Gabriel sank back against the pillows and tried to steady his breathing.How could he have turned his back on his uncle, the man who had taken him in and raised him, taught him and mentored him and expected such great things of him—and Dom?His brother, in all but name.Gabriel felt a crushing pressure in his chest.
Grief, he identified the sensation distantly.
Whatever had happened to cause such a catastrophic division from his only living family, Gabriel couldn’t remember it.He experienced it now as a sudden rending of the fabric of his life and all he knew.
He’d felt something like it once before, when he was six years old.“It was a solicitor who told me, the last time.”
“The last time…what?”
“When they came to tell me my parents were lost at sea in a particularly violent Channel crossing.”
She sucked in an audible breath, all her attention riveted on him.Gabriel found himself telling her more than he’d meant to, the words spilling from him like blood from a lanced wound.
“The solicitor was not unkind, but his manner was quite brusque, and he clearly didn’t expect the six-year-old new-minted Duke of Thornecliff to cry.”
“And you didn’t,” Lucy guessed.
Gabriel looked away.“Not until later that night, alone in my bed in the dark.”
He’d screamed into his pillow until his throat was scraped raw.He hadn’t been able to speak for two days.
And then Uncle Roman arrived.
Gabriel gritted his teeth.“Why are those memories so fresh and vivid that I can recall the solicitor’s iron-gray wig and the flash of his gold pocket watch, but I can’t remember what came between me and my uncle and cousin?Why can’t I remember what it feels like to kiss the woman I’m meant to marry?”
Frustration and loss simmered inside him, threatening to boil over.He realized his head was pounding again, his headache back in full force, the instant before Lucy rose in a flurry of plum-colored skirts and went to draw the curtains closed.
“Thank you,” he said, hardly recognizing his own ragged voice.
“I’m sorry.”Lucy came back to stand by his bedside.She looked distraught, the plump softness of her bottom lip bitten red.“Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.The doctor was very clear that you weren’t to be agitated in any way.”
“No,” he said sharply, and her head came up in shock at his tone.He tried to gentle it, but he wasn’t sure how well he succeeded.“I don’t mean to shout.But everything is shifting all around me; it’s as if I’m standing in quicksand and there’s no solid ground anywhere, and you’re the only person holding out a hand to stop me from disappearing beneath the earth.”
He reached for her, and she came to him at once, folding her cool fingers around his.Her touch soothed the thing inside him that wanted to rage and gnash its teeth.It gave him the control to be able to admit, “I need you to tell me the truth.I trust you.”
Her pretty face crumpled a bit at that.He liked that she was so tenderhearted.She seemed to feel everything so deeply.Perhaps she even…loved him.
It wasn’t such a leap, he supposed, since they were planning to be married.But people wed for many different reasons; love was one of the least of them, especially amongst the upper classes.
Given that they’d almost certainly anticipated their marriage vows, at least to some degree, Gabriel thought it was not a stretch to assume that Lucy cared for him.
Her caring felt like a gift he hadn’t earned.
All he could do was attempt to cherish and protect that gift until his memories came back, and he could once more be the man she’d agreed to wed.
Until then, she’d expressed a wish that they get to know one another.And he, for one, had a lot of questions.
“Enough.Let us abide by Dr.Perry’s rules and remain unagitated.”The smile felt unfamiliar on his face, but it made her smile back at him, so he counted it as a triumph.“I’m tired of thinking about all the things I’ve forgotten.Tell me something new, something I didn’t know before.”
* * *
Right around the moment she felt her heart crack in two at the expression on Gabriel’s face when he spoke about learning of his parents’ deaths, that was when Lucy realized this whole faux betrothal was going to be a lot more complicated than she’d anticipated.
She wanted to hang on to her anger, her sense of betrayal, but he was making it awfully difficult.
Gabriel was just so different from either The Gentle Rogue or the Thornecliff Lucy had thought she knew.Still sharply clever and with a wicked bent to his wit, but less cynical and cutting.And so much more open—yet everything she’d learned from him today left her with more questions than answers.
What had happened between him and his last remaining family members?Fitz had implied that Thorne had changed after that falling out, and Lucy could now attest to that fact.The Gabriel before her, free of those memories, was a different man.
