Page 26 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

“Yes,” he lied. Lying came easily to him; he’d taught himself the trick of it ages ago, when his entire life fell apart and he had to remake it, and himself, anew.

So why did this particular lie feel as though it would cut the inside of his mouth?

“I realize this means I’ll be failing to fulfill my promise to you,” he went on, doggedly, “but I simply won’t have the time to play tour guide to an aspiring spinster. You understand.”

“Oh, I understand, all right.” Lucy’s scorn flayed him open, but nothing cut deeper than the hurt he glimpsed beneath it. “I understand that you’re a coward.”

Thorne stilled. The air smelled like lightning, charged and tense, and the temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees in the past minutes. The few stray passers-by began to hurry their footsteps, rushing to get home before the weather broke.

A storm was coming.

Lucy glared at him, all defiant challenge, and Thornecliff stared back, feeling frozen.

Cowardice was the cardinal sin of his childhood. For Uncle Roman, who had never backed down from anything in his life, there was nothing worse than cowardice.

Thorne and Dominic had gone to great lengths to avoid any appearance of it, whether by vying to be the first to ride a fractious horse or by throwing themselves into their fencing and sparring lessons as though training for war.

Lucy’s own brother had flung the same accusation at Thorne once and goaded him into a no-holds-barred bare-knuckle fight that had ended with both of them bloody.

Only the entire building going up in flames had been enough to stop the bout before they’d beaten each other senseless.

“Have a care, Lucy,” he warned her hoarsely. “I don’t like that word.”

“I don’t give a damn what you like,” Lucy growled. “There is something between us, or there could be. If you weren’t too afraid to see where it leads. But you’d rather have your fantasy woman who is paid to fawn over you rather than anything real.”

A spark of anger kindled under his breastbone. Who was she to talk about preferring reality to fantasy when the man of her dreams wore a mask and had never told her his true name? “That’s rich, coming from a woman who’s been obsessed with the fantasy of a masked highwayman since she was a girl.”

Lucy reared back, shock flaring in her eyes, and Thorne pressed his advantage, every breath a blade in his lungs.

“Yes, I know what you actually write, Lady Lucy. And it’s not your travel memoirs.”

“My writing has nothing to do with this?—”

“The Gentle Rogue isn’t real,” he said with crushing emphasis. “And he’s the one you truly want.”

Lucy’s mouth trembled. “You have no idea what I want.”

And then she surged up onto her toes and kissed him.

Thorne had an instant of near panic—there was a reason he wasn’t supposed to kiss Lucy, wasn’t there?—before every thought was drowned in the crystalline perfection of the freshwater taste of her.

Her tongue stroked into his mouth, agile and quick, and Thorne thrust his hands into her hair and tugged her into the shadows of the lane behind the hotel that housed the mews.

She stilled for a moment when he kissed her back, and Thorne nearly let her go, but then she was kissing him again.

People hurried past them, heads down against the wind, hands holding bonnets and hats to keep them from blowing away. Everyone was in a hurry to get indoors before the storm hit, sensing the rain on the air with the infallible instinct inherent to all who lived in London.

No one took any noticed of Thorne and Lucy wrapped in each other’s arms as the first fat drops fell from the sky and splattered on the pavement around them.

Thorne felt as though steam should be rising from him, as though the rain must evaporate the instant it touched his heated body.

She made him desperate, hungry and aching after nothing—nothing!

A mere kiss! He, who had performed every lascivious act imaginable and plumbed the depths of every sin he could think of.

Undone by a mere slip of a girl and a single kiss.

A feeling rose in his chest, even as he clutched her closer and tilted his head for a deeper connection between their slick, open mouths. A feeling he’d had before.

Trapped. Not by her physical arms wrapped around his neck, but by the intensity of his own need for her.

Tearing his head away, Thorne panted down at her. He knew his eyes were wild in the darkness of the rain-soaked night.

You have no idea what I want , she’d said.

Didn’t he, though? He’d made quite the study of Lady Lucy Lively.

He knew that she loved her family, but didn’t always feel accepted by them.

He knew she wanted to carve out her own place in the world, even as she longed for someone to share it with.

He knew her secret, romantic heart that she shielded with her barbed wit, and he knew that her outward confidence hid a core of self-doubt that she struggled to contain.

He knew her. And if he wasn’t careful, she was going to come to know him in return.

That, he could not allow.

So he did the only thing he could think of to free himself, and her.

He forced himself to smile down at her. And he said, “Perhaps I have time for a quick one before I return to Mrs. Forrest. I must say, I’m surprised you’re still up for it after finding out I’ve only been toying with you this whole time.

I do like you Lively girls. Such good sports. ”

Ripping herself from his embrace as though his touch suddenly burned, Lucy stared at him through the driving storm. Her lashes were clumped and wet, her cheeks tracked with raindrops or teardrops; he would never know which.

His heart squeezed as though she’d reached a hand into his rib cage to strangle it in her fist.

“I hate you,” she said, so quietly it should have been inaudible in the downpour, but Thorne felt every syllable like a separate blow.

Then she turned, gathered up her heavy, wet skirts, and walked out of the alley.

“I know,” he murmured to the empty darkness, eyes unseeing, hands still tingling where they’d held her to him only moments ago. “You forgot, for a bit, that’s all.”

So he’d reminded her. He’d peeled back the ribbons and lace he’d used to pretty the thing up over the last two weeks, to reveal the ugly truth at the core of it all.

She hated him. And she was right to.

But as Thorne walked back inside The Grand to settle his account and check that Mrs. Forrest wasn’t still sitting in the dining room waiting for him—of course she wasn’t; a woman like Susannah Forrest never sat alone in any room containing red-blooded men for longer than two minutes—he couldn’t stop picturing Lucy’s eyes when she said it.

I hate you.

Except her eyes weren’t full of hatred; they were dark with pain.

He’d hurt her. And despite all his schemes and stratagems, he hadn’t meant to do that.

He hadn’t truly thought he could touch her deeply enough to cause her pain.

Another sin for the tally sheet, which was growing long and unwieldy and wearisome at this point.

Thorne paid his bill and accepted the hotel manager’s effusive apologies for Lucy’s intrusion upon his meal, and went home to his elegant, impersonal suite of bachelor apartments on Piccadilly, and the vision of Lucy’s blue, hurt-shadowed eyes never left him.

He greeted his valet, Avery, absently and submitted without complaint to the man’s remonstrations upon the sodden state of his clothes. His mind was far away—or at least a mile away in Grosvenor Square, at Ashbourn House.

What if there was a way to take some of the pain from Lucy’s eyes, so that he could remember them glowing with warmth and light and life and pleasure? And what if he could do it all without risking falling into the same exact trap he’d just wriggled free of?

It was possible. Because tonight, Thorne realized, marked two weeks since The Gentle Rogue had issued his challenge to Lucy to spend more time with her not-unhandsome duke. Tonight was the night he had promised to see her again.

Thornecliff couldn’t risk going to Lucy now and undoing all his efforts to disentangle them from the knotty mess he’d made.

But The Gentle Rogue could.

He’d just have to follow Rook’s advice, and be careful about it.

There was a time, not so long ago, when he’d been determined not to use The Gentle Rogue to get to Lucy. But the time for such scruples was over.

Lucy deserved to know that she was wanted. Needed. Hungered for . And The Gentle Rogue could give her that.

He could give her everything Thorne couldn’t.

And apart from all of that…Thorne had reached the end of his self-control. He would have Lucy tonight, and it wouldn’t matter what she saw when she looked at him or what name she screamed when he made her come.

He had to have her. No matter what it cost him.

* * *

Lucy lay in her carved four-poster bed and stared, dry-eyed, at the ceiling.

She had meant nothing to him. He had seen her as an intriguing puzzle to solve, at best. And at worst?

A joke.

What more should she have expected from a man who’d made a laughingstock of one of his closest friends, without hesitation or apparent regret?

The sad fact was that Lucy had come to expect more from Thornecliff. The more fool her.

After she’d stumbled out of that alley and found Charlie frantically searching for her, Lucy had allowed him to scold her all the way back to Ashbourn House. She deserved it, and more, for the unpardonable stupidity of her actions.

She’d even given Charlie leave to tell her brother or Bess if he felt he must, at which point he’d shot her a truly alarmed glance and said, “You go right upstairs and get yourself into a hot bath. You’re clearly nigh on delirious from the chill.”

So that was all right, and she would be allowed to go her merry way, making her silly stands and foolish plans and playing at being an adult.