But he was already striding from the room, the viscount falling into step beside him.
“I’ll be with him,” Tarquin called over his shoulder.
The unfamiliar weight of his new responsibilities settled around his shoulders like a sodden cloak. This was his life now. Trying to salvage what remained of his family’s fortune while a little voice whispered that none of this would be necessary if Ava had simply told him the truth.
“Your father’s been like this since your ‘death’,” Tarquin explained as they descended the stairs. “The grief broke something in him. He gambles to forget, drinks to numb the pain. It’s gotten worse since your mother passed.”
“And no one thought to stop him?” Lucien demanded.
Tarquin’s expression hardened. “Many tried. Your sisters. Your friends. Your father’s friends…. But a man determined to destroy himself will usually find a way.”
“But I’m home now. He has no excuse, and I won’t tolerate this behavior. I’ll lock him away if I have to.”
They emerged into the cool night air, and Lucien tried to get his strangled emotions under control.
“If only you’d come home sooner. Thank God Rockwell found you when he did,” Tarquin said as they entered his carriage waiting outside. “That bloody woman… Courtney told me what happened,” Tarquin was referring to Ava and her lies, and while his heart had loved her, he could not defend her actions to Tarquin.
“I loved her,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “Even knowing what she did, I still love her. We built a life together, raised our daughter…” He broke off, the familiar guilt twisting in his gut at perpetuating Ava’s lie about Ava-Marie’s legitimacy. They could find no record of his marriage to Ava. She’d told him they were married when in fact they never were.
“She helped you when you were alone. I’m not surprised you loved her. She was all you had. But now?” Tarquin asked quietly.
“Now I don’t know if any of it was real. Did she truly love me, or was that just another manipulation? Did she die knowing she’d succeeded in keeping me from my real life? Or did she regret it at the end?”
Lucien caught a glimpse of his reflection in the carriage window. A stranger stared back at him, caught between two lives—the simple farmer he’d been and the lord he was supposed to be.
“I should have been here,” he said as the carriage lurched into motion. “Five years ago, I should have been here to stop all this.”
“You can’t change the past,” Tarquin replied. “You can only decide what to do with the present.”
Lucien nodded grimly. First, he would drag his father from the gaming hell before he could lose what little remained of their fortune. Then…then he would have to figure out how to be Lord Furoe, how to save his family from ruin, how to build a future from the wreckage of his past.
A future he could stomach. A future he wanted. He deserved to be happy. He just didn’t know how to make that happen.
And somewhere in all of that, he would have to decide what to do about Lady Courtney. The woman who had loved him enough to wait five years, only to have a stranger return, wearing her fiancé’s face. The woman who might have been his wife, might have borne his children, might have shared his life if not for Ava’s selfish choice. He couldn’t ask her to honor their engagement because his marriage to Ava would have voided it. And he certainly didn’t want anyone to know he was never married. Only Rockwell and Farah knew that secret. That would make Ava-Marie illegitimate and could destroy any chance of her making a good marriage later.
He glanced at Courtney’s older brother. What were his thoughts on his sister marrying a man returned from the dead? A man who needed her money more than he needed her.
It was now obvious Lucien had run out of time to find a wealthy wife. Could he marry Courtney? He’d loved her once. And Lauren let slip that she had apparently turned down offers of marriage.
The carriage clattered through London’s darkened streets, carrying him toward the first of many battles to come. But as the city passed in a blur outside the window, Lucien couldn’t help wondering what his life might have been if Rockwell had never found him. Would he have remained a happy man? Would he have been satisfied living a simple Irish peasant life?
The questions haunted him, even as he knew they were pointless. He couldn’t change the past. He could only try to salvage what remained, to build something new from the ashes of what was lost.
But oh, how the weight of those lost years pressed down on him. And oh, how the anger burned—at Ava, at himself, at the cruel twist of fate that had stolen his memories and allowed her deception to succeed.
The carriage drew to a stop outside Crockford’s, and Lucien straightened his shoulders. Time to be the son and heir his father needed, even if he couldn’t remember being either.
Some lies, he was learning, had consequences that echoed far beyond the grave.
He was conscious of Tarquin by his side as they made their way into the seedy club. He was trusting a man he couldn’t remember but he knew the man had his best interests at heart. How a man like Tarquin knew this sort of club was a story for another day.
The stench of stale spirits, sweat, and desperation hit Lucien as he entered Crockford’s. Tarquin’s steady presence at his side kept him grounded as they navigated the dimly lit gaming hell. Despite his memory loss, something about the atmosphere felt disturbingly familiar—perhaps his body remembered what his mind could not.
Raucous laughter and the clink of glasses mingled with the rustle of cards and the rolling of dice. Well-dressed gentlemen hunched over gaming tables, their faces transformed by greed ordespair. Scantily clad women wove between the tables, offering drinks and themselves, and the forced smiles of the men who’d lost more than they could afford met his gaze.
“There,” Tarquin murmured, nodding toward a corner table. “Your father’s at cards with Baron Lockwood.”
Lucien’s jaw clenched at the sight. The Earl of Danvers sat slumped in his chair, his cravat askew and his eyes glazed. Across from him, a man Tarquin had called Baron Lockwood, sat with a shark-like smile which spoke volumes.
