Excerpt: Not Quite A Scandal

Before Sheba could offer an objection, Noel set himself in front of her. “Shall we try a simpler dance? A waltz, perhaps, M. de Brunhoff?”

A look of relief passed over the poor dancing master’s face. “As you wish, monsieur.”

The restlessness Noel had felt all afternoon, being in Sheba’s company but not the focus of her attention, settled as soon as he guided her hands up to rest against his shoulders. Unlike the more demure society misses with whom he typically danced, she kept her head held high, eyes not shying away from his. But the pink tint of her cheeks blazed nearly scarlet when he set his hands not on her elbows, as she was obviously expecting, but more daringly against her waist. That elusive scent of honeysuckle enticed his nose, and he could almost swear he felt the pulse of her blood coursing beneath his fingers, even with the weight of her silk gown and stays and his gloves between them.

“March, march, march, march, then messieurs, pirouette, mesdames, pas de bourée, pas de bourée, pas de bourée. Up, up, up on the toes, oui, oui…”

A satisfaction bone-deep settled over him at finally having Bathsheba Honeychurch in his arms. At being able to allow his eyes to roam without embarrassment or restraint over the sweep of her pert brows, the stretch of her lush mouth, the expanse of her graceful neck below that tip-tilted chin, confident and defiant in turn. He’d never had much sympathy for Goethe’s self-indulgent Werther, but the romantic hero’s assertion that “a maiden whom I loved, or for whom I felt the slightest attachment, never, never, never should waltz with any one else but with me” struck him as painfully apt.

He twirled her carefully, silently, unwilling to allow meaningless small-talk to distract him from a pleasure he feared he’d never stop craving.

She, too, remained quiet as the slow notes of the waltz enveloped them in a bubble of awareness, her blue eyes roving his face as his roved hers. She blinked, and blinked again, as if she could not quite understand what she was seeing.

Might she be beginning to recognize, even if she could not quite yet allow herself to believe, that the man standing opposite her might be more vital to her happiness than the one dancing on the other side of the room?

Yes, this was how he would win her. Not by wooing her with words, but by allowing her to see the truth of what he felt.

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