Page 93 of The Wallflower Takes All

Poppy’s breath caught. “Remove yourself?”

“I will speak with my father. He may resume the oversight of your affairs temporarily or recommend another solicitor of unimpeachable discretion. I will provide every document, every note, and every relevant fact. You will not be left without advice.”

“Only without you.” The words escaped too quickly.

Gabriel’s face changed. “Poppy.”

“No.” She drew in a breath. “No, you cannot reduce this to another simple line in your notebook. Review settlement. Write Lord Montague. Abandon troublesome client at first opportunity.”

He clenched his jaw. “That is not what I am doing.”

“Is it not?”

“No.” His voice roughened. “Do you imagine this is easy?”

Poppy looked at him. The quiet intensity in his expression stole the next sharp reply from her lips.

“You must understand,” he continued. “I have spent my entire life guarding against precisely this,” he said. “Against letting affection persuade me that compromised judgment is acceptable.”

Poppy nodded sagely. “I see. You think caring for me makes you foolish.”

“No.” The word was quiet, immediate, and rough enough to cost him. “I think remaining in a position of influence when I am no longer impartial would be.”

Poppy wanted to argue. She could not entirely. That only made it worse.

He stepped closer, though not close enough to touch her. “I am not a peer,” he said. “I cannot give you what you require. My practice is respectable, but I do not have a fortune. My family is not your family’s equal in rank. You need safety. A home. A future for Lady Montague as well as yourself.”

She swallowed hard. “I know what I need.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” Her voice sharpened. “And I have spent ten years knowing what everyone needs, too, Gabriel. Mama needs rescuing from men who want money she does not possess. Tradesmen need paying. Lord Montague needs the town house because he has reached one-and-twenty and discovered the intoxicating pleasures of curtains. I am very well acquainted with need.”

Gabriel flinched.

Poppy pressed on because if she stopped, she might cry, and she refused to cry beside the Serpentine while Freddie smelled of pond water.

“What I do not know,” she said, “is what I want. No one has asked me that in quite a long time. Not even me.”

Gabriel looked at her for one searching, painful moment. Then he said, “What do you want, Poppy?”

The question struck somewhere deep. She opened her mouth. Then closed it.

She had wanted a husband. A titled one, preferably. A house Mama could not lose. Bills paid. Coal delivered without negotiation. A future that did not vanish because a young man with a snuffbox wrote a handful of sentences on a piece of paper.

She still wanted those things. She needed those things.

But standing before Gabriel with her lips still tingling from his kisses, she wanted something else too.

Something impossible.

“You,” she said.

The word came softly.

His breath changed.

Heat climbed her cheeks, but she did not look away. “I want you,” she repeated. “Which is inconvenient and impractical and not at all what Bea and Georgie had in mind when they began assembling titled gentlemen in ballrooms. But it is true.”