Free Most Eagerly Yours by Allison Chase

for their chance to trip over their own feet. At the commencement of another quadrille, Mrs. Sanderson joined hands with the balding, pock-faced Marquess of Wentworth, who proved to have no better luck than his predecessors. Their feet all but tangling on several occasions, poor Wentworth looked downright harried as he attempted to match Mrs. Sanderson’s pace.
    The sight made Aidan grin; he had never much liked Wentworth. Shaking his head, he looked away, only to glance back to discover a vivid green gaze pinned on him.
    The music continued, but for several beats Mrs. Sanderson did not. Wentworth stumbled. Then she was moving again, dancing her way down the line beside Wentworth.
    Aidan’s senses buzzed. A flurry of sounds and sights invaded his thoughts: jammed sidewalks, bright bunting adorning the shop fronts, the queen’s carriage making its way across the city amid the cheering of a joyful crowd.
    In the midst of that crowd, a woman struggled against a haberdashery window, in danger of being trampled. He remembered that she had knowingly put herself in peril, risking her life to save a neighbor’s child.
    Familiar? Yes . . . yes, he remembered her. More important, this delicious young widow of Beatrice’s appeared to remember him.
    Rather well, he’d say.

Chapter 5
    “ M rs. Sanderson, are you quite all right? Have you grown faint? Perhaps you require a breath of air.”
    For a full ten seconds Laurel failed to respond to her dance partner, whose name she could not remember. Nor did she realize, during those heart-thumping moments, that the Mrs. Sanderson he addressed was in fact her.
    He was here. The man who had saved her on Knightsbridge Street, whose handsome face had haunted her dreams and waking fantasies these many months since.
    How often had she stood at the Emporium window, staring into the night fog and attempting to conjure his muscular physique atop his powerful gray? How many nights had she lain awake, wondering who he was, where he might be, and whether she would ever see him again?
    And now he was here, as imposing and breathtaking as she remembered. No, far more so, for only now did she realize how pale a reproduction her imagination had fashioned.
    “What the devil makes Barensforth stare with such impertinence?” drawled the man beside her.
    Her heart reached into her throat. Barensforth? The Earl of Barensforth?
    An individual of the very worst sort, hardly fit to be called a gentleman.
    But no, surely Victoria had been mistaken. Certainly a man who risked incurring the wrath of the police to rescue a total stranger must be the very best sort of individual, the most honorable of gentlemen. . . .
    Who had left her, with the briefest touch of his lips, simmering, vibrating, besieged by a host of emotions a spinster had no right to feel. Sensual, enthralling . . . and utterly dis honorable.
    “Mrs. Sanderson?”
    “Yes? Oh. I am quite well, thank you. Or no, I believe I am a trifle warm.”
    “You do appear flushed,” the gentleman agreed. “I believe refreshments are being served in the tearoom. Would you care for some?”
    “That would be splendid, thank you, Lord . . . er . . .”
    “Wentworth.” He placed perplexed emphasis on his name. It was not the first time he had had to remind her. He sucked the pitted skin of his cheeks against his teeth and offered the crook of his arm.
    She found the octagon room only marginally less oppressive than the ballroom. Her cheeks felt clammy, her brow both hot and cold. In the blazing glare of scores of candles, faces and fashions blurred into a riot of confusion made all the more intolerable by the combative scents of perfumes and hair tonics. Her airways tightened around a threatening cough she did her best to suppress.
    She was not accustomed to such a crush. The closest thing to a ball at Thorn Grove had been the yearly Christmas revelries for the villagers and estate servants. Instead of dancing, she and her sisters had distributed small