Page 149 of Dukes for Dessert

“The Rook had more reason. I’m glad he took his vengeance.”

Sebastian didn’t argue the point, Mortimer had kept Ash and Lorelai from each other for almost twenty years. He was the reason the boy had become the Rook…had survived the pits of Hell to bring his damned soul back to the woman he’d loved as a child. To inflict his wrath on the foul fiend who’d separated them for no reason but his own cruelty.

But Mortimer Weatherstoke spent a handful of years hurting the woman that Sebastian was—

Was what?

He couldn’t even think the words… Could not turn the strange maelstrom of his emotion into a tangible thing.

He didn’t know how.

What he did know was that she’d asked him to stow his anger. She needed his deference. His gentility. His understanding. He could grant her those things and indulge in his own rage later.

It was the least he could do.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said, measuring his voice. “But it might do you some good to unburden your mind.”

She took in a preparatory breath. “I never conceived after that. Some doctors said my womb was too small, others that my body temperature was too low, or things weren’t…shaped correctly inside of me. I was examined in all manner of ways, and no one could give me an answer.”

That did less than nothing to abate his ire. “What about your husband? Was he examined?”

The question seemed to startle her. “No one…no one suggested that the fault might lie with him.”

“Unbelievable,” he snapped. “There’s every chance the infertility is his.”

“Oh? Are you a doctor as well as a pirate and an earl?” she asked, with surprising levity.

“Obviously not. But surely if a woman can…malfunction internally, it stands to reason that a man would as well. There’s no way to look inside of our bodies, so who is to say what…pipes and channels and bits and bobs could be defective. It only stands to reason.”

“I love that you think that, but the medical community seems to agree that if a man can finish then he is able to breed.”

He snorted his naked derision. “I think they’ll someday figure out that I was right, and then I’ll delight in telling you that I had once informed you thusly.”

She let out a soft little sound of mirth. “I look forward to you finding me on that day.”

Finding her? Where would she be?

Then it dawned on him, stealing his breath with the bloody obviousness of it all.

Of course, they would go their separate ways. Would she even want to see him again after this?

Was tonight all they had?

There was a man he needed to murder several railcars away. A room they’d ransacked that would be discovered before morning. Questions regarding a missing family that would most certainly arise once the patriarch was found dead.

Pure unmitigated chaos would ensue.

Would she disembark the train now that Penelope and her intended had escaped? And even if Veronica remained until Constantinople, they’d run out of track eventually. What then? Back to her life at Southbourne? Paris? London?

Swallowing a surge of unexpected misery, he allowed himself to ask another question burning within him for the past year.

“Do you see them often, Lorelai and Ash?”

“All the time. She is my closest friend and I find I like Ash the more I am in his company.”

“And…” He drew little circles around her knuckles with an errant finger. “They fare well?”

“They are disgustingly happy.”