She took a quick glance toward the choir stalls. Grayson had sunk out of sight. The coward!
She brushed a few tufts of black dust from the front of her skirt, picked up her coat and gloves and followed her father outside to the rectory drive, where Luc waited with the landau. Luc avoided eye contact. He was probably still angry with her for sneaking out and getting injured. Gabby did feel awful about the angel’s burn. She’d said she was sorry the night before while he’d been flying her home—which was, Gabby had to note, the most exhilarating thing she had ever done in her life. But Luc had been in his scales and unable to respond. By the look of his stony face, he hadn’t accepted her apology yet.
Once in the carriage and rattling down rue Dante toward the Seine, Gabby could no longer stand the suspense.
“Where are we going?”
Her father tugged on the shade’s string and blocked out the milky sunlight.
“We’re paying a visit to Dr. Frederic Hauss,” he answered.
“I’m sorry … who?”
“Dr. Hauss is a renowned surgeon, Gabriella.”
The carriage jerked over a particularly deep rut. It shook her and set her injured shoulder blazing.
She didn’t understand. “A surgeon?”
Lord Brickton held out his hand and gestured toward her face. “You cannot possibly wish to endure such marks for the rest of your life. Dr. Hauss might be able to help you overcome this deformity.”
The carriage bucked again, providing nice cover for the look of pure shock spreading over her face. Was that how he saw her scars? As a deformity? Her father continued to ramble about Hauss’s celebrated rhinoplasties in Germany and in Great Britain and how fortunate Gabby should consider herself now that he was practicing here in Paris.
Her chest felt like it was caving in.
“I’m not deformed,” Gabby said, too hurt to put much fire behind the declaration. Her father ignored her.
“If anyone can fix you, my dear girl, Hauss is the one.”
Their landau slowed to a stop and her father sent the shade up. They’d pulled alongside the arcaded entrance of a fortresslike limestone building. H?tel-Dieu. He’d taken her to the hospital.
Since the morning after the hellhound had shredded half of her face, Gabby had dreamed of being able to erase the damage. How miraculous and lucky she would be if she woke up one day to find the pink, waxy-looking scars gone and her supple, unblemished skin back.
But hearing that someone might be able to do it, hearing her father wish for it as well, hurt more deeply than Gabby could have imagined.
Luc opened the landau’s door and this time looked straight into Gabby’s eyes. He could feel what she did: the sensation of being turned inside out. Luc’s wrathful glare speared Lord Brickton, but Gabby’s father wasn’t paying his driver the slightest bit of attention.
“I’m not going in,” Gabby announced. She sat farther back on the bench.
“You needn’t be embarrassed,” her father replied. He rested his hand on her knee, and for the briefest of moments, she saw true compassion in him. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He was just blinded by what he wanted. What he thought was best for an earl’s daughter.
“I’m not—” She was going to say embarrassed, but then he’d want to know what the problem was. She didn’t know how to explain it. “I’m not ready.”
Her father was clearly disappointed but agreed to let her wait inside the hospital while he and Dr. Hauss consulted alone this first time. As they entered the building and found their way into a vaulted corridor, her father admitted that perhaps he’d sprung this visit on her too suddenly. He gave her a moment to reconsider joining them—during which she stood resolute and silent—before entering Dr. Hauss’s office without her.
Left alone in the corridor, Gabby paced a small swath of floor. Her father’s rich baritone carried from behind the closed doors, but she didn’t want to listen to him talk about her. She moved away down the hall until her father’s voice faded.
A string of tall, arched windows running down the corridor overlooked a narrow inner courtyard and, across from that, the exterior of another wing of the hospital. The windows on that side were also arched, and she saw more people walking back and forth.
A head of thick black curls caught her attention. Gabby stopped. Practically pressed her nose to the glass as she watched Nolan Quinn march through the arcaded entrance into the courtyard portico and enter the opposite wing. She held her breath. What was he doing here?