Page 9

For a moment, all he did was look into her eyes. He didn’t move her to their starting position or ask her about her evening. Nothing. He just looked at her while his blazing hot arm seared its silhouette into her lower back.

Is he going to say something? Should I say something?

The more he stared at her, unmoving, the more her mind reeled with possibilities.

“Are we going to stand here like this, or are we going to dance?”

The corner of his lips quirked up into a sly grin. His eyes danced with mischief that had her questioning if accepting the dance was the right thing to do.

“We’ll dance, of course.”

His voice was even and gave no hint of his true emotions. Surely he had to be affected by her as she was by him. At least she hoped he was.

Yet, he did not move.

Jenny glanced around the dance floor. No one was looking at them yet, but soon it was going to be blatantly obvious that they were the only two not moving.

“Sir, I don’t know where you come from, but here, when we dance, we actually mo—oh!”

The man tightened his grip around her waist and began to twirl her around in perfect rhythm with the rest of the dancers. Jenny stumbled to keep up, but once she found her footing, she was pleasantly surprised with his dancing ability.

“You seem shocked.” He didn’t seem offended. In fact, he spoke as if he was talking about the weather. Completely unaffected.

“Well, if I’m being honest?—”

“As you should always be,” he interjected.

“I have no idea who you are. We had a…” Jenny looked around to make sure no one could overhear her.

“No need to worry about others. From my experience, they are too worried about their own dance steps to waste a single brain cell on what other people are doing, let alone what they’re saying while dancing.”

Jenny chuckled. “Have you been absent from the ton recently? Perhaps you have hit your head? This is the prime time to catch up on the latest gossip. Everyone is watching and listening.”

“And you worry about your place in the ton so much that you cause yourself stress by making sure everything about you is prim and proper. Sounds very calculating to me.”

Jenny gasped. “I assure you, if you don’t protect yourself with some sense of decorum, true or not, this place will eat you alive.”

The man said nothing but shrugged. His ability to shrug off the conversation was irritating.

“Do you always do that?”

“Do what?”

“Shrug off conversations? You did it in the lib—” She looked around, dipping her head to whisper, “Inthe library, and you just did it now.”

The man looked down at her and pursed his lips in thought. “I see no reason to continue a conversation if I have nothing of note to add. I surmise most people talk to fill in the silence—I do not. Do you?”

Jenny could feel the beginnings of a headache between her temples. Smooth voice or not, this man was intolerable and willingly played with her emotions. He had to be aware of how insufferable he was.

“Now who’s dropping the conversation?” he added with a smirk.

Jenny huffed out a breath. She tried to look away, but his body was so bloody big it blocked her entire line of sight.

He wasn’t bulky, but tall with lean muscles—not that she was noticing. Regardless, she could only fix her eyes on the buttons of his shirt.

“Tell me, kitten, why did you accept my offer to dance?”

Kitten.Why did that nickname cause her stomach to flip in a devilish way?