But of course, she hadn’t known him.She understood that now.
Looking back from the present moment, held within the true, naked, shivering glory of the closeness she felt to Gabriel, she wondered if fixing her girlhood affections upon an impossible object like The Gentle Rogue had simply been a safe way to explore her burgeoning feelings about what went on between adults.
“Some people prefer not to be known,” Gabriel mused, his voice a pleasing rumble in the darkness.“And others are only capable of wading in the shallow waters of another person’s soul.Not everyone is like you, Lucy.”
“And what am I like?”She held her breath for his answer.
“A deep diver,” he said slowly, his long fingers coming up to comb her hair back from her face.“Someone who wants to be known, all the way to the bottom, and will never be truly satisfied with anything less than a husband who will open himself to being known in the same way.”
“Sometimes I think you understand me better than I understand myself,” Lucy whispered, struck to the quick.
Instead of answering, Gabriel suddenly twisted and reached one his long arms to feel around behind the headboard.Lucy knew what he’d found before he pulled out the small figure of the wooden horse.
She bit her lip guiltily, hating that she had to pretend to be surprised as he showed it to her.
“What’s this?”she faltered.
“I’ve always hated this bed,” he said.“The whole room, really.Uncle Roman insisted I take it.As soon as he arrived at Thornecliff to take charge of me, after the funeral where we buried two empty coffins because my parents’ bodies were lost at sea, Uncle Roman took me aside and said, ‘You are Thornecliff now.Everything is going to change, and you will rise to the occasion.’”
Lucy pictured it vividly, the little golden-haired boy staring up at his only living family.He’d been a six-year-old child being told he had to grow up overnight because he was a duke.She felt heavy with grief for that child, but Gabriel’s voice was light, as though he didn’t see anything wrong with the story he told.
“He looked at me so seriously,” he recalled, sounding fond.“As though I was a grown man and not a sniveling infant.I remember staring up at his solemn face and wanting nothing in the world so much as to be the person Uncle Roman thought I was.”
Youwerean infant, Lucy wanted to cry, but she held her tongue, not wanting to stop the flow of memories.
Gabriel settled back against her comfortably, his arm draped over her waist with the hand holding the horse in front of them.“Among the many, many things it turned out that the Duke of Thornecliff did not do, according to Uncle Roman, was that the Duke of Thornecliff did not sleep in the nursery.That very evening, all my clothes were transferred to the ducal suite.All my other things, including my toys, stayed up in the nursery.Except this.”
His thumb stroked the horse’s nose, in the exact spot Lucy had noticed earlier was worn smooth, and tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.
Oblivious, Gabriel said happily, “I can’t believe no one ever found him.Probably not a recommendation of the housekeeping at Thornecliff, but to be fair to the maids, I hid my contraband well.It would’ve gutted me for Uncle Roman to know I’d smuggled him down here.And God forbid, Dominic.I never would’ve heard the end of it.”
But he was showing her.Because he wanted her to know him.Because he wanted to open himself to her, the way he knew she needed.Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and felt the tears overflow to dampen the pillow beneath her head.
“He’s lovely,” she said when she thought she could keep her voice steady.“What’s his name?”
“Dante,” he replied, his voice deep and beginning to blur with tiredness.“For my father’s favorite writer.”
Of course.Lucy’s tears continued in a silent stream as quiet descended on the bed.Gabriel’s big body relaxed at her back into the deep stillness of sleep, but Lucy couldn’t stop crying.
All she could think of was the way the masked Rogue had recoiled when she’d expressed a desire to know him, the night he’d told her it was over.The way Thornecliff had lied and obfuscated, throwing up every barrier he could to keep Lucy from seeing who he truly was.
She was every bit as much a thief as The Gentle Rogue had ever been, Lucy thought miserably.Except instead of baubles and trinkets, she was stealing pieces of Gabriel’s soul that he would never give away if he were whole, with his memories intact.
It was wrong.But how could she abandon him now?If she told him the truth, she would have to leave.And she couldn’t bear to go.God, it was such a mess.
What was she going to do?
ChapterTwenty
Gabriel sat in the tufted leather armchair behind the big oak desk in the Thornecliff study for a long time after his man of business departed.
The estate’s books lay open on the desk, line after meticulous line in the financial shorthand he’d learned at his uncle’s knee—but these books told a story Gabriel couldn’t seem to parse.
He’d almost missed the meeting entirely.Waking after the deepest sleep he could remember with Lucy still wrapped in his arms and not a single nightmare image swirling in his head, Gabriel had been in no hurry to rise.
But the latitude given to a duke and the woman he intended to make his duchess didn’t extend to being found naked in bed together by the servants.So when the house began to stir, he’d kissed Lucy awake and bundled her into her wrapper and back down the empty hallway to her bedchamber.
She was beautiful in the morning, he knew now.Sleep-warm and soft, with her hair a tumble of mahogany waves and the slight marks of his fingers still showing on her creamy thighs.He’d tried to apologize, but she’d raised a brow along with one corner of her lips and said, “Don’t you dare.I love them.I’ll feel you all day.”
