ChapterEleven
Thorne bolted up from the table, knocking into it and causing the already ruined supper things to rattle and clank together.He froze, staring down at the mess he’d made.
Mrs.Forrest shot him an entirely unimpressed look.“Well, what are you waiting for?Go after her, you fool!”
Thorne’s body, already in open revolt against his mind and will, obeyed her.Heedless of the startled waiters and the avidly watching guests, he stormed from the dining room.His muscles burned and throbbed as though he was on his way to a duel, every nerve and sinew screwed to the highest pitch of awareness.
One look at Lucy’s face after more than a week of seeing it only in his restless dreams.One look was all it had taken to undo ten days and nights’ worth of effort.
All the defenses he’d shored up with midnight revelries and debauches, too much drink and not enough sleep—all swept away in an instant.
Not that the revelries and debauches had done him much good.
After depositing Lucy on her doorstep, he’d gone straight back to Sharpe’s.In something of a daze, Thorne had found himself sitting alone at one of the small tables reserved for whist.
Apart from a tentative serving girl bringing him a full bottle of brandy and a glass when he asked for them, he was left severely alone.Thorne had set about getting thoroughly drunk, until a dark, hulking form had slid into the seat next to his.
“Rook,” Thorne had said, tipping him an acknowledgment with his overfull brandy snifter.
The owner of Sharpe’s had regarded him silently while he knocked back the exquisite French cognac like it was cheap gin.
“That girl,” Rook said, slow and deliberate.He always spoke like he was being charged ten pence per word.“Saw her with a man, before Chicheley got at her.”
“Chicheley,” Thorne hissed, his vision going scarlet for an instant while he thought of all the ways he’d like to make that monster pay for putting his hands on Lucy.
“NotChicheley,” Rook repeated, with the impatience of a man unused to being forced to repeat himself.“Before him, she spoke with someone else.”
“Who?”
“An agent of the Crown.Home Office.Sir Colin Semple.Not a member.”
Suddenly alert, Thorne set down his glass.The fact that Sir Colin wasn’t a member was worrisome—it meant he wasn’t one of the Home Office boys Rook could count on to look the other way when it came to the illegal gambling that took place at Sharpe’s.“He’s looking into the club?”
But Rook shook his head.“Don’t think so.Never approached me.Only her.”
“Why would such a man want to speak with Lucy?Aside from the obvious, of course.”
“Beautiful,” Rook agreed briefly, as impassive as if Lucy’s beauty was a quality that interested him no more or less than any other.He might just as easily have saidtall.Orfemale.
“But he didn’t proposition her,” Thorne surmised.“Or at least, if he did, she didn’t mention it to me.Perhaps his advances were overshadowed by Chicheley’s more odious behavior.”
Rook didn’t think so.Thorne could tell by the way the man barely lifted that scarred brow.“Be careful, Thornecliff.”And with that dire warning, he left Thorne alone to brood into his brandy glass.
Accordingly, Thorne brooded and drank and brooded some more, and still the only conclusion he could come to was that it would be better for all concerned if he were to distance himself from Lucy and whatever this Home Office fellow wanted from her.
It couldn’t have anything to do with Thorne, or The Gentle Rogue.Only a paranoid narcissist would assume any conversation Lucy had must be about him.
But Thorne had learned at the tender age of twenty that there was no such thing as paranoia—his worst fears could and would manifest themselves, without warning.At around the same time, he’d also learned to put himself first, because no one else was going to.
So, call him a paranoid narcissist, but he was staying away from Lucy Lively.And if that decision just so happened to feel more like fleeing in panic than a strategic retreat, so be it.Thorne gave up on bravery and heroics a long time ago.
Since that night at Sharpe’s, he’d tried everything he could think of to banish Lucy Lively from his thoughts.But she wasn’t only lodged immovably in his mind, she seemed to have taken over his loins as well.
She was a witch.And his damned prick was under her spell.
Thorne knew himself to be a man of strong appetites.When he finally rebelled against his strict upbringing, he’d plunged wholeheartedly into hedonism and never looked back.His body craved pleasure—a lot of it.
But since that night at Sharpe’s, it had done nothing but betray him.
