Chapter 4 #2
He moved farther into the room and waved toward the open doorway. Instead of running for it, she took a step back, bumping into the table behind her. She caught herself with a hand flat against the wood, visibly annoyed at her own clumsiness.
“I did not come to torment you, Miss Winthrop, whatever you may believe of me.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Because you ran, and with what happened during the birthday ball...” He tilted his head.
“I find myself wanting to understand it. Isn’t that a funny thing?
There are so many other thoughts I could preoccupy myself with, and yet it is you who has stayed in my mind.
I have spent a week turning over every reasonable explanation for what happened on that terrace, and none of them satisfy me, especially not after what you said.
So, I will ask you again, and I would be obliged if, this time, you gave me something closer to the truth. ”
She looked at him for a long moment before she spoke. Her pale eyes, which had before been so easy to read, were clouded and dark. “Very well,” she said, tapping the wood again. “The truth, then. There is a gentleman...”
Gabriel felt a side smile pull at his mouth and something like jealousy curl in his gut. “Is there now?”
“Yes, there is a gentleman I have long admired, who has never once looked at me with anything warmer than politeness, because I am...” She gestured vaguely at herself, as though the sentence explained itself.
“Unremarkable to most. I had heard, from a source I shall not name, that gentlemen are provoked to notice a woman once they believe another man has taken an interest in her. I thought... foolishly, I see now... that if I were seen in a compromising moment with someone else, it might reach his ears, and he might finally notice me.”
She stopped, pressing her lips together, her whole face a portrait in guilt that looked to Gabriel’s practiced eye almost convincing. He remained silent, encouraging her to finish her explanation.
“It was a scheme from a novel. A bad one.” She shook her head. “I am aware of how it sounds.”
“Well, it sounds like what you said,” Gabriel said slowly, “like something out of a penny dreadful.”
“My taste in reading material is eclectic to say the least. But there is nothing in Plato’s work or in Locke’s work about obsession and rejection—about being ignored for the better part of one’s life—nothing that I remember and could put to use, in any case.
But cheap literature discusses the matter ad nauseum, which makes it not so very cheap in the end, I think. Though you may judge me as you wish.”
He studied her carefully as she said this. There was something not quite settled about the story, like a seam out of place somewhere he couldn’t yet locate. When she spoke about books and the way she felt, that much had seemed real. But as for the rest, he was still undecided.
She held his gaze without flinching once she was done, and he found against his better judgment that he wanted to believe all of it.
Or he simply wanted an excuse to keep standing in this dusty little room with her a while longer, asking her questions about this gentleman and her plans for trapping him; this gentleman who was not him, so she said.
“Did it work?” he asked, glancing at the floor, toeing a loose floorboard. “Your scheme to entice this man?”
She opened her mouth in surprise, then closed it, thinking. “I have no idea,” she said eventually. “I have been too occupied avoiding you... thinking about you and fearing you... to find out whether I was successful.”
“It has been less than a week.”
“And yet it has been the longest less-than-a-week of my life, Your Grace.”
That startled a laugh out of him. She blinked in surprise at the sound of it.
“It’s not funny,” she said.
“It is. I ought to be angry with you. Being used as a prop in someone else’s courtship is not generally an experience I enjoy. Though it is a rarity, I will give you that.”
“I took no pleasure in it,” she stressed, straightening herself. “I have apologized already, and I shall apologize again if it will end this conversation any faster. I am sorry for meeting you.”
“Don’t grovel on my account.” The words came out sharper than he intended, and she looked at him, startled again.
“I did not pursue you in hopes of receiving another apology. This constant submission you undertake does not suit you. To tell you the truth, I found you more appealing when you were taking what you wanted without asking.”
Her neck worked. “You do not know what suits me, Your Grace. How could you? We have met twice.”
“Well, three times, no? If you count the terrace, unless you mean to tell me you were a different person because of your mask.”
“Maybe I was a little different that night,” she admitted. “Bolder. Out of my mind. A mask can hide so much.”
“Not your identity.”
“How did you find out?”
“My aunt pointed you out to me as you were leaving. I only realized the next morning that your mask seemed familiar to me, for good reason.”
“Your aunt must have a vendetta against me.”
“No, she thinks very highly of you.” He recalled Elisabeth’s descriptions of the Winthrop daughter.
“She said you read often in the mornings, and sometimes they could not find you, because you had tucked yourself away somewhere odd, like up a tree. You preferred history and archeology to art, even though your mother is a painter. They tried to get you to drink wine from Veneto to Toscana, but you refused all the way. She said you wrote to your friends every evening, even when they did not write back to you because they were busy with their lives.”
He had more things to list, things he had remembered, but she cut him off with, “If you do not end your enumeration soon, I will leave.”
Gabriel leaned against the wall. “You cannot have it both ways. You cannot complain about being invisible but also complain when you are seen.”
She fell silent, watching dust motes cascade down a stream of light from the window. “Maybe you’re right.” She smiled. “I get the feeling that is the worst thing I could have said to you.”
“For what it is worth, Miss Winthrop, you are a highly suitable topic of conversation and interest in my eyes.”
“Stop now.”
“And I enjoyed your kiss immensely, whatever the reason for you forcing it upon me.”
“You...” She gasped softly, then pressed a hand to her chest. “You cannot possibly mean that. And even if you did, you should not say it.”
“Why? I say what I mean. It saves everyone a great deal of trouble.” He took a step closer, close enough now that he could see she had frozen entirely still. “Does that displease you?”
“What displeases me most of all is to be toyed with.”
“In that we are alike.”
She laughed. He was standing so close to her that he could feel the air around her, warm and charged, faintly suffused with her perfume and the smell of dust. “We could not be more different,” she said.
“Time will tell.” He arched a brow. “You know, Miss Winthrop, I would be happy to serve you again, if love is what you seek. A second kiss in full view of half of Vauxhall might do wonders for your gentleman’s jealousy. Shall we find out?”
He meant it mostly as a provocation—the point of a needle pressing into her story to see what truth might spill out under the pressure.
But the moment the words left him, he understood that he had not entirely been lying—and that some reckless part of him was waiting quite sincerely for her to say yes.
Then, he could kiss her again and satisfy his growing need for her, this woman who was somehow ignored by most of the ton except for him.
Of course, she did not say yes. She may have been a schemer, just not the kind he thought she was, but she was not a fool. Slowly, she circled him, making for the door. He didn’t try to stop her, not even when his body coiled as she brushed against him.
“Good evening, Your Grace,” she said in a voice gone thin and unsteady, and she was through the door and gone before he could answer, her pale green skirts vanishing into the lamplit dark of the gardens.
Gabriel stood alone for a long moment, listening to the orchestra strike up something livelier outside.
This will not do, he thought. She is not mine to pursue, evidently. And nowhere I could lead her would be good. But there are lies tangled in her story. And I must discover what... and why.