“Remind me how long you intend to stay with me,” he glowered at his unrepentant cousin.
“Until you’re back on your feet,” was Dominic’s cheery reply.
Thorne grunted and hauled himself up against the pillows.“I thought that’s what I was proving last night.I’m back to normal.Everything is back to normal.”
So you can leave me in peacewas heavily implied.
“You don’t look normal to me,” Dom countered, giving him a critical once-over.“In fact, you look terrible.”
“Out of practice,” Thorne grumbled, throwing back the blankets and ignoring Dom’s squawk of protest in favor of stalking nude across the room to splash cold water from the basin into his gritty eyes.
If Dom didn’t like the view, he could bloody well find someone else to annoy.
The irony didn’t escape Thorne.He’d spent years blaming his family for leaving him alone, and now it was all he wanted.
Uncle Roman had certainly complied readily enough, once it became clear Thorne had regained the full use of his faculties and the full scope of his memories.He’d gone back to Wolverton Chase, the family hunting lodge in the north of England, and Thorne told himself he’d been glad to see the back of him.
Gratitude for Roman’s assistance with the scheme to protect The Gentle Rogue from being brought to justice was tempered now with the returned memory of every bitter word and harsh accusation he and his uncle had flung at each other.
The morning he made Lucy leave, Roman had found him standing in the middle of the dining room, in the wreckage of his life.To his credit, his uncle had tried to reach out.
But Thorne had shut down everything inside himself, every vestige of emotion, simply to get Lucy to go.He couldn’t turn it back on, just like that.
Unable to get more out of Thorne than blank, one-word responses, Uncle Roman had given up.
Dominic was another story.Dominic, he couldn’t seem to get rid of.
Groaning, Thorne hung over the washbasin for a long moment, taking stock.His head hurt, but he was reasonably sure that was due to having drunk more than two-thirds of a bottle of whisky the night before.
The whisky had been necessary, Thorne thought, meeting his own dull gaze in the looking glass, still dripping with water.He’d needed the alcohol to blunt the bright, flinching rawness of the evening.They’d gone to Sharpe’s, which had felt altogether too loud, too coarse, too full of men braying laughs and shouting bets and slavering over the heavily painted women who strolled the card room floor.
Dominic had tried to get him involved in a game, or to take one of the women upstairs for a quick tumble to “take your mind off things,” as he so delicately put it, but the very thought of touching another woman made Thorne feel ill.
So he’d sat in a corner and poured out glass after glass, and it had been almost tolerable.In the sense that he’d been able to force himself to sit there and not knock over every green-baize-covered table in the room, scattering cards and roaring in the face of anyone who tried to stop him.
But it had taken the better part of a bottle of whisky.
And this was what he had to look forward to, he knew.Night after night after night, he would go out and see people and drink himself insensible and maybe one day, his pent-up needs would force him to fuck one of the women who always seemed to be there, on the edge of his consciousness, willing and available, and if even the idea of it now made him want to retch, well.
What did Uncle Roman use to say?Oh yes.
Your desires need not enter into it.
What did it matter what Thorne wanted?
Thorne wanted the impossible.What he wanted was to be…not himself.To be the man Lucy loved.
To never have hurt her.
“You were saying something about the papers,” he said, unable to muster up a facsimile of interest as he shrugged into a silk banyan and wandered over to drop into one of the chairs by the fireplace.
“Disgraceful.”Dominic shook his head.He, of course, looked as though he’d been awake for hours, shaved and pressed and full of the sort of boundless energy that made Thorne long to crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over his head.
Instead, Thorne held out his hand imperiously, twitching the broadsheet from Dom’s grasp when it was within reach.
It was already folded open to the gossip column, a scurrilous bit of nonsense about the anatomically implausible escapades Thorne absolutely had not gotten up to the night before, but he supposed “The Duke of T--- brooded in the corner all night, alone” wouldn’t sell a lot of papers.
He’d always been good business for the newspaper publishers and printers.It was one of his more legitimate streams of income in the early days after he’d signed over the farms to his tenants, long before he’d come up with The Gentle Rogue as a way of generating cash.
