Read Online In the Arms of a Marquess by Katharine Ashe - Free Book Online Page B

slithered through Tavy, the same she had felt at the theater when she first saw him. With brutal will, she shut out the memories.
    “Very well.” She placed her fingertips upon his palm.
    And her world halted.
    Then began again, with a great lurch and considerably more color and sound and thorough agitation than in far too long.
    He guided her into place and released her to take his spot with perfect ease as he had always done everything. Until that night. The night when ease had become hunger.
    Tavy barely managed the patterns, calling upon years of practice to make her way through the steps without disgracing herself, aware of little but her shaking fingers and her partner. Clearly, her mother was not the only widgeon in the family.
    “Why don’t you go about in society?”
    The pattern separated them. They came back together at the lead of a line of dancers. He drew her forward.
    “Why don’t you?” she repeated.
    “I have only a modest acquaintance in town.”
    “That is impossible,” for a peer, an East India Company proprietor, and an enormously wealthy man. “I do not believe it.”
    “Whether you believe it or not has little effect upon the truth.”
    She bit her lip. “So I see you cannot be civil after all.”
    “Not when you continually plague me with impertinent questions. No, apparently.”
    Her gaze darted to him. He faced forward, but the dent had reappeared in his cheek. Tavy’s heart sped.
    “I merely wondered.”
    “I cannot fathom why you ask when you clearly know all the answers already,” he said with a brief glance at her and a lift of one black brow. He released her and they parted.
    He had spoken to her as though they knew one another. As though it had not been seven long years and one horrid drawing room conversation since their last meeting. She watched him through the other dancers, allowing herself to stare now. She didn’t know why she should not. Every other woman must, when confronted with such masculine perfection.
    “I came to you the other day because I haven’t any answers,” she said when the dance brought them together again. “Or, at least, very few.”
    He grasped her hand and drew her to a halt, the other dancers continuing around them. Tavy’s blood seemed to wash through her veins like monsoon rain.
    “Oftentimes, Miss Pierce, that is for the best.” Double lines appeared between his brows.
    “What are you saying?” Her fingers shook in his. She could do nothing for it. His black gaze held hers but she had no desire to look away. She should. She must. This was a mistake, this familiarity, this strange intimacy that was not intimacy at all, the memories scratching to be set free from imprisonment.
    “Here now, Doreé,” a gentleman said at her shoulder. “You are disturbing the pattern with this flirtation.”
    The marquess released her into the other gentleman’s hold. Breathless, Tavy looked up into bright blue eyes, amusement writ across a finely handsome face capped with yellow-gold hair. He guided her into the steps.
    “I give my friend credit for excellent taste,” he said, scanning her face.
    Tavy ducked her head. Her cheeks burned. She willed herself to calm. No man ever flustered her. Not even him, then. Especially not him. She would not begin now. If this was what renewed acquaintance with him meant, she did not welcome it.
    When the dance brought her back to her partner, she met his gaze firmly and curtsied.
    “My lord.”
    “Madam.” He bowed, his look benign. The moment had passed, just as seven years earlier. She would not let it happen again.
    She moved away, her steps measured, only the base of her spine warm, and the palm of her hand where his fingertips had rested briefly and perhaps—she tried to ignore the sensation—not entirely steadily either.
    T avy could not rest. She paced her bedchamber like a panther in a cage at the Calcutta menagerie. Finally despairing of sleep, she threw on a wrapper and climbed the stairs to the