Page 26 of How to Seduce a Viscount (Wed Within a Year #3)

Luce laughed, a soft sound in the night air.

‘The four of us liked to be outdoors. We’d camp near the lake at Sandmore during the summers and Grandfather felt it was not an opportunity to be wasted.

He sent our tutor with us to teach us the stars at night.

I liked it because of the Latin. But it was Stepan who was the best at it.

We all had our gifts. Caine was an excellent marksman at an early age.

Kieran is an all-around talent from weapons to conversation.

He’s always mastered anything he’s set his mind to.

The problem with him is that he doesn’t set his mind to everything.

He is rather selective.’ Luce chuckled. ‘I excelled at language and academia—probably more from circumstance at first than choice.’

‘Why is that?’ She smiled up at him, enjoying this intimate look into the brotherhood, into him .

‘Well, I was the youngest by six years and we’d have this swimming competition every summer to see who could race out to the island in the lake fastest. The loser had to do the others’ homework for a week.

I couldn’t hope to compete with them although I tried my best. Inevitably, I ended up doing four Latin assignments instead of one quite often.

Later, I was glad for it. I enjoy books and history and languages.

They weren’t hard for me and my father was a great supporter of learning.

We’ve bonded over books throughout the years.

’ He gave a teasing smile. ‘May I tell you a secret? I think my father likes me best because of it.’ He laughed.

‘I am joking of course. My father loves all of us.’

Wren thought it was wondrous to have a father at all. To have one who loved you, who shared such a deep abiding interest in something that also interested you, was beyond her scope of imagining but not beyond her scope of wanting.

A little silence stretched between them.

Luce sighed, his breath coming out frosty.

‘Stepan was the best at astronomy, though. He was the consummate outdoorsman out of all of us. He could swim like a fish, hike like a bear and track like a fox. He’d take off on day treks and come back with a knapsack full of plants and herbs.

He’d spend the next day analysing them. Or he’d go out to the home farm.

He loved to work with the farmers and talk about crop rotation.

Country folk were his folk. He might have struggled with Latin but the language of the countryside was his language.

Crops, yields, fallow fields—he knew it all. ’

‘You miss him.’ He’d not talked about Stepan in the weeks she’d been here. For a man who spoke six languages, such silence was an indicator of the depth of his pain. The subject of his brother simply hurt too much yet. What he had mentioned in passing had been perfunctory.

She squeezed his hand beneath the robe in quiet gratitude for the story.

No words were necessary. Words would only make it worse.

It was enough to be the recipient of these beautiful stories tonight, to be given this rare look inside the Parkhurst world and yet her secret kicked at the bars of its cage with a new ferocity.

Tell him! Tell him! Tell him his brother may be alive. Take away his pain.

‘Luce, I…’ she began. The words were nearly there, nearly breathed into existence on the wisps of a frosty night, ‘…I am so sorry.’ Truth faltered in the silence, the secret intact and yet Wren felt as if in keeping the secret she’d somehow failed.

After a while, Luce picked up the reins and chirped to the patient horse. He turned to her all smiles and mischief, as if he hadn’t been entirely vulnerable just minutes before. ‘I believe I’ve promised you some dancing tonight.’

‘More than dancing I believe was promised.’ She smiled back, willing to play along.

She understood it all better—the flirting, the fun, the projects and the passions.

They were all ways to drive the hurt into oblivion, whether it was late nights spent working on his grandfather’s memoir, restoring his home, or solving codes.

If he was busy, if he was working on something meaningful, it held the pain at bay and perhaps in its own way kept alive hope that Stepan was out there.

Somewhere. And someday he’d find his way home, perhaps guided by the very stars he loved so much.

A wave of guilt over her failure earlier swept over her.

She had the power to give him some hope, real hope.

But she’d promised the earl to say nothing until they were sure.

That promise grated on her tonight. The man she loved was in pain, living daily with an anguish he kept hidden, and she was sworn to do nothing about it.

Yet . She consoled herself. She was doing something about it, she simply couldn’t tell anyone.

Yet . In many ways yet was a word of hope, a promise of things to come.

Luce parked the cutter in the tavern’s stable yard and helped her down with a laughing caution about watching where she stepped.

She laughed, too, their laughter restoring some of the mirth of the evening.

For her, though, the evening was already tainted.

The secret was eating her alive. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Tonight was supposed to be magical, a moment out of reality, her very own fairy tale.

She touched the pearls one last time before they stepped inside.

She’d played parts before but never one as difficult as the one tonight.

‘You look beautiful. No one will be able to take their eyes off you.’ Luce held the door.

‘I feel beautiful because I’m with you,’ she confessed in a whisper, flirting hard as they stepped over the threshold into the boisterous warmth of the tavern.

She couldn’t let him guess that she’d held out on him.

Couldn’t let him guess that in the morning she’d be gone.

After their moment under the stars, she knew it was the right choice.

If she couldn’t tell him, she couldn’t stay.

His hand was at her back, his voice at her ear with a final caution. ‘Remember, you promised to be good, tonight.’

She leaned close to him with a wicked rejoinder and a warm, throaty laugh to hide her distress. ‘So did you. I’m holding you to that.’