QUILL STARED into the fireplace, the taste of doom in his mouth. He had stepped over the bounds of civility. He had lost all claim to the title of gentleman. Not only did he snatch his brother’s intended wife up in his arms and carry her off before the interested eyes of half of London, but later …

Yes, later.

He sighed and stretched his leg. Miraculously, it seemed utterly untouched by the experience of carrying Gabby through Lady Fester’s house and into the carriage. Quill had deposited Gabby on the seat, with every intention of escorting her home in the most proper fashion. But then she started sobbing.

At first he couldn’t understand a thing Gabby said. Then her words tumbled together into a miserable acknowledgment of a fact that, unfortunately, Quill agreed with.

“He’ll never love me!” Gabby had cried, her breath caught with sobs. “Peter looked at me with just the distaste that my father—that my father—” And her speech wandered into tangled incoherencies again.

Quill felt helpless in the face of such a storm of female unhappiness. Awkwardly, he pulled her head against his shoulder and patted her back. But he found himself patting his own evening coat, since she was still wearing it, and he couldn’t tell whether she even felt his touch through its thick folds.

Then Gabby raised her head and looked him straight in the eye. “Peter will never love me the way I love him, will he, Quill?”

Quill’s heart skipped a beat. “It depends on how you love him,” he finally said, well-aware that his pedantic tone was not at all suitable to the occasion.

“I love him,” Gabby sobbed. “I love his…I love his picture, and I thought he would never look at me with reproach. And he does! And he wouldn’t kiss me, and I so wanted him to kiss me. Probably every man would look at me that way, but I can’t bear it, because I thought that Peter would be, would be—” And she broke down sobbing and collapsed against Quill’s chest again.

Quill couldn’t make heads or tails of her explanation. He did grasp that Gabby wanted Peter to kiss her. Well, naturally she does, he told himself. She’s in love with him. She’s marrying him.

“I am sure that Peter wants to kiss you,” Quill said, taking a deliberate plunge into the shady area of possible untruths.

“He doesn’t! We went on the balcony, and when I kissed him, he pushed me away! He was very fierce,” she added.

“Peter has a strong sense of propriety,” Quill answered, relieved. This wasn’t as bad as he thought. “Peter would never kiss a woman in the middle of a ball.”

“Why not? A horrid man, Mr. Barlow, tried to kiss me.”