“I am. If you’ll allow it.” Somehow, the two of them had slid down the headboard and were laying side by side, sharing a pillow but staring up into the darkness.
She’d never had this sort of intimacy with Arthur. With Arthur, she’d often lain awake in bed feeling distant, anxiouslywondering what he was thinking, what he was feeling. After asking a few times and having her questions dismissed, she’d ceased making the effort.
She pushed thoughts of him out of her mind. If she was only to have a few days more with Luke, she would make the most of them. She was not fool enough to deny the possibility that he would change his mind while they were apart. People fell in and out of love all the time. Arthur had.
As had she.
Something of her thoughts must have shown in her expression, because his jaw stiffened. “I won’t,” he growled, almost as if in direct answer to her doubts. “I won’t change my mind if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“But you can’t promise something won’t happen to you.”
“No. I can’t. The sooner I speak with my commander at the War Office, the better, but I don’t want to do that until I’ve met with my brother.”
“Your brother’s opinion matters greatly to you.” They must be close, like she and her sister had once been. The thought sent a pang of sadness through Naomi, knowing Theo would never barge into her room in the morning again to wake her, nor would her mother be present to encourage her when the baby was ready to be born.
She even missed her father, for all his overbearing decisions. And now that certain details had come to light, she was beginning to suspect he’d been right in his assessment of Arthur, after all.
“My brother…” Luke paused as though to consider his words. “Not many understand him. Our parents were killed in a fire while Blackheart and I were away at school. The servants barely managed to save my sisters, who were four at the time, and Blackheart… he always believed he should have been there. There was no funeral, the bodies were never recovered, and sorather than allow me to return home with him, he insisted I finish my schooling while he dealt with the solicitors and the care of Lucinda and Lydia. While he dealt with everything.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten and three. Blackheart wasn’t much older, ten and seven, and yet he became an adult that spring, for all intents and purposes. I resented him for it at first. He immersed himself in running the dukedom while I fooled around at school, got into trouble simply because I resented him making decisions for me, decisions my father ought to have made. I didn’t understand his sacrifice until I graduated.” His voice trailed off in self-recrimination.
“Did you like school?”
“I didn’t give myself a chance to. Perhaps I might have if I’d been any good, but I lacked the mind for it. To someone like Blackheart, of course, that was unacceptable, something he made sure I was keenly aware of—which only caused me to become more resentful. I was a fool.
“And now… now I must tell him of another thing that I cannot do. Another task that he’s set before me, an opportunity, which I have failed.”
Naomi pondered the image of a young man coming of age, not allowed to mourn his parents in any real way, struggling to meet the academic expectations of a domineering older brother.
Luke could build almost anything with his hands. He understood military strategy, and he showed compassion and empathy for those who served under him.
He was a doer. Not one who spent hours reading or studying or debating. If he saw a problem, he went right to work fixing it. Whenever Naomi, or even Ester, was in need of anything, he always set himself immediately to providing it.
He raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Luke’s brother wasn’t the only person who’d emerged from their parents’ deaths with a heightened sense of responsibility. Luke had been yoked by his brother’s expectations. Knowingly or unknowingly, Blackheart had burdened Luke when he demanded that he fulfill the scholastic endeavors he himself had been denied. When Luke hadn’t excelled there, he’d pursued other jobs, both at his brother’s suggestion. The church, the military.
This would explain the anxiety that arose whenever the subject of talking to his brother about selling out came up.
Apparently, the Duke of Blackheart hadn’t spent much time with his younger brother over the past decade. Had he done so, he would realize Luke was a natural-born manager, gifted in the ability to rebuild and maintain, to assess a situation and quickly determine what needed to be done. He’d casually offered several suggestions for Naomi’s little plot of land, improvements that could make her property more profitable.
“At some point,” she said gently, “we must shed the expectations of others.”
He didn’t answer, but she sensed his reluctance to be consoled. When beliefs, even mistaken ones, entrenched themselves into people’s souls, it was difficult to shed them.
Talking with her wouldn’t automatically erase his worry. Nor was it going to help him fall back to sleep.
Naomi burrowed into Luke’s bare chest, smoothing her hand over his skin, teasing the smattering of hair that circled his taut nipples.
She didn’t want to abandon him yet to the darkness of his dreams. She wanted to provide the comfort he’d so often provided for her.
“You do not sleep in a nightshirt?” She should return to her own chamber. Hadn’t she learned her lesson before? Apparently not, because lying beside him like this, she acknowledgedwillingly, to herself anyhow, that she was, indeed, something of a wanton. Her fingertips walked a teasing path from his sternum to just above his navel.
And then she swirled gentle circles in the short curling hairs there.
Luke groaned and turned on his side so that they were face to face. “I want everything with you.”
