Page 12 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

“Oh, you have no idea.”

Rosalie pressed her lips together, torn between the urge to laugh and the urge to weep. “If you have come only to accuse me and then mock me for defending myself, Your Grace, I confess I do not see the purpose of this visit continuing.”

His eyes sharpened, as though she had said something unexpectedly interesting. “You are the first young lady in some years to ask me to leave rather than beg me to stay.”

“I would not comment on the company you have kept, Your Grace,” she managed to say before her head started pounding. “But, I beg you not to say a word of this to anyone, for my sake and yours. You desire, from the sounds of it, a marriage to me no more than I desire a marriage to you.”

He studied her for a moment longer, and she made herself hold still under his gaze, her chin lifted, though her heart was beating so hard she feared he might hear it.

“Very well, Miss Winthrop,” he said, stepping back. “I will trouble you no further this morning. But I hope you will forgive me if I confess that I am unsatisfied with these developments. I do not care for mysteries in the slightest. And there is a mystery here.” He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Why you let me suffer your kiss at all if you never intended to tell me the reason.”

The feeling had returned to her fingers, and she dug her nails into her hands. “I am afraid you shall have to learn to bear the unknown, Your Grace.”

He gave a real laugh at that, obviously startled out of him, and it changed his face so much that Rosalie forgot for a second to be afraid of him.

Without saying anything, he bowed and crossed to the door. He paused there with his hand on the frame. “For what it is worth, Miss Winthrop, I do not think you are a schemer necessarily. Which begs the question: What are you?”

He was gone before she could answer, his footsteps receding down the hall, his voice already low and pleasant again as he took his leave of her parents. Rosalie stood frozen by the hearth, her hands pressed flat against her skirts to keep them from trembling, and she thought, with a sinking, certain dread...

This will not be the last of him and me.

Four

“Ido wonder about you sometimes,” James said, later that day. “Though it is not my preferred pastime.”

Gabriel glanced up from his goblet. They were seated in an abandoned box at Almack’s assembly rooms now that the party was dying down. Below them, the dancers moved lazily through a country reel. Miss Warwick sat off to the side in pale yellow, glowing like a woman recently engaged as she watched the dancing.

“I beg your pardon?” Gabriel said, pulling himself out of his thoughts.

“Your mercurial moods, and that frown. They make me wonder,” James repeated.

Gabriel rubbed his eyebrows. “Could it be that I am frowning at the present company and its unfounded accusations of my moods?”

“You will have to try a great deal harder to insult me tonight.” James looked at his betrothed discreetly. “I have many reasons to be happy.”

Gabriel looked back at his ratafia. It was not the ratafia’s fault—even though it was hideous—nor James’s, nor even entirely his own that he had spent the better part of the day distracted by the memory of a mouth pressed against his in the dark.

He had gone to Winthrop House expecting to unmask a schemer, and had instead found a woman who seemed devastated by what she had done.

You know precisely why you cannot let it lie, said some unhelpful voice in his mind. You cannot abide a mystery, just like your aunt says. And if Miss Winthrop did not intend to kiss you to ensnare you, then why did she?

He pressed his lips together. He had told himself that his curiosity about Miss Rosalie Winthrop was merely the ordinary itch of an unsolved puzzle. But there was something more to her than he could explain, maybe the fear that she would use the kiss against him when the time was right for her, and the shame that he hadn’t seen her coming in the first place.

“What do you know about the Winthrops?” he asked loudly enough to draw Miss Warwick into the conversation. “I learned recently that my aunt encountered them while in Italy and stopped with them for weeks. Are they... a good breed?”

James and Miss Warwick turned in tandem, and James nodded, reading some invisible cue from his betrothed.

“My parents say they are fine enough people. The baron and his wife are a literary sort, though they are highly sociable. They are not often in London, which makes sense. Some of their connections are dubious and not exactly up to our standards.” She paused, tucking a ringlet behind her ear. “Has something happened between the Winthrops and Lady Chipping, Your Grace?”

“No...” Gabriel downed the rest of his drink and rose. “But a man should know who he has surrounded himself with, even peripherally.” He paused. “The daughter.”

“Annabelle?”

Gabriel scowled. “Who?”

“The daughter,” Miss Warwick replied. “Unless you meant the youngest, Miss Rosalie.” She looked sleepily back toward the dancers. “I have not spoken to her directly, Your Grace. She is very quiet, not like her elder sister at all. Annabelle—that was who I thought you meant—married last year. It was a good match. But Miss Rosalie? You never hear much about her.”

A quiet sister, often overlooked. Gabriel wondered whether her reputation factored into her plans. A desperate woman driven to desperate measures. She was beautiful in a funny way, so typically beautiful she was almost forgettable, except for her hair. There was a girlish softness in her face, but her eyes were clear, betraying every thought that crossed her mind. She didn’t need to resort to trapping gentlemen with looks like that.