Chapter Five #3
The count offered his arm with enough grandeur to suggest trumpets ought to have been involved. Lady Viva took it with great ceremony, and together they proceeded toward the salon.
“Has Belloronni become a duke while I was asleep?” came Lady Stone’s sleepy voice from the room.
“Not yet, darling,” Lady Viva replied.
“Pity.”
Gabriel remained in the hall, deliberating ignoring the absurdity drifting from the salon.
Too many things, Lady Viva had said.
Yes. Miss Montfort knew how much was owed to the wine merchant. No doubt she knew which guests might steal spoons and which would merely borrow books indefinitely. She knew how to calm creditors, redirect her mother, manage servants, soothe poets, and laugh while the roof cracked overhead.
She knew too many things because everyone else knew too few. And it was entirely unfair.
Gabriel returned to the study and sat down again, though he did not immediately reach for the papers.
He thought of the unmarried titled gentlemen of England, with their respectable names, solvent estates, and power to offer protection. Any one of them could give Miss Montfort a house where she need not count candles or barter with wine merchants.
Marriage was the sensible answer. Perhaps the only answer. A titled husband would solve several practical problems.
Gabriel had told her so himself.
The trouble was that he could not stop imagining some faceless peer assessing Miss Montfort as a bargain to be weighed against debts, a dowry, and the inconvenience of Lady Viva.
Even worse, the faceless peer in his imagination had hands.
Too many hands. Gabriel imagined them at Miss Montfort’s waist in a dance, lifting hers to his mouth, touching her with the casual claim of a man who had offered for her.
Gabriel had no reason to resent such things, and yet he resented them with a force that made mockery of every scrap of restraint he possessed.
His fingers tightened around the quill.
Ridiculous.
He had known the woman one day.
Less than that.
He had no claim. No cause. No reason whatsoever to feel anything but professional satisfaction if her well-placed friends managed to arrange what law and ledgers could not. Besides, a wealthy husband might be able to settle the amount the ladies owed to him and his father.
Yet when he drew his notebook closer and turned back to the list, the final line seemed less tidy than it had that morning.
Conclude account upon settlement of urgent matters.
Gabriel stared at it.
Then he struck the words through. His decision had not precisely changed, but urgent matters remained unsettled, and he disliked premature conclusions. That was all.
A sound at the study door made him look up.
Miss Montfort stood there, eyes bright with something that might have been fear, hope, or both. For one unreasonable instant, the room seemed to arrange itself around her.
He noticed the wind-touched color in her cheeks first, then the loosened bonnet ribbon, then the bright blue of her eyes.
The sequence was damning. A solicitor ought to notice documents before ribbons and practical concerns before beauty.
Gabriel, evidently, had begun noticing all the wrong things in exactly the wrong order.
“Mr. Ashby,” she said breathlessly. “I have been to see my friends, Lady Vanover and Lady Pembroke.”
Those names were more than familiar. Lady Vanover and Lady Pembroke were exceptionally well regarded, though the scandals that had attended their marriages had likely helped as much as they had hindered. Society adored a scandal once it had been made respectable by a wedding ring and a title.
He rose. “And?”
Miss Montfort stepped into the room, then stopped beside the chair opposite his desk. For a moment, her expression held, bright, composed, almost eager.
Then the brightness faltered.
She turned slightly away from him, closed her eyes, and drew one careful breath.
It was only one breath, so small a movement that another man might have missed it.
But Gabriel saw the way her shoulders lifted, the way her gloved fingers pressed briefly against the back of the chair, and the way she gathered herself before facing him again.
Something in his chest tightened.
It was not pity, because he knew pity, and pity looked down. This was something else, far more inconvenient—the instinct to step closer and take the weight from her hands before she noticed she had dropped it.
He remained where he was.
“They have offered to help,” she said.
“That is good,” he managed.
“Yes.” She smiled, but the edges of her mouth trembled. “Lady Pembroke means to give a dinner. And Lady Vanover a ball. She believes a ball is efficient.” She paused before adding, “What do you think?”
Gabriel did not immediately answer.
Why did she care what he thought?
The question came to his mind so sharply that it felt almost accusatory. He was her solicitor, and she had no business treating his opinion as though it carried any weight beyond deeds, debts, and legal correspondence.
Then the answer arrived, unwelcome and obvious.
There was no other sensible adult in her household to ask.
Lady Viva floated from calamity to calamity on laughter and silk. The late viscount was a portrait on a wall. His own father had been indulgent, perhaps kind, but he had not forced the truth upon them early enough.
Had Miss Montfort asked him questions in this same careful way?
Had she looked across the desk at his father, waiting for guidance, because there had been no one else to give it?
The thought settled badly.
“A dinner and a ball,” Gabriel said at last, because she was still waiting.
“Yes.”
“With eligible gentlemen invited for the purpose of courtship?”
Color touched her cheeks. “When you put it like that, it sounds dreadful.”
“It sounds direct.”
“That is not better.”
“No,” he admitted. “Perhaps not.”
Her gaze searched his face. “You disapprove.”
“No.”
“You have a very disapproving silence.”
The hint of a smile touched his lips. “So you have informed me.”
Her smile returned, smaller this time. “Then you approve?”
He looked at her—the wind-touched curls, the hope she did not quite trust, the bravery she wore as though it cost nothing—and thought of every man in London who might see only red hair, blue eyes, and a pretty solution to his own ambitions.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that Lady Vanover is correct. A ball is efficient.”
Miss Montfort stared at him for one beat. Then she laughed. “Good heavens. That is the least romantic thing anyone has ever said about a ball.”
Gabriel should not have liked the sound. “I was not aware romance was the purpose.”
“No,” she said, her smile fading. “I suppose it isn’t.”
Relief should have followed. Instead, the words settled uneasily in his chest.
She turned to go, then paused. “Oh, and Mr. Ashby?”
“Yes?”
“Lady Vanover says if you manage to secure us more time from Algernon, she will consider you one of the useful men.”
His brows lifted. “High praise?”
“From Bea? Practically a coronet.”
Then she was gone, taking all the light from the room with her.
Gabriel remained standing long after her steps faded down the hall.
On the desk, the Montfort accounts waited. His notebook lay open, the final line crossed through but still legible beneath the ink.
Conclude account upon settlement of urgent matters.
There was no hidden money. No generous heir. No tidy law to save them.
He had never spent more time—unpaid time at that—trying to find something, anything, to assist a client.
Unfortunately, the only things left were a looming date, a dim young viscount with an apparent taste for snuff, and Miss Montfort’s increasingly urgent need to marry.
Professionally speaking, Lady Vanover and Lady Pembroke’s assistance was a promising development.
So why did Gabriel hate it?