Gabriel had not realized he was pacing until Fox stepped into his path and brought him up short. “But you also cannot deny you have helped him blacken your reputation over the years. For the sake of your future, then, isn’t it time to move ahead with your plans to turn over a new leaf?”
Fox was right, of course. Whatever Gabriel’s desires where a certain lady’s companion was concerned, he must put them aside in favor of the only proper match he was ever likely to make—and with it, the hope of saving Stoke and its people from future devastation. Better his bollocks than his neck in a noose.
Without replying, Gabriel turned and strode back toward the window.
“I am fully prepared to stand before you at the altar, if you will have me, and celebrate the union of my oldest and dearest friend to a woman worthy of his regard,” Fox vowed, his solemnity entirely in keeping with his future as a clergyman. Gabriel did not doubt his sincerity.
But the earnest note in his voice—Gabriel might have been tempted to call it longing—forced Gabriel to meet his friend’s eyes. What he saw there sliced open his veins as neatly as the bloodletter’s lance. He thought of Fox walking with Felicity, talking with Felicity, dancing with Felicity. Oh, from a practical standpoint it was a perfectly ineligible match: a younger son could not afford to fall in love with a dowerless girl. But love was not a practical matter. Or so Gabriel had heard.
Fox was willing to give up a woman for whom he obviously was coming to care deeply. Give her up for Gabriel. For a man who did not deserve such a woman—or such a friend.
“From here on out, though, I expect you to be on your best behavior,” Fox concluded. “Felicity Trenton is a lady, Ash. So you must be a gentleman.”
“For once,” added Gabriel wryly. Compared to Fox’s sacrifice, it was a trivial request, really. It was only giving up a flirtation in which it was ridiculous to indulge.
It would go badly for him and rather worse for Miss Burke if he should offer anything more.
His feet once more began to wear a path across the rug. For the first time since he had rented these rooms, the moment he had been of age and legally entitled to do so, the flat felt like a prison to him.
Remington backed into the room carrying the breakfast tray. “When you have finished with the other matter,” Gabriel said to him, “see that the Grosvenor Square house is opened and prepare to move us there at the earliest opportunity.”
The tray clattered onto the desktop. “You—you mean to—to relocate to Finch House?” Remy stammered.
“Rented rooms are an appalling waste of money when a man owns several perfectly good homes,” he said, echoing the words his trustee had spoken to him on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, as he had handed over the last of Gabriel’s dreadful inheritance. Finch House was an elegant, luxurious townhouse nestled in the heart of the beau monde—entirely out of keeping with the life he lived. Gabriel had resolutely refused to occupy it.
But orchestrating a campaign to thumb his nose at his uncle and take his rightful place in society would benefit from a proper base of operations. The home of a gentleman. “And besides, I cannot very well bring my bride here.”
At that announcement, Remy positively goggled.
“That’s the spirit.” Fox clapped Gabriel on the back. “I shall rejoice to see you settled at last. And on the way to restoring the thing fate stole from you all those years ago.”
Gabriel hesitated. “And what would that be?”
“A family.” With a sharp squeeze of his shoulder, as if for encouragement, Fox urged him toward his customary chair and came to sit beside him.
Remy approached with a cup in one hand and the teapot in the other. Neither hand seemed as steady as was wont. Gabriel had at last contrived to shock his manservant. “Tea, sir?” Remy asked Fox.
Absently, Fox nodded at Remy, his attention still focused on Gabriel. “I firmly believe Lady Felicity will make you…”
“Happy?” he suggested, a little wryly. What business had he dwelling on coquelicot ribbon and Camellia Burke?
“Of course,” Fox agreed. “But I was going to say, ‘a better man.’”
Laughable, really, to imagine that bland, blonde slip of a girl taming him. Nevertheless, in a matter of weeks, Gabriel intended to be a married man. With a proper wife, living in a proper household, forming proper habits.
Giving up his larks, just as Fox had said.
Swallowing against a sudden drought in his throat, he watched as the dark, steaming liquid poured from the spout into the cup Fox held. Gabriel never drank the stuff. But his recent discovery that those brownish bits of chaff were actually the dark, glossy leaves of the camellia plant made the beverage suddenly, surprisingly…tempting.
“Just a moment, my lord, and I’ll bring your coffee,” Remy said, returning to the tray.
But he knew coffee would not do the trick this time. Only one thing would slake this powerful thirst. And though he well knew its tendency to scald, surely he could dare just a sip.
“On second thought, Remy,” he murmured, “I believe I’ll have tea.”
Chapter 7
Cami reached under her spectacles to press her fingertips to her eyelids, hoping for relief. Instead the grit of exhaustion pricked her eyes and made them water. The third cup of coffee had done little more than make her irritable. The mere thought of a fourth made her stomach churn.
“Lady Montlake’s ball would seem to have done you in,” Felicity said, looking up from her perusal of her papa’s newspaper.
It was not the ball that had exhausted her, though they had arrived home only shortly before the hour at which Cami generally rose. No, her muse had been demanding. Or restless, at least. Pages and pages of corrections, additions, investing Lord Granville with a tragic past—father killed in a suspicious accident, a cruel uncle for a guardian—that made his present villainy believable, if not excusable. After breakfast, she would reread those scribbled words and pray that the energy with which they had spilled from her pen was matched by their quality.
“A headache, merely,” Cami lied, covering her ink-stained fingers—the ones he had kissed—with her napkin. No matter how she scrubbed, they never came clean. Fortunately, Aunt Merrick’s cold had made her so fretful that only King’s presence could be tolerated this morning, else she would already have been chided for her slovenliness.
Felicity’s eyes flicked anxiously across the page. “Oh, my. How dreadful.”
“What is it?” Cami demanded as she twitched the paper away. Her pulse leaped along with her imagination. A riot? Another assassination attempt? Some news from Dublin?
No. Merely a gossip column. Clearly, it would have been wiser to have stopped at two cups of coffee.
Your eyes did not deceive you last night, dear readers. It seems a certain sooty peer roams among us once more. Rumor has it, the Beast has even chosen a bride! One wonders if the lady in question has any notion of the Frogs he is said to have kissed….
“Oh, Felicity. Why do you read this nonsense? You can only expect to hear the worst.”
An inelegant shrug. “There seems to be nothing but the worst to be heard. I ought to know what I’m getting myself into, oughtn’t I? Why, last night I was reduced to begging Mr. Fox to tell me some good of him. As Lord Ash’s oldest friend, he must know something, even if it’s hidden from everyone else.”
Impatience itched at Cami. “And what did he say?”
“After a bit of hemming and hawing, he managed to recollect that Lord Ash had been something of a scholar when they were at university.” Felicity was clearly nonplussed by the revelation. “Apparently, he took top honors in mathematics at Cambridge.”
Of course. A successful gambler would have to have some facility for numbers. “At least you may take some comfort in the knowledge that he is not entirely—or at least, not only—a scoundrel,” Cami said, smoothing
her napkin across her lap, then picking up her fork. “Though I confess I am somewhat surprised to hear that he bothered with university at all.” His description of learning the classics as torture suggested the sort of man who wasted little time on such activities. But then, from what she had heard and what Cousin Stephen’s experience had confirmed, a gentleman’s university experience had very little to do with books.
“Mrs. Kendal said his guardian—his uncle, that is—insisted upon it.”
His uncle? Cami’s fork slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers and clattered onto her plate.
Some of the details of Lord Granville’s story had been drawn unabashedly from Lord Ashborough’s life. But the idea that she had accidentally hit on such a striking similarity gave her qualms. What would he do if he ever suspected she had used him as the model for her villain?
A moment’s reflection made her see the ridiculousness of her worry. After all, how likely was it that the Marquess of Ashborough would read The Wild Irish Rose and see himself in its pages?
“I really do not think you should be listening to Mrs. Kendal’s, or anyone else’s, ridiculous gossip,” Cami said firmly, retrieving her fork, forcing a bite of cold, rubbery egg past her lips, then immediately regretting the decision.
“Well, I would not need to put so much store in her titbits if you would only tell me what you and he discussed. You spent more than an hour in his company last night.” As she spoke, Felicity curled the corner of the newspaper around her fingertip, then frowned at the black smudge it left behind. “Surely, in all that time, he must have said something worth repeating.”
Had he? Their talk had been commonplace, yet a strange sort of intimacy had surrounded their exchange, a cocoon of calm amid the noise and bustle of the ballroom and the supper room. Talk of childhood and family. The sound of her name on his lips. Those lips pressed impertinently, improperly to her hand…
A wave of heat swept up her chest to her cheeks, chasing some sensation, some emotion for which she had no words.
“Lord Ashborough is courting you, Cousin Felicity. He had no particular call to make himself agreeable to me.”
“He is not courting me, Cousin Camellia,” Felicity corrected, an uncharacteristic sharpness in her voice. “I’m a bought bride, and we both know it. Though I doubt he feels much obligation to make himself agreeable to anyone, come to that.”
“Was he disagreeable?”
“No.” Felicity sounded nonplussed. “Merely…distracted.”
At that moment, Tom the second footman entered, bearing an enormous bouquet in one hand and a salver on the other and extending them both to Felicity.
“How lovely! Why, they look just as if they had been gathered from a meadow.” Felicity’s expression of surprised delight was nearly obscured by a profusion of what looked like wildflowers, although it was really too early in the year for them to be any such thing. The splendid riot of pink and yellow and lavender blooms came together in an artful arrangement that appeared free of artifice, perfectly suited to a young lady of Felicity’s romantic tastes and nothing like the nosegays more typically sent by eager young men the morning after a ball.
“Who could have sent them?” she exclaimed, though the answer seemed obvious enough. “Who knows me so well as to choose all of my favorites? Do open the note, Cousin Camellia.”
Tom’s face was contorted in what might have been intended as a speaking glance, though its message was opaque. Wordlessly, Cami motioned for him to give her the letter.
My dear lady,
Thank you for the favor of your company last evening. Though these blooms cannot rival the bloom of your cheeks, I hope this small token, and the memory of my esteem it carries, will call up the luster of your charming smile.
Yours &c.
Ash——
Only the first three letters of his signature were legible, as if he too thought of himself by the shortened version of his title. The hand was as bold and dark and strong as the words themselves were, well, flowery. “The bloom of your cheeks”? “The luster of your smile”? Did such obvious and hackneyed sentiment produce the desired results? Were women really wooed with such utter nonsense? Although she had little experience with rakes on which to draw, Cami had somehow imagined their techniques a bit more refined.
“Lord Ashborough sent them, of course,” she told Felicity, dropping the note onto the table. A flicker of something—disappointment?—crossed her cousin’s face, but Cami’s attention was claimed once more by Tom, who was standing just out of the line of Felicity’s vision, nodding first at Cami, then jerking his head in the direction of the door.
Cami frowned. “Is something the matter with your neck, Tom?”
“No, miss.” But while Felicity examined each petal and leaf, he went through the same elaborate routine, this time moving only his eyes. Torn between exasperation and worry that he might do himself an injury if allowed to continue this pantomime, Cami rose from the table. “I promised my sister a letter,” she said, excusing herself.
“Goodness, Tom,” she scolded as soon as the door to the breakfast room shut behind her. “What are you about, making such dumbshow? Is it another letter from Mr. Dawkins?”
“No, miss.” With a more restrained tip of his chin, he indicated the florist’s boy standing just inside the front door.
Cami walked slowly down the stairs and across the marble-tiled foyer, stopping in front of him. “Have you a message? If it’s money you want, you’ll have to wait for the butler.”
“You’re Miss Burke?” Before she could even nod, he drew a second, smaller bouquet from behind his back. “I was ’structed to give these into your hand, direct.”
“For Lady Felicity?”
“No, ma’am. For you.”
Wide eyed, she took the flowers from his outstretched hand. With a touch to the brim of his cap, the boy was gone.
“Well, I never,” Cami gasped to no one in particular, as Tom had already made himself scarce and the hall was otherwise empty.
She had taken three swishing strides back to the staircase before her curiosity got the better of her and she glanced down at the bouquet she carried. At first, she saw only what she expected to see: a proper, predictable nosegay. A small, neat arrangement of hothouse flowers that might have been meant for any woman who merited some little notice. A kind gesture from the always thoughtful Mr. Fox, perhaps. Certainly nothing that required subterfuge or secrecy. Merely ordinary blooms bound with a length of ribbon.
Silk ribbon, she realized as her fingers curled more tightly around the stems. An almost unthinkable luxury for a woman in her position. Oh, Aunt Merrick saw to it that Cami had everything she truly required. A lady’s companion simply did not require silk ribbon.
Especially not silk ribbon in the most glorious shade of red she had ever seen.
The flowers were no less extraordinary than the ribbon that bound them. Creamy petals ordered themselves precisely around feathery yellow stamens, a golden treasure at the heart of each sweetly scented blossom.
Camellias.
A rare bloom in this part of the world, he had said, the sound of her name on his lips as real to her now as the touch of those lips against her skin.
She glimpsed a card tucked amid the shining green leaves, and her fingers trembled—drat that coffee!—as she withdrew it carefully from its nest. A calling card. The Marquess of Ashborough’s calling card. With a calm she did not feel, she palmed the rectangle of stiffened paper, feeling its sharp corners bite into her hand, and ascended the stairs to her room.
Safely within the privacy of its four walls, she admired the nosegay once more. What had he intended to buy with these flowers? Her silence? Or something else entirely?
She turned her attention to his card as if it could reveal the answer to her question. Embossed lettering rose from it, the print surprisingly plain. Slowly, sh
e turned it over, wondering whether it bore any message even as she despised her curiosity.
Just one word, scrawled by a confident hand.
Gabriel.
Her eyelids fell as she lifted the card almost to her lips. Carried in his breast pocket, against the heat of his chest, it had absorbed his unique fragrance. From the ivory paper wafted the warm scents of tobacco and bergamot and something she could not identify. It smelled like…an invitation to sin.
Her pulse ticked upward and her eyes popped open, but she did not immediately thrust away that invitation.
She had no illusions about why he fascinated her. He was unlike anyone she had ever known, except perhaps in the pages of the sort of novels she generally denied reading. Powerful. Free to do as he pleased. Dismissive of the world’s scorn. He represented everything she had ever desired. He could give her a taste of things that she, as a woman, had always been denied.
Oh, but every story ever told taught that the price of such knowledge was dear. Too dear. Her hand dropped to her side. She could not, would not, pay it.
Still, might she not enjoy the flowers while they lasted? Like as not, Gabriel had had no hand in their purchase, but had given the task to some servant. And as the petals faded and fell, they would serve as a reminder of the fleeting nature of men’s affections.
At the washstand, she filled a tumbler with water; the flowers’ thick green leaves would disguise its chipped edge. Seating herself at the worktable that filled one wall of her narrow room, she began painstakingly to unpick the exquisite poppy-colored ribbon and arrange the stems in the makeshift vase.
* * * *
Gabriel’s knock on the door to Trenton House was opened by the butler.
“You are expected, my lord.”
By whom? Gabriel had not known himself that he would call until the hubbub of sorting and packing had driven him from his rooms, and his restless feet had carried him into Mayfair. And he did not delude himself into thinking that Felicity was any more eager for his visit than he was to make it.
Disapproval radiated from the butler as he bowed Gabriel inside and led him stiffly up the stairs to the doorway of an unfamiliar room. Before Gabriel could decide whether the servant’s demeanor simply inhered to his species or was directed toward him specifically, the man bowed once more. “Wait here, my lord. I shall inform her ladyship you have arrived.”
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