Page 13 of The Wallflower Takes All

Worse, Miss Montfort knew it. Perhaps not in full legal detail, but in the way a person knew a floorboard was rotten because she had stepped carefully over it for years.

She sat across from him now, twisting the edge of a handkerchief between her fingers while pretending she was not holding her breath.

Gabriel shut the last ledger. The sound was soft.

Her gaze flew to his face. “Well?” she asked, and there was the first crack in her cheerfulness.

One word, nearly steady.

Nearly.

He had intended to be dispassionate. Clear. Correct. He had intended to say that the accounts were unsustainable, that Lady Viva’s expenditures must be curtailed at once, that further credit would be all but impossible to secure, that a comprehensive settlement of debts would require more assets than appeared to exist.

All true.

All useless.

Because what she was really asking was, Are we ruined?

And Gabriel, who had come to this house determined not to be his father, found himself wishing with sudden, fierce irritation that he could give her any answer but the truth.

He looked down at the ledgers once more, hoping some overlooked sum had appeared by divine intervention alone.

It had not.

No forgotten annuity. No overlooked investment. No tidy legal instrument waiting to rescue them.

Only debts, dwindling funds, and a household that burned through coin like kindling.

Gabriel lifted his gaze. Miss Montfort sat very still, her hands folded now, her smile gone. Without it, she looked younger. Not girlish, precisely, but unguarded in a way that made something uncomfortable shift in his chest.

He disliked the feeling, which was safer than admitting he disliked how much it had to do with her.

“I will need to review the remaining papers before I give a final opinion,” he said.

She appeared to absorb that, nodding slowly. “But you have an opinion already.”

“Yes.”

She bit her lip. “And it is bad.”

“It is not favorable,” he admitted.

Her laugh was small and humorless. “How delicately put.”

Gabriel pushed the ledger aside and leaned back. “Miss Montfort?—”

The study door burst open before he could continue.

Lady Viva swept in, her expression bright with imminent mischief. Freddie leapt to his paws and barked with all the ceremony of a herald announcing royalty, which perhaps, in this household, he was.

“Poppy, darling,” Lady Viva said, “you must come at once. Mr. Loxley has composed a farewell ode to the sofa, and Lady Stone is weeping into the tassels. You know how much I dislike weeping.”

“It is the second-best sofa I’ve ever known,” came Lady Stone’s devastated drunken wail from the salon.

Poppy rose immediately. “Mama, not now.”

“Oh, very well. In a moment.” Lady Viva turned her radiant gaze upon Gabriel. “Dear Mr. Ashby, have you discovered that we are secretly wealthy?”