Page 151 of Dukes for Dessert

Finally, after the silence stretched into a tangled, uncomfortable place, the man beneath her tilted his chin away and studied the canopy while a long exhale deflated him.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she recanted, searching for a way back to their intimacy of before.

“It’s a question I often ponder,” he responded, his fingers still tangled in her hair, though he couldn’t seem to meet her gaze. “And all the answers that present themselves feel inadequate and pathetic.”

She knew he’d done wrong by his friend, and by hers, but the despondency in his voice tugged at a deep-seated sympathy in her soul.

“If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that anger is little more than fear, pain, or grief wearing a protective mask.” She fidgeted with the finely stitched hem of his collar. “You were so furious at Ash,” she recalled. “Was it because he’d hurt you, he’d taken something from you, or he’d made you afraid?”

“Do I have to pick only one?” he scoffed.

“Of course not.” She waited patiently for him to gather a few more thoughts, discovering the soft golden hairs fleecing his breastbone with curious fingertips.

“You asked me once how I’d escaped a prison sentence,” he said stonily, his dazzling eyes dulled as they remained locked on the canopy above them.

“You’re changing the subject,” she gently chided.

“Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

He hazarded a glance at her, and what she read in it broke her heart. She’d expected defiance and excuses and his singular sense of blistering humor.

What she found was a bleak, fathomless indignity.

His gaze skittered away when he spoke again, as if he couldn’t both look at her and examine himself at the same time.

“I’m not the Earl of Crosthwaite,” he confessed to the shadows above. “My mother, may she rest in peace, was trapped in a loveless marriage to an impotent earl. She had a lover, several in fact. None of them noble.”

“Do you know which one of them sired you?” she queried.

“I don’t even think she did, or she died before she was able to reveal it to me or the earl.”

“And the earl always understood you were not his progeny, for obvious reasons…”

Sebastian shifted, and when she would have raised herself to give him more room, his arms tightened around her, keeping her close. “He hated me for it, but he hated worse the cousin that would inherit. Though, to save face, he named me his heir, and publicly claimed me as his own. Privately, I lived my youth as a prisoner of his rage.”

“That’s awful,” Veronica murmured, pressing a hand to his chest.

“It wasn’t so bad. The earl trotted me out when he was supposed to. Granted me the education due my station—er—his station. All the while, he pissed away any inheritance, ruined my childhood home, and dismantled all other properties that might have provided income. I swear to Christ, he even salted the earth in the fields. And so, when he died, I was seventeen and left with nothing but tax debt and a title I’d usurped through no fault of my own. I was the Earl of Nothing.”

“That must have been so lonely,” she commiserated, resting her chin on the meat of his chest.

He summoned a wan smile that must have meant to be cheerful, but fell short of the mark. “I’ve never wanted for company,” he boasted, more out of habit than pride, she thought.

“Yes, but don’t you find that sometimes a crowded room is the loneliest place in the world?”

He tucked her hair behind her ear, stroking at the little diamond bob in her lobe. “Stop looking into my soul, Countess, especially when I’m trying to bare it to you. Sometimes it feels you know me better than I know myself.”

Driven by a quick impulse, she pressed a soft kiss to his cheek. “So, you took to the sea to find your fortune,” she prompted.

He gave her an arrested stare before continuing. “Fortune found me on the Devil’s Dirge, where I climbed in rank rather quickly as I proved my usefulness to the Rook. Eventually we formed a kinship. The Rook violently obtained things, and I violently enjoyed those things.

For me, pirating had begun as a rush of life-affirming exhilaration. The freedom of calling no man king and no country home. And then, it was about something bigger than myself, as well. Revenge on the very system that still took liberty from others. The seas are such a dangerous and wild place…not only because of nature, but because of the types of men that move goods around the world. It was the Rook’s own tragic story that tied me to him so utterly.”

“Which brings us to the betrayal in question,” he said, seeming to notice the confusion wrinkling her forehead. “What the Rook didn’t know—what I’d never told him—was that he’d become a brother to me. We’d planned to follow that ancient Roman treasure, the Claudius Cache, to the end of the world, and then retire to paradise. We’d even spoken of doing exactly what I do now, finding the bastards who make a living off the broken backs of shanghaied men, and helping them from this world, starting with your late husband.”

Suddenly it all made sense to Veronica…and she finished the story, herself. “But instead, he found Lorelai—and me—and in doing so, he connected with his past and the brothers he’d left there, neither of whom were fond of you or his life as a pirate.”