Page 46 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

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...

He looked down at her hand, resting on the bench, supporting her weight. Although he knew what he would say next, he longed to take her hand and remove her glove slowly, to press each fingertip to his mouth and kiss her skin, to run over the knuckles she worked when she was worried, and feel her pulse at her wrist with those same accursed lips.

“Very well,” he said instead. “Then let us be friends.”

Hartmere House was quiet by the time Gabriel let himself into the study, quiet enough that his own footsteps sounded too loud. He lit a candle rather than call for a footman, poured himself a drink, and sat down at his desk with the concept of friendship fresh in his mind.

“Peter,” he wrote, and crossed it out, and started again. “Cousin...”

“I have reconsidered our conversation. You will have one hundred and fifty pounds by the end of the week. Consider it the last such conversation we shall have on the matter, epistolary and/or verbal, not because I begrudge Margaret her physician, whom I have already engaged and shall continue to pay for myself, but because you must be taught to fish, or buy a rod, or however else the saying goes, but not today.”

He read it back once, decided it was nonsensical, and sent it anyway. He was too tired to write anything else.

Gabriel had just sealed the letter when the door opened without a knock, which meant it could only be one person in the house who still felt entitled to that liberty.

“You are meant to be asleep,” he said without looking up, putting the stamp back in its drawer where it rolled around, before he closed it.

“I am meant to be a great many things which I am not.” Elisabeth entered slowly, wrapped in a shawl the color of ripened wheat, her hair loose and gray down her back. “I heard you return when I was reading. You are usually quieter when you come home ashamed of yourself. And you usually return much later, do you not?”

“I am early, perhaps. But I am not ashamed of myself.”

“Not even a little?” She settled in the chair opposite his desk and looked around his study. “Perhaps you are loud when you are happy instead. I had wondered what it would be like to find you like this, insouciant.” She smiled up at him. “It suits you to be carefree.”

Still holding his quill, he sat down, turning it between his fingers. “You came all this way at this hour to assess the magnitude of my cares?”

“No. I came because I cannot sleep, and I confess I am too old and too curious to let the mystery of your early return go unexamined. We are both like that. Except you are not old, and have much life yet to live.” She tilted her head at him. “What did she say to you?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

When she made a displeased sound, he exhaled through his nose.

“The baroness told her about Marcus,” he admitted.

His aunt’s face changed, softening at the edges. He heard her chair creak under her as she leaned backward. “Ah...”

To his surprise, she reached over and helped herself to the claret he had poured and not drunk.

“She is good for you, I think, if she can cast you into melancholy in this way, and if she asks about your life’s history.” She laughed at his confused expression, eyeing the letter he had sealed but not mentioning it. He assumed she must have known what it was. He had told her about Peter before leaving. “And then draw you out of your melancholy and make you kinder. A good wife is like that—a whetstone for your spirit.”

“I would rather an anvil to be hit over the head with.” He poured himself a fresh glass. “You do not know her enough to make such declarations, regardless.”

“I traveled with her. I know the parents, which tells me a lot about a person, more often the sons, but sometimes the daughters.” She went quiet, tapping her nails against her glass. “Though I will say, I do worry, watching the two of you. You have Mr. Sinclair on the one hand and yourself on the other, and I wonder sometimes whether she is playing you both against each other...”

He felt outraged on Rosalie’s behalf. “She is not playing me against anyone,” he declared, putting the stopper back into the bottle with more force than was required.