Those intrigues were some years behind them now, however.Thorne had found better ways to access the bursts of risk, danger, and reward that served as crucial—if temporary—distractions from his moods.And Fitz…well, Fitz had somehow gotten himself leg-shackled to the brainiest woman Thorne had ever met.
Certainly Caroline, Lady Fitzwilliam Drake, had always been far too intelligent to trust Thorne with her husband.
“I’m surprised the lovely Caroline let you come riding with me today,” Thorne remarked as they topped Parliament Hill and paused to take in the view.London crouched at their feet wreathed in coal smoke and fog, but the breeze that caught at Thorne’s hair was fresh and clean.
“Caroline is immersed in polishing a new paper she intends to present to some society or other, perhaps that Linnean one?I can’t keep track.Anyway, she wouldn’t take notice of anything I did today even if I burned the house down around her,” Fitz relayed cheerfully, “so I’m entirely at your service.”
“I suppose you’ll be punished for it later, but better to ask forgiveness than permission, eh?”Thorne baited his oldest friend.
Fitz looked at him in genial bewilderment.“Not sure what you think marriage is like, old chap, but I can tell you permission don’t enter into it much.Caroline’s not my mother.”
“Good,” Thorne couldn’t help but say with too much vehemence.The late Marchioness of Huntingdon had been awful.Caroline might be bookish and awkwardly direct, but at least she seemed to adore Fitz.Unlike his mother, who’d barely given him the time of day.
From what Thorne had seen, having living parents was decidedly overrated.Uncle Roman hadn’t treated his stepson with much more warmth than he’d shown his ward.Though Dominic had proved remarkably loyal to the man who had eventually adopted him and given him his name.
Quite suddenly, Thorne felt the cold, encroaching fingers of one of his black moods reaching for him.A flash of his dream from the night before overtook his thoughts, bleeding the life from the charming vista before his eyes.
In the dream, Gabriel was cold, his limbs shaky and weak from weeks of forced inactivity followed by a long, exhausting trek, but he was home.Thornecliff.The ancient hall nestled like a pale jewel in the rolling green hills of Buckinghamshire—hills Gabriel had spent the past two days traversing on foot, weary and sore and desperate.He’d finally made it home…but where was everyone?
He mounted the front steps to the entrance and pushed at the door, which creaked as it swung inward.Where was Uncle Roman?Where was Dom?Farthingdale?No one was there to greet Gabriel.
No one had even noticed he was gone.
Thorne’s fists tightened on the reins.At least it hadn’t been the other—the stinking hold of the ship, pitch-black except for what light found its way through the cracks in the deck above.Sitting in his own filth, the eternal pitch and sway of the ocean, all that water rushing in his ears and so thirsty his stomach cramped over and over…
Attempting to shake it off, he said, “After all, your mother adored me.Whereas your wife, never one to bow to fashion, doesn’t like me in the slightest.”
“It’s not that she doesn’t like you,” Fitz protested.Always so earnest.How had he survived amongst the pack of wolves Thorne counted as his inner circle?“She doesn’t know you.We’ve hardly been back in London at all since we wed.”
And over the past eight years when they had visited, they’d spent most of their time with Fitz’s father, the Marquess of Huntingdon, and his recently acquired second wife, who also happened to be Caroline’s mother.Their domestic arrangements seemed a bit of a tangle to Thorne.
He gave his friend a mocking smile.“I’m sorry, are you implying that if your lady wife became better acquainted with me, she would…what?Discover some hitherto unrevealed depths in my character that would allow her to think well of me?”
“If anyone could, it would be Caroline,” Fitz declared, loyal to a fault.His smile took on a mischief familiar to Thorne from countless pranks and scrapes they’d gotten into as boys.“You are something of an acquired taste, Thorne.”
Fitz had lost that happy gleam somewhere in their twenties, Thorne realized only now that he saw it returned.Perhaps when the pranks graduated from schoolboy nonsense to the twistier schemes Thorne had pursued after he’d banished his uncle from his life.
“Well,” Thorne said, forcing his mind out of that well-worn path, “now that you’re back in Town, perhaps she will have time to acquire a taste for me.”
He thought his tone was admirably light.Careless, even.But Fitz shot him a look.
“I wouldn’t want you to think that it’s Caroline who has kept me from seeking you out much, on our other visits back here,” he said slowly.“I know a lot of gentlemen blame their wives for curtailing their movements after marriage, but I think quite often it’s the men themselves who don’t want to go out carousing and womanizing any longer, only they’re embarrassed to say so to their friends.So the woman gets the blame.But I’m not embarrassed, Thorne.I love my wife.I’d rather be with her than anyone in the world.Including you—especially the way you were before I left.”
Thorne stiffened, the words hitting him hard.His immediate instinct was to lash back with the most cutting insult he could think of—it was on the tip of his tongue to tell Fitz he hadn’t even noticed he’d been gone except to remark that the quality of intelligent conversation in his general vicinity seemed to have improved.
But it wasn’t true; Thorne had noticed.In fact, in addition to that ugly business of one of Thorne’s inner circle burning down The Nemesis, Fitz’s friendship fading from his life had been one of the things that had forced Thorne to consider that perhaps he’d let his vendetta against his uncle go on too long, and too far.
He wondered now if he’d lost more from it than he’d gained.After all, there was little use in plotting revenge against a man who didn’t care if one lived or died.
Thorne didn’t want to drive Fitz away with his sharp tongue.But neither was Thorne interested in hashing out all his past misdeeds and character flaws.So he strove for an ease he didn’t feel as he replied, “Well, I wouldn’t care to compete with your lady wife; she has many charms I could never match, I’m sure.”
“That’s true,” Fitz agreed with unflattering readiness.“But you do seem different these days, somehow.Less…restless.”
Thorne knew he had changed.At first because, as The Gentle Rogue, he’d found an outlet for his frustrations that drinking, carousing, and fucking his way through London had never matched.
And later, when he began to channel the restless energy that drove him into things like Ashbourn’s home for orphaned children…well.It was appallingly mawkish, but it had made Thorne feel…good.
Horrifying as it was to be forced to admit to himself that he had any desire to be a better man—whatever that was supposed to mean—it was far worse to have that desire perceived by anyone else, even his oldest friend.
