The Earl's Practical Marriage. Louise Allen

the way his mouth twitched she was not convinced that Giles took her remark at face value, but he sat back and watched the dancers, leaving her to recover her equilibrium. She shifted a little in her seat so that she could watch his profile covertly. Now she was over the first shock of seeing him again she was able to find more traces of the youth she had known beneath the handsome skin of the man he had become. The shape of his jaw and his nose and the arch of his brows were recognisable as she studied him. His hair had lightened from a honey-brown into blond, perhaps from the sun, because his brows were darker, as were his lashes. Those blue eyes, of course...

      But the sensual curve of his mouth, the way his skin was tight over the bones of his face, his height and the breadth of his shoulders... Where had they come from? He must top his father by four inches and he looked hard and fit without a surplus ounce on his body. That might be expert tailoring, of course, but she very much doubted it.

      She had the sudden urge to reach out and touch those shoulders. She had not touched him on the Downs. There he had only brushed her lips with his as they shared a few fleeting breaths...

      ‘Have I a smudge on the end of my nose?’ Giles enquired without turning his head.

      ‘No. As you are very well aware I was studying how you have changed in appearance,’ she said calmly, refusing to blush over staring at a man. At this man. ‘I doubt your character has changed as much as your looks.’

      ‘You think not? Over nine years, in a foreign country and on the edge of a war?’ He did turn his head to look at her then. ‘Forgive me, but I think experience and life create many changes.’

      ‘Not in fundamental character,’ Laurel said firmly.

      ‘So you judge me to be as fundamentally unsatisfactory as the last time we met, despite having barely exchanged a dozen sentences with me?’

      ‘Undoubtedly you are. And older and more experienced, which makes it only worse.’

      ‘That is sauce for the goose, as well as for the gander,’ he murmured as the music for the last dance in the first set ended and a smattering of applause broke out. The dancers walked off the floor and Giles stood. ‘Our set, I think.’

      It was surprisingly difficult to rise gracefully to her feet and take Giles’s outstretched hand. Her knees seemed to have turned to jelly, as though all the nerves she had been keeping out of her voice and her gestures had fled to the back of her legs. She managed it somehow without stumbling and placed her kid-gloved hand in his.

      ‘I did not look to see what this set is,’ she confessed for something to say as they took their places at the end of a long line of couples. However she felt about him she was a lady and she knew how to behave in public. It would embarrass and distress Aunt Phoebe if her antagonism was obvious to onlookers. Some kind of small talk had to be found.

      ‘It is various country dances, I think.’

      The music began and Laurel recognised it as a severely modified version of an old tune, slowed down and with all the bounce taken out of it. The measures that had been put to it were unfamiliar, but it was slow enough to be able to follow easily.

      ‘Whoever set this has a cloth ear for music,’ Giles observed after a few minutes as they paused, waiting their turn to promenade down the line. ‘And it is slow enough to be a funeral dirge.’

      When they came together after a few more measures Laurel remarked, ‘I would have thought that dancing at the Lisbon Court would have involved any number of very stately measures.’

      Giles was striking enough in ordinary evening dress—black-silk breeches, white stockings, midnight-blue superfine tailcoat—but if the diplomatic corps wore full Court uniform at the Portuguese Court as they did at St James’s then he would have looked even more magnificent with heavy silver lace on his coat. He was also a graceful dancer with the muscular control to move well through slow turns and promenades. She had often noticed that the slower the dance the more a clumsy dancer was caught out.

      ‘You are correct. Court dances there are rather slow and old fashioned, unfortunately. Very mannered with much posturing. At first it was hard not to laugh at the sight of us all peacocking about. But Wellington wintered in Portugal and he liked to throw a ball at the drop of a cannonball. He expected all his young gentlemen to dance and he liked things lively.’

      ‘And you were one of his young gentlemen, were you?’ The more she heard the more she was convinced he had spent the past years in the thick of the Peninsular conflict, not lounging around at the Court exchanging pleasantries and diplomatic chit chat in the intervals between minuets. Which was both admirable and infuriating, because now she would have to admire him for it and, she acknowledged, she did not want to have to discover any good in him.

      Not one scrap.

      ‘I would drop by, on occasion.’ His face was shuttered now, the smile simply a reflex on his lips. ‘I was not in the army, Laurel. I was attached to the diplomatic corps.’

      And something else, he cannot deceive me with that offhand manner. Intelligence work, perhaps? Interesting that he does not want to talk about that time, let alone boast about it. Oh, dear, another admirable trait.

      ‘Thank goodness that is over,’ Laurel said as the violins scraped their last mournful note and the dancers exchanged courtesies. ‘Ah, this one is much better.’ It was a proper country dance with vigorous, cheerful music. ‘It is familiar,’ Laurel said as Giles caught her hands and spun her around. ‘But I cannot place it.’

      ‘Neither can I.’ They stood aside for the next couple to spin. ‘Yet somehow I associate it with you.’

      ‘With me?’ And suddenly, as Giles joined hands across the circle and spun another of the ladies, it came back to her. The smell of lush green spring grass crushed under dancing feet, the scent of the blackthorn blossom in the hedgerows glinting in the torchlight, the cold white light of the moon and everywhere laughter and the scrape of a fiddle, the thud of the tabor and the squeak of a penny whistle.

      ‘The village May Day fête,’ she blurted out as he came back to her side and she was whirled into the circle away from him.

      She had been what? Fourteen? They had all gone to the fête during the day which had been delightful, even though Stepmama had not allowed her to buy the gilded trinket she wanted because it was ‘vulgar trash’. And equally she had forbidden Laurel to go to the dance in the evening. It would be an unseemly rustic romp, quite unsuitable for any young lady, even one who had not yet let down her hems and put up her hair. Laurel had bitten her lip against the tears of disappointment and nodded obediently, but she had opened her window wide that evening, had put on her nicest dress and had danced by herself in her room to the distant music on the warm air.

      And then there had been a scraping sound against the sill and Giles’s head had risen slowly into view. ‘I say, are you decent, Laurel? Still dressed? Good. Come on, I’ve got the orchard ladder. We can go to the dance.’

      She had not needed asking twice. They had scrambled down the rough rungs and run across the meadows, somehow hand in hand, although there was no reason for her to need any help. They danced all evening with other people, Laurel mainly with the other village girls of her age because none of the sons of tenants would risk the consequences of being found romping with the daughter of the big house.

      And at the stalls set up around the green Giles had bought her the trinket she had yearned for. He slipped it in his pocket for safekeeping just as the musicians had struck up with the tune they were dancing to now and he caught her hands and pulled her into the measure. They had danced until they were breathless and, at the end, when all the lads pulled their partners into their arms and kissed them, he had kissed her, too. Just the innocent, friendly brush of his lips over hers for a fleeting second.

      They had run back as the clock struck midnight like the best of fairy tales, still hand in hand, and when she put one foot on the first rung of the ladder Giles had kissed her again, just that same harmless, laughing caress, and she had laughed back and kissed the tip of his nose.

      ‘Your