Page 57 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
But Miles only smiled. “She looked well,” Miles said.
Oh, she had looked more than well. The gown was a different blue than anything he had seen her wear before, cut lower at the neckline and fitted in a way that had made him set down his glass the moment she came through the door and not pick it up again for two full minutes. He was not going to say any of that.
“He reads. She found the conversation engaging.”
“Hm.” Miles looked into his glass. “You and your excuses, Silverford. I dare say she’s doing a fine job of screening her marriage candidates all by herself.”
Dominic’s jaw clenched, and he looked toward the piano at the far end of the room, blatantly refusing to answer.
Instead, he watched Lord Harcroft move through his guests with the expansive energy of a host who had drunk enough to feel hisown generosity. He watched the man cast about and settle his attention on Annabelle.
“Lady Annabelle. Hartwell tells me your talent at the pianoforte is considerable.”
Annabelle’s expression did not shift, but her hand moved slightly at her side. “I would not wish to take the place of a more accomplished?—”
Lady Rosenhall said something low near her ear. Annabelle’s shoulders settled by a fraction. She handed her glass to Helena and crossed to the bench.
Dominic did not move from the far wall, even as his entire body thrummed with the energy of ten thousand nervous men.
She sat. Arranged her hands on the keys without ceremony. A brief stillness during which the nearest conversations dropped in volume, then stopped.
Then she played.
What she played was unhurried and unshowy. It moved through its phrases with the ease of a piece she had lived with long enough to stop thinking about, the melody going where it intended to go without announcement.
The room absorbed it the way rooms absorb things better than they expected. The man beside Miles closed his conversation.
She looked up once, toward the middle of the room, and their eyes met.
He had three seconds, possibly four, during which her hands did not falter, and her face in the low candlelight was open and looking directly at him, and he did not look away, and neither did she, and the melody went on under her hands with no break in it at all.
Then she looked back at the keys, and the moment was broken. But then…
So was he.
The piece ended on a clean, quiet chord. There was one breath of stillness. Then the applause came from every corner at once.
Miles said something, but Dominic did not hear it.
She did not know why she had held it for that long.
Annabelle had been watching the keys, and then she had looked up, and three seconds was three seconds too many, and yet her hands had not stumbled, which was the only reasonable thing she had to say in her own defense.
The lords came in succession afterward, each with something to say, and Annabelle heard every word and replied with warmth and smiled at the right moments.
Hartwell was among them: he said she had been right about the afternoon’s worth of argument, and she thanked him, and he made a remark about acoustics that was genuinely funny, and she laughed again with the same ease as before.
She was aware, without looking, that Dominic was not among them.
After the fifth lord complimented the piece in terms that were really compliments to himself for recognizing it, she touched Helena’s arm and said she needed a moment.
And she slipped through the glass doors at the far end and out into the garden.
The air was cool after the warmth of the house. The smell of the flower beds came up from the east, something late in bloom, faint and persistent. The window light spilled across the path stones and fell short of the bench at the garden’s far end, which was where she went.
She put one hand on the back of the bench and stood there, listening to the distant music through the glass.
She had played beautifully tonight. She knew this without vanity, because she knew the difference between a correctperformance and one that was actually right, and tonight had been right, and the eye contact had been something she was not going to examine in the garden at a party where forty people were ten yards away on the other side of a pane of glass.
