Page 37 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Chapter Sixteen

Over the next few days, Gabriel’s headaches came and went, but as long as he kept resentfully still and quiet in his darkened bedchamber, they were manageable and seemed to improve day by day.

He’d barely seen Lucy since that first afternoon. They’d had nothing more than short visits here and there, where she carefully didn’t mention anything that could lead to an emotional outburst, and he just as carefully didn’t try to tempt her into joining him in the big blue bed.

But sometimes when he woke in the morning, her favorite armchair would be stationed at his bedside, an open book lying facedown over the scrolled arm of the chair, and he wondered if she was spending her nights watching over him.

The thought both warmed his chest and made him feel achingly frustrated with his lack of ability to climb out of this damned bed and resume whatever he’d made of his life.

Four days in, just when Gabriel was beginning to think he might expire from sheer boredom even though he’d been deemed fit enough to get up from his bed and sit in a chair instead, Fitz arrived on a wave of blessedly familiar enthusiasm.

The gangly boy Gabriel remembered had grown into a strapping man who looked as though he spent most of his time out of doors. His skin was weathered and tanned, his hair permanently windblown. He looked older, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but was.

Somehow, Fitz having laugh lines was more disconcerting than the half hour Gabriel had spent studying his own face in the mirror.

It didn’t make any rational sense to Gabriel that he felt so at home in his thirty-one-year-old body, yet expected his friends not to have aged a day. But then again, none of this mad situation made any sense.

Though Fitz had clearly been briefed ahead of time not to agitate the patient, he seemed to have a less than firm grasp of what that might entail, and Gabriel was able to wring quite a few details about the past decade out of his old friend.

The most astonishing thing Gabriel learned was that Fitz was married to a brilliant lady of scientific bent—but Fitz also let slip that before his marriage, he had been party to several years’ worth of ruinously bad behavior with “Thorne,” as he’d grown used to calling him.

Fitz reminisced fondly enough about their time carousing through London’s seediest gaming hells and rowdiest taverns. Meanwhile, all Gabriel could do was lie there and wonder who that fellow, Thorne, was.

“Did my uncle never attempt to curb my wilder excesses?” he broke into one of Fitz’s stories to ask. “I can’t make sense of it. Uncle Roman could not have approved of that sort of reckless folly.”

“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t,” Fitz agreed cheerfully.

“I imagine that was at least half the point of it, to you. Not that you admitted as much to me. But, do you know, though many people think I’m something of a bacon-brain, my darling Caroline tells me I’m wise in the ways of my fellow man, and I have come to believe there’s something in what she says. ”

“She sounds like a very perceptive woman,” Gabriel said.

It was true that Fitz had never been the cleverest of men, but he’d always possessed a certain canny awareness—an innate understanding of the undercurrents of social situations, the true motivations and feelings and concerns of the people involved.

Gabriel was glad his friend had found a woman who saw him for the uniquely gifted, sensitive, and affectionate man he was.

Which left Gabriel to consider just why he might have spent the better part of a decade, it seemed, rebelling so hard against his uncle that he’d cemented his own reputation as the worst rake in London.

“What happened between Uncle Roman and me? Do you know?”

“I don’t know the particulars. It was all to do with that awful episode when you were taken—” Fitz cut himself off, eyes flaring wide with alarm. “That is to say, it was a difficult time.”

“Taken where?” Gabriel demanded, his every nerve flaring to alertness. “By whom?”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” Fitz said. “And after I promised Lucy so faithfully to keep to pleasant topics. Blast.”

“Fitz, tell me,” Gabriel growled, but his friend only went shifty about the eyes and protested that he hadn’t been involved and really didn’t know the facts and oh, look at the time, maybe he ought to be going.

“Fine. Fine!” Gabriel ground his back teeth. “Don’t go, I’ll stop asking. Only tell me what happened with my uncle, then. We fought? Over whatever it was?

Fitz nodded reluctantly. “I wasn’t there, you understand. And after, you refused to talk about it. I do remember Dom tried to get the two of you to make it up, but you would have none of it. Eventually he stopped trying.”

Of course Dominic would side with his own father, Gabriel thought, feeling sick. Over a cousin.

Dom had always felt he owed Uncle Roman everything; understandable, perhaps, given that Roman had adopted him and turned him from a stepson to his legal heir after Dom’s mother died.

Roman had always treated Dom as his own son, and Gabriel had certainly felt as close to him as if they were related by blood.

But he’d been aware of the restless, hidden pressure Dom had felt to live up to his new family’s legacy.

Gabriel knew his cousin so well. Or so he’d thought.

Everything about this family rift felt wrong, terribly wrong, but Gabriel couldn’t argue with the facts.

He evidently hadn’t been in touch with either his uncle or his cousin in years, since some catastrophic event no one would share with him.

Even now, after suffering a fall that could have killed him, neither of them had come.

Gabriel had lost his entire family.

Fitz took his leave soon after, when Gabriel couldn’t rouse himself to much more than somber, one-word responses to his light anecdotes and attempts at cheer. Gabriel went back to bed and dozed fitfully for the rest of the afternoon.

His head hurt. His whole body hurt, in fact, the forced inactivity weighing on his limbs and joints and making him feel weak.

He had no appetite, could barely choke down more than a couple of spoonsful of the beef tea and coddled egg brought to him by the same impassive-faced, watchful-eyed footman who’d assisted him into this bed.

This bed, which now felt more like a prison cell.

Day lurched slowly into night, the hours compressing and expanding oddly so that Gabriel never quite knew when he was supposed to be awake.

He lay in bed and stared up at the intricate plasterwork ceiling, following the loops and curls of the flowering plaster vines with his eyes, over and over and over, until he finally fell asleep.

* * *

With the ease of practice, Lucy skirted the creaky floorboard just outside her bedchamber and tiptoed down the hall. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she crept up to Gabriel’s door.

Ashbourn House was still and silent at this hour, all the family and the servants abed. With bated breath, she peered into the open doorway of the Blue Room. Gabriel was asleep, too, his long, muscular form unmoving except for the steady rise and fall of his chest.

Breathing out in relief, Lucy pulled her wrapper more tightly around her body and let herself into the room as she’d done every night since he lost his memory.

She’d continued to pore over what medical tomes Ashbourn House’s library held, and she’d been haunted by one detail in particular. Apparently, in quite a few recorded cases of head injuries, the patient had fallen into a sound sleep…and never awakened again.

Lucy didn’t know how or if her presence could prevent such a thing from happening to Gabriel, but she found it impossible to stay away and do nothing.

Conflicted feelings or no, she was certain of one thing: she did not want him to die.

So every night, she slipped out of her bed and sat beside his. And every morning, she waited until he began to stir, and hurried from the room before he could open his eyes.

She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want him to know about her nightly vigil. Perhaps it felt too revealing, somehow, in a way she wasn’t ready for.

Might never be ready for, honestly.

In the days since Gabriel’s fall, she had endured endless rounds of incredulous questions from her brother and sister-in-law.

Nathaniel was entirely stuck on the fact that Lucy had always professed to despise the Duke of Thornecliff, until finally Bess pointed out, with some amusement, that they would hardly be the first couple for whom antagonism had sparked into attraction.

Lucy had then been treated to the sight of her reserved older brother giving his wife a look so tender it had made Lucy blush. Then Bess had calmly and incisively said that she’d always thought there was more to the animosity between Lucy and Thorne than met the eye, so she wasn’t at all surprised.

Though she did question the speed with which Lucy had seemingly progressed from “I hate your twisted innards” to “I vow to cleave only unto you until death do us part.”

“You know that you don’t have to marry him,” Bess said gently. “No matter what has passed between you—Nathaniel and I would never expect you to carry through with a wedding to a man you don’t love, simply because he proved impossible to resist.”

“How conventional do you all think I am?” Lucy groused. “Gabriel mentioned something similar. As if I’d feel the need to wed the first man to touch me. I’m hardly some green girl!”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Nathaniel said loudly, standing up and stalking out of the drawing room, leaving Bess shaking her head in fond exasperation.

“Men can be so squeamish at the oddest things.”

“Nathaniel is an awful prude.” Lucy shook her head. “I’m sorry for you, Bess. He must be very boring in bed.”

Choking a bit, Bess coughed into her hand. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account, Lucy dear,” she managed to say, though it was a bit garbled. Was she laughing?