He was through with her.
Lucy indulged in a stormy bout of tears that left her with aching eyes, a stuffed nose, and a clear head.
You’re a child.Go home and grow up.
Inescapably, Lucy thought of another man who had mocked her youth and dismissed her as though she were nothing more than a babe needing her nursemaid.
She shook her head sharply to clear the Duke of Thornecliff from her thoughts.He had nothing to do with what was between Lucy and her Rogue.
She might never be the kind of woman who could tempt a man beyond reason, who could inspire the kind of passionate love she dreamed of.Lucy wasn’t seductively flirtatious and sumptuously curved like her sister, Gemma.Nor was Lucy serenely warm and womanly like her friend, Bess.
Lucy was too tall.Too skinny, with no curves to speak of, and a tongue tart enough to make more than one young gentleman wince when he saw her coming across a ballroom.She was too impulsive by half and she’d read far too many novels to ever be able to settle for anything less than a grand passion.
But as far as her age went, well,thatwas a solvable problem.Time would, eventually, take care of it for her.All she had to do was wait.And then…try again.
“I’ll stay away from you, somehow.I’ll grow up, my Rogue,” she whispered to the wind.“Then I’ll come find you.You’ll kiss me again.And this time…you won’t stop.”
ChapterTwo
Five years later
April, 1826
Light glowed from the windows of Ashbourn House, as golden and welcoming as when her father had been alive to throw the most scandalous parties Mayfair had ever witnessed.
Lucy stepped down from the traveling chaise and stripped off her gloves, staring up at the old pile.
It had been a long time since Ashbourn House had felt like home to Lucy.If she were to be honest, she’d have to admit that she’d never truly known the meaning of “home” until she and her mother and older sister had been unceremoniously tossed from this one and forced to make a new place for themselves in the ramshackle coaching inn of a tiny Wiltshire village.
It was there that Lucy had decided that home was not so much a building as it was the people who lived in it.
Since then, Lucy had laid her head in many an odd place: the narrow bunk of a boat sailing for France; a series of inns on the way from Paris to Rome; a pensionein Florence with a nosy landlady so nurturing and funny and dear that Lucy had stayed on there for months.
Armed with the fortune her half-brother had settled on her, an increasingly dog-eared travel guide, and a searing need to be away from England, Lucy had seen the world.
She had grown up.In the ballrooms of Paris, the piazzas of Rome, and the poppy-strewn hillsides of Florence.While gazing at risqué French fashions and crumbling frescoes and soaring cathedrals…Lucy had grown up.
She hadn’t put her life on hold; she had lived.But she’d never forgotten the man who had driven her from England in the first place, and the way she’d felt when she was with him.
Though he’d almost certainly forgotten all about her.
Pushing that lowering thought from her mind, Lucy checked that the footmen were exercising particular care with regards to unloading her traveling writing desk from the roof of the coach.Satisfied that her closest companion of the past five years had arrived intact, she gathered her travel-stained skirts and strode up the steps to Ashbourn House.
A stooped white man with ruthlessly combed steel-gray hair answered the door.His dour expression brightened minutely upon seeing Lucy; he’d always had a soft spot for her.
“Lady Lucy.”He bowed from the waist, as solemnly as though she were visiting royalty and not someone Goring had once rescued from a tumble into the coal cellar when she was a toddler.“We did not expect you until the morrow!Do please come in.”
“Thank you, Mr.Goring.”Lucy felt a strong urge to give the elderly butler a hug, but she resisted.It would have discomfited him greatly.“Are they all at dinner?Shall I go through?”
His hesitation surprised her.“Of course, my lady.It is only that there is a guest for dinner tonight.”
The heavy emphasis he placed on the word “guest” made Lucy grin.Poor old Goring had weathered the turbulent ups and downs of the Lively family for decades now, from the extremely staid and respectable affairs organized by Lucy’s father’s first duchess, through the wild years of the last duke’s scandalous marriage to Lucy’s mother, and now into the advent of the new Duke of Ashbourn, Lucy’s half-brother.
Goring had seen it all and had remained stoic throughout—but Lucy knew he took the family’s reputation more seriously than ever her brother had, even at his proudest and most arrogant.
If this guest had overset Goring’s tender sensibilities, Lucy felt she was quite likely to enjoy them, whoever they were.
“Don’t announce me,” she said impulsively.“I want to surprise them.”
