Page 24 of The Companion’s Secret

The flowers were no less extraordinary than the ribbon that bound them. Creamy petals ordered themselves precisely around feathery yellow stamens, a golden treasure at the heart of each sweetly scented blossom.

Camellias.

A rare bloom in this part of the world, he had said, the sound of her name on his lips as real to her now as the touch of those lips against her skin.

She glimpsed a card tucked amid the shining green leaves, and her fingers trembled—drat that coffee!—as she withdrew it carefully from its nest. A calling card. The Marquess of Ashborough’s calling card. With a calm she did not feel, she palmed the rectangle of stiffened paper, feeling its sharp corners bite into her hand, and ascended the stairs to her room.

Safely within the privacy of its four walls, she admired the nosegay once more. What had he intended to buy with these flowers? Her silence? Or something else entirely?

She turned her attention to his card as if it could reveal the answer to her question. Embossed lettering rose from it, the print surprisingly plain. Slowly, she turned it over, wondering whether it bore any message even as she despised her curiosity.

Just one word, scrawled by a confident hand.

Gabriel.

Her eyelids fell as she lifted the card almost to her lips. Carried in his breast pocket, against the heat of his chest, it had absorbed his unique fragrance. From the ivory paper wafted the warm scents of tobacco and bergamot and something she could not identify. It smelled like…an invitation to sin.

Her pulse ticked upward and her eyes popped open, but she did not immediately thrust away that invitation.

She had no illusions about why he fascinated her. He was unlike anyone she had ever known, except perhaps in the pages of the sort of novels she generally denied reading. Powerful. Free to do as he pleased. Dismissive of the world’s scorn. He represented everything she had ever desired. He could give her a taste of things that she, as a woman, had always been denied.

Oh, but every story ever told taught that the price of such knowledge was dear. Too dear. Her hand dropped to her side. She could not, would not, pay it.

Still, might she not enjoy the flowers while they lasted? Like as not, Gabriel had had no hand in their purchase, but had given the task to some servant. And as the petals faded and fell, they would serve as a reminder of the fleeting nature of men’s affections.

At the washstand, she filled a tumbler with water; the flowers’ thick green leaves would disguise its chipped edge. Seating herself at the worktable that filled one wall of her narrow room, she began painstakingly to unpick the exquisite poppy-colored ribbon and arrange the stems in the makeshift vase.

* * * *

Gabriel’s knock on the door to Trenton House was opened by the butler.

“You are expected, my lord.”

By whom? Gabriel had not known himself that he would call until the hubbub of sorting and packing had driven him from his rooms, and his restless feet had carried him into Mayfair. And he did not delude himself into thinking that Felicity was any more eager for his visit than he was to make it.

Disapproval radiated from the butler as he bowed Gabriel inside and led him stiffly up the stairs to the doorway of an unfamiliar room. Before Gabriel could decide whether the servant’s demeanor simply inhered to his species or was directed toward him specifically, the man bowed once more. “Wait here, my lord. I shall inform her ladyship you have arrived.”

He opened the door to reveal a sitting room. Lady Merrick’s, he guessed, by the plump chairs and primrose draperies. More knickknacks than books lined the shelves on either side of an empty marble fireplace. And before the window stood a delicately carved lady’s writing desk with a matching chair, whose occupant did not raise her head from her work.

“Oh, Miss Burke,” the butler said. “I did not know you were here. Lord Ashborough has come to call.”

If the butler’s voice, or the sound of Gabriel’s name, produced any reaction, she did not show it. No start of recognition. No turn of her head, even, until she had put the point to whatever she was writing and laid her pen aside. When she rose, she stayed standing before the escritoire, her back to it, her ink-stained hands folded demurely in front of her. “Then you must tell Lady Merrick he has arrived, Wafford,” she prompted.

With another stiff bow in Gabriel’s direction, the butler left.

For a moment, Gabriel stood in the doorway and simply soaked in the sight of her, a chiaroscuro of bright and dark, her head tilted slightly to the side, the light from the window behind limning her body and shooting through wisps of her black hair like stars in the night sky. Then he stepped closer, skirting a table with curving legs whose marquetry top was almost entirely obscured by an enormous bouquet of rather ordinary-looking spring flowers arranged incongruously in a crystal vase.

Another three steps and he could see that her spectacles had slid down to perch at the end of her nose. A smudge of ink along her cheekbone, near her ear, suggested that impatient fingers had brushed away an errant lock of hair, perhaps more than once. Scattered across the desktop behind her lay a half dozen sheets of closely printed paper, with lines scored through and words crammed in between to replace them. At this distance, he could not read what she had written, but she caught the direction of his gaze and shifted nonetheless, blocking his view.

“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” he said, returning his eyes to her face.

Camellia dipped her head to acknowledge his apology but did not demure as ladies often did. Obviously, she had been hard at work, and she resented his interruption. She made no move to sit down again nor offered him a chair. She did not curtsy. He did not bow.

Hang good manners. He wanted to kiss her, and not just on the hand.

And he was used to getting what he wanted.

While he struggled to bring his basest impulses under control, she spoke. “I must thank you for the flowers.” The cadence of her voice curled through him like soft music. “Your servant must have been put to some trouble to find camellias in London, in May.”