“It has been a long time,” Thorne pointed out, determined to redirect the conversation.“I’m sure you’ve changed as well.On your travels to—where was it this time?Borneo?”
“Close,” Fitz laughed, showing off the new lines in his tanned face.The rugged outdoorsman thing suited him, Thorne thought.“New Zealand.Caroline discovered a new sort of emu, a terribly small one that doesn’t look much like the big fellows they have over there, but all the same, she says they’re related.Not but what siblings quite often look and act nothing alike—take me and my brother and sister, for example.”
Yet sometimes, Thorne knew, family resemblance could be uncanny.There had been many years when he’d felt as close to his cousin, Dominic, as if they’d been brothers.Even though there had been no shared blood between them at all.
Christ.Fitz’s return had stirred up the past too much.And that dream last night.
Beyond the monthly reports he received from the servants he’d suborned into keeping an eye on his estranged family’s movements, Thorne never allowed himself to think of Dom.He didn’t intend to start now.
Needing to move, he wheeled his horse around and urged him into a run.The wind whipped into his face, his lungs burning as he leaned low over Samson’s neck and pushed him to a full gallop.
He ignored Fitz’s shout from behind him, pursued by unwanted memories like a pack of hellhounds nipping at his heels.
This was why he came to Hampstead Heath.Because there was space to move, to breathe, to outrun the thoughts that threatened to overtake him.
Despite its proximity to London and the thriving market town of Hampstead, the heath was wild.No one came here for a stroll or a?—
Thorne pulled Samson to a sliding stop a few feet away from the group arrayed upon a blanket around a hamper.
The temper tantrum he’d tried to outrun exploded through him and out of his mouth.“What the devil are you doing here?”
“Having a picnic,” trilled a very small voice.
Thorne’s vision cleared enough to focus on the speaker, a tiny girl child in a straw bonnet.He blinked again, and recognized both her and her mother,damnation, and then the whole rest of the bloody Lively family.
Including Lady Lucy, glaring daggers at him from across the blanket.
Still hearing the wind whistling in his ears, it took Thorne a long moment—too long—to shove the lid back on the box that held his worst impulses.
“I beg your pardon,” he said through stiff lips, addressing little Lady Katherine Lively.“Wasn’t watching where I was going.”
He needed to get out of there.He couldn’t be around people he liked, couldn’t trust himself, so he lifted a hand to tip his hat.But before he could take his leave, Fitz trotted up beside him.
“Good God, man, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Thorne snapped.“Why wouldn’t I be?”He was sharply conscious of the eyes upon him.Lucy’s eyes…
“The way you took off on your horse,” Fitz gabbled, “I thought he must have been stung by a bee!You could have trampled this family—oh, hullo, Your Grace.Er, Your Graces, my lady, good gracious,twoladies, I do apologize.We seem to be interrupting your picnic.”
“Not at all,” the Duchess of Ashbourn replied serenely.“We’d only just sat down, and Thorne stopped in plenty of time to avoid trampling anyone.Won’t you join us, Lord Fitzwilliam?Thorne?”
It was an idyllic scene, like a Gainsborough painting, all soft light and easy brushstrokes portraying an English family in repose.There was the duchess with her honey-colored hair and serene upturned countenance, one hand cradling the swell of her belly beneath her high-waisted gown.Beside her, the silent, watchful sentinel of her protective husband, who had leapt to his feet and taken hold of Thorne’s horse’s bridle, as though he might lose control and send his mount rampaging through the picnic after all.
Their cherubic daughter, having tired of the adult conversation already, was armpits-deep into the hamper, rummaging about.And at the back of the blanket perched Lucy, a vision of spring in a cherry-red spencer that set off her mahogany curls and blue eyes to perfection.
Thorne stared down at them all.It seemed to him that the worst thing he could do would be to attempt to insert himself into the scene—akin to taking a handful of mud and smearing it across that priceless Gainsborough landscape.
So of course Fitz gave a cheerful and enthusiastic, “I say!Capital idea.Splendid of you to ask!I’ve been meaning to drop round and call, you know, since the wife and I got back to Town, only it’s been such a whirl what with one thing and another.But now here we all are!Fortuitous, that’s what I call it—if that’s the word I’m thinking of.Is it, Lady Lucy?You’re a writer, you must know.”
Fitz puzzled his brows appealingly at Lucy, who appeared to have fallen into the lightly dazed trance incurred by most sensible people when thrust into conversation with Lord Fitzwilliam Drake.
“Yes,” she said as Fitz swung down from his mount.“Fortuitous means fortunate.A lucky happenstance.If this is indeed an accidental meeting, then that word suits very well.”
If indeed.
Thorne felt some of the blackness disperse.The suspicion in Lucy’s tone delighted him.A bit of color bled back into the world.
“Ah yes, the lady author,” he purred, gazing down at her from horseback.“Remind me, what is it you write again?”
