“Ye can tell me, lass. I want tae know yourself.” Ethan brushed her cheek again, this time with his thumb. Unthinkingly, she leaned into his hand. The heat of his palm seeped into her skin, warming the chill creeping up her limbs. “And it will help me tae know how much to loathe Kendall from here on out.”
Allie gave a watery laugh.
“You cannot loathe him as much as I do now,” she said, dashing a palm across her eyes. “After my mother’s death, I found myself in particularly desperate straits. I went through her effects, looking for things to sell. While doing that, I discovered a packet of letters from my father, ordering my return. Unbeknownst to me, old Kendall had been sending letters to my mother through an uncle for five years. Apparently, he had realized I had value after all as a pawn on the marriage mart.”
“The blackguard.” Ethan shook his drunken head, his hand slumping once more to the bed quilt.
“Yes, my father was that and more. However, the letters did give me Tristan’s direction at Oxford. Stupidly, I wrote to my twin. The first letter I had been able to write him in over eleven years. I poured my heart out, telling him of our mother’s death and my dire situation. I pleaded for his help. Tristan wrote back—”
Allie’s voice cracked. She swiped away her tears once more.
She hated thinking upon this. Reliving the shattering moment of reading Tristan’s letter—the first words she had received from her brother in over a decade. The metaphorical sensation of dirt being shoveled atop the memory of her twin.
“He wrote ye?” Ethan’s green eyes glittered in the candlelight.
“Yes.” She looked down at the counterpane, tracing its seams with a fingertip, biting her trembling lip. “But he offered no help. No kind words of greeting or sense that he had missed me. Nothing. Instead, my brother railed against my perfidy in refusing to do my duty by our father. He said if I held any love in my heart for him as my twin, that I would . . .”
She trailed off.
Ethan nudged her to continue.
Allie took in a stuttering breath, forcing out the words. “That I would heed our father’s demands and marry the man of his choosing. Tristan called me terrible things—cruel, selfish, obstinate.”
They had been like a death . . . those words. Every last hope, every last spark that had held her through the darkest moments with their mother . . .
Gone.
Crushed under the weight of Tristan’s caustic indifference. In the realization that the boy she had known was gone.
That in every sense that mattered, her twin, too, was dead.
That the memory of her brother would forever be just that—a memory.
And as Tristan’s letter had dropped from her bloodless fingers, Allie understood that she was truly, utterly alone.
No one would care for her. No one would rescue her.
She would have to be her own rescuer—her own source of protection and care.
And so she had.
“Worse,” she said, “on the heels of Tristan’s letter, a henchman arrived, sent courtesy of our father. Not only had Tristan refused to help me, but he had betrayed my situation and location to Old Kendall. My father’s thug attempted to abduct me, but I escaped by hiding in a neighbor’s wardrobe.”
“Bloody hell!” Ethan hissed.
Allie pushed back the memories of those harrowing days. Of her father’s man hunting her like a fugitive, tracking her from friend to friend, house to house. Of her own blind grief at losing her mother and Tristan in the same fell swoop.
Finally, she had taken refuge with mere acquaintances, an elderly couple who were supporters ofLa Giovine Italia.
“What did you do then, lass?” Ethan asked.
Allie ran her gaze over his supine body—long legs crossed at the ankle, a hand propped behind his head on the pillow, the intent earnestness in his eyes.
“I left Venice,” she said. “I knew my father would be relentless in his efforts to find me. Therefore, I took my mother’s surname, became Allegra Barozzi, and disappeared. The elderly couple provided an introduction toLa Giovine Italia,and I joined their cause. The rest you know.”
The revolutionary group had afforded Allie the escape and freedom she craved. Within their ranks, she had been her own woman, able to pick and choose her path, to forge her own purpose. To forget, in a way, that she had ever been Lady Allegra Gilbert.
Ethan reached out and placed his large palm on her dressing-gown-covered knee, the heat of it instantly sinking through the fabric.
