“Regrets are for people who want to be better,” Thorne said, attempting to recover his poise.“I am what I am, and I have no interest in changing.”
It was something he’d said before, an attitude he’d struck with his followers and friends, who had greatly admired it and repeated the sentiment far and wide.Lucy, however, merely lifted a skeptical brow.
“Change comes for us all, whether we will it or no.Even dukes.”
A frisson of something cool skated down his spine.The new plan.He had to stick to the new plan.
If he couldn’t cut Lucy out of his heart and mind, he could at least use what had happened tonight to keep her out of his life.
For both their sakes.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said deliberately.“After all, I’ve never before cared to take a mistress.But Mrs.Forrest is, indeed, extraordinarily lovely.”
The words landed between them like he’d flung a handful of dung at her feet.Lucy took a step back, her expressive face closing down as though she’d drawn the curtains across a window.
“Is that what you followed me out here to say?”she asked through bloodless lips.He was distantly, perversely proud of her steady tone, the dignified tilt of her chin.
“Yes,” he lied.Lying came easily to him; he’d taught himself the trick of it ages ago, when his entire life fell apart and he had to remake it, and himself, anew.
So why did this particular lie feel as though it would cut the inside of his mouth?
“I realize this means I’ll be failing to fulfill my promise to you,” he went on, doggedly, “but I simply won’t have the time to play tour guide to an aspiring spinster.You understand.”
“Oh, I understand, all right.”Lucy’s scorn flayed him open, but nothing cut deeper than the hurt he glimpsed beneath it.“I understand that you’re a coward.”
Thorne stilled.The air smelled like lightning, charged and tense, and the temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees in the past minutes.The few stray passers-by began to hurry their footsteps, rushing to get home before the weather broke.
A storm was coming.
Lucy glared at him, all defiant challenge, and Thornecliff stared back, feeling frozen.
Cowardice was the cardinal sin of his childhood.For Uncle Roman, who had never backed down from anything in his life, there was nothing worse than cowardice.
Thorne and Dominic had gone to great lengths to avoid any appearance of it, whether by vying to be the first to ride a fractious horse or by throwing themselves into their fencing and sparring lessons as though training for war.
Lucy’s own brother had flung the same accusation at Thorne once and goaded him into a no-holds-barred bare-knuckle fight that had ended with both of them bloody.
Only the entire building going up in flames had been enough to stop the bout before they’d beaten each other senseless.
“Have a care, Lucy,” he warned her hoarsely.“I don’t like that word.”
“I don’t give a damn what you like,” Lucy growled.“There is something between us, or there could be.If you weren’t too afraid to see where it leads.But you’d rather have your fantasy woman who is paid to fawn over you rather than anything real.”
A spark of anger kindled under his breastbone.Who was she to talk about preferring reality to fantasy when the man of her dreams wore a mask and had never told her his true name?“That’s rich, coming from a woman who’s been obsessed with the fantasy of a masked highwayman since she was a girl.”
Lucy reared back, shock flaring in her eyes, and Thorne pressed his advantage, every breath a blade in his lungs.
“Yes, I know what you actually write, Lady Lucy.And it’s not your travel memoirs.”
“My writing has nothing to do with this?—”
“The Gentle Rogue isn’t real,” he said with crushing emphasis.“And he’s the one you truly want.”
Lucy’s mouth trembled.“You have no idea what I want.”
And then she surged up onto her toes and kissed him.
Thorne had an instant of near panic—there was a reason he wasn’t supposed to kiss Lucy, wasn’t there?—before every thought was drowned in the crystalline perfection of the freshwater taste of her.
