Page 67 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

Her father had no idea that she had released Mr. Sinclair that very day, but maybe that did not matter. Maybe he did not even mean Sinclair, but every other man who might vie for her hand out of duty or convenience.

“Now... Put that down, and fetch Brown,” he murmured. “And let us never talk of this again.”

She kissed his hand, laughing and crying together in a way that made no sense, and went to find Anna and her mother to tell them the news about her father’s awakening.

Anna tasked herself with fetching the doctor while their mother went upstairs to see their father. When she returned to the drawing room, she drew Rosalie into a hug.

“What did he say to you?” Anna asked.

“He made me write down some verses he had been thinking about.”

“You are joking.” Anna sighed, rubbing her brows in defeat. “All this worrying, and the first thing he thinks to do is compose a poem. But there is something else, isn’t there? What is it?”

Rosalie smiled sadly, her heart still beating wildly. “I must leave, Anna. I have an important call to make.”

Twenty-Two

“No, I am afraid it still pulls at the shoulder, Your Grace. There are only so many alterations that can be made. Shall we consider ordering a new vest instead, in the silk?”

The tailor circled him for what felt like the twentieth time that evening, pinching the fabric above Gabriel’s shoulder blade. Gabriel watched him in the standing glass in his dressing room, restless from standing for so long. He reached for the wine on the dresser beside him and felt a pin poke into his side.

If the waistcoat could not be made to sit properly by the time of James’s wedding, he would simply attend in whatever else he already owned. Let Mr. Brand’s reputation suffer the consequences, if it meant he did not have to stand through another evening’s fitting.

Gabriel brought the glass to his lips. “You and your silk... Do what you like, Brand. If you believe there will be time to tailor something new alongside the other orders, by all means.”

Mr. Brand was a small, exacting man who had dressed three generations of Ashcrofts and consequently felt entitled to a certain amount of familiarity around their ilk. He sighed loudly and began unpinning the seam, pushing his spectacles up his nose.

“We will try again in the morning, and if that fails, we will draw the pattern for the new vest. And the traveling coat?”

Gabriel glanced at the fabric swatches nearby. “The brown kerseymere will do fine.”

“Certainly,” Mr. Brand replied. “Most fine.”

After a few more minutes of careful unpinning, and a promise to return at ten o’clock the following morning, Mr. Brand gathered his belongings and took his leave. Gabriel was left alone in shirtsleeves and stockinged feet, disinclined to bother with a proper coat for the rest of the evening.

He stepped down from the fitting stool and wandered to the window, glass in hand. The night had turned properly foul, rain coming down in long sheets, the street below slick and empty, the wind loud enough to rattle the panes.

His aunt was out for supper at some new hotel, one of the few engagements she’d accepted since the news of the baron. Gabriel found himself watching the street, some part of him braced for her return. He worried that another loss, on top of everything she had already lost, might finally make her realize how little good Gabriel could bring her.

The wine traced a bitter path down his throat. He rubbed his eyes, still sour from his evening at the club with James. Just then, a carriage turned into the drive.

He straightened, setting down his glass, already composing the mild but unserious scolding he intended for Elisabeth about traveling in such weather. But then the carriage lamp swung with the wind and threw its light across the drive. The figure climbing down from the vehicle was hooded, slight, and unaccompanied. And she was not his aunt at all.

It cannot be, he thought. That is Rosalie.

Gabriel was down the stairs and across the hall before the knocker had even sounded, wrenching the door open himself before a footman could reach it. She stood on his own front step in the rain, which had soaked through her cloak, her face pale and resolved in the lamplight hovering above them.

“What in God’s name...” He pulled her inside before she could answer anything, water pooling immediately on the marble at her feet. “Does your mother know where you are?”

“Perhaps she does know, if Anna has divined my intentions and told her.” She pushed the hood back from her face, unrepentant. She looked around the empty hall. “I did not want to wait for a chaperone, to have to fight for the right to be here tonight.”

He stared at her for a long moment, torn between fury at the sheer recklessness of her visit and his delight at seeing her again—until it dawned on him what had happened.

“Is the baron...”

“He is alive and awake. Or... He was awake for a time before I left. And he said something to me that I could not ignore. Might I stay a moment? Just to speak with you?”

This was not the Rosalie that he knew, and yet he could not bring himself to send her away. “Come then,” he said.