“Who could have sent them?” she exclaimed, though the answer seemed obvious enough. “Who knows me so well as to choose all of my favorites? Do open the note, Cousin Camellia.”
Tom’s face was contorted in what might have been intended as a speaking glance, though its message was opaque. Wordlessly, Cami motioned for him to give her the letter.
My dear lady,
Thank you for the favor of your company last evening. Though these blooms cannot rival the bloom of your cheeks, I hope this small token, and the memory of my esteem it carries, will call up the luster of your charming smile.
Yours &c.
Ash——
Only the first three letters of his signature were legible, as if he too thought of himself by the shortened version of his title. The hand was as bold and dark and strong as the words themselves were, well, flowery. “The bloom of your cheeks”? “The luster of your smile”? Did such obvious and hackneyed sentiment produce the desired results? Were women really wooed with such utter nonsense? Although she had little experience with rakes on which to draw, Cami had somehow imagined their techniques a bit more refined.
“Lord Ashborough sent them, of course,” she told Felicity, dropping the note onto the table. A flicker of something—disappointment?—crossed her cousin’s face, but Cami’s attention was claimed once more by Tom, who was standing just out of the line of Felicity’s vision, nodding first at Cami, then jerking his head in the direction of the door.
Cami frowned. “Is something the matter with your neck, Tom?”
“No, miss.” But while Felicity examined each petal and leaf, he went through the same elaborate routine, this time moving only his eyes. Torn between exasperation and worry that he might do himself an injury if allowed to continue this pantomime, Cami rose from the table. “I promised my sister a letter,” she said, excusing herself.
“Goodness, Tom,” she scolded as soon as the door to the breakfast room shut behind her. “What are you about, making such dumbshow? Is it another letter from Mr. Dawkins?”
“No, miss.” With a more restrained tip of his chin, he indicated the florist’s boy standing just inside the front door.
Cami walked slowly down the stairs and across the marble-tiled foyer, stopping in front of him. “Have you a message? If it’s money you want, you’ll have to wait for the butler.”
“You’re Miss Burke?” Before she could even nod, he drew a second, smaller bouquet from behind his back. “I was ’structed to give these into your hand, direct.”
“For Lady Felicity?”
“No, ma’am. For you.”
Wide eyed, she took the flowers from his outstretched hand. With a touch to the brim of his cap, the boy was gone.
“Well, I never,” Cami gasped to no one in particular, as Tom had already made himself scarce and the hall was otherwise empty.
She had taken three swishing strides back to the staircase before her curiosity got the better of her and she glanced down at the bouquet she carried. At first, she saw only what she expected to see: a proper, predictable nosegay. A small, neat arrangement of hothouse flowers that might have been meant for any woman who merited some little notice. A kind gesture from the always thoughtful Mr. Fox, perhaps. Certainly nothing that required subterfuge or secrecy. Merely ordinary blooms bound with a length of ribbon.
Silk ribbon, she realized as her fingers curled more tightly around the stems. An almost unthinkable luxury for a woman in her position. Oh, Aunt Merrick saw to it that Cami had everything she truly required. A lady’s companion simply did not require silk ribbon.
Especially not silk ribbon in the most glorious shade of red she had ever seen.
The flowers were no less extraordinary than the ribbon that bound them. Creamy petals ordered themselves precisely around feathery yellow stamens, a golden treasure at the heart of each sweetly scented blossom.
Camellias.
A rare bloom in this part of the world, he had said, the sound of her name on his lips as real to her now as the touch of those lips against her skin.
She glimpsed a card tucked amid the shining green leaves, and her fingers trembled—drat that coffee!—as she withdrew it carefully from its nest. A calling card. The Marquess of Ashborough’s calling card. With a calm she did not feel, she palmed the rectangle of stiffened paper, feeling its sharp corners bite into her hand, and ascended the stairs to her room.
Safely within the privacy of its four walls, she admired the nosegay once more. What had he intended to buy with these flowers? Her silence? Or something else entirely?
She turned her attention to his card as if it could reveal the answer to her question. Embossed lettering rose from it, the print surprisingly plain. Slowly, she turned it over, wondering whether it bore any message even as she despised her curiosity.
Just one word, scrawled by a confident hand.
Gabriel.
Her eyelids fell as she lifted the card almost to her lips. Carried in his breast pocket, against the heat of his chest, it had absorbed his unique fragrance. From the ivory paper wafted the warm scents of tobacco and bergamot and something she could not identify. It smelled like…an invitation to sin.
Her pulse ticked upward and her eyes popped open, but she did not immediately thrust away that invitation.
She had no illusions about why he fascinated her. He was unlike anyone she had ever known, except perhaps in the pages of the sort of novels she generally denied reading. Powerful. Free to do as he pleased. Dismissive of the world’s scorn. He represented everything she had ever desired. He could give her a taste of things that she, as a woman, had always been denied.
Oh, but every story ever told taught that the price of such knowledge was dear.
