Page 68 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

He led her into the nearby library in silence, sneaking through the house unseen, where a fire was already lit. He closed the door behind them, the propriety between them already so compromised that a closed door hardly mattered anymore.

“You know that you should not have come like this,” he said, once the door was shut. “Do you have any notion of what could be said of you if anyone saw your arrival?”

“I know precisely what could be said of me.” She pulled off her sodden gloves, her hands just steady enough to peel back the fabric. Her cloak came off next. “But they will speak about me regardless after today.”

Unsure what she meant, he took her cloak and draped it by the fire to dry. Her teeth chattered, and she wrapped her arms around herself. He had every desire, even now, to pull her close and guard her against the cold, to wipe the wet strands of auburn hair out of her face.

If she noticed his state of undress, she did not mention it. He took a blanket from the chairs before the fire and wrapped it around her shoulders, his heart skipping a beat as his fingers brushed her neck. He paused as her lips moved to say something.

“My courtship with Mr. Sinclair has ended.”

Gabriel blinked. “What?”

“I ended my courtship with Mr. Sinclair,” she repeated, like it was entirely expected. She blinked, her lashes still wet with rain, the fire turning her pale skin gold. “He loves someone else and has for years. The affair was published in the papers this morning... I would not spend my life as second best in my husband’s eyes when I have already spent so much of it feeling second best everywhere else. Don’t you see? It had to be done...”

She said it without self-pity. Gabriel stepped back, slowly unraveling her confession. She and Sinclair are through, he thought. And she ended the courtship herself. But was she not in love with him? Why does she not seem to care?

“He hurt you,” Gabriel said, “disgraced you⁠—”

“No,” Rosalie interrupted, shaking her head. “He could not hurt me. I never loved him. He deserves to be happy. And I deserve...” Her face was alight with hope and trepidation. “I deserve to pursue what my heart desires, just like he does, even if he is a man and I am a woman. I am not sorry. I only wanted you to know what had happened before you learned it elsewhere.”

He did not know what to say to that. Something enormous and terrifying settled over him: a door closing somewhere behind them, their courtship’s agreed ending no longer available, Sinclair no longer waiting at the far end of it to receive her.

“And... I wanted you to know something else too,” she said, quieter now. “This courtship of ours, this arrangement... it has meant a great deal to me, Gabriel. It has meant more than I think you intended when you proposed it.” She lifted her chin, though her voice shook. “Did any of it ever become real to you...? Any part of it at all...?”

Gabriel took another step back, his head spinning. Genuinely, thoroughly terrified. Like he was sixteen years old again and watching his father’s coffin being lowered into the ground. Like he was even younger, completely blindsided by the news that he would never see Marcus again.

He understood then, with a sudden, aching clarity, that he had fallen in love with Rosalie Winthrop. Somewhere between a masked terrace and a meadow full of lavender. Somewhere between then and now. She was standing in front of him, unattached and unclaimed, deserving a husband who would not lie to her the way Sinclair had lied.

And I do not know, he thought, whether I am capable of being that man. Can I promise her to be honest, when I have spent my whole life around a promise to never love anyone, at a graveside? Can I trust myself not to disappoint her the way I was disappointed, not through unfaithfulness but by leaving, by not guaranteeing I could be there for her, forever?

“Gabriel,” she whispered. “Just tell me⁠—”

Before he quite knew what he was doing, he closed the distance between them and took her face in his hands, wet and cold, and he kissed her. It was not careful and half-permitted like before, but whole and unguarded, the culmination of everything he had spent months, years, refusing to admit to himself, arriving all at once through his mouth instead of his voice.

She made a startled sound against him and then kissed him back with an urgency that matched his own, her hands fisting in the front of his shirt. They stumbled together toward the desk, his hip catching the edge of it hard enough that a stack of books toppled from the corner and hit the floor with a scattering crash.

Rosalie pulled back breathlessly, glancing down at the mess. He leaned forward and trapped her mouth again, kissing her so hard he did not realize she had stopped kissing him back. His mouth went to her neck, breathing her in, pulling her against him.

“What is that?” she said, her voice broken.

Gabriel drew back and looked where she was staring. Among the fallen books, face-up on the library floor, lay a folded paper. It was a receipt, the ink still crisp, for two cabin passages aboard a ship from Dover to Calais.

Rosalie looked up at him, confusion clouding the bright, heavy longing that had been in her face a moment before.

“What is that?” she repeated.

He could have lied. He reached for a lie automatically, an easy deflection or a joke. But he had just asked himself whether he could be a man who did not disappoint her. He could not begin now, before he even had the chance to prove himself.

His fingers pressed into her sides, the taste of her still on his lips, as he told her the truth: “James and Tiffany are married in a week. After the wedding... I had intended to leave England, with my aunt, for France...”

Twenty-Three

He may as well have shot her for the amount his declaration hurt. Rosalie clutched her chest, nails biting into her skin. She could not look away from the receipt on the ground, the books, travel novels about France, scattered all around it.

“Ros...”

“Don’t call me that,” she ordered, shaking. He was still holding her, his breath ghosting against her face. Her lips were swollen from their kiss, her body tight and uncomfortable in a way only Gabriel had ever made her feel.