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confidently instead of worrying that they were going to spear his foot with one of their lethal heels.
    Yet the soft music was very seductive and more seductive still was the way in which he pulled her towards him—almost before she realised he’d done it. She could feel the jut of his hips against hers and suddenly she became aware of the formidable heat of his hard body pressing into hers and could sense the desire which radiated from his powerful frame. Zara swallowed.
    ‘Relax. You seem rather uptight,’ he commented as an irresistible tug of desire shot through him.
    She felt the almost careless caress of his thumb at her waist. What could she say—that the last time she’d had a slow dance with a man had been at some awful, noisy club, and it had felt
nothing
like this?
    ‘I’m not used to dancing,’ she said.
    ‘Why not?’
    Her face inches away from his shoulder, Zara wondered how best to answer him. Even if she hadn’t been tied to the sickroom for the past however many months, she still couldn’t have imagined herself whirling around a formal ballroom like this. It seemed rather old-fashioned.
    She risked a glance up at his hard-boned face. Howold was
he?
Difficult to say, but certainly a lot older than her. He had experience written on every sculpted angle and there were faint lines of cynicism etching the sides of his mouth. Yet there was nothing old-fashioned about the way he was holding her, or the way it was making her pulse rocket. It felt elemental. As if dancing were something far too intimate to be doing in front of a crowd of people…‘Because—’
    ‘There you go. That wretched word again.’ He pulled her closer and felt her soft flesh yielding to his as he bent his head to her long neck and, closing his eyes, he inhaled her subtle scent. Was it roses he could smell? ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you that repetition is boring?’
    ‘You asked me a question and I was answering it,’ she protested.
    ‘I know I did. But suddenly I’m much more interested in the language of your body.’
    ‘That’s
outrageous!’
    He bent his lips to her ear. ‘I know it is. But you’re making me feel outrageous. Don’t you feel a little outrageous, too, Zara?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Yes, you do,’ he demurred softly. ‘Go on. Be brave. Admit it.’
    End the dance,
she told herself fiercely as she began to feel even more out of her depth.
End it now. Walk out of the ballroom and don’t stop until you’ve reached the street. If you do it firmly then he’s not likely to risk a scene by trying to stop you.
    But it was difficult to do anything other than to let the sweet strains of the string instruments lull her and the power of his touch wash over her senses. Zara could feel the slide of silk over her skin as she moved in time to the music, and she could feel the barely touching sensation ofhis fingers pressing against her flesh. A shiver of longing rippled over her flesh, a sensation so unexpected and unwanted that she felt the sudden thunder of her heart. Did he feel it, too? Was that why he positioned himself so that they were fractionally closer and her body seemed to be silently screaming that it wanted to be closer still? She had to stop all this—she
had
to, before she made a complete and utter fool of herself.
    She pulled away from him with the reluctance of someone who was being forced to leave a warm fire to face a freezing blizzard outside. ‘I really must go,’ she said.
    He nodded, knowing that if he stayed on the dance-floor with this rapidly escalating sense of arousal, then soon any kind of movement might prove impossible. And yet her abrupt ending of the dance made him reluctant to let the evening end—and he wasn’t quite sure why. Because he was the one who usually called all the shots, who made the decision when to leave and when to stay?
    ‘Okay. I’ll take you home.’ He saw her lips open and he shook his head. ‘And before you go through the motions of protesting, you must