Page 117 of The Wallflower Takes All

Gabriel stared at the notes from his man of business and felt the irrational conviction that if Poppy Montfort were placed in that cottage, some vivid part of her would fade by degrees.

He drew her list closer.

Poppy had written it with wit because she could not bear to write fear plainly. She had converted exile into requirements, humiliation into a practical inventory, and uncertainty into lines of neat black ink.

Last night he had kissed her in the drawing room while that list sat on the escritoire.

No. He had done rather more than kiss her. He had loosened his own restraint as surely as she had loosened his cravat. He remembered the sofa, her hands in his hair, the quiet shock of her trust when his hand covered her breast through the thin muslin of her gown. He remembered telling her to say if she wished him to stop.

He remembered that she had not wished him to stop. He remembered the heat of her beneath him, the way her hands had clutched at his coat, the soft, broken sounds that had undone every civilized thought in his head.

Then Freddie had hurled himself between them, and Gabriel had retreated into the safest, stupidest words available.

I should not have done that.

He should not have said that, or most of what came after. But what he could not erase from his memory was the hurt in her eyes when she accused him of being the man who touches her and then remembers all the reasons he should not.

He had hurt her again, and it was the last thing he had meant to do.

He should have told her that wanting her was not the thing he regretted. He regretted risking her trust, her reputation, her hope, when he could not offer anything worthy of them.

He could not offer for her. Or rather, he could in the most literal sense, but he had no right to ask, and she had no sensible way to accept. To marry him would cost her too much. He would take her from the world that had formed her and set her apart from it, just as marriage had once separated his mother from the life and friends she had known before. Poppy would become an object of amusement and pity, the daughter of Lady Viva Montfort brought lower still by wedding a man with no title, no fortune, and no prospect of maintaining her in the style to which she was accustomed. There was no chance that she and Lady Viva could go on as they did now. What had he to offer her, after all, but affection and inadequacy?

He had tried to explain. Tried and failed. Then she had handed him the cottage list and asked him to find her the least unsuitable future.

He could not bear to think of her in the dismal little cottage. For several seconds, he simply stared at the list, despising every single line of it.

But she had asked him to find an adequate property. He was her solicitor. He had no right to replace her request with his own wishes.

Gabriel folded the notes, the paper snapping beneath his fingers. Then he slid the list safely inside his coat and left for Berkeley Square.

Once again, the Montfort front door stood open when he arrived.

Freddie shot past it with a sheet of paper in his mouth, pursued by Jenkins at a pace that suggested composure was now merely a memory.

“Freddie,” Jenkins called, not hopefully.

The spaniel skidded around the hall table, saw Gabriel, and attempted to change direction too late. Gabriel caught him with one hand beneath the ribs and removed the paper from his teeth with the other.

“Again,” Gabriel said. “This has become a troubling habit.”

Freddie looked deeply offended.

Jenkins arrived, slightly breathless. “Thank you, sir.”

Gabriel unfolded the dampened sheet.

My final breath shall carry Viva’s name,

Though seed cake may postpone the mortal flame?—

Gabriel looked up. “Mr. Loxley is improving.”

Jenkins’s expression did not change. “He has eaten two slices of cake, sir.”

“Medicinally, I trust.”

“According to Mr. Loxley, yes.”