Chapter Eighteen #2
His brows drew together. “Will Lady Montague agree to live quietly?”
“No.”
The word escaped with such certainty that, despite everything, they both smiled.
Then Poppy’s smile slipped. “I shall have to persuade her.”
Gabriel’s gaze rested upon her face. “You should not have to carry all of this alone.”
His quiet certainty threatened the composure she had so carefully assembled. Poppy reached for the papers and aligned their edges. “It is easier if I know what must be done.”
The silence stretched. The curtains stood open to the dark street beyond, where carriage wheels rattled over the stones. She could not help but think that ladies and gentlemen would still be making their way toward Lady Lemonwood’s ball.
“You are not attending the Lemonwood ball,” Gabriel said as if reading her thoughts.
Poppy kept her attention upon the papers. “An impressive deduction.”
“Poppy.”
The use of her name undid the small defense she had built from courtesy.
She looked at him.
Gabriel’s face had changed. Beneath the calm, she saw anger gather—not at her, never at her, but on her behalf.
“Lady Lemonwood would not invite me,” Poppy said. “Bea did everything she could. She even offered to escort me without Mama, but Lady Lemonwood felt the Montfort name presented too great a risk to civilized Society, which sums up all my troubles, doesn’t it?”
His jaw tightened.
“The truth is it was prudent of her,” Poppy continued. “One cannot be too careful with unattached red-haired women who know how to calculate ledgers.”
“Lady Lemonwood is a fool,” Gabriel bit out.
The words were so angry, so immediate, that Poppy’s laugh caught in her throat. “You should not say that. She is important.”
“Then she is an important fool,” he nearly spat.
Poppy looked down at her old ivory gown. “I told myself I did not care.”
Gabriel moved a little nearer. “You are allowed to care, Poppy.”
She shook her head. She would not cry. Not when he was looking at her like that, with all the tenderness he refused to name.
“I would like to be at the ball,” she murmured.
He paced away from her, frustration pulling him into motion, every step betraying his need to set her feelings right. “What do you like about attending a ball?” he asked next, and the question held no empty courtesy. What pleased her obviously mattered enough for him to ask.
Poppy nearly gave him something light. The gowns. The lemonade. The pleasure of observing people who thought themselves unobserved. But Gabriel had asked with such grave attention that the answer seemed important, and she was so tired of turning the truth into something harmless.
“The possibility,” she said. “Before the first dance begins, before one knows who will ask or who will look away, there is a moment when anything might happen. A gentleman might cross the room. He might ask you to dance. It is foolish, perhaps, but at a ball, one can pretend the world has not yet decided.”
Gabriel’s expression softened into something that made her chest ache.
“Tonight,” she said, “the world decided before I reached the door.”
He looked toward the dark windows. Then back to her. “Dance with me.”
Poppy stared at him. “What?”
“You were denied a ball,” he said, his voice low. “A dance is the least Society owes you.”
The words went through her with such force that she sucked in her breath. “Gabriel.”
“Only a dance,” he said, which was the sort of thing a man said when he was not at all certain it would remain only anything.
“There is no music,” she countered.
“I can count.”
Her brows lifted. “How devastatingly romantic.”
“I did not claim expertise.”
Despite herself, she laughed, and the sound seemed to move something in him. The severity shifted, and for one brief, unguarded moment, she saw the man beneath the restraint—the one who wanted to give her something, though he feared he had no right to offer it.
She had every reason to expect this could end the same way his offer to ride in the park did. With regret and recriminations. Still, she could not bear to refuse him.
Poppy rose slowly.
Gabriel extended his hand. “May I have the honor?”
The question should have been silly in a half-lit drawing room, with no musicians, and no chaperone beyond a wet-nosed spaniel.
Instead, Poppy placed her hand in his. “Yes.”
His fingers closed around hers.
The first steps were awkward because there was no space suited to dancing between the sofa, escritoire, two small tables, and Freddie, who had decided the exercise required his supervision.
Gabriel counted under his breath, and Poppy followed, laughing when Freddie darted between them and nearly sent them into the pianoforte.
“Freddie,” Gabriel said, “your participation is not required.”
Freddie wagged his tail and tried again.
“He loves dancing,” Poppy said.
Gabriel’s mouth curved. “He loves obstruction.”
They turned again, smaller this time. Poppy knew these steps. And she’d even performed them in this very room. Her father had taught her before she was old enough to attend balls, allowing her to stand upon his shoes while Mama laughed from a chair by the fire.
For years after Papa died, Poppy had avoided that memory. It hurt too much—the sure hold of his hands, the smell of tobacco and soap, the way he had counted softly and told her she must never apologize for taking up space in a ballroom.
Tonight, with Gabriel’s hand firm at her back and the empty house around them, the memory returned without quite hurting.
“My father taught me to dance like this,” she said.
Gabriel’s steps slowed. “Here?”
“In this room. I stood on his shoes when I was little and tried very hard not to trip him.”
Gabriel’s eyes twinkled. “Did you?”
“Constantly. He claimed it was excellent training for Society.”
Gabriel’s gaze held hers. “He sounds kind.”
“He was.” The words came softly. “Careless in some ways. Too hopeful in others. But kind.”
Gabriel nodded, his expression softening with recognition. Loving someone did not make the consequences of their flaws disappear. And parents were not perfect. “My mother used to sing when she thought no one heard,” he said after a moment.
Poppy looked up. “How old were you? When she—?”
“I was nine,” he said. “She had been Lady Anne before she married my father,” he added. “The title always sounded oddly distant to me. Far too proper. She rarely used the name. I think she preferred being simply Mrs. Ashby, where affection mattered more than precedence.”
Poppy nodded.
He stared past her shoulder, his gaze gone distant.
“When my mother married my father, she gave up more than a title. She left friends who had known her since childhood and a life already arranged for her. Some remained loyal. Some drifted away. She did not speak of it often, yet I was old enough to see that affection does not prevent a cost.”
Poppy’s breath caught.
Gabriel looked down at their joined hands. “A man ought not ask a woman to alter her whole life unless he has considered every part of what he asks her to leave.”
The quiet weight of the words settled between them. He had not said her name. He had not needed to.
But Poppy had known him long enough by now to hear what lay beneath one fear and what belonged to another. What he had just confessed was about marriage, sacrifice, and the cost a woman paid. The rigid order by which he governed himself had similar roots.
“You told me that you thought if you could keep everything in its proper place, the house would hold together,” Poppy reminded him softly.
A faint smile touched his mouth and vanished. “Partly.” He was silent for a moment. “The week my mother died, my father took me into town on an errand. I stole a barley sweet from a confectioner’s jar.”
Poppy blinked. “You?”
“I was young and wanted it. At that age, wanting seemed sufficient reason.” His thumb shifted once against her hand.
“Later, my mother asked why my fingers were sticky, and I lied to her. By morning, she was worse. By the next day, the house had gone quiet, and I spent years persuaded that carelessness invited punishment.”
“Oh, Gabriel.”
“When I was older and earning a little money helping my father between school terms, I went back to the shop. I left coin on the counter and walked out again. Far more than the sweet had cost. I knew even then that it could not repair anything. Still, I paid it.”
Poppy’s throat tightened. “And ever since, you have been trying to keep everything in order so nothing can be taken from you again.”
His gaze met hers. “Yes. I suppose you’re right.”
“Does the order help?” she whispered.
“Sometimes.”
“And other times?” she asked.
His hand tightened slightly at her back. “Other times it only arranges the loss more neatly.”
Poppy understood then that his order was not coldness.
It was vigilance, penance, and love turned into something so controlled it had almost forgotten how to ask for joy.
Her heart ached for the boy he had been and for the man who still believed every happiness must be paid for before he dared reach for it.
The dance had slowed to almost nothing. They were no longer counting.
Freddie had settled by the sofa with his chin upon his paws, bored by any activity that did not require his involvement.
Gabriel’s hand remained at Poppy’s back. Her hand rested upon his shoulder. Near enough to feel the restrained power in him. Near enough to remember what his mouth had done to hers beside the Serpentine.
“You should not look at me like that,” he whispered.
She blinked at him slowly. “How am I looking at you?”
“Like you want me to forget myself.”
Poppy’s fingers tightened at his shoulder. “Would that be so terrible?”
“Yes.”
The word came out rough, but he did not step back. His hand settled more firmly at her waist, and the space between them seemed to vanish.
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Then he kissed her.