Andrew was staring at her, with a faint frown, rather arrested, as if perhaps he hadn’t seen her in this light before.
“Perhaps now we can alldance!” Delacorte enthused.
Captain Hardy froze. “Optionally, perhaps we ought not get carried away, Delacorte.”
It was too late. Delacorte was carried away. He was already shoving furniture aside.
“Nonsense, nonsense,” he said happily. “If you can sing then you can dance, Captain. I dance a fair reel and we’ve enough people here for a quadrille. A waltz wouldn’t even go amiss if some of the ladies wouldn’t mind dancing with each other. Oh! Shall we waltz? No one is about to care whether we do it well. We needn’t stand on ceremony among friends.”
“A bit daring, isn’t it?” Angelique said. “But then, we did play Faro.”
Very dryly said.
“It’s all between family here,” Mr. Delacorte said, which were such uncommonly sweet words to Delilah’s ears she was tempted to kiss him on the cheek. “We’ll make a lark of it. What say you all? Can you play a waltz, Miss Bevan-Clark?”
Miss Bevan-Clark opened her mouth.
Then closed it again.
Her expression revealed that she very much wanted to dance, rather than play the pianoforte.
“Ican play a waltz,” Angelique volunteered. Just a tad slyly.
“Well,thatis splendid!” Delacorte could not be more thrilled.
Angelique stood and smoothed her skirts. “And perhaps Mr. Farraday would like to show Lady Derring how once dances the waltz in Sussex,” she suggested.
Mr. Farraday’s eyes went wide.
But he could not, of course, refuse this suggestion and still be a gentleman.
Captain Hardy may have started it, but they were all colluding now.
“I should be honored if you would dance with me, Lady Derring,” Mr. Farraday said, because he possessed excellent manners and because Delilah was smiling sweetly at him and he was as putty in her hands. But then, in the hands of the right woman, Mr. Farraday was the sort who would be putty for the rest of his days.
Unlike the man who’d instigated this whole thing.
But a hunted look skittered across Miss Bevan-Clark’s face when he leaped to his feet and held his hand out to Delilah, who allowed the young man to pull her to her feet.
She stared at Delilah the way Farraday had stared at Captain Hardy. As if surely a grown woman—a widow, no less—no matter how pretty, couldn’t possibly appeal. She was practically a different species, in Miss Bevan-Clark’s mind.
“And I should be honored if you’d dance the waltz with me, Miss Bevan-Clark,” Captain Hardy said.
“I should be delighted, Captain Hardy,” Miss Bevan-Clark said as defiantly as if she was making a closing argument in court.
“I should be pleased to dance with Dot,” Mr. Delacorte said.
He would until he tried it, thought Delilah.
Dot performed a witty little curtsy and managed not to tip over, and Delacorte extended his arm.
“Miss Gardner and Miss Gardner?” Captain Hardy surprised everyone by aiming a determinedly inviting expression toward the sisters in the corner.
“Oh, we cannot dance,” Jane Gardner said very, very meekly.
“But I insist,” Captain Hardy said. Kindly. Very gently. “I shall be happy to show you how to waltz if you’re unfamiliar with it. Every woman ought to know it.”
There was a brief silence as they stared at him, eyes enormous, before Margaret looked down at her lap again.