He laughed softly. "Your faith is misplaced, but I'll try. For you, I'll try."
They went upstairs together, and Clara changed into his shirt while he turned his back, maintaining the illusion of propriety even as they prepared to share a bed. When they lay down together, Gabriel pulled her against him, her back to his chest, his arms wrapped around her as if he could keep her there through sheer will.
"Tell me something true," he said into the darkness.
"I'm terrified," Clara admitted.
"Of Aunt Agatha?"
"Of leaving you. Of staying. Of wanting things I can't have."
“What do you want?”
“Things that don’t exist,” Clara said softly. “A world where class doesn’t matter. Where scars are only marks on skin, not definitions of worth. Where a physician’s daughter could love a duke without the whole world demanding penance.”
“Is that what this is? Love?”
She was quiet for a long time, the silence full of her breathing, her heartbeat. “What else would make us both so utterly foolish?”
“Lust?”
“That too,” she said with a faint smile, “but lust alone wouldn’t make me risk everything just to spend three more weeks in your arms.”
“And love would?”
“Love makes people do impossible things.”
“Like proposing matrimony to a woman you’re not supposed to even speak to?”
“Like accepting comfort from a man you should never have allowed near you.”
Gabriel bent his head and pressed a kiss to her shoulder, his lips lingering against her skin as though he could taste the shape of the moment. “We’re a disaster.”
“A complete catastrophe.”
“A slow-burning wreckage.”
She gave a tremulous little laugh. “And yet here we are.”
They lay in silence then, listening to the old house creak and settle around them, the wind rattling the windowpanes like some impatient messenger of winter.
“Clara?”
“Mmm?”
“What if I fought for you? Really fought? Made it possible somehow?”
“How would you do that?”
“I am not privy to the answer. But I’m a duke. I ought to be able to find a way.”
“Being a duke is part of the problem, not the solution.”
“Then I’ll give it up.”
Clara rolled in his arms to look at him properly, her expression torn between disbelief and longing. “You can’t give up a dukedom.”
“Can’t I?” he asked, almost reckless. “I’ll name a cousin my heir, disappear to the continent, live in happy obscurity with the woman I…” He stopped.
