Page 30 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Chapter Thirteen

Thorne awoke to the delicious sensation of his morning erection cradled between the smooth, soft globes of a distinctly feminine behind.

He’d slept. Next to another person, for hours.

With no dreams.

Before he could begin to decide what that meant, the woman in his arms stirred, tickling his nose with her dark hair. It was the smell of candied lemon peel that brought him fully awake.

Lucy.

He’d had her. She’d taken everything he had and magnified the pleasure a hundredfold until Thorne hadn’t been able to form a coherent thought.

It was a bloody miracle he hadn’t spent inside her like a mindless, rutting animal, but thank God it was ingrained in him to never, ever take a chance on getting a woman pregnant.

He’d seen the heartbreak that resulted from an unwanted babe, as well as the indiscriminate way some gentlemen spread their seed, and he’d sooner cut off his own balls than be one of them.

Lucy stretched against him, wiggling her bottom delightfully, and Thorne realized he’d trapped her in their sleep with his arm across her ribs and his hand covering one of her small, perfect breasts.

She shivered, beginning to rouse, her puffy little nipple tightening and poking into his palm.

He closed his eyes and remembered how they’d gone from pale pink to a lush, swollen raspberry from the attention of his fingers and tongue.

Lucy sighed and arched her back, which pressed her arse more fully against his hard prick. Thorne gave a pleased hum—and Lucy abruptly panicked.

She flailed, nearly bashing him in the nose with a flying elbow.

Thorne swore and released her to bring a hand to his face and ensure that his mask was still in place—it was, by the grace of God, even after the vigorous fucking and subsequent unplanned drop into unconsciousness—and Lucy rolled out of bed and onto the floor with a muffled thud.

“Are you all right?” he said, alarmed.

Lucy’s head popped over the side of the bed, eyes like saucers and hair curling wildly around her shocked face. “You’re still here!”

A light scratching at the door had them both freezing in place. She turned to give the doorway a fearful glance before hissing, “The maid! Come to lay the fire!”

“Send her away,” he said, running his hands over the scarf that still hid his hair. It was slightly askew, so he straightened it.

“One moment, please,” Lucy called out to the maid in the hallway.

While she raced across her bedchamber to wedge the chair from her vanity beneath the doorknob, Thorne climbed out of bed and gathered his scattered clothes as swiftly as he could.

“You need to go,” she whispered.

“Go where?” he asked, struggling to get his feet into the correct trouser legs.

“Not a morning person, are you?” Lucy threw on her dressing gown. “I suppose that is to be expected, given your regular nighttime routine.”

He finally got his pants on, grimacing as he buttoned them over his still half-hard cock. Feeling more in command of the situation with his private parts covered, he said, “No, I mean what time is it? Clearly I cannot exit through the front door. Is the whole house awake?”

“About six thirty, I would guess, based on when Daisy usually starts making her rounds. You should be able to sneak out through the garden, but only if you make haste .”

Thorne jammed his feet into his boots and shoved his arms into his black shirt without bothering to tuck it in. Grabbing his coat and cloak, he made for the open window, through which filtered the murky gray light of a London dawn.

He paused, straddling the windowsill, and looked back at Lucy. He wouldn’t see her again as The Gentle Rogue, or as Thornecliff either if he could help it. Perhaps he’d go for an extended stay at the family estate, he thought, until she went back to the Continent.

He controlled his reflexive surge of tension. No, perhaps not the Thornecliff estate. He never went there if he could help it. But somewhere, away from Lucy and the temptation she represented.

One night was what he’d promised her and himself. One night was all it could ever be.

That didn’t make it any easier to leave.

Pausing in her frantic rushing about the room, tidying away all evidence of their spent passion, Lucy came over to the window. There was a complicated look on her face. Thorne realized with a pang that he didn’t know her well enough to parse it, and now he never would.

Just go , he told himself sternly. But one light touch of her hand stopped him.

Lucy looked at him in the chilly light of the spring morning, her eyes thoughtful as she lifted one slim hand to his masked face. “Thank you for last night. It was a dream come true.”

She kissed him softly, once, then again. His fingers flexed on the windowsill so hard that the wood creaked.

“But now it’s time to wake up,” she whispered and stepped back.

Thorne’s chest squeezed like a vise, but he nodded and dropped over the side of the window. Finding his footing on the trellis, he started the climb back down to the garden, alert to every twittering bird call and rustling tree branch.

But it must have rained again in the night after they’d fallen asleep, because the trellis was wet and slippery.

Thorne’s booted foot skittered out of its toehold. He scrabbled for a desperate moment and got his balance back, heart thundering.

His fingers loosed their grip in instinctual relief…just as his other boot slipped, and the weight of his body ripped him from the trellis and sent him crashing to the ground.

A sharp, sickening crack of pain lanced through the back of his head. The last thing he saw before darkness took him was Lucy’s pale, terrified face peering down from her bedroom window.

Then Thorne was gone.

* * *

Lucy tore open her bedchamber door in a flat panic, startling poor Daisy, who was waiting with her coal scuttle.

He fell , was all she could think, over and over with blank lack of comprehension, because how could it have happened?

One moment, The Gentle Rogue was accepting her stumbling thanks for a lovely evening, in which he had given her a taste of what it was like to share her body with someone with whom she felt a connection.

The next, he was lying motionless on the wet grass below her window.

Lucy’s bare feet pounded down the staircase. She nearly bowled over poor Mr. Goring, on his way upstairs for his morning meeting with her brother.

“Call Dr. Perry, please, Mr. Goring,” she huffed out, barreling onward. “There’s been an accident.”

“What? Miss Lucy—” the butler sputtered, taken aback, but Lucy couldn’t spare a moment to explain.

She had to get to him.

Lucy rounded the corner of the staircase and hurtled down the hallway toward the drawing room that opened out onto the back garden. She nearly crashed straight through the French doors in her desperation to get outside.

The spring morning carried a chill that bit at her bare feet and legs as she threw herself across the sodden grass, slipping in the mud to land in a terrified heap at The Gentle Rogue’s side.

The Gentle Rogue. Who was lying so still and so pale, Lucy thought for a horrified moment that he was dead.

But then his chest rose in a shallow breath, and she bent her head over him with a sob of relief.

Not dead, that was good. But knocked unconscious, which was bad. With tentative fingers, Lucy felt along his neck and shoulders and up the back of his head as far as she could reach.

Her fingers came back red with his blood.

Breath sawing in and out of her lungs, Lucy wiped her fingers clean on the grass and leaned over him.

“Dr. Perry is coming,” she said helplessly. “You’re going to wake up and be absolutely fine, I know it. Oh, please wake up.”

She touched his cheek, which was reassuringly warm, and startled as her hand brushed the edge of his black mask.

Oh, dear God. He was still masked.

And Dr. Perry was coming to examine him. And before that, surely Mr. Goring would be rousing the household and coming out here himself to see what was the matter.

Even now, she heard shouting from inside Ashbourn House.

At any moment, someone would come out and see the most infamous highwayman of the day lying senseless and undefended in the garden.

She had to do something. She had to protect him—but how?

There was only one thing to do. Running footsteps sounded in the drawing room behind her.

Lucy reached down and, as swiftly and gently as she could, she untied The Gentle Rogue’s mask and the black pirate scarf, pulled them away from his face and bundled them up into a tight ball.

“Miss Lucy,” shouted someone behind her, and she whirled to face Charlie while shoving the blood-soaked bundle into the pocket of her dressing gown.

“Here,” she said, waving him over, before glancing back at the man stretched out at her feet.

And the bottom dropped out of Lucy’s world.

It was Thornecliff.

The Duke of Thornecliff lay prone, handsome face as still as if it were cast in stone. There was blood in his beautiful, mussed golden hair, a smudge of it on his jaw where she’d grazed him while getting the mask off.

The Gentle Rogue’s mask, which he’d been wearing, because Thornecliff was The Gentle Rogue .

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to act. Nothing was what she thought and the world pitched wildly under her and Charlie reached her just as her knees crumpled like paper.

“Ho there, breathe, miss,” Charlie said, dismayed.

Lucy staggered a bit but kept her feet. She was proud of that.

“It’s not me,” she managed to say, pointing at the man she’d taken into her body the night before, oh God . “It’s him. He hit his head.”

The arch of Charlie’s thick, black brow clearly stated he knew there was a bit more to the story, but he elected to bypass it for the moment. Grateful, Lucy stood back enough to let Charlie kneel by Thornecliff and look him over critically.

“Sir?” he said loudly. “Can you hear me?”

Wake up , Lucy thought hysterically. Wake up, so I can shout at you!

But he didn’t.