She’d gone into that room hating him for lying to her and seducing her and making a fool of her.She’d come out of it more confused and conflicted than ever.
It had taken all of one conversation with Gabriel to melt her resolve…and to show her the danger she was in.Because Lucy absolutely could not and would not allow herself to fall in love with this man for thethird time.That would be absurd.
Even she must learn her lesson, finally.
She would simply have to stay away from him.She would let him rest and recover, and she would avoid being alone with him until she’d shored up her own defenses.
Lucy hurried to her room to pen a note to Fitz and Caroline informing them of Gabriel’s accident and their supposed engagement, and also one to Gabriel’s sister, Lady Rosalie, with whom she happened to know he was still on good terms.
Fascinating that he hadn’t asked when Rosalie would arrive, however—it was the mysterious Dominic de Vere he had expected would rush to his sickbed.
The expression on Gabriel’s face when he’d learned that Lucy had never even met his relatives tugged at her heart.
He had always been such a locked strongbox with her, an enigmatic puzzle of a man.The vulnerability he exhibited now was like a drug to Lucy.Already, she wanted to go back in and sit with him again, to soak in both his easy smile and his unguarded grief.
With a sinking heart, Lucy realized it was going to be a miracle if she managed to stay away from him for longer than a few hours.
ChapterSixteen
Over the next few days, Gabriel’s headaches came and went, but as long as he kept resentfully still and quiet in his darkened bedchamber, they were manageable and seemed to improve day by day.
He’d barely seen Lucy since that first afternoon.They’d had nothing more than short visits here and there, where she carefully didn’t mention anything that could lead to an emotional outburst, and he just as carefully didn’t try to tempt her into joining him in the big blue bed.
But sometimes when he woke in the morning, her favorite armchair would be stationed at his bedside, an open book lying facedown over the scrolled arm of the chair, and he wondered if she was spending her nights watching over him.
The thought both warmed his chest and made him feel achingly frustrated with his lack of ability to climb out of this damned bed and resume whatever he’d made of his life.
Four days in, just when Gabriel was beginning to think he might expire from sheer boredom even though he’d been deemed fit enough to get up from his bed and sit in a chair instead, Fitz arrived on a wave of blessedly familiar enthusiasm.
The gangly boy Gabriel remembered had grown into a strapping man who looked as though he spent most of his time out of doors.His skin was weathered and tanned, his hair permanently windblown.He looked older, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but was.
Somehow, Fitz having laugh lines was more disconcerting than the half hour Gabriel had spent studying his own face in the mirror.
It didn’t make any rational sense to Gabriel that he felt so at home in his thirty-one-year-old body, yet expected his friends not to have aged a day.But then again, none of this mad situation made any sense.
Though Fitz had clearly been briefed ahead of time not to agitate the patient, he seemed to have a less than firm grasp of what that might entail, and Gabriel was able to wring quite a few details about the past decade out of his old friend.
The most astonishing thing Gabriel learned was that Fitz was married to a brilliant lady of scientific bent—but Fitz also let slip that before his marriage, he had been party to several years’ worth of ruinously bad behavior with “Thorne,” as he’d grown used to calling him.
Fitz reminisced fondly enough about their time carousing through London’s seediest gaming hells and rowdiest taverns.Meanwhile, all Gabriel could do was lie there and wonder who that fellow, Thorne, was.
“Did my uncle never attempt to curb my wilder excesses?”he broke into one of Fitz’s stories to ask.“I can’t make sense of it.Uncle Roman could not have approved of that sort of reckless folly.”
“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t,” Fitz agreed cheerfully.“I imagine that was at least half the point of it, to you.Not that you admitted as much to me.But, do you know, though many people think I’m something of a bacon-brain, my darling Caroline tells me I’m wise in the ways of my fellow man, and I have come to believe there’s something in what she says.”
“She sounds like a very perceptive woman,” Gabriel said.It was true that Fitz had never been the cleverest of men, but he’d always possessed a certain canny awareness—an innate understanding of the undercurrents of social situations, the true motivations and feelings and concerns of the people involved.Gabriel was glad his friend had found a woman who saw him for the uniquely gifted, sensitive, and affectionate man he was.
Which left Gabriel to consider just why he might have spent the better part of a decade, it seemed, rebelling so hard against his uncle that he’d cemented his own reputation as the worst rake in London.
“What happened between Uncle Roman and me?Do you know?”
“I don’t know the particulars.It was all to do with that awful episode when you were taken—” Fitz cut himself off, eyes flaring wide with alarm.“That is to say, it was a difficult time.”
“Taken where?”Gabriel demanded, his every nerve flaring to alertness.“By whom?”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” Fitz said.“And after I promised Lucy so faithfully to keep to pleasant topics.Blast.”
“Fitz, tell me,” Gabriel growled, but his friend only went shifty about the eyes and protested that he hadn’t been involved and really didn’t know the facts and oh, look at the time, maybe he ought to be going.
