Chapter 14
Fourteen
Suffice it to say that Gabriel did not remember much about leaving the assembly rooms. A cloud of anger escorted him from the premises, familiar faces blurring into a dark, gray sky around him.
Outside, his coachman looked startled to see him when he returned to King Street, only five minutes after they had parked there in the first place.
“We’re returning to the house,” Gabriel ordered, reaching for the door as his driver quickly tucked away the paper he had been reading. The boot-boy who had come with them dropped off the back of the vehicle and extinguished his cheroot under his shoe.
Drifting out of Almack’s, there were sounds of frivolity and amusement, and they made Gabriel’s teeth ache.
The dancing had obviously started in earnest. James had remained indoors to be with Tiffany, who attended the assembly with her sister and her husband.
Gabriel had no reason to remain where he was not needed. The one in a crowd of twos.
He heard someone call his name. The boot-boy moved toward him defensively, but Gabriel waved him off and scolded him.
Rosalie closed the assembly room front doors behind her.
Her white skirts were bunched in her free fist, and she looked out of breath from having run after him.
He was almost too annoyed with her to appreciate how reckless her behavior was, and how beautiful she looked when she was flushed and apologetic.
“Did I forget something indoors?” he asked.
She stumbled as she walked toward him. “What?”
“Oh, I thought you were one of the servants...” When she did not laugh, Gabriel turned away from her. “Go back inside, Miss Winthrop. Sinclair will wonder where his beloved has gone if you do not go quickly.”
When she said nothing, he slipped his fingers around the door handle. As soon as he had opened it, Rosalie emerged from beside him and slammed it shut again.
“Are you mad?” he said.
“I never know around you.” She came closer, dropping her voice as she eyed the boot-boy like he was a common footpad. “Please, Your Grace, allow me only a moment of your time.”
He could not deny his curiosity, even when it hurt to look at her just then. “Please?” he mocked. She looked disinclined to speak while they had an audience, let alone respond to his teasing. He groaned and swung open the door. “Get in the carriage, then.”
She did as she was told without complaint, probably thinking, like Gabriel, that the sooner they were out of sight, the better.
He scanned the front of the building and the rest of the street.
There was no one around. The other drivers had gone to play cards at the end of the cavalcade of parked carriages.
He entered his carriage beside her and closed the door tight.
The light from the lamps pushed through the glass in a yellow fog. He pulled the blinds just enough to hide their faces from passersby, and he saw the boot-boy move in front of the carriage window to further eclipse the scene within.
“Now,” Rosalie said, when he showed no sign of speaking first. “Are you going to keep brooding or will you allow me to apologize to you for tonight without mocking me?”
“Brooding?” Gabriel cried. “I have never brooded a day in my life.”
She laughed in shock. “That is hardly true.”
“Adding insult to injury. Is this why you chased me down? You are a cruel mistress, Miss Winthrop. Cruel, and disorganized with your time.”
“It was an error.”
“Oh, quite the error, I agree.”
“I had forgotten that I had agreed to attend tonight with both you... and him. And it shames me. But I doubt anyone noticed. You were gone so quickly from the venue.”
“A more suspicious fellow could assume you had invited us both on purpose to try and incite a public fight for you, or to make an exciting story for the rags to fight over.”
She scowled. The expression should not have pleased him as much as it did. He liked when she was angry. He liked knowing she was capable of feeling upset, rather than agreeing to things simply because that was easier.
Though I suppose, he thought, more aware of the limited space between them with every unspoken word, that she made that painfully clear when she spoke out in Peter Ashcroft’s defense.
I wonder if that is why she insists on apologizing tonight, so her attacks against me do not accumulate until an insurmountable mountain of hurt stands between me and her.
“Does that seem likely to you? Do you really think I am that sort of woman?” she asked, drawing him from his thoughts.
He shrugged.
“Tell me honestly.” Her less-than-soothing tone made him flinch. “Are you upset with me about the scheduling error... or are you angry that you caught me speaking with Mr. Sinclair alone?”
A startled laugh erupted from his throat.
“It is not cause for laughter,” she scolded.
“I disagree. Why should I care about either circumstance?” The question came out harder than he intended, and he repositioned himself so he was facing her fully.
“Do you believe I should be angry at you for whispering with a man who is not me in the darkness? Or for looking at him tenderly? Do you think I should be put out by the assignation, regardless of your comportment? That I should burn with jealousy for you, and curse the stars under which the meeting took place, and brood, and so on, like a poet, like a man who truly—?”
He stopped himself before he said something stupid and honest, more stupid and honest than what he already had said.
“You are mocking me again,” she said bitterly, and leaned back from him, pressing her body against the opposite carriage door.
“No,” he said, “not at all.”
“Then what would you call it if not a mockery?”
“A fair description of your expectations. It should not matter to me one way or another. For in fact, it does not matter. I have no claim on your evenings, Miss Winthrop. I relinquished my right to command you, and to be upset when you disobeyed me, the moment I proposed this arrangement of ours, and proposed it to be fake. I have no right to mind who you sit beside in the dark, discussing whatever it is the two of you discuss. God, what could a man like Sinclair even want to discuss with you? The weather? Remedies for balding?”
“You think very little of him, and I do not know why. You are not even that different in age. And you still have not answered my question.”
“Which was?”
“Whether you are vexed by my error or vexed that you found us together.”
He looked at her rather than out the window behind her. He could have said something evasive again. It might have been easier to explain. “Both, I expect,” he said instead. “Though I could not tell you in what proportion.”
The crease between her brows eased slightly at his response. His grudging honesty had bought him a moment of grace. She was quiet for a beat, smoothing her glove over her knuckles. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge.
“My mother told me about your brother’s fate.”
The carriage seemed to grow smaller. He hoped she did not hear the way his breath caught in his throat.
The mention of his brother always did something strange to him, making him feel faraway, locked in a cellar, words coming through the cellar door but not quite reaching him, like sunlight through the clouds.
“Did she now?”
“His name was Marcus,” Rosalie said the word carefully, but her voice had gone weak and strained. “I did not know... You never said a word about him.”
“Why would I have spoken about him? There was no occasion to speak about him.” His jaw ached again. “It has... had... no bearing on our arrangement.”
“Yes, but it has bearing on you.”
He considered what to say carefully. Usually, he avoided talking about Marcus altogether.
The people who knew him most knew this. The distance between him and Rosalie had never felt wider.
A veritable chasm of truth between them.
He could have stepped back. He could have stepped closer and pushed her into the chasm instead, to hurt her.
He wanted to leave the scene altogether. But he could not leave yet.
“Young Miss, I do not require an audit of my grief for you to hold up your end of a bargain. Have you forgotten the bounds of this pact? It is all for show. Whether you cast me off for Sinclair tonight or next week, it is not significant, as long as you do not embarrass me. And tonight... It was an embarrassment. That is what has vexed me. Nothing else.”
He watched his words land. He was not sure whether he had meant any of them. She did not flinch or move until she nodded slowly.
“I am sorry it was so,” she said.
“Good that you are sorry.”
“But I am not sorry for asking about your past.”
When her eyes met his, they burned with something more than anger, and it left him singed.
“I am very good at being a friend, Gabriel. Better at being a friend than being a daughter, a sister, or a suitable candidate for marriage. But you make it very hard for me to be your friend. And I would rather be your friend than your enemy in all this. We have been drifting closer to one pole than the other recently, with tonight... and then with that business with your cousin...”
He was confused and restless. He had not expected to feel intrigued, excited, frustrated, spurned, exposed by her in that sequence, over and over.
His body and mind were tired. Maybe she was right, and a truce built on a dispassionate friendship was what they required so he could stop thinking about her.
Men and women were not friends. By becoming her friend, she would stop being a woman in his eyes.
A terrible loss on the one hand, he thought. Because she is the best woman I have known in some time—maybe ever. But a tremendous gain on the other, to not have to feel how I feel about her...