Page 70 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “Sit with me and tell me everything. You need not protect me from the truth.”

Rosalie stepped into her mother’s embrace just as Anna appeared at the top of the stairs. She joined them, and together they went into the nearest drawing room and huddled by the fire. Rosalie told them everything from the beginning: the terrace, the mistaken kiss, the false courtship proposed to ease Elisabeth’s grief and unsettle Sinclair, every lie she had told, all the way through to the receipt on the library floor and the kiss she had not been able to stop herself from giving him even after.

When it was done, Rosalie was spent but unable to cry. She lay her head in Anna’s lap while her sister stroked her hair, quiet for the first time in her life. The quiet stretched on until it was broken by a weary sigh from their mother, who came to kneel beside Rosalie.

“You must see that he loves you,” Lady Winthrop said. “Whatever else is untrue, that much is real.”

Rosalie buried her face in the folds of Anna’s skirts. “He is leaving England. A man who loved me would not leave.”

“Men do foolish things when they are frightened of what they want.” Her mother took her hand and drew her into a sitting position. “Your father nearly sailed to India once, you know, the month before he proposed to me. He booked the passage and paid for it... I only learned of it years later, when you were born, when he told me he was tired of praying in secret for my forgiveness.”

Rosalie smiled sadly. She could picture her father doing that, and yet it did not console her as much as it should have. Her father and Gabriel were not the same man.

“Fear makes fools of the best of them,” Lady Winthrop continued. “I am not defending the duke. I could not defend a man for lying to me, to my face, and for steering my daughter towards disgrace. I am only telling you what I see, and what I have seen in men before. They are not like us.”

Anna was considerably less generous. “I do not care what he feels... I care what he has done, which is to toy with my sister’s heart and then plan his escape without so much as a word of warning.”

Lady Winthrop widened her eyes. “Now, Anna...”

“Whatever his reasons or his feelings, Rosalie does not owe him the patience to sort them out.”

“But she must be happy,” Lady Winthrop said.

“Yes, she must.” Anna rose and walked over to the bell to call for more tea. “That is precisely my point.”

They sat together a while longer, the three of them, until the fire had burned low. Lady Winthrop finally rose, kissing each daughter’s head before she went up to bed, murmuring something about checking on their father before she slept.

“His recovery will be slow but steady now,” she said at the door. “Doctor Brown is cautiously hopeful, though he has said plainly that the baron will likely need a gentler pace of living for whatever years remain to him... a life smaller than the one he’d led before... fewer late nights and indulgences... and no travel... But I think we can manage. Good night, my doves. I will see you in the morning.”

When their mother had gone, Anna turned to Rosalie in the quiet. She leaned forward and looked deeply into Rosalie’s eyes.

“Do you think the Duke of Hartmere could ever love you the way our mother loves our father?” she asked, without any of her earlier sharpness. “Do you think he could love you truly, completely, past all sense and reason, sacrificing parts of himself in exchange for parts of you? Do you think that he could care for you like that?”

“I do not know,” she said honestly. “I thought I did... an hour ago. Now I am not certain of anything.”

Anna nodded solemnly. “In that case, you should come to Scotland with me,” she said finally. “Not forever, of course, but only for a while. Let London and all its complications fall away for a time and give yourself somewhere quiet to decide what you actually want. And I should like you there, too. I know William would be glad for the company. Consider it. That is all I ask for tonight.”

Rosalie looked at her sister, and thought of Dumfries, and William, and the child not yet born—and of the sad possibility of a life entirely apart from Gabriel and everything he had said to her that night.

“I will consider it,” Rosalie replied. “I have a great deal to consider.”

“You do,” Anna agreed. “But chief of all, you must consider your own good heart.”

Twenty-Four

Gabriel had attended many services at St. George’s over the years as Duke of Hartmere, and before he had come into the title. Christenings, funerals, the occasional sermon as a boy. But he had never once stood inside the church without a sense of foreboding: that something about the occasion heralded someone else’s doom.

Standing at the top of the steps, he looked past the colonnade at the rest of Hanover Square, confident in the fact that the present day was not going to prove the exception to that rule.

“Ah. They told me you had arrived early,” James observed, exiting his carriage with his brothers. They greeted Gabriel and then headed into the church, leaving Gabriel and James alone. His friend looked very gentlemanly in his wedding clothes. “I did not think a wedding could unsettle you more than it has unsettled me, and I am the one getting married...”

“How happy we are for you,” Gabriel said, not meaning to sound as sardonic as he had. “I am pleased for you.”

“You know, somehow I believe you.” James smiled and looked across the square. “But you still half look like you expect a hearse to arrive instead of the carriage carrying my bride.”

Gabriel laughed softly. “Can you blame me?”

James’s mouth twitched. “The Warwick family insisted. I would not have married here by choice, given this is where they are... But I ought to have asked you first, made a point of denying them with a lie, like you would have done for me.”