Page 46 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)
She’d never worried about having to explain her choices to a husband expecting a virgin on their wedding night.
For one, she didn’t intend to get married, and for another, she’d known too many girls who’d gone to the marital bed and reported back that their husbands seemed to have little or no idea what to expect from a virgin anyway.
Lucy was convinced that most men were too self-absorbed and ignorant of a woman’s body to have any idea whether she was a virgin or not.
But she found herself wanting to tell Gabriel everything anyway. It would be nice, she thought, to be able to be honest about her sexual history, even if she was lying about everything else.
And there was something in his voice when he said he wished that was his first experience that she didn’t altogether like—a shadow of contempt for himself that tugged at her chest.
“Do you believe it matters,” she asked, threading their fingers together to bring his hand to her lips for a kiss. “What we did before we found each other?”
He was silent for a moment. “Maybe it would matter less if I could remember more,” he finally said. “Or perhaps I would always feel unworthy of you. Tainted as I am by the things it seems I’ve done.”
“You think me so pure.” Lucy ducked her chin to her chest, which felt broken open and exposed. “But I’m twenty-four years old, Gabriel. I traveled the Continent for several years, living quite independently and freely. I have a past of my own.”
“Nothing you would have done could be as bad as the misdeeds that led to my current reputation,” he returned grimly. “I may not know much, but I am certain of that.”
“I’m sure my past exploits cannot compare with yours,” Lucy replied, a little miffed, “but I assure you, what you and I just shared in this bed was far and away better than my actual first time—which was with a Parisian aristocrat, in a garden gazebo during a ball. I also dallied with a different gentleman, after a musical salon at his house, and one man who pursued me so ardently, I thought I might as well try him as not. Oh, and there was an artist in Rome, who was there to restore a fresco in one of the cathedrals but spent quite a lot of time painting me instead. Am I tainted? Does any of that change how you feel about being here with me now?”
He went perfectly still behind her. Lucy bit her lip, afraid for a moment that he was shocked or disgusted, but when he spoke his voice was warm and rich with amusement.
“You little minx,” he growled in her ear. “It seems we’re better suited than I dared to hope.”
A smile curled Lucy’s lips. She knew she’d been right to trust him with this.
It made her want to be as open with him as possible.
“I know you have…concerns about what you’ve done, in those years you can’t remember.
But our past does not have to dictate our present.
And in the present, here and now, I can tell you that nothing else I’ve experienced comes close to the way I feel when I’m with you. ”
“Lucy,” he whispered, and she turned her head far enough to meet his searching lips in the sweetest kiss they’d yet shared. “You don’t know how happy that makes me.”
“Me, too!” she said fervently, which made him laugh. Settling back against him, nestling herself comfortably, Lucy grinned. “I mean it. The way I feel when you touch me is a relief. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me.”
“What could possibly be wrong with you?”
She loved the scowl she could hear in his voice.
“Nothing awful, I suppose, just…the time I spent with those lovely Frenchmen was pleasant. I enjoyed it well enough; they were kind and concerned with my pleasure and all reputed to be excellent lovers. But I couldn’t seem to form an attachment to any of them, and the pleasure itself was…
empty. Mechanical, almost—do you know what I mean?
The physical responses were there, somewhat involuntary I suppose, but there was nothing in it.
It reminded me of the way I felt when other girls would titter behind their fans and make eyes at the gentlemen across the ballroom, flirting and blushing and getting themselves all in a tizzy if he so much as smiled back.
Some gentleman they’d never even spoken to!
Or maybe they’d danced together once. And they considered themselves in love. ”
Lucy shrugged, her shoulders moving against his chest. “I could never understand it. There was nothing there. Why did they want to be with someone they didn’t know at all? Someone who didn’t know them?”
It struck her suddenly that some might think this made Lucy something of a hypocrite, given her longstanding infatuation with The Gentle Rogue.
But it had never felt like that to her as a young girl—she had felt that she did know The Gentle Rogue, and that he understood her in a way no one else in her life did or could.
But of course, she hadn’t known him. She understood that now.
Looking back from the present moment, held within the true, naked, shivering glory of the closeness she felt to Gabriel, she wondered if fixing her girlhood affections upon an impossible object like The Gentle Rogue had simply been a safe way to explore her burgeoning feelings about what went on between adults.
“Some people prefer not to be known,” Gabriel mused, his voice a pleasing rumble in the darkness. “And others are only capable of wading in the shallow waters of another person’s soul. Not everyone is like you, Lucy.”
“And what am I like?” She held her breath for his answer.
“A deep diver,” he said slowly, his long fingers coming up to comb her hair back from her face. “Someone who wants to be known, all the way to the bottom, and will never be truly satisfied with anything less than a husband who will open himself to being known in the same way.”
“Sometimes I think you understand me better than I understand myself,” Lucy whispered, struck to the quick.
Instead of answering, Gabriel suddenly twisted and reached one his long arms to feel around behind the headboard. Lucy knew what he’d found before he pulled out the small figure of the wooden horse.
She bit her lip guiltily, hating that she had to pretend to be surprised as he showed it to her.
“What’s this?” she faltered.
“I’ve always hated this bed,” he said. “The whole room, really. Uncle Roman insisted I take it. As soon as he arrived at Thornecliff to take charge of me, after the funeral where we buried two empty coffins because my parents’ bodies were lost at sea, Uncle Roman took me aside and said, ‘You are Thornecliff now. Everything is going to change, and you will rise to the occasion.’”
Lucy pictured it vividly, the little golden-haired boy staring up at his only living family.
He’d been a six-year-old child being told he had to grow up overnight because he was a duke.
She felt heavy with grief for that child, but Gabriel’s voice was light, as though he didn’t see anything wrong with the story he told.
“He looked at me so seriously,” he recalled, sounding fond. “As though I was a grown man and not a sniveling infant. I remember staring up at his solemn face and wanting nothing in the world so much as to be the person Uncle Roman thought I was.”
You were an infant , Lucy wanted to cry, but she held her tongue, not wanting to stop the flow of memories.
Gabriel settled back against her comfortably, his arm draped over her waist with the hand holding the horse in front of them.
“Among the many, many things it turned out that the Duke of Thornecliff did not do, according to Uncle Roman, was that the Duke of Thornecliff did not sleep in the nursery. That very evening, all my clothes were transferred to the ducal suite. All my other things, including my toys, stayed up in the nursery. Except this.”
His thumb stroked the horse’s nose, in the exact spot Lucy had noticed earlier was worn smooth, and tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.
Oblivious, Gabriel said happily, “I can’t believe no one ever found him.
Probably not a recommendation of the housekeeping at Thornecliff, but to be fair to the maids, I hid my contraband well.
It would’ve gutted me for Uncle Roman to know I’d smuggled him down here.
And God forbid, Dominic. I never would’ve heard the end of it. ”
But he was showing her. Because he wanted her to know him. Because he wanted to open himself to her, the way he knew she needed. Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and felt the tears overflow to dampen the pillow beneath her head.
“He’s lovely,” she said when she thought she could keep her voice steady. “What’s his name?”
“Dante,” he replied, his voice deep and beginning to blur with tiredness. “For my father’s favorite writer.”
Of course. Lucy’s tears continued in a silent stream as quiet descended on the bed. Gabriel’s big body relaxed at her back into the deep stillness of sleep, but Lucy couldn’t stop crying.
All she could think of was the way the masked Rogue had recoiled when she’d expressed a desire to know him, the night he’d told her it was over. The way Thornecliff had lied and obfuscated, throwing up every barrier he could to keep Lucy from seeing who he truly was.
She was every bit as much a thief as The Gentle Rogue had ever been, Lucy thought miserably. Except instead of baubles and trinkets, she was stealing pieces of Gabriel’s soul that he would never give away if he were whole, with his memories intact.
It was wrong. But how could she abandon him now? If she told him the truth, she would have to leave. And she couldn’t bear to go. God, it was such a mess.
What was she going to do?