Page 111 of The Wallflower Takes All

“Lady Lemonwood would not invite me,” Poppy said. “Bea did everything she could. She even offered to escort me without Mama, but Lady Lemonwood felt the Montfort name presented too great a risk to civilized Society, which sums up all my troubles, doesn’t it?”

His jaw tightened.

“The truth is it was prudent of her,” Poppy continued. “One cannot be too careful with unattached red-haired women who know how to calculate ledgers.”

“Lady Lemonwood is a fool,” Gabriel bit out.

The words were so angry, so immediate, that Poppy’s laugh caught in her throat. “You should not say that. She is important.”

“Then she is an important fool,” he nearly spat.

Poppy looked down at her old ivory gown. “I told myself I did not care.”

Gabriel moved a little nearer. “You are allowed to care, Poppy.”

She shook her head. She would not cry. Not when he was looking at her like that, with all the tenderness he refused to name.

“I would like to be at the ball,” she murmured.

He paced away from her, frustration pulling him into motion, every step betraying his need to set her feelings right. “What do you like about attending a ball?” he asked next, and the question held no empty courtesy. What pleased her obviously mattered enough for him to ask.

Poppy nearly gave him something light. The gowns. The lemonade. The pleasure of observing people who thought themselves unobserved. But Gabriel had asked with such grave attention that the answer seemed important, and she was so tired of turning the truth into something harmless.

“The possibility,” she said. “Before the first dance begins, before one knows who will ask or who will look away, there is a moment when anything might happen. A gentleman might cross the room. He might ask you to dance. It is foolish, perhaps, but at a ball, one can pretend the world has not yet decided.”

Gabriel’s expression softened into something that made her chest ache.

“Tonight,” she said, “the world decided before I reached the door.”

He looked toward the dark windows. Then back to her. “Dance with me.”

Poppy stared at him. “What?”

“You were denied a ball,” he said, his voice low. “A dance is the least Society owes you.”

The words went through her with such force that she sucked in her breath. “Gabriel.”

“Only a dance,” he said, which was the sort of thing a man said when he was not at all certain it would remain only anything.

“There is no music,” she countered.

“I can count.”

Her brows lifted. “How devastatingly romantic.”

“I did not claim expertise.”

Despite herself, she laughed, and the sound seemed to move something in him. The severity shifted, and for one brief, unguarded moment, she saw the man beneath the restraint—the one who wanted to give her something, though he feared he had no right to offer it.

She had every reason to expect this could end the same way his offer to ride in the park did. With regret and recriminations. Still, she could not bear to refuse him.

Poppy rose slowly.

Gabriel extended his hand. “May I have the honor?”

The question should have been silly in a half-lit drawing room, with no musicians, and no chaperone beyond a wet-nosed spaniel.

Instead, Poppy placed her hand in his. “Yes.”