The Wallflower Takes All (EBOOK) - Pre-Order

London, July 1820

Her house was on the brink of disaster by half past ten in the morning.

Miss Poppy Montford knew this because someone was crying in the blue drawing room, someone was laughing in the front parlor, someone had misplaced a peacock
feather fan of alarming size, and the spaniel puppy had just stolen a deviled egg from beneath a drunken countess’s very nose.

“Freddie!” Poppy called.

Freddie, who possessed the long ears of an angel and the conscience of a highwayman, darted beneath a gilt side table with the egg clamped triumphantly in his jaws.

“Oh, let him have it,” said Lady Bexley from the sofa, already on her third glass of claret and not yet noon. “He has such a soulful face.”

“He has yolk on the Aubusson,” Poppy said.

“That too,” Lady Bexley agreed.

Poppy bent, reached beneath the table, and narrowly avoided having her fingers bitten—not out of malice, only enthusiasm. Freddie swallowed the entire egg in
one gulp and wagged at her as if he had done something noble.

From the adjoining room came her mother’s unmistakable peal of laughter, rich and reckless and half a shade too loud for respectable Society.

“Oh, do not be absurd,” Mama said. “If I had truly meant to insult Lord Tewksbury, I should have done it far more elegantly.”

A second burst of laughter followed, male this time, then the clink of glass.

Poppy closed her eyes.

Just once—just once in her life—she would like to wake to a quiet house, a balanced account book, and a mother who did not collect stray poets, widows, impoverished baronets, theatrical sopranos, and mysterious gentlemen with beautiful cheekbones the way other women collected calling cards.

Instead, Lady Viva Montfort collected people, emptied wine bottles, and set drawing rooms ablaze with a sort of glamorous catastrophe that had become, over the
years, their family’s chief distinction.

Poppy rose, smoothed her morning gown, and tried to recover the expression of serene competence she had cultivated since the age of thirteen. It was the expression
that said nothing in this household had ever surprised her, though in truth almost everything did.

“Miss Montfort?”

Their butler, Jenkins, hovered in the doorway with the look of a man who had spent the morning deciding whether to resign or take to prayer.

“Yes, Jenkins?”

“There is a gentleman in the hall regarding the accounts from the wine merchant, and Mrs. Pritchard says the Frenchwoman in the yellow bedchamber refuses to leave
unless someone finds her pearl earring. Also…” He hesitated. “Her ladyship has ordered champagne.”

“Champagne?” Poppy repeated.

Jenkins nodded grimly. “For breakfast, miss.”

“Of course she has.”

Poppy handed Lady Bexley’s abandoned empty glass to a footman passing by in a state of mild panic. “Tell Mrs. Pritchard I shall come to the yellow bedchamber in
five minutes. Tell the wine merchant’s man he may wait another quarter hour. And under no circumstances is anyone to bring Mama champagne.”

Jenkins’s expression flickered. “Her ladyship said if we refused, she would send Tommy with a note to Gunter’s.”

Poppy looked toward the ceiling.

Some daughters were called upon to pour tea, arrange flowers, or perhaps soothe an occasional maternal indisposition. Poppy, on the other hand, spent her days
preventing Lady Viva from ordering champagne for breakfast, mortgaging what remained of the silver, or inviting unsuitable people to reside indefinitely under their roof.

The fact that she had once imagined herself a romantic girl with dreams of courtship and elegant balls seemed, at this point, almost comic.

“Very well,” she said. “Bring her coffee instead and put it in a champagne coupe. She may not notice.”

Jenkins gave a solemn nod that suggested this was not the strangest instruction he had received this week and withdrew.

Poppy turned just in time to see Freddie emerge from beneath the table and spit out a piece of deviled egg onto the hem of her gown.

Naturally.

She scooped him up before he could commit another offense against upholstery and tucked him beneath her arm. He smelled faintly of butter and dust and puppyish
triumph.

“I hope you are enjoying yourself,” she told him.

Freddie licked her wrist.

That, unfortunately, was answer enough.

She crossed the hall, stepping around a hatbox, a sleeping hound dog that did not belong to them, and Mr. Loxley—the melancholy poet Mama had met at a musicale—who was sprawled on a chaise as if he had been personally ruined by sunlight.

The front parlor doors stood open.

Inside, Mama presided over the room like a queen of some disreputable little kingdom, draped in lilac silk, a bright red curl fallen artfully over one eye, a tea cup in one hand and, Lord help them, a champagne flute in the other. Around her lounged three houseguests, one widow, one gentleman with opera tickets he could not afford, and a woman Poppy suspected might be a cardsharp though she had not yet proven it.

Lady Viva looked up and brightened. “Poppy, darling. There you are. Tell Mr. Fenwick he is wrong. A person absolutely can live on champagne and anchovy toast if she is committed enough.”

“I refuse to encourage this discussion,” Poppy said.

Mr. Fenwick, who had the dazed expression of a man who had wandered in by accident and found himself staying three nights, gave her a small, desperate bow.

Mama waved a dismissive hand. “You are no fun before noon.”

“I am no fun after noon either, as you very well know.”

This earned a delighted laugh from the room, which was irritating, because Poppy had not intended to be amusing.

Lady Viva extended her cup. “Jenkins is bullying me.”

“No,” Poppy said. “Jenkins is attempting to preserve what remains of our household.”

“A household should be lived in, darling, not preserved like a pickled fish.”

Poppy opened her mouth, then closed it again. There was never any point. Mama could turn recklessness into wit so deftly that half the room forgot there was anything ruinous in it.

That was the problem, in fact. Mama was charming. Glorious. Dazzling. She filled every room she entered. Men adored her. Women forgave her. Society scolded her while secretly hoping she would do something outrageous enough to enliven the week.

And Poppy—

Poppy paid the bills, or at least saw to it that they were paid.

Or tried to.

For years, Mr. Ashby had helped her do precisely that.

Dear, patient Mr. Ashby, with his thinning gray hair and ink-stained cuffs and miraculous ability to descend upon the house just as Mama was about to sign something inadvisable. He had saved them from creditors, smoothed over awkward situations, quietly negotiated with tradesmen, and once, memorably, prevented Mama from selling a parcel of land to finance a masked entertainment involving live swans.

He had never laughed when Poppy brought him ledgers with trembling hands and asked whether they were ruined this time. He had only adjusted his spectacles and
said, “Not today, Miss Montfort, if I can help it.”

And now Mr. Ashby had retired.

Retired.

The very word felt like betrayal.

This morning his replacement was due to arrive—and Poppy had spent the last hour in a state of such dread she could scarcely breathe.

Because Mr. Ashby knew them.

Mr. Ashby knew Mama.

He knew the unpaid milliner’s bill hidden beneath the blotter in the study. He knew which servants could be trusted, which tradesmen would extend credit,
which guests would never leave unless tactically starved into movement. He knew that behind the laughter and silk and late candles, the Montfort household tottered on the edge of financial humiliation.

His replacement would know none of it.

His replacement would walk into this madhouse, see the wine, the guests, the dog, the disorder, and know at once that Poppy Montfort—a woman who had smiled her way
through every disaster of the past decade—was barely holding the whole thing together with sealing wax and prayer.

She set Freddie down before he wriggled free and disgraced himself in the parlor.

“Mama,” she said, lowering her voice as she approached. “Please tell me you have not invited anyone else to stay.”

Lady Viva blinked at her with large innocent eyes no one in England should ever have trusted. “Only one or two.”

“How many is one or two?”

“Six.”

Poppy frowned.

Mama brightened. “Possibly seven, if Celeste comes back from Bath. But Celeste hardly counts, because she always brings her own maid.”

“You have invited seven more people into this house?”

“They were in need.”

“We are in need.”

As usual, Mama looked faintly bored by arithmetic. “Oh, darling, need is so unfashionable when discussed plainly.”

Poppy was still trying to decide whether to laugh, cry, or seize the nearest decanter of wine for herself when a knock thundered through the front hall.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The sound cut through the chatter, through Mama’s half-finished complaint about the decline of civilized hospitality, through the yapping of Freddie who clearly believed any knock announced his personal triumph.

Poppy went still.

Of course.

Today.

At once, every ridiculous detail around her sharpened into horror: the half-empty wine glasses, the wilted flowers, the houseguests in varying states of dishabille, the poet asleep in the corridor, the puppy with egg on his whiskers, Mama in an evening gown and disreputable good spirits before luncheon.

Her humiliating secret, indeed.

Not merely that they were in precarious straits.

That everyone she loved, every room she crossed, every account she touched, every smile she managed, existed in a state of beautiful, tottering chaos—and she could not stop it.

“Who is it?” Mama asked idly.

Poppy already knew.

“The new solicitor,” she said.

Mama made a face. “Must he come this morning? Morning is such an unflattering hour for legal advice.”

“Yes,” Poppy said grimly. “It appears he must.”

She did not wait for commentary. She gathered her skirts and marched into the hall, trying with each step to transform herself back into Miss Poppy Montfort:
composed, polished, charming, thoroughly equal to her circumstances.

Jenkins had just opened the front door.

The man on the threshold was not at all what she had expected.

For one disorienting second, Poppy thought Jenkins had admitted the wrong visitor entirely.

This man was tall. Broad-shouldered. Unfairly handsome. Sun-gold hair brushed back from a striking brow. Eyes a clear, impossible blue. His coat was cut well, though not in a peacockish way, and he carried himself with that dangerous sort of quiet confidence that suggested heknew perfectly well what effect he made and had no need to announce it.

He did not look like a solicitor.

He looked like the sort of man a lady made the mistake of noticing across a ballroom and then suffered over for a fortnight.

Poppy stopped so abruptly Freddie bumped into the back of her slippers.

The gentleman’s gaze found hers at once.

And changed.

Not dramatically. Not enough that anyone else would have marked it. But something in his expression sharpened, warmed, lingered. As if he, too, had not expected—

Well.

That.

“Good morning,” he said.

His voice was low and even and maddeningly pleasant.

Poppy’s heart gave one completely traitorous thud.

Who was this?

Surely not a creditor. Creditors did not possess shoulders like that.

Not one of Mama’s strays, either. He was too self-possessed. Too neat. Too sober.

Then he removed his gloves, and Jenkins said, with dreadful calm, “Miss Montfort, Mr. Gabriel Ashby.”

The floor did not open and swallow her, though it was very much invited to.

Mr. Gabriel Ashby.

Mr. Ashby’s son.

Their new solicitor.

The man who was, at this very moment, taking in the overturned umbrella stand, the traveling case abandoned on a chair, the suspicious scent of claret before noon, the barking puppy, and—if heaven had fully abandoned her—the sound of Mama in the parlor declaring that no truly interesting person had ever balanced an account correctly in his life.

Heat rushed into Poppy’s cheeks.

Of all the days for Mr. Ashby’s replacement to appear looking like an archangel with excellent tailoring, it had to be this one.

He bowed. “Miss Montfort.”

She ought to have curtsied. Or spoken. Or at the very least remembered how ordinary
human breathing worked.

Instead she heard herself say, “You are very young.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

“I beg your pardon?”

Dear God.

She wanted to die.

“What I meant,” Poppy said, with the brittle clarity of a woman watching her dignity fling itself from a rooftop, “is that Mr. Ashby did not mention—”

“My age?”

“That he had sent”—she gestured vaguely, hating herself—“someone not old.”

One golden brow lifted.

Behind her, from the parlor, Mama’s voice floated into the hall.

“Poppy, if that is Lord Gillingham at the door, tell him I am not receiving until after luncheon.”

Mr. Gabriel Ashby’s gaze flicked over Poppy’s shoulder toward the sound. Then back to her.

There it was again—that look. Not mockery. Not quite. Something more dangerous.

Understanding.

And Poppy knew, with a sick plunge in her stomach, that before this day was over, he would understand far too much.

Because he was not merely stepping into an office.

He was stepping into the ruins she had spent years trying to disguise.

And he was looking at her as if he had already begun to see straight through the laughter.