Page 21 of Restored

Kit hated how much that hurt. Enough time had passed, and enough had happened that such careless words shouldn’t affect him in the least. But they did. Because Henry hadn’t just “behaved shabbily”—he had broken their agreement entirely. Had effectively swindled Kit.

“Understand?” Kit said incredulously. “Understand what? Being cheated?”

Jean-Jacques gave a little shrug that was part mystified, part I-told-you-so.

“I was such an idiot,” Kit groaned.

“I think I said so at the time,” Jean-Jacques agreed.

Kit sighed. “Yes, I know. And so did Mabel and everyone else with half a brain, but I was stupid and stubborn and—”

“—in love,” Jean-Jacques completed for him.

“Infatuated,” Kit amended.

Jean-Jacques’s gaze was sympathetic. “You thought he would come back, didn’t you?”

Kit let his head fall back and stared at the ceiling. “I suppose I did,” he admitted. “I hoped he’d wake up one day and realise he missed me.” He scoffed at himself quietly. “I was a very foolish boy.”

After a moment, he raised his head and met Jean-Jacques’s steady gaze. “So how did you respond to him?”

Jean-Jacques shook his head unhappily. “I wanted to give him a part of my mind, but—how could I, Kit? The man is a duke, and I am just a—a man with a little bit of a business.” He shook his head, his expression disgusted. “But I should have said something.”

“No,” Kit said firmly. “You did the right thing. Besides, Evie would have my spleen if you got into an argument with a duke over my head.”

Jean-Jacques gave a dry laugh. “Very true.”

“So,” Kit said gently. “Didyou tell him how I was?”

“Only that you were in good health and settled. I said there was no more I could share with him without your agreement. That was when he asked for your direction, and I said I could not give that either but I would ask you if you would agree to meet. I said I would let him have your answer tomorrow.”

Kit gave an incredulous laugh.

“Oui!” Jean-Jacques exclaimed. “You could have knocked me down with a bird.”

“Feather,” Kit said absently.

Jean-Jacques gave a Gallic wave of dismissal.

“I can't believe he wants to meet me,” Kit said at last. It was incredible. What had prompted such a notion? After all these years?

“Would you consider it?” Jean-Jacques asked curiously.

“It’s been so long,” Kit hedged.

“Eighteen years, your duke said.”

Kit looked up, a little surprised. “That’s right.”

He tried to imagine what Henry might look like now, but all he could think of was Henry all those years ago, not quite thirty years old. He’d seemed so mature to Kit back then. Strange to think that if Kit met that Henry now, he would probably think of him as a mere boy.

Today’s Henry was seven-and-forty. Only six years Kit’s senior. Those six years had mattered a great deal when they had first known one another, but they meant very little now. The years between had equalised them in maturity, if nothing else.

Kit was a very different man now from the innocent Henry had once known. Well, perhaps “innocent” was a bit much. A boy who’d grown up in a brothel and serviced his first client at sixteen had no business calling himself an innocent—but in his way he had been quite naive.

When he looked back now at how he’d behaved after Henry had left him, he cringed to think what a foolish, idealistic boy he had been. It was not, even then, that he’d believed Henry had loved him—he had not been that stupid—but hehadthought there might be a little affection there, enough to at least earn him the right to a farewell delivered in person.

Instead, he’d been given fifty pounds, his marching orders, and a single day to remove himself from the little house in Paddington Green. The news had been delivered not by Henry, but by his man of business, Silas Parkinson. And it hadn’t been so much a farewell as a warning to stay away from Henry or risk losing the use of his legs.