Page 20 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

The table around them dissolved into confusion as she grabbed her throat and stood. Someone’s chair scraped back. A woman’s voice rose in alarm at the other end of the table.

Gabriel did not think. He was on his feet and behind Rosalie’s chair before he had fully registered himself moving. One arm locked hard beneath her ribs as he pulled her against him, securing her there. He pulled once sharply, the length of the table watching in a silence broken only by Rosalie’s ragged, gasping breath as the grape finally came free and fell onto the floor.

For a moment, neither of them moved. His arm was still around her body, her back pressed against his chest. Her breath came in shaking gulps beneath his hand, and the whole dining room had gone silent, thirty pairs of eyes fixed on the Duke of Hartmere with his arms wrapped around Miss Winthrop in front of God, her parents—and Mr. Sinclair.

He did not release her immediately, and he wasn’t sure why. Her body slotted against his so perfectly it almost killed him. She was cold from shock. He could feel it through the fabric of her gown. He released the breath he had been holding and looked down at her, his eyes traveling the length of her neck, the slope of her shoulders. She had almost died in his arms—a second time, if he counted the fall from the terrace steps. Except this time, he had not kissed her.

Though he wanted to, very badly, the thought made him sick with hatred for himself and his wickedness.

“I... I am...” Miss Winthrop pulled away the instant breath allowed her, turning in his arms and prying herself out of his hold. Her eyes were bright with tears she was visibly fighting not to shed. “I am all right now. Thank you, Your Grace. I am ... Please, everyone, just...”

“Rosalie...” Lady Winthrop was already storming toward her.

“I must step outside for a moment,” Miss Winthrop said to no one and everyone. She fled the dining room without waiting for permission, her napkin still crumpled in one shaking hand.

Gabriel stood by her empty chair amid the wreckage, acutely aware of Beatrice Levant watching him from across the candles, and he understood with a sinking certainty that whatever was between him and Miss Winthrop was only just beginning.

Seven

After the ordeal, which was the only label fitting for that moment, Rosalie had been taken to a room so far away from the dining hall she couldn’t hear the other guests anymore.

It was small and cool—maybe a private room for moments of important intercourse—adjacent to Lord Peachey’s office. A single candle burned on a small table between two chairs, emitting a snaking tendril of smoke. They had laid her on a decorative chaise by the window and left her there with Lady Peachey’s housekeeper. The gentlewoman kept pressing a damp terrycloth to Rosalie’s head as though her brain had been the offending organ and not her windpipe—or her foolish heart.

“Really, Mrs. French, I am... perfectly well,” Rosalie said for what felt like the tenth time. “It was only a grape, and it came up whole. I feel mostly all right.”

“Mostly all right, mostly all right...” the housekeeper repeated with a little more derision than Rosalie’s pride could handle at that moment. “You sit here a while longer, Miss Winthrop, and let the color come back to your face. Her ladyship will not abide you swooning on the way home. Lady Winthrop begged us to take the best care of you, and that’s what I will do.”

Rosalie did not dare to argue any more. She stared at the candle until her eyes burned, trying in vain not to think about the last quarter of an hour.

A bead of cold water cut a path down the side of her face. She had choked in front of all the guests, in front of her parents and Mr. Edmund Sinclair, and worse still, in front of the Duke of Hartmere himself. Infinitely worse, he had wrapped his arm beneath her ribs and pulled her against him as though he had done it a hundred times before with a hundred different women; as though her body, the feminine body, belonged in the shape of his arms and always had.

She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and made herself stop thinking about the heat that had rushed through her. Her efforts lasted the length of a sigh before she was thinking about it again.

Not thirty seconds before it happened, he had asked her whether she had kissed Mr. Sinclair. She could still feel the deliberate warmth of his voice in her ear, the volume of his words coming low enough that no one else at the table could have caught them. The memory made her stomach tighten even now, sitting alone with a housekeeper and a damp rag on her face.

You are meant to be grateful that he did not let you die at the dinner table, she told herself sternly. No matter the measures he took to get there. What else was he supposed to do? Not touch you and hope the grape dislodged itself? His embrace was medical and sterile. It is your interpretation of the moment which has cast a disgraceful light on it.

A knock came at the door, and Rosalie’s body went rigid with dread—or something close to dread that felt a little more pleasant, but no less distressing. She guessed who was on the other side of the door and began composing what she meant to say to him: something tepid that would put the necessary distance back between them. The housekeeper waited for Rosalie to admit their visitor.

“Come in,” she said, her voice hoarse. She was already halfway out of the chaise when the door opened.

It was not the duke who appeared but Mr. Sinclair.

“Miss Winthrop, forgive the intrusion. I wished to see for myself that you were recovering. Your mother is occupied assuring Lady Peachey that her menu was not at fault, and your father is similarly engaged with His Lordship, and I thought... Well, I thought someone ought to come and ask how you are faring. We are all concerned about your wellbeing.”

Mr. Sinclair hovered in the doorway, looking visibly uncertain about whether he ought to enter, a candle of his own in one hand. His fine hair was messy, like he had just raked his hands through it. It endeared him to Rosalie despite her surprise at seeing him instead of someone else. An arrow of guilt loosed itself inside her at the goodness of his exercise and the fact that he had not come armed with questions or provocations, only a plume of light and a straightforward concern.

“Everything is all right,” she said, and this time the assurance came out steadier than it had with the housekeeper. “I am thoroughly embarrassed by everything that occurred at the table.... but I’m all right regardless.”

“There is no cause for embarrassment,” he stressed, his face a blank canvas. “None whatsoever, in so far as it concerns me.”

Mr. Sinclair came a few steps into the room, careful to leave the door open behind him. Rosalie acknowledged the gesture's correctness and was grateful. The housekeeper greeted the gentleman politely and handed Rosalie the damp cloth, stepping away to linger by the door.

“I have seen far worse happen at much more serious houses than this,” he said, turning to Mrs. French to add, “You shall not repeat that to the lord and lady of the house... My own aunt once set her sleeve on fire reaching over some candles at court. Nobody speaks of it now except our family, and we remember it only because she brings it up herself every year with considerable relish. I think it pleases her to have left her mark on the court. These moments are inevitable in life. One presses on, makes something of them.”

Despite everything, Rosalie felt her mouth curve into a smile as she leaned back in the chaise. “That is a very generous thing to invent, if you invented it, purely to make me feel less ridiculous about my predicament.”

“I assure you, I did not invent it. I wish I had invented it. It is a better story than most of the stories in my social arsenal. But I will confess I brought it out this evening because I suspected you needed to hear something to assuage your unnecessary embarrassment.”