Chapter 18

Gabriel was beginning to fear that he would never succeed in banishing her from his waking thoughts and from the dreams and fantasies that tormented him. He sat in his study, having had enough of the majority of his guests for now, and he must have been betraying some unusual agitation, for the dogs sat there regarding him with what he could have sworn were anxious expressions. He stroked them both, and talked to them in the foolish way people, even dukes, spoke to their dogs when they were alone with them, but it scarcely helped his inner turmoil.

To his consternation she had refused him, in no uncertain terms too, and in his hurt – he didn't know why it should hurt, but there was no doubt it did – he had warned her that he would be obliged to woo another. This was, of course, nothing less than the truth. He had set about that wooing today, under her very nose, her beautiful little nose, and if a part of him had rejoiced to think that she would see what he was about and be hurt in return, a greater part had always known this for the ignoble and unworthy folly that it was.

But it was worse than that. He had seen her watching him as he walked among the ruins at Whitby with her friend, and saw her look away with a poorly concealed expression of frozen misery when his gaze caught hers and challenged it. Her distress shook him, and he realised with a jolt of unwelcome certainty that if she was suffering, he was too. She was unhappy, that was plain, but no more than he was. He could call it a Pyrrhic victory, but that would be mistaken, for it was no sort of victory at all.

He didn't want to marry any other woman. Not the little mouse Alice who squeaked and trembled whenever he addressed her, not any other of the debutantes Blanche had assembled. He would previously have said – would have said a bare two days ago – that he didn't want to marry anyone at all, so it made no odds which woman he chose, but most curiously this no longer appeared to be true.

Fate was a damnably cruel jade. It was almost amusing, but he was not just now in the humour to be amused. He had proposed marriage to a woman for the first time in his life and she had refused him. There were any number of young ladies at the Castle who would have accepted him without a moment's thought and with every appearance of delight, but his cursed erratic fancy must light on the one who would say no. Who could find the strength to say no even when she lay in his arms, her pupils dilated with desire, her perfect breasts still tingling from his touch, her delectable little pink nipples still swollen with arousal, still slick from having his lips, his mouth on them. His hand had been on the hem of her nightgown; a moment later he would have… She admitted she wanted him, she even admitted – Christ! – that she would give herself to him willingly, completely, if he persisted. But she would not marry him whatever he did. It was refined torture.

To refuse him was of course her privilege; he hoped he was not such a coxcomb that he had expected her to weep with delight when he proposed the solution to both their problems. God knows it wasn't his masculine pride that was offended. He feared it was much more than that. He was trying very hard, as he smiled and conversed with others with perfect civility though he had hardly the least idea what he was actually saying, not to dwell too much upon her reasons, for they created a storm of confusion in his head – and not just in his head – that he found himself singularly ill-equipped to deal with. The picture that she had painted of him, passing his wife's lover on the stairs, that stung. The picture of him leaving her crying bitter tears when he left her bed bound for another's, that stung too. Her talk of mere lust, that was a barb in his flesh, though he had no idea why it should be when he'd never had the slightest problem with lust in the past; quite the contrary, in fact, he'd been an enthusiastic advocate of it. He didn't want to think about any of these things, to consider whether there was any justice in what she said, and what he could do about it if there was. He refused to.

He knew he had been damnably clumsy in his approach to her, babbling of bloody Leaky Sue like an imbecile. It must have been the most unflattering proposal of marriage that a young lady had ever received – Leaky Sue herself would have laughed, no doubt – and yet he was famed for the suavity of his address, his powers of persuasion, known across Europe as a man who could seduce a nun out of her convent, though it wasn't something he'd made a habit of, or at least not lately. (Venice had been the place for that, as for so much else, once upon a time.) He had lain awake last night rehashing every word, every gesture, every damn thing that had occurred in her chamber, and it had gained him nothing except a painfully intense erection and the conviction that he was very possibly losing his mind.

And there was no point to any of it, and it didn't matter whether he was touched in the upper storey or not, because she had refused him, and he was obliged to woo another. And he would. He would not go to her chamber any more, he would not attempt to shake her resolve or dwell on the thought of her lying there warm from his embrace; no, he would woo another, be accepted – for why else were any of them here? – and allow himself to dance his one dance with Georgiana at the ball, the only dance he would ever dance with her in both their lives, and then put her out of his mind for ever.

He also refused to dwell on his fear that this would be very, very hard to do. He wanted to lie on the floor with his faithful companions and whine like one of them, but of course he did not. Dukes did not do such things, even in private. Instead, he composed himself and left the room, to resume his distasteful wooing, all the while conscious that he was making a huge mistake and there was nothing he could think of that would mend matters.