Page 15 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

“I wouldn’t want you to think that it’s Caroline who has kept me from seeking you out much, on our other visits back here,” he said slowly.

“I know a lot of gentlemen blame their wives for curtailing their movements after marriage, but I think quite often it’s the men themselves who don’t want to go out carousing and womanizing any longer, only they’re embarrassed to say so to their friends.

So the woman gets the blame. But I’m not embarrassed, Thorne.

I love my wife. I’d rather be with her than anyone in the world.

Including you—especially the way you were before I left. ”

Thorne stiffened, the words hitting him hard.

His immediate instinct was to lash back with the most cutting insult he could think of—it was on the tip of his tongue to tell Fitz he hadn’t even noticed he’d been gone except to remark that the quality of intelligent conversation in his general vicinity seemed to have improved.

But it wasn’t true; Thorne had noticed. In fact, in addition to that ugly business of one of Thorne’s inner circle burning down The Nemesis, Fitz’s friendship fading from his life had been one of the things that had forced Thorne to consider that perhaps he’d let his vendetta against his uncle go on too long, and too far.

He wondered now if he’d lost more from it than he’d gained. After all, there was little use in plotting revenge against a man who didn’t care if one lived or died.

Thorne didn’t want to drive Fitz away with his sharp tongue.

But neither was Thorne interested in hashing out all his past misdeeds and character flaws.

So he strove for an ease he didn’t feel as he replied, “Well, I wouldn’t care to compete with your lady wife; she has many charms I could never match, I’m sure. ”

“That’s true,” Fitz agreed with unflattering readiness. “But you do seem different these days, somehow. Less…restless.”

Thorne knew he had changed. At first because, as The Gentle Rogue, he’d found an outlet for his frustrations that drinking, carousing, and fucking his way through London had never matched.

And later, when he began to channel the restless energy that drove him into things like Ashbourn’s home for orphaned children…well. It was appallingly mawkish, but it had made Thorne feel…good.

Horrifying as it was to be forced to admit to himself that he had any desire to be a better man—whatever that was supposed to mean—it was far worse to have that desire perceived by anyone else, even his oldest friend.

“It has been a long time,” Thorne pointed out, determined to redirect the conversation. “I’m sure you’ve changed as well. On your travels to—where was it this time? Borneo?”

“Close,” Fitz laughed, showing off the new lines in his tanned face.

The rugged outdoorsman thing suited him, Thorne thought.

“New Zealand. Caroline discovered a new sort of emu, a terribly small one that doesn’t look much like the big fellows they have over there, but all the same, she says they’re related.

Not but what siblings quite often look and act nothing alike—take me and my brother and sister, for example. ”

Yet sometimes, Thorne knew, family resemblance could be uncanny. There had been many years when he’d felt as close to his cousin, Dominic, as if they’d been brothers. Even though there had been no shared blood between them at all.

Christ. Fitz’s return had stirred up the past too much. And that dream last night.

Beyond the monthly reports he received from the servants he’d suborned into keeping an eye on his estranged family’s movements, Thorne never allowed himself to think of Dom. He didn’t intend to start now.

Needing to move, he wheeled his horse around and urged him into a run. The wind whipped into his face, his lungs burning as he leaned low over Samson’s neck and pushed him to a full gallop.

He ignored Fitz’s shout from behind him, pursued by unwanted memories like a pack of hellhounds nipping at his heels.

This was why he came to Hampstead Heath. Because there was space to move, to breathe, to outrun the thoughts that threatened to overtake him.

Despite its proximity to London and the thriving market town of Hampstead, the heath was wild. No one came here for a stroll or a?—

Thorne pulled Samson to a sliding stop a few feet away from the group arrayed upon a blanket around a hamper.

The temper tantrum he’d tried to outrun exploded through him and out of his mouth. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“Having a picnic,” trilled a very small voice.

Thorne’s vision cleared enough to focus on the speaker, a tiny girl child in a straw bonnet. He blinked again, and recognized both her and her mother, damnation , and then the whole rest of the bloody Lively family.

Including Lady Lucy, glaring daggers at him from across the blanket.

Still hearing the wind whistling in his ears, it took Thorne a long moment—too long—to shove the lid back on the box that held his worst impulses.

“I beg your pardon,” he said through stiff lips, addressing little Lady Katherine Lively. “Wasn’t watching where I was going.”

He needed to get out of there. He couldn’t be around people he liked, couldn’t trust himself, so he lifted a hand to tip his hat. But before he could take his leave, Fitz trotted up beside him.

“Good God, man, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Thorne snapped. “Why wouldn’t I be?” He was sharply conscious of the eyes upon him. Lucy’s eyes…

“The way you took off on your horse,” Fitz gabbled, “I thought he must have been stung by a bee! You could have trampled this family—oh, hullo, Your Grace. Er, Your Graces, my lady, good gracious, two ladies, I do apologize. We seem to be interrupting your picnic.”

“Not at all,” the Duchess of Ashbourn replied serenely. “We’d only just sat down, and Thorne stopped in plenty of time to avoid trampling anyone. Won’t you join us, Lord Fitzwilliam? Thorne?”

It was an idyllic scene, like a Gainsborough painting, all soft light and easy brushstrokes portraying an English family in repose.

There was the duchess with her honey-colored hair and serene upturned countenance, one hand cradling the swell of her belly beneath her high-waisted gown.

Beside her, the silent, watchful sentinel of her protective husband, who had leapt to his feet and taken hold of Thorne’s horse’s bridle, as though he might lose control and send his mount rampaging through the picnic after all.

Their cherubic daughter, having tired of the adult conversation already, was armpits-deep into the hamper, rummaging about. And at the back of the blanket perched Lucy, a vision of spring in a cherry-red spencer that set off her mahogany curls and blue eyes to perfection.

Thorne stared down at them all. It seemed to him that the worst thing he could do would be to attempt to insert himself into the scene—akin to taking a handful of mud and smearing it across that priceless Gainsborough landscape.

So of course Fitz gave a cheerful and enthusiastic, “I say! Capital idea. Splendid of you to ask! I’ve been meaning to drop round and call, you know, since the wife and I got back to Town, only it’s been such a whirl what with one thing and another.

But now here we all are! Fortuitous, that’s what I call it—if that’s the word I’m thinking of.

Is it, Lady Lucy? You’re a writer, you must know. ”

Fitz puzzled his brows appealingly at Lucy, who appeared to have fallen into the lightly dazed trance incurred by most sensible people when thrust into conversation with Lord Fitzwilliam Drake.

“Yes,” she said as Fitz swung down from his mount. “Fortuitous means fortunate. A lucky happenstance. If this is indeed an accidental meeting, then that word suits very well.”

If indeed.

Thorne felt some of the blackness disperse. The suspicion in Lucy’s tone delighted him. A bit of color bled back into the world.

“Ah yes, the lady author,” he purred, gazing down at her from horseback. “Remind me, what is it you write again?”

“Travel memoirs,” she said shortly, immediately turning back to Fitz with a determined smile. “Come sit by me, Fitz, and tell me how Caroline has been.”

“Travel memoirs,” Fitz repeated, looking confused. Or perhaps that was merely his face. “I thought you were writing a novel. I’m sure Caroline mentioned taking the newspapers so she could keep up with?—”

“Do you two know each other?” Ashbourn interrupted sternly, looking between Lucy and Fitz. No matter what the man said, it sounded like an interrogation.

Fitz jumped, looking alarmed, but Lucy seemed relieved at the change of topic.

“We met in Paris, just before they were to set sail for the other side of the world,” Lucy explained swiftly.

“I heard Caroline—Lady Fitzwilliam—give a fascinating lecture on the mating habits of birds and accosted her afterward to shower her with praise. We became fast friends. Tell me everything, Fitz, I had no idea you both were in Town!”

She was ignoring Thorne, something he ordinarily wouldn’t tolerate. But for once, he found he didn’t mind. His brain was too busy sifting through what Fitz had inadvertently revealed.

Lucy wasn’t writing a travel memoir. She was writing a novel. Anonymously, or he would’ve known about it already, and serialized, if it was appearing in the papers.

And what had her main subject of interest been for as long as Thorne had known her?

The Gentle Rogue.

It was a leap of intuition, but Thorne had always trusted his gut. Lucy Lively was the author of The Midnight Rider . He’d be willing to bet on it.

Thorne almost laughed aloud as he recalled their conversation on the Maidenhead Bridge where he’d called it drivel.

It occurred to him, as he dismounted from his patient gelding, that the reason he’d chosen Maidenhead Bridge that night was that he’d read the latest chapter of The Midnight Rider that morning, in which the fictional highwayman who was so obviously based upon The Gentle Rogue had robbed someone on the Maidenhead Bridge.

Lacking a more clear-cut plan, he’d made his way to Maidenhead. And that was where Lucy had found him.

He’d always wondered how she happened to be able to find The Gentle Rogue when the authorities had never had the slightest luck. And now, suddenly, Thorne was certain he knew.

She planted ideas for places he should go in the papers, knowing he would read them. And, vain bastard that he was, he had avidly devoured his own press to the point of turning up at, say, Maidenhead Bridge the night after Lady Lucy Lively wrote a scene featuring it in her Midnight Rider novel.

Lucy had played him from the first. And all he could feel about it was stunned and…appreciative. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had gained the upper hand over him like this.

He had to have her.

As Thorne looped Samson’s reins over a nearby tree branch, he decided today’s chance meeting might in fact prove fortuitous . If Thorne wanted to trick Lucy into believing there was more to him than met the eye, there could be no better way than letting her observe him with her family and friends.

Giving the gelding an affectionate stroke and leaving him to happily crop grass, Thorne sauntered closer to the picnic blanket.

Lucy was still doing a marvelous impression of someone who had forgotten Thorne existed, but he saw her sit up a little straighter as he approached.

She clearly assumed he’d settle at her other side and attempt to divert her attention from Fitz’s happy, if confusing, account of the odd animals they’d encountered in New Zealand.

So instead, with a regretful sigh and a silent apology to his valet for everything that was about to befall his snowy white cravat and silk-embroidered waistcoat, Thorne sat down beside little Lady Katherine.