I can tell you that I am a trained historian with a PhD.’
Jack looked at her with new respect. He also thought that she must be a little older than she seemed. The careless grace of the flapper which she had displayed on the dance floor certainly concealed from the world that she was a most learned lady.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I was aware that women in the States were freer than ours and were invading all the professions hitherto reserved for men, but I never thought that I should meet one. And if I had, I should have expected her to be something of a gorgon, not a lady who looks like a model or a movie star and can dance like a professional.’
Lacey, who had been about to sip her champagne, began to laugh. ‘That was a compliment…I think. Did you mean it as one?’
Jack decided to be candid. ‘I don’t know what to think or even what I meant. Other than that you have bowled me over. There I was, under the impression that you were as light-minded as Darcey and Rupert, and then you tell me otherwise—that you’re a lady academic, no less. Do they really not know?’
‘Certainly not, and you are not to tell them. They might not wish to dance the Charleston with me again if you do!’
‘Then why don’t you dance the waltz or the foxtrot with me once we have finished supper and you are quite recovered from your previous exertions?’
‘Willingly,’ she said and laughed up at him. ‘To dance either of them with Fighting Jack would make my evening.’
Darcey and Rupert watched them with amazement. Or rather they watched Jack with amazement. Lacey’s frank and cheerful way with Jack was no surprise, but Jack’s behaviour was quite another matter. For years they had accepted him as the dour man he had become since he had returned to England—and now he was behaving as though he were twenty again.
Rupert wanted to go over and twit him, but Darcey put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to see what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object.’
‘The latter being Jack, I suppose. OK, then—it might be fun,’ Rupert said.
They were even more amazed when a little later Jack and Lacey strolled off to the dance floor to take part in the slow foxtrot which the musicians had begun to play in a slightly faster tempo than usual.
As she had expected, Lacey found that the slow fox was a perfect dance for Jack since he was able to perform it gracefully, if decorously, guiding her round the floor, and holding her at a little distance from him. There were no sudden swoops and bends from him when they turned and glided in perfect time with the music.
He did say once, shortly after they had made the first circuit of the floor, ‘I was always intrigued by this dance’s name. Slow fox, indeed! The only foxes I have ever seen were fast ones.’
‘From horseback, I presume. Do you still hunt?’
‘No time,’ he said briefly, which was not the whole truth, but half of it. He was not about to tell her that the Compton fortunes had declined to such an extent that they could not afford to keep hunters any more. Their once-huge estate had shrunk to being a small working farm.
Since his very touch, as well as his nearness, was disturbing her, Lacey tried to dismiss these unwonted feelings by looking up at him and asking, if only to keep her mind off them, ‘I never did get to hear any of the details of the jolly japes which earned you your nickname. What exactly were they?’
Jack looked down at her sparkling eyes, which were beginning to trouble him more and more, and replied in what he hoped was an offhand manner, although he had never felt less offhand for years, since having her almost in his arms was doing terrible things to him.
‘Now that would be telling, and I don’t intend to play the sneak on my young self. Broadly they came under the heading of what a Yankee I met in the war said was called hell-raising in the States.’
On the last word he looked down at her intently and, whether he knew it or not, his expression was such that for a moment she could seen in him the lively, reckless boy he had once been…And then it was gone as quickly as it had come.
‘Now, that,’ she told him severely, ‘is more intriguing than ever, since hell-raising back home covers such a multitude of sins.’
‘Then I suggest that you use your lively imagination—I’m sure that you have one—to work out exactly what mine must have been.’
‘Wine, women and song?’ she merrily proposed. ‘The rake’s classic path to hell?’
‘Something of the sort—but I visited hell later on in quite a different place from Oxford or London.’
Lacey refused to ask him to elaborate on where he had found hell, for she thought that she knew the answer. To restore the conversation to its previous, lighter, level, she said provokingly, ‘I don’t want to use my lively imagination about your past, whose sinfulness has undoubtedly been exaggerated by the time that has passed since then. Instead, to punish you for your lack of frankness, I shall insist that on the next occasion when the Charleston is played you will join me on to the floor again so that I may teach you how to dance it!’
Jack stopped dead—nearly causing a collision behind him by doing so and gathering a lot of amused, angry and surprised stares into the bargain.
‘You wouldn’t! Oh, yes, I do believe that you would. What a spectacle I shall present if I allowed you to do any such thing,’ he exclaimed, resuming the dance again.
‘Exactly—a splendid one, I’m sure. I shan’t take no for an answer. You are not to refuse me when I come to collect you for it. If you do, I must tell you that I have a nice line in throwing comic conniption fits—scenes to you—which I stage to punish boy friends who let me down.’
Jack said, ‘But I am not your boy friend.’
Lacey raised her fine black brows at him in derision. ‘If you’re not, then tell me why you have been flirting with me ever since we were introduced, and why, before we met, you looked at me as though you could eat me.’
‘None of it was intentional.’ Jack tried to make his voice as stiff as possible.
‘That makes it worse, not better. Come on, Fighting Jack, live up to your nickname and dance the Charleston with me.’
Her face, nay, her whole body, was so alight with mischief that suddenly Jack could refuse her nothing. ‘Very well, on your own head be it. Take the consequences, Miss Lacey Chancellor, and live with them.’
‘Great!’ she sparked back at him. ‘That’s the ticket.’
‘Happy to hear it,’ he murmured, wondering what on earth he had let himself in for—and what this was doing to his reputation.
Each of them was so engrossed in the other that neither of them noticed that the music had stopped and the dance had ended until they saw that people were leaving the floor and staring at them as they still revolved.
Lacey murmured wickedly, ‘No need to wonder about making a spectacle of yourself, you are already one.’
‘Too true—and I put it down to my unfamiliarity with this life. I do hope that we shan’t be blackballed and not
