Page 34 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Chapter Fifteen

Gabriel was a touch embarrassed at the speed with which he’d nodded off, once ensconced in the spacious comfort of the guest bedchamber.

He’d managed a brief, shaky wash with the footman’s help—humiliating—then barely had time to register the leather embossed wall hangings with small birds in gold on a dusky blue background that no doubt gave the Blue Room its inventive moniker, before he’d sunk into the soft mattress piled with goose-down pillows and fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Gabriel woke to find his bride-to-be curled in a navy blue tufted leather armchair she must have pulled over to his bedside, an open book on her lap and her head drooping at a surely uncomfortable angle.

Gabriel felt his heart do a strange stuttering hop in his chest, and he rubbed a hand absently under his breastbone as he contemplated this stranger he had evidently chosen as his life’s companion.

With the benefit of a bit more rest and a bit less of a sore head, he thought she might appear more ordinary to him—less of a glowing anchor point in the maelstrom of his confusion.

But she was still the most beautiful, compelling thing he’d ever seen.

Sunlight streamed in through the window, setting off the pearly perfection of her skin and striking reddish-brown highlights from her dark hair.

It was wrenchingly disorienting to stare at her lovely, elfin face and search his mind for any clues as to what had drawn them together, what had happened to bring them to the point where she’d invited him into her bedchamber. What had happened to make him propose.

But at the same time, perhaps it didn’t matter. In the few short moments he could recall spending with her since his fall, he had felt the pull toward her instantly.

Gazing at Lucy’s slumbering form, her hastily pinned-up waves of hair already beginning to rebel and her declarative dark brows slightly knit in sleep, Gabriel thought perhaps he’d simply met a woman whom he’d been unable to envision giving up.

Already, he felt as though he would do almost anything to keep Lucy by his side.

She stirred, brows wrinkling harder for a moment as she grimaced at what must be an awful crick in her neck. With a muffled noise, she pulled herself painfully upright. The book slid from her lap to bang on the floor, and Lucy darted a guilty glance at him.

Smiling to reassure her, Gabriel said, “Don’t worry, I was already awake. How long have I been out?”

She checked the ormolu clock in the corner of the room. “Gracious. You slept for four hours!”

“It’s hard work healing a head injury, I suppose,” he offered, feeling vaguely like he ought to apologize for spending the bulk of the day unconscious after such a dramatic morning.

To his surprise, Lucy tensed. “Are you healed?”

“My head is a little improved, I think. The headache has abated somewhat. But if you’re asking whether my memories have returned, I am sorry to say they have not.”

Paradoxically, that appeared to relax Lucy.

“Not to worry. The medical texts I’ve been looking through all seem to say the memories will come back on their own, in time.

” She leaned down to retrieve the heavy tome that had fallen off her lap.

“There are several very interesting accounts of amnesia patients going about their lives while waiting for their memories to come back.”

Gabriel grimaced. “An ordeal that will hopefully be of short duration.”

“Actually,” Lucy mused, “according to the literature, a lot of patients seem to find a sort of peace with it, an ability to approach the unfamiliar with a sense of curiosity and wonder that made up for the disorientation. And their families report that their afflicted loved ones were?—”

She hesitated, biting her lip, and Gabriel frowned. “Were what?”

“Nothing awful,” she hastened to reassure him.

“Only…the family and friends of the amnesia patients all tended to say the same thing—that the person without memories was almost more themselves , as though they’d been stripped down to the core of who they were.

Not to echo Dr. Perry, but it really is fascinating.

I wonder what I’ll discover about who you are, at the core. ”

She blinked innocently, but for some reason Gabriel felt a shiver of unease grip his guts. “It’s sweet of you to want to research my injury,” he said slowly, “but I shouldn’t like to put you to any trouble.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble.” Her cheeks had gone very pink; it was damned pretty. “I love to read. All writers begin as readers first, I suppose.”

“You’re a writer? You mentioned an income, but I assumed it was an inheritance of some kind.”

“I have that too,” Lucy told him. “But I try not to spend too much of it. I prefer to live on the money I make from my writing.”

“I wish I could remember. I feel like a cad,” he confessed quietly, studying her. “We must be so close, intimate enough that I spent last night with you, and yet I can’t remember anything about you. I can’t even remember what we did last night.”

Her blush extended down her slender throat to color the part of her chest he could see above the gathered bodice of her day dress.

“Please, let’s not speak of it. Not yet at least. It’s almost as though you are meeting me for the first time. And in a way, I feel the same. Perhaps we might…defer discussion of what has passed between us until we know each other a bit better?”

“That makes sense,” Gabriel agreed, though he felt obscurely disappointed. It wasn’t exactly that he’d hoped she would immediately offer to give him a very physical demonstration of all they’d done the night before…but he hadn’t not hoped for that.

Still, he could see that she was uncomfortable with the topic, and, wishing to spare her sensibilities, he changed the subject. “So, when is Dom arriving?”

She blinked. “Who?”

Gabriel stilled, his insides chilling. What did it mean that his betrothed didn’t know Dom?

“My cousin,” he clarified carefully. “Mr. Dominic de Vere. We grew up together. Surely…you would have notified my family of my accident?”

If anything, this topic seemed to make Lucy even more uncomfortable than the discussion of their intimacies. “Oh yes, of course. Your cousin, Dominic. Well, you see, the thing is. Oh dear. The thing is, I’ve never met Mr. de Vere.”

Were he and Dom no longer close? Gabriel couldn’t fathom it.

Feeling more at sea than he had since the moment he realized he’d been catapulted fully grown into an unknown future, he said, “What about my uncle? Lord Roman de Vere. Surely, you’ve met him.”

She shook her head, lips pressed together in distress. “You…had a falling out, some years before I met you. I’m not sure what it was all about; you never speak of it.”

Gabriel sank back against the pillows and tried to steady his breathing.

How could he have turned his back on his uncle, the man who had taken him in and raised him, taught him and mentored him and expected such great things of him—and Dom?

His brother, in all but name. Gabriel felt a crushing pressure in his chest.

Grief , he identified the sensation distantly.

Whatever had happened to cause such a catastrophic division from his only living family, Gabriel couldn’t remember it. He experienced it now as a sudden rending of the fabric of his life and all he knew.

He’d felt something like it once before, when he was six years old. “It was a solicitor who told me, the last time.”

“The last time…what?”

“When they came to tell me my parents were lost at sea in a particularly violent Channel crossing.”

She sucked in an audible breath, all her attention riveted on him. Gabriel found himself telling her more than he’d meant to, the words spilling from him like blood from a lanced wound.

“The solicitor was not unkind, but his manner was quite brusque, and he clearly didn’t expect the six-year-old new-minted Duke of Thornecliff to cry.”

“And you didn’t,” Lucy guessed.

Gabriel looked away. “Not until later that night, alone in my bed in the dark.”

He’d screamed into his pillow until his throat was scraped raw. He hadn’t been able to speak for two days.

And then Uncle Roman arrived.

Gabriel gritted his teeth. “Why are those memories so fresh and vivid that I can recall the solicitor’s iron-gray wig and the flash of his gold pocket watch, but I can’t remember what came between me and my uncle and cousin?

Why can’t I remember what it feels like to kiss the woman I’m meant to marry? ”

Frustration and loss simmered inside him, threatening to boil over. He realized his head was pounding again, his headache back in full force, the instant before Lucy rose in a flurry of plum-colored skirts and went to draw the curtains closed.

“Thank you,” he said, hardly recognizing his own ragged voice.

“I’m sorry.” Lucy came back to stand by his bedside. She looked distraught, the plump softness of her bottom lip bitten red. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. The doctor was very clear that you weren’t to be agitated in any way.”

“No,” he said sharply, and her head came up in shock at his tone.

He tried to gentle it, but he wasn’t sure how well he succeeded.

“I don’t mean to shout. But everything is shifting all around me; it’s as if I’m standing in quicksand and there’s no solid ground anywhere, and you’re the only person holding out a hand to stop me from disappearing beneath the earth. ”

He reached for her, and she came to him at once, folding her cool fingers around his. Her touch soothed the thing inside him that wanted to rage and gnash its teeth. It gave him the control to be able to admit, “I need you to tell me the truth. I trust you.”

Her pretty face crumpled a bit at that. He liked that she was so tenderhearted. She seemed to feel everything so deeply. Perhaps she even…loved him.

It wasn’t such a leap, he supposed, since they were planning to be married. But people wed for many different reasons; love was one of the least of them, especially amongst the upper classes.