Page 73 of The Wallflower Takes All

Everything had changed: the gown, the room, the gentleman now promised to call. Still, beneath the pink satin, beneath the careful smile, beneath the cautious hope that Lord Ketterham might be the answer she had been hoping for, her skin remembered where Mr. Ashby’s mouth had met her cheek.

Worse, she remembered how desperately she had wanted him to turn his head and kiss her properly. To forget the open door, the waiting carriage, the whole watching world, and put his mouth to hers as if restraint had never stood a chance.

Chapter Eleven

Gabriel received Lord Montague’s answer before ten o’clock the next morning.

It contained three sentences, one smear of snuff, and no mercy whatsoever.

Gabriel read it once. Then twice. Then a third time, because foolish hope, apparently, did not confine itself to young ladies in precarious circumstances. It afflicted solicitors as well.

Mr. Ashby,

I have received your communication on behalf of Lady Montague and must decline the requested extension. My arrangements are already made, and I shall take possession of the London house at the week’s end, as previously indicated. I trust Lady Montague and Miss Montfort will have seen to their own arrangements by then.

Montague.

Gabriel set the letter upon his desk.

For a moment, he only looked at it.

The week’s end.

No extension. No courtesy. No time for delicacy, grace, or the sort of gradual removal a widow and her unmarried daughter ought to have been allowed as a matter of common decency.

Damn the man.

Gabriel rose, crossed two paces toward the window, then turned back before he reached it. Walking would not improve the letter. Nor would glaring at three sentences written by a pompous fool whose claim to consequence rested entirely upon title, property, and the accident of birth.

Unfortunately, law did not require decency.

Only possession.

He returned to the desk and read the letter again.

No. Still no mercy.

His father would say something about human nature being disappointing in endlessly inventive ways. Gabriel would say Lord Montague was a complete horse’s arse.

Neither remark would give Miss Montfort more time.

He reached for a clean sheet of vellum and began drafting a reply before he trusted himself to think too long about her face when she heard. He could imagine it with unwelcome clarity. Her smile would hold. He knew that already. It would probably hold with dreadful perfection while her fingers tightened around whatever object was nearest. A reticule. A letter. Freddie’s ear, though the dog would object.

She would say she had expected nothing else. She would make some quip about curtains. Then later, perhaps where no one could see her, she would close her eyes and draw one of those careful breaths he had learned to recognize.

Gabriel’s quill stopped.

No.

He was not sitting in his office imagining how Miss Montfort would absorb another blow. He was not measuring the shape of her courage or thinking of how she smoothed it over with laughter until everyone else was comfortable. He was not becoming the sort of man who carried a client’s disappointment inside his own chest.

He dipped the quill again.

A second appeal could be drafted. A sterner one, perhaps, though there was little point. Lord Montague had rights, and rights, once held by fools, were among the most exasperating instruments in English law.

A knock sounded at the office door.

Before Gabriel could answer, his clerk opened it and peered in. “Lord Ketterham to see you, sir.”