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“I believe you are smiling, Ambrose,” Marina said, teasing him.

He looked down. Her eyes were bright with mischief, her cheeks flushed from the dance, and a single dark curl had slipped loose to brush against her neck. It took him a moment to remember that she had said anything at all.

“I dare say I am. I have done a great deal of that since you came into my life.” He guided her through the turn, his hand firm at the small of her back. “I have also done a great deal of frowning.”

She giggled, and the sound went straight through him. “Yes, you have. And I am glad of both, because it means I have had an effect upon you.”

“My dear,” he said quietly, “I could never tell you how great an effect you have had upon me. You and Emma both.”

Something softened in her face. She did not answer at once, and he felt her fingers tighten ever so slightly upon his shoulder.

“It has been a wonderful Christmas, has it not?” she said at last. “I cannot wait until Emma is older and we can give her presents. She will tear the paper to pieces and care nothing at all for what is inside.” She glanced around them, suddenly uncertain. “And I think the guests are enjoying themselves too. Do you?”

Ambrose looked over her head at the ballroom. Couples spun beneath the chandeliers in a blur of silk and velvet. Others had drifted into the refreshment rooms, where footmen moved between the tables with trays of negus and sugared almonds. And a surprising number of people had gathered around the enormous fir in the center of the room, the peculiar German Christmas tree Marina had insisted upon dragging into his home, pointing at its ribbons and apples and gilded walnuts as though they had never seen anything like it.

They likely had not. Neither had he, until her.

“I think you have done very, very well,” he said. “I am proud of you.”

She looked up at him then, and the full force of her smile struck him like light through an open window.

For most of his life, people had looked at him and seen a beast. Marina looked at him and saw a man who could be proud of her, and perhaps a man worth making proud in return.

He had no name for what that did to him, and he did not intend to look for one. Not here, beneath two hundred pairs of curious eyes. Perhaps not ever. For tonight, it was enough simply to hold her and to be seen.

He was still searching for something to say in return when the music stopped.

It did not fade. It stopped mid-phrase, the violins breaking off with a ragged scrape that set his teeth on edge. Around them, the dancers stumbled to a halt. Skirts swayed and stilled. A hush rolled across the ballroom from the far end, swallowing the laughter and the clink of glasses until all he could hear was the faint crackle of the candles.

With more than two hundred people in attendance, and with some of the very villagers he suspected of wrecking Marina’s cottage among them, he had been half expecting a disturbance all evening. A drunken remark. A spilled cup of punch. Someone calling his wife a witch to her face.

But what sort of disturbance could silence an entire ballroom?

His eyes swept across the crowd, and then he saw him.

A gentleman was making his way toward the small platform where the musicians sat with their bows lowered. He was not tall, but he moved through the crowd as though it belonged to him, nodding to strangers, smiling as they stepped aside to let him pass. His coat was cut in the latest London fashion, his fair hair swept back from a narrow, handsome face.

Ambrose recognized him at once. Ambrose’s hand went still against Marina’s back.

“What is it?” she asked, searching his face.

“Do you see that gentleman going toward the platform?”

She turned her head. “Yes.”

“That is Douglas, the Earl of Rutland.” The name tasted foul in his mouth. “Emma’s father.”

Marina’s head snapped back toward him, her eyes wide. “You invited him?”

“Of course not.” He kept his voice low; heads were already beginning to turn their way. “But we invited more than two hundred people. He must have slipped in with the late arrivals.”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” Douglas called once he reached his place.

His voice carried easily over the hushed room, warm and pleasant, the voice of a man accustomed to being liked at first hearing.

“Some of you may not know me. But Ambrose, the Duke of Griffin, is my brother-in-law. I was married to his beautiful sister.”

Ambrose’s hands curled into fists at his sides.