve been caught,” Webb said, a grin on his face.

Lily followed his gaze only to find a frowning Adam standing at the doorway.

“Now this is an interesting surprise,” her fiancé said, striding across the room until he stood over them. “What are you doing with my betrothed, Mr. Dryden?”

Lily cringed. There was no mistaking the challenge in the young man’s words. She’d have a devil of a time keeping Adam from doing anything foolish now.

Webb grinned at her. If she wasn’t mistaken, he’d probably spotted Adam the moment he’d stepped into the room. She continued to struggle to get free but his hip still held her skirt to the floor.

The lout, she thought, as she yanked the bombazine free. Then with Adam’s quick assistance, his hands wrapping possessively around her, she found her way to her feet.

“Adam, what are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought you and Giles were going shooting this morning.”

“So it seems,” he said, his gaze flicking toward Webb, who had also gotten up off the floor and was standing behind Lily.

“Couldn’t you tell?” Webb asked, a touch of amusement and something else Lily couldn’t quite identify in his words. “We were dancing.”

Adam turned to her. “Dancing? You?”

He needn’t sound so surprised. Though it was no secret in their Virginia circle that Lily D’Artiers Copeland never danced, and only a handful, like Adam, knew the real reason why.

She couldn’t.

“I wanted to surprise you,” she said, casting a glance over her shoulder at Webb.

Adam nodded. “Your sister is so set on announcing our engagement this evening at her party, and it will be expected that we lead the first set out.”

Lily shook her head. “Adam, we agreed. There wouldn’t be any announcement of our engagement until after the holidays. Not until I’ve finished my mourning for Thomas.”

“Yes, dear departed Thomas. Wasn’t he a friend of yours?” Webb chimed in, but he was ignored by both parties.

“We’ll discuss the announcement later,” Adam said. “The real question is why you felt compelled to keep this such a secret and why you would want to practice with him? You should have told me, and we could have done this together.”

The tension in the room rose, and at the pianoforte, Mme. Beauvoir nervously tapped at the keys, the delicate instrument sending out notes of protest.

Later he wasn’t sure why he did it, perhaps he was tired of the younger man’s constant posturing, but Webb put his hand on Lily’s shoulder and stared into the other man’s eyes. “Don’t be so hard on her, my good man. We were just learning some new steps.” He grinned his most lascivious smile at Lily. “It’s like she said, she just wanted to surprise you. No harm in that.”

“She never stops surprising me. And neither do you,” Adam said, taking Lily’s hand and pulling her out of Webb’s reach. “But if anyone’s going to teach her new steps, she’ll learn them from me.”

“Oh, but I think I have more experience with these steps and with the lady,” Webb said, reaching out and hauling Lily back into his reach.

Both men stared at each other, and Webb wasn’t about to back down. In watching Lily with her fiancé over the last two weeks, he was more convinced than ever that her engagement to this arrogant fool was either the second biggest mistake of her life or, just as he’d suspected all along, a farce.

Though why Lily would go to such lengths to avoid the mission to Paris, he still hadn’t been able to determine.

At this point, Lord Dryden wandered in, having deliberately waited until he was assured he would not be drafted into dancing with Lily. If he noticed the tug-of-war going on between Adam and Webb, he gave it no notice. Instead he inquired of monsieur as to how the lessons were progressing.

“Bah, it is no use!” M. Beauvoir declared. He pounded the silver-tipped cane on the floor, its hard staccato beat punctuating each word. “She is unworthy of my talents, she is unworthy of dance.” The man motioned to his wife, who started to gather up her sheets of music.

“It would utterly ruin my reputation as a master to have anyone think I was possibly associated with this, this, leaden-footed baggage. Your money, my lord, would have been better spent teaching an ox to do a Scotch Reel,” he told an open-mouthed Lord Dryden, and with that, demanded his hefty fee. All Lord Dryden’s carefully worded protests fell on deaf ears, until monsieur was able to extract and collect his fee, at which time, he made a courtly bow to Lady Larkhall and promptly left, his little wife scurrying along in his affronted wake.

“Why is Lord Dryden paying for your dancing lessons, my dear?” Adam asked.

Before Lily could answer, Webb’s father stepped in. “A wedding gift. She confided in me her desire to learn to dance, and I asked Monsieur Beauvoir to come here to assist her.”

Adam seemed somewhat satisfied with that answer. “Lily, if you please,” he said, holding out his arm and escorting her from the ballroom.

While his father and Lady Larkhall exchanged pleasantries, Webb followed the betrothed pair.

At the door he heard part of what was obviously a heated exchange as they descended the main staircase.

“I won’t stand still and allow him to manhandle you. I wouldn’t be a gentleman if I did,” Adam was saying. “And I won’t stand by and allow that man to impugn your honor with his ugly insinuations.”

“Calm down, Adam. You know why we are engaged and it matters not what Webb Dryden says or does. I’m doing all this to protect you, to protect both of us.”

Protect them, from what? Or better, from whom?

At that moment M. Beauvoir and his wife arrived in the grand foyer, bags in hand, the little Frenchman still lamenting his first failure in twenty years of instructing ladies to dance.

As Lily and Adam paused, Webb couldn’t hear Adam’s next response, but he did see Lily’s features.

A wide self-satisfied smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. Webb could only wonder if it was at the sight of having finally driven the dancing master out of Byrnewood with her hapless tramping, or something else.

Something akin to satisfaction. As if she’d planned to fail all along.

L
ily halted on the landing and looked down the staircase at the milling group of arrivals.

“A coming out,” Sophia had explained a few days earlier. “A small yuletide party to test your new skills.”

A little party
, Lily thought with chagrin. It appeared every member of the
ton
in Bath and the surrounding countryside had ventured out to sample the Marchioness of Trahern’s legendary hospitality. Festooned in garlands and yuletide decorations, the house appeared ready for Christmas, though it was still well over a fortnight away.

None of the guests appeared to mind, and from the wide smiles and cheerful greetings, all seemed more than delighted to get an early start on their holiday merrymaking.

Lily groaned. It was bad enough she’d spent the last two weeks making everyone in Byrnewood think her a complete idiot, now she would have to continue her charade in front of half of the
ton
.

At least she had convinced Sophia and Giles not to announce her engagement as yet. She still had a month of mourning left and she’d argued quite convincingly that it would tarnish her reputation to announce this second marriage.