Page 43 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

“That part makes sense.” He still wasn’t looking at her, his blank stare trained on the ground as though he could find answers among the carpet of flower petals beneath their feet.

“In my nightmares, that’s where I am. The hold of that godforsaken ship.

Alone in the dark, with no one coming for me. ”

“You’ve had that dream again?”

His mouth twisted. “Every night.”

Stricken, Lucy bit her lip. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Gabriel pulled away to wrap both arms around himself.

His gaze finally snapped to hers, and Lucy sucked in a breath at the emotion swirling in the black depths.

“Because what sort of man has nightmares every night, like a child afraid of the monsters under his bed? You already know I’m broken.

I couldn’t bear to… Lucy. Should I be eager to show you how deep the damage goes? ”

“You’re not broken,” Lucy cried. “You’re healing. There’s a difference.”

“But will I get ‘better’? If I heal, if I regain all my memories, will the man I am be better than the one standing before you right now? Because everything I learn about him makes me think that the world is better off with him gone.”

The bitterness in his voice was like a lash across Lucy’s chest, scoring her heart with deep wounds. “What’s got you in this state?” she asked hoarsely. “What else did Fitz tell you?”

He shook his head again, not a denial or a refusal but like a horse too long in harness, weary and sore from too many places to pinpoint one source of pain.

“It’s no wonder I dream of it, I suppose.

I was there, in the stinking hold of that leaky bucket of a ship, for three months.

Three months, Lucy. And do you know how I finally got out? ”

“Your uncle ransomed you?” Lucy guessed, her eyes following him as he began to pace, prowling the confines of the walled garden like it was a cage. “Or his men found you and brought you home?”

His cold laugh echoed harshly off the brick walls.

“What good guesses. That’s exactly what I assumed, as well.

But no. After three months, evidently I realized no one was coming to save me, so I saved myself.

Fitz said the story went that I fought my way free of my captors, jumped off the ship and swam to shore.

Then walked from Southampton all the way here, to Thornecliff.

It must have taken nearly a week, on foot. ”

“That sounds awful.” Lucy hated the words the moment they left her lips. They were entirely inadequate, but what words would suffice? What would comfort him in the face of this outrageous revelation?

Gabriel stopped pacing with his back to her. A cloud passed overhead, dropping the garden into shadow for a long moment.

“What I cannot fathom, the part that I cannot seem to make sense of, is that I was there for longer than a week. Why didn’t my uncle simply pay the ransom?

Perhaps he was advised not to—perhaps he was told that kidnappers often ask for more, and still more, once they know their mark is willing to pay for the return of the missing person.

Uncle Roman is stubborn. Self-sufficient to a fault.

Perhaps he thought he could locate me on his own and rescue me.

But either he failed…or he never looked for me at all.

I don’t know. All I know is that he left me there to rot. He just…left me.”

Raw misery ached through his voice, and Lucy couldn’t bear it. She ran to him and threw her arms around him, pressing her face into his back and breathing in the scent of him: horse and leather, fresh-cut grass and piney juniper. She felt her heart settle a bit.

Words couldn’t comfort him now. But some innate sense told her perhaps this could.

At first, it was like clinging to something dead, heavy and unmoving and cold. But Lucy only gripped him harder, and eventually life animated his limbs once more.

He lifted his hands as though they weighed fifty tons each and laid them over hers where she clutched him to her. His wide back rose and fell under her cheek with a single, heaved breath. She could feel the steady thud of his heart under her left palm.

“I would find you,” he vowed, voice a throb so low she felt it more than heard it. “If you were taken from me, if you were lost, no matter where you were in the world—I would find you.”

Lucy’s battered heart swelled like a bruise. In fact, he had found her and saved her once, when she was truly lost. But she couldn’t tell him that, because he’d done it as The Gentle Rogue.

“I believe you would,” Lucy told him, throat aching. “You’re a good man, Gabriel de Vere.”

And as they stood there in the homely kitchen garden, surrounded by the scent of growing things and blooms making ready to bear fruit, she wondered…what if it was true?

What if the worst rake in London, the villain of her sister’s love story, Lucy’s own nemesis…was a good man at heart?

What would that mean about Lucy’s presence here, at Thornecliff and at Gabriel’s side and pretending to be a woman he loved enough to wed, when she couldn’t be certain he cared for her at all beyond a single night of passion.

Lucy couldn’t continue this charade forever, she realized with a sinking sensation. Every day she spent as Gabriel’s faux fiancée brought her closer and closer to the moment when she would no longer be able to extricate herself from the situation in one piece.

Closer and closer to the moment when he would look at her and see…a liar. Someone who had taken advantage of a terrible accident to discover his most deeply held secrets, rifling through his past the way she’d rummaged about in his bedchamber earlier.

There were reasons he had never told her of his abduction, or his relationship with his uncle, or any of this—and those reasons were Gabriel’s, not hers to violate at a whim.

Lucy felt sick, with disgust at herself and grief for him. And most of all, with the knowledge that she wasn’t going to tell him the truth right now and walk away.

Like a woman walking into a lake with rocks lining her pockets, Lucy was already in too deep. She would stay, though it drowned her—to be near him. To know this complex puzzle box of a man while she had the chance.

She would stop searching for answers about The Gentle Rogue; what he’d intended that night he came to her didn’t matter now.

Lucy had to take every moment she could steal, because it was all she’d ever have of him. When his memories returned, he would banish her from his life, the same way he had his uncle and cousin.

But until then, she vowed, holding him close and feeling his heart beat against hers, she would love him. In every way possible.