Gabriel palmed absently at his swelling prick beneath the desk.How had he gotten so lucky?
Lucy was with the Drakes, who had taken her on a long walk to visit the nesting grounds of some local birds Gabriel had forgotten the name of.They ought to be back soon, and Gabriel found himself staring into space and wishing for Lucy’s swift return like a bloody mooncalf.
Ridiculous, yet he couldn’t bring himself to mind it too much.After all, the woman he yearned for was his, or promised to be.
Now if only he could make sense of these bloody account books.Gabriel bent back to his work, checking and rechecking the ledgers, and he became absorbed enough that he almost missed the sound of the front door opening and closing.
But some part of him was so attuned to Lucy, the noise registered in his distracted mind enough to have him dropping his pen and starting for the door of the study with a smile on his face.
He reached it just as the butler-who-wasn’t-Farthingdale opened it.Startled, Gabriel stopped.Why was he announcing Lucy and showing her in, as if she hadn’t been staying in the house for days?
But when Not-Farthingdale opened his mouth, what he said was, “Lord Roman de Vere to see you, Your Grace.”
Gabriel fell back a step.Staggered, was more like it.He couldn’t imagine what he looked like, but Not-Farthingdale seemed to consider it above his pay grade to notice.Eyes studiously trained on the middle distance, he crisply opened the study door and stood aside.
Uncle Roman filled the doorway, the same way he’d filled every room in Gabriel’s childhood.
He looked older, Gabriel thought blankly, then clenched his jaw.Hewasolder.
Roman de Vere had to be in his early forties by now.More than a decade had added those silver streaks at his temples and the additional grooves bracketing his unsmiling mouth, though time had done little to bend the unyielding line of his shoulders.
But Gabriel was older now, too.He wasn’t a newly orphaned child, or even a young man desperate for approval, desperate for attention.Desperate to matter.
He was a grown man, a duke in his own ancestral home.And Roman de Vere had not been welcomed here in years.
Everything Gabriel had learned about his abduction swirled in his head, the multitude of questions he still harbored cramming into his throat and stopping his tongue.
Not-Farthingdale disappeared, leaving Gabriel standing like a block in the doorway, everything he wanted to say choking him silent.
He stood there long enough to realize there must have been something warm in his uncle’s watchful gray eyes, because Gabriel saw the moment they chilled to the color of a winter storm.
“Thornecliff,” Roman said with rigid formality.His voice, at least, was the same.Deep and deliberate, with an air of authority no amount of courtesy could quite extinguish.“May I come in.”
It was phrased as a question, though he did a poor job of making it sound like one.Wordlessly, Gabriel stood back to allow his uncle to stalk into the study as though he owned it.
This had been his uncle’s domain, once, Gabriel realized.All those years before Gabriel went off to school, it had been Uncle Roman who saw to the management of the estates.It had been in this very room that he’d undertaken to teach Gabriel how to steer the enormous, unwieldy ship that was the Thornecliff dukedom.
The past overlaid the present in a hazy jumble.He had looked up to this man; Roman de Vere was the god who ruled over every moment of Gabriel’s childhood.
He hadn’t been a gentle, benevolent god, exactly—he’d been a demanding taskmaster, single-minded in his pursuit of his duty.Which, as he saw it, was to safeguard the legacy of Thornecliff.
Which included molding his nephew into the perfect duke.
Gabriel, in turn, had sought his uncle’s approbation with all the focus and fervor of his somewhat intense personality.The introduction of a rival and comrade in the form of a step-cousin, when Roman married Dominic’s mother, had only increased Gabriel’s drive.
It seemed he and his uncle had both failed.The thought hurt more than he wanted to admit.
He wondered briefly where Dominic was.If he knew Roman was here, if he’d asked after Gabriel.
Stupid.But he couldn’t help a stab of disappointment that Dom hadn’t come.
A pulse of pain behind Gabriel’s left eye made him set his jaw against a grimace.Perfect timing for my first headache in days, he thought grimly.
“Reports have reached me that you suffered an injury.”His uncle’s clipped voice broke the silence.“I must know, at once, if it’s true that you have lost your memory.”
Gabriel’s jaw unlocked.“You must already know it’s true, or you wouldn’t have expected to be admitted into my home.”
Roman’s eyes flickered.He put his hands behind his back, and Gabriel knew without looking that he’d clasped one wrist in the opposite hand, as though shackling himself.It was the same pose he’d adopted innumerable times during Gabriel’s childhood, and the sight of him standing that way now sent a complicated cascade of emotions washing through Gabriel.
