Almost Heaven Read online

  He nodded in silence, and Elizabeth started to walk forward and step past him. Then she changed her mind and hesitated, remembering her friends’ wagers and how much they were counting on her. “I have a rather odd request—a favor to ask of you,” she said slowly, praying that he felt, as she did, that they’d enjoyed a very brief and very pleasant sort of friendship out there. Smiling uncertainly into his inscrutable eyes, she said, “Could you possibly—for reasons I can’t explain . . .” she trailed off, suddenly and acutely embarrassed.

  “What is the favor?”

  Elizabeth expelled her breath in a rush. “Could you possibly ask me to dance this evening?” He looked neither shocked nor flattered by her bold request, and she watched his firmly molded lips form his answer:

  “No.”

  Elizabeth was mortified and shocked by his refusal, but she was even more stunned by the unmistakable regret she’d heard in his voice and glimpsed on his face. For a long moment she searched his shuttered features, and then the sound of laughing voices from somewhere nearby broke the spell. Trying to retreat from a predicament into which she should never have put herself in the first place, Elizabeth picked up her skirts, intending to leave. Making a conscious effort to keep all emotion from her voice, she said with calm dignity, “Good evening, Mr. Thornton.”

  He flipped the cheroot away and nodded. “Good evening, Miss Cameron.” And then he left.

  * * *

  The rest of her friends had gone upstairs to change their gowns for the evening’s dancing, but the moment Elizabeth entered the rooms set aside for them the conversation and laughter stopped abruptly—leaving Elizabeth with a fleeting, uneasy feeling that they had been laughing and talking about her.

  “Well?” Penelope asked with an expectant laugh. “Don’t keep us in suspense. Did you make an impression?”

  The uneasy sensation of being the brunt of some secret joke left Elizabeth as she looked about at their smiling, open faces. Only Valerie looked a little cool and aloof.

  “I made an impression, to be sure,” Elizabeth said with an embarrassed smile, “but ’twas not a particularly favorable one.”

  “He remained by your side for ever so long,” another girl prodded her. “We were watching from the far end of the garden. What did you talk about?”

  Elizabeth felt a warmth creep through her veins and steal up her cheeks as she remembered his handsome, tanned face and the way his smile had glinted and softened his features as he looked at her. “I don’t actually remember what we spoke of.” That much was true. All she could remember was the odd way her knees had shaken and her heart had beaten when he looked at her.

  “Well, what was he like?”

  “Handsome,” Elizabeth said a little dreamily before she could catch herself. “Charming. He has a beautiful voice.”

  “And, no doubt,” Valerie said with a thread of sarcasm, “he’s even now trying to discover your brother’s whereabouts so that he can dash over there and apply for your hand.”

  That notion was so absurd that Elizabeth would have burst out laughing if she weren’t so embarrassed and oddly let down by the way he’d left her in the garden. “My brother’s evening is safe from any interruption in that quarter, I can promise you. In fact,” she added with a rueful smile, “I fear you’ve all lost your quarterly allowances as well, for there isn’t the slightest chance he’ll ask me to dance.” With an apologetic wave she left to change her gown for the ball that was already underway on the third floor.

  Once Elizabeth had gained the privacy of her bedchamber, however, the breezy smile she’d worn in front of the other girls faded to an expression of thoughtful bewilderment. Wandering over to the bed, she sat down, idly tracing the golden threads of the rose brocade coverlet with the tip of her finger, trying to understand the feelings she’d experienced in the presence of Ian Thornton.

  Standing with him in the garden, she’d felt frightened and exhilarated at the same time—drawn to him against her very will by a compelling magnetism that he seemed to radiate. Out there she’d felt almost driven to win his approval, alarmed when she’d failed, joyous when she’d succeeded. Even now, just the memory of the way he smiled, of the intimacy of his heavy-lidded gaze, made her feel hot and cold all over.

  Music drifted from the ballroom on another floor, and Elizabeth finally shook herself from her reverie and rang for Berta to help her dress.

  “What do you think?” she asked Berta a half hour later as she pirouetted before the mirror for the inspection of her nursemaid-turned-lady’s maid.

  Berta twisted her plump hands as she stood back, nervously surveying her glowing young mistress’s more sophisticated appearance, unable to supress her affectionate smile. Elizabeth’s hair had been caught up into an elegant chignon at the crown with soft tendrils framing her face, and her mother’s sapphire and diamond eardrops sparkled at her ears.

  Unlike Elizabeth’s other gowns, which were nearly all pastel and high-waisted, this one was a sapphire blue, by far the most unusual and alluring of them all. Panels of blue silk drifted from a flattened bow upon her left shoulder and fell straight to the floor, leaving her other shoulder bare. Despite the fact that the gown was little more than a straight tube of silk, it flattered her figure, emphasizing her breasts and hinting at the narrow waist beneath. “I think,” Berta said finally, “it’s a wonder Mrs. Porter ordered such a gown for you. It’s not a bit like your others.”

  Elizabeth tossed her a jaunty, conspiratorial smile as she pulled on the sapphire gloves that encased her arms to above the elbows. “It’s the only one Mrs. Porter didn’t choose,” she admitted. “And Lucinda hasn’t seen it either.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Elizabeth turned back to the mirror, frowning as she surveyed her appearance. “The other girls are barely seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen in a few months. Besides,” she explained, picking up her mother’s sapphire and diamond bracelet and fastening it over the glove on her left wrist, “as I tried to tell Mrs. Porter, it’s a great waste to spend so much for gowns that won’t be at all suitable for me next year or the year after. I’ll be able to wear this one even when I’m twenty.”

  Berta rolled her eyes and shook her head, setting the streamers on her cap bobbing. “I doubt your Viscount Mondevale will want you wearin’ the same gown more’n twice, let alone until you wear it out,” she said as she bent over to straighten the hem on the blue gown.

  5

  Berta’s reminder that she was virtually betrothed had a distinctly sobering effect on Elizabeth, and the mood stayed with her as she walked toward the Sight of steps leading down to the ballroom. The prospect of confronting Mr. Ian Thornton no longer made her pulse race, and she refused to regret his refusal to dance with her, or even to think of him. With natural grace she started down to the ballroom, where couples were dancing, but most seemed to be clustered about in groups, talking and laughing.

  A few steps from the bottom she paused momentarily to scan the guests, wondering where her friends had gathered. She saw them only a few yards away, and when Penelope lifted her hand in a beckoning wave Elizabeth nodded and smiled.

  The smile still on her lips, she started to look away, then froze as her gaze locked with a pair of startled amber eyes. Standing with a group of men near the foot of the staircase, Ian Thornton was staring at her, his wineglass arrested halfway to his lips. His bold gaze swept from the top of her shining blond hair, over her breasts and hips, right down to her blue satin slippers, then it lifted abruptly to her face, and there was a smile of frank admiration gleaming in his eyes. As if to confirm it, he cocked an eyebrow very slightly and lifted his glass in the merest subtle gesture of a toast before he drank his wine.

  Somehow Elizabeth managed to keep her expression serene as she continued gracefully down the stairs, but her treacherous pulse was racing double-time, and her mind was in complete confusion. Had any other man looked at her or behaved to her the way Ian Thornton just had, she would have been indi