Gabby nodded, and smiled, and murmured polite nothings, and blushed whenever bodices were mentioned. She tried to ignore the fact that her throat tightened every time the door opened. Quill was nowhere to be seen. It was rare for him to appear until the evening, but surely today he would join them for luncheon?
“Well, you got away with it, gel,” Lady Sylvia said after the throngs of visitors had trickled to nothing and the room finally emptied. “Thanks to Her Grace. That girl is a right ‘un, I’ll tell you that.”
The door opened once again and Gabby’s heart jumped into her throat. Here she was, besieged by trouble, and she kept being distracted by memories of Quill’s hungry kisses and the way he groaned in his throat when she—She took a deep breath.
But it was Peter, not Quill, who entered. Gabby could barely meet his eyes. What would Peter think of her if he knew what she had been doing with his brother? She was jilting him. She was going to humiliate him in front of the entire ton, given that he introduced her to all his friends as his fiancée only the night before.
She wanted to die of mortification. Even more strongly, she wanted to burrow into the fierce warmth of Quill’s arms and remember why she was doing such an unladylike and scandalous action as marrying her fiancé’s brother.
The thought made her shiver again. In fact, what with one memory and another, she had spent the entire morning with a feverish pulse, and ill humor was beginning to creep over her.
Quill entered the dining room just as the rest of the family was sitting down, so Gabby assumed that he had not spoken to Peter. And yet, by halfway through the meal, the tension between the brothers was so clear that Gabby changed her mind.
The group was idly discussing a large fire that had destroyed a brew house and a public house in Argyle Street, suspected to be the work of a disgruntled patron of the public house who was refused a meat pie.
“There are two questionable items in the tale as it stands,” Gabby pointed out. “The first is the unlikelihood that a public house would refuse to give anyone a meat pie, and the second is that, in such an unlikely event, a customer would care enough to actually burn the premises. Why not simply buy a pie from another establishment?”
Quill’s eyes rested on her with something warmer than the appreciation one might show for a logical point. Gabby frowned at him in a warning that he ought to be more reserved with his attentions.
Peter was vigorously defending his account. “Apparently there was only one meat pie left, and the landlord had promised to save it for the Watch, or rather, for the Watch’s wife.” He smiled at Gabby and said, just a trifle ponderously, “We ought not to censure given that the recipient of the meat pie was a fair woman.”
Quill snorted. “Troy burned for the love of a beautiful woman. Are you saying, Peter, that London would have been well lost in order to satisfy the appetite of the Watch’s wife?”
“The landlord ought to be commended for placing his promise to a lady above mercantile concerns such as planks and mortar.”
Quill answered Peter with such a mocking smile that Gabby had the feeling that the conversation would have disintegrated into a family quarrel had not Codswallop appeared with the next course.
After the meal Quill disappeared before she could question him, and it wasn’t until five o’clock when he sauntered—yes, sauntered—into the parlor and asked Gabby if she would care for a ride in Hyde Park. It took all her fortitude not to scream her profound irritation to the skies.
Instead, she managed a stifled “yes” and went to change her clothing.
Quill looked after his betrothed curiously. Did she seem just a trifle disgruntled? She appeared to be a moody sort of girl. Sensitive, they called it when women were cantankerous.
Peter leapt to Quill’s side and dragged him over to the windows, out of Lady Sylvia’s hearing. “Well?” he asked eagerly. “When are you going to ask her?”
Quill looked down at his brother. “What in God’s name did you do to your hair?” he asked. “Is that pomade?”
Peter almost stamped his foot. “As I said, when are you going to ask her? I thought you planned to do so at breakfast. I didn’t dare speak a word to Gabby all day. I am quite certain that she noticed my incivility.”
“I asked her this morning,” Quill said, staring out the windows. It was all he could do to maintain a casual tone. He felt like shouting it. Gabby—beautiful, luscious Gabby—had agreed to marry him. A crippled man. A silent merchant. A man who had given up fashionable company for the inelegant world of trade.
Actually, that was the problem that had absorbed him all day. She didn’t know what a bad bargain she was getting.
“Well?” It was Peter who was almost shouting.
Quill had spent the day wrestling with his conscience. “She will give me an answer this afternoon,” he said negligently, as if the most important conversation of his life was naught more than a simple yes or no.
“Oh, God, it’s all over,” Peter groaned, raking his hand through the locks that had taken Rinsible forty-five minutes and a quantity of pomade to arrange. “If she put you off, then she was trying to think of a way to let you down easily. I knew Gabby would never take you.”
“She seemed encouraging this morning,” Quill said, wrenching his mind away from a memory of Gabby’s throaty little moans.
“She’s a nice woman. I am certain that she will refuse you gently. I told you, Quill, under different circumstances I would enjoy her company.” Peter sat down and stared straight ahead. “I think I will just go ahead and do it, Quill. I can’t move to America. They don’t…it’s full of savages. Impossible. I’ll just marry the woman. At least she seems to have escaped utter ruin, thanks to the Duchess of Gisle’s dropping bodice.”
Peter roused himself from dejection enough to look up at his brother. “I say, Quill, do you think it was a little odd that Her Grace’s bodice took the plunge just after Gabby’s?”
To Quill’s mind, it was not odd but obvious. Sophie had moved into the number-two spot on his secret list of treasured females, and there were only two females on it. Although he did maintain an errant affection for a milkmaid named Anne, who divested him of his virginity some fifteen years before.
He shrugged.
Peter was used to his unresponsiveness and didn’t even notice. “So Gabby didn’t give you an answer yet?”
Quill shrugged again. Of course, Gabby had said that she would marry him. But that was before he decided in all conscience that he had to detail what a bad bargain he truly was. Smelling of the shop, and dragging a gimpy leg. But most important, there were the migraines.
“Well, just give me a wink at supper,” Peter said gloomily, straightening his neckcloth and heading for the door. “As I said, you needn’t worry about me. I’ve decided to take my medicine and marry the chit.”
Codswallop appeared at the door. “Miss Jerningham awaits, Mr. Dewland.”
Quill stepped out of the salon and found Gabby pulling on her gloves in the entranceway. She was tightly buttoned into a pelisse of a deep rose color, and all her gorgeous hair was tucked away under a tight bonnet. She cast him an impatient look. Definitely she was in a cantankerous mood.
His curricle was pulled up before the house. Quill deftly helped Gabby up onto the seat and then followed. He waved off his groomsman and took the reins himself.
It was odd, Gabby thought to herself, how different it was in the carriage without Phoebe. Or perhaps it was because when Quill drove her from the docks, she was so much in love with Peter. She hadn’t noticed the way Quill’s muscled thighs took up most of the seat. But now …
She cleared her throat. “Have you informed your brother of our engagement?”
“No. I thought I should be certain that you wish to marry me first.”
Gabby blinked. Hadn’t she made that clear in the morning, rolling around on the rug like a trollop? “We agreed to marry,” she said, her voice stiff.
“I thought perhaps we should discuss
the issue more rationally,” Quill replied smoothly, turning the curricle into Hyde Park.
Hot rage was rising in Gabby’s throat. He had tumbled her around on the floor, and now he wanted to back out of the marriage? She was no idiot. He had decided to renege. Probably the tumbling had convinced him that he didn’t want damaged goods, as Lady Sylvia had put it. Well, she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. She managed to school her voice into calmness.
“Certainly. What in particular do you wish to discuss?”
“I feel that I should clarify what sort of a husband I will be,” Quill replied.
There it was: he was going to say that she deserved a better man, and therefore he was breaking off the engagement for her own good. There was nothing she hated more than a cowardly approach.
“Do go on.” After all, it wasn’t as if she had proposed to him. She would have been perfectly happy married to Peter. Still would be happy, Gabby thought savagely.
“A gentleman does not engage in the activities with which I fill my day, Gabby,” Quill was saying. “I have invested in several English firms, an activity that is anathema to my father, for example.”
Gabby felt a flush of triumph. He couldn’t use this as an excuse! “My father spends his days exporting goods to the Netherlands and China,” she said, her tone cool. “I was not raised to believe that a gentleman should spend his time dawdling about the streets waiting for his next meal to be served.”
Quill paused. He’d lectured himself all morning about the necessity to be absolutely truthful with Gabby regarding the various infirmities stemming from his horse-riding accident. To be blunt about it, he had to tell her about his postcoital migraines.
“I would like to be very clear about the outcome of the accident I suffered six years ago,” Quill said. Now that it had come to the point, he was remarkably reluctant to give her a real reason to back out of the engagement. “Doctor Trankelstein feels that I will always have a limp when tired, for example. I cannot dance. And there are other limitations—”
Gabby turned her beautiful eyes up to his. He felt a shock. Could they be flaming with anger? Surely not.
“Your limp does not concern me, Quill.”
He opened his mouth and she cut him off. “Neither do any other bodily ailments that ensued from your accident.” There! That shut him up, Gabby thought. But the persistent beast was continuing. He truly has changed his mind since the morning, Gabby thought with some pain.
“I feel obliged to warn you—”
But Gabby interrupted him again. “You needn’t go on,” she said, her tone airy and light. “I realize that you have decided to…throw me over, and I would rather not discuss it. After all, I have a positive embarrassment of riches. At the moment I have two fiancés. I shall quite happily marry Peter.” She almost dusted her hands to emphasize the finality of her comment, but she clutched them together instead. Something about the way Quill’s face had darkened during her little speech made her heart skip a beat.
“Do you dare to imply that I am trying to break off our engagement?”
Gabby nodded.
“I would never do such a thing.” Quill’s voice was thunderous.
Gabby suddenly realized her mistake. Once again she had insulted the English sense of propriety. She had offended Quill by implying that he wished to break off their engagement. A gentleman never spurned a lady—he forced the lady to break off the engagement instead.
She placed a gloved hand on his sleeve. “Quill, as friends, can’t we speak truthfully to each other?”
Quill stared at her in some bewilderment. He didn’t want her to speak truthfully if she was going to gibber on about having two fiancés and it not mattering which she married. She had one fiancé. And he was it. And she was going to have him as a husband too. After plaguing him all day, his conscience had gone silent. She was his.
He scowled at her. “Go ahead, then,” he barked.
Gabby bit her lip. He looked just as angry as Peter had when she tried to kiss him in public. Truly, English gentlemen gave absurd credence to their rules of conduct.
“All I mean to say,” she said, as reasonably as possible, “is that given our friendship, you needn’t pretend that you still wish to marry me. You needn’t try to find ways to make me jilt you. I completely understand.”
There was a sick pain in her heart that belied her statement, but she’d think about that later. The important thing now was to preserve her dignity as much as possible, given that she’d just been thrown over. Luckily, the only person who knew about their brief engagement was Lady Sylvia, since they had decided not to disclose her change of fiancés to morning callers.
The horses were trotting down a lane on the north side of Hyde Park. Quill pulled on the reins, put on the brake, and tucked the reins into the curricle rail, without saying another word.
Gabby was feeling quite sick to her stomach now and would much rather return to the house than continue this unpleasant discussion. She expressed this desire in a slightly querulous tone.
Satisfied that his geldings were peacefully at a standstill, Quill turned his large body toward Gabby, which caused his thigh to press against her leg. Gabby flushed. It was embarrassing to remember how she had clung to his body that morning. No wonder he had rethought their marriage.
When Quill didn’t say anything immediately, Gabby took a deep breath and repeated herself. “If you wouldn’t mind, I should very much like to return to the house.”
The traffic in the park was gradually increasing as the hour of six o’clock drew near and London gentlefolk turned out to admire themselves—at least those who braved a chill. The snap in the air had given Gabby’s cheeks a pink glow that made her look as delectable as an apple tart, to Quill’s mind.
He had registered the fact that she leapt at the chance to break off their engagement. Not that he was going to let her get away with it. Quill was used to setbacks. They happened frequently in business endeavors and only made him the more determined to gain whatever it was he wanted. However, there was no reason to further blacken Gabby’s reputation by jerking her onto his lap in public and kissing her until she begged him to marry her.
That could wait for the evening.
Without bothering to say another word, he untucked the reins, loosed the brake, and deftly turned the horses back into the circular drive.
Gabby swallowed hard. For a moment she had thought that he was angry enough to kiss her. But he must have caught himself, remembering that he had got what he wanted: he was a free man once more. She stared at the flicking ears of the horses, trying hard to calm the furious misery in her heart. Luckily she still had her first fiancé. It was providential, like keeping one’s money until the milk had been tasted. Now that her second fiancé had turned sour, she hadn’t really lost anything.
Except that the lump in her throat told her that there had been an irrational—and quite stupid—transfer of affections. To put it in a nutshell, she wanted rather desperately to marry Quill, and she didn’t give a fig whether she married Peter or not. And to make matters worse, she thought that Peter probably felt the same about her.
She pressed her lips together hard. You will not cry, she told herself. You thought you were in love with Peter only yesterday, for goodness sake.
Quill cast her a sideways glance. She had a queer, pinched look around her eyes, his Gabby did. And then he remembered a line of Peter’s, something to the effect that Patrick Foakes had convinced everyone that he was madly in love with Lady Sophie by throwing civility to the winds.
He stopped the curricle, pulling it over to the right once again.
“Quill! I should very much like to return to Dewland House now!” His future wife spoke in a regrettably shrill voice.
When he was finished setting the brake, Quill turned to Gabby and dragged off his gloves.
Gabby’s eyes darted to his bare hands and then back to his face.
Without a word he reached out and took her left hand. He be
nt his head and began to painstakingly unbutton the small pearl buttons at her wrist.
Gabby stared at his tousled hair. What the devil was he doing? He tossed her left glove to the floor of the curricle and began on the buttons of the right. Gabby looked up, but when she caught the eyes of a stranger passing in a carriage, she looked back at Quill’s head. He tossed her right glove to the floor.
It was shockingly intimate, the touch of his bare hands on hers. Still without speaking, Quill drew her hands to his mouth and placed a kiss on each palm. His mouth lingered, velvet soft, slipping to her wrist. Gabby shivered as a flush of heat swept down her legs.
One hand rounded her shoulders, slid down her back, leaving a path of molten nerves behind it. Gabby heard Quill’s breath catch in his throat as the hand swooped under her bottom, paused for a moment, and then lifted her onto his lap in one sure movement.
His mouth came down on hers with a shudder. She opened her lips to his silent command, and he plunged into her mouth. Gabby didn’t notice that she was winding her fingers through his hair and holding his head in case he tried to stop kissing her. She had no idea that four separate carriages drove slowly past the curricle, their passengers eagerly assessing the boundaries of the scandal.
In fact, when Quill finally did pull back and say, his voice a hoarse whisper, “Do you still think I want to jilt you, Gabby mine?” she couldn’t find words to reply.
Instead, she leaned toward him and feathered her lips across his. He stopped the torment. A large hand jerked her head against his lips, held her there while his mouth ravaged hers.
But he drew back again, leaving her with choked breathing and a racing pulse. “Do you still think that I want to jilt you?” he repeated.
“No,” Gabby breathed.
“Then don’t ever say it again,” came a growling command. He had pushed off her bonnet, and her hair was falling around her ears.