Page 50 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Lord Roman cleared his throat and squared his shoulders.

“For the past seven years, you have gone out, dressed in black and masked, to rob coaches and carriages along the Bath Road. You are a highwayman. The Gentle Rogue. And this woman you propose to make duchess has known all along yet hasn’t mentioned a word about it to you.

I think it would be prudent to discover why . ”

* * *

Gabriel’s head was throbbing with pain, like a dagger was being shoved slowly into his left temple.

“Say that again,” he demanded. “What are you saying? Lucy, what is he saying?”

He turned to her, the one still point in his swiftly revolving universe, and found her blinking tears out of her eyes as she gazed up at him.

Distress radiated from her, hands wringing, mouth downturned, her blue eyes swimming.

It must be true.

“Well. Fuck me,” Gabriel said. He sat down abruptly on the sofa. His legs hadn’t given out, he told himself. He just felt like sitting, that was all. “So, I’m a highwayman.”

And he started to laugh. Through slitted eyes, he saw Lucy and Uncle Roman exchange dismayed looks, and it only made him laugh harder.

“Good God,” he gasped, “what next? Did I assassinate the king as well? Do I perform satanic rituals under the full moon, sacrificing virgins?”

“You’d better not,” Lucy said tartly, sinking down on the couch next to him and watching him worriedly. “Gabriel, I’m sorry, I should’ve said something—only at first we weren’t supposed to mention anything upsetting, and then it just seemed so…outlandish, I suppose?”

“How did this come about?” Gabriel wanted to know. “And how do you come to know so much about it?”

“I, also, would like the answer to that question,” Uncle Roman put in stiffly, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked especially forbidding with the blood staining his collar and dark bruises beginning to shadow both eyes.

Gabriel looked at Lucy, who was biting her lip.

The wheels behind her blue eyes were turning and he could almost see her deciding how much to tell.

Wanting her to know it was all right, she could tell him anything, he took one of her small, cold hands between his.

“Darling. Sweetheart. It doesn’t matter. Not to me.”

“It should.” Her lips twisted. She looked very unhappy, and it made something in Gabriel’s chest twist. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you. Your uncle is correct about that, at least. But he makes it sound so…nefarious, and it isn’t! And I don’t know all that much about it, anyway!”

“Nothing nefarious,” said Uncle Roman before Gabriel could respond.

His voice held that chilly tinge of disbelief Gabriel remembered from a thousand lectures, growing up.

“I suppose you will also deny that you have been in contact with an agent of the Crown, whose primary mission at this moment is to track down and apprehend The Gentle Rogue?”

Lucy’s pointed chin went up. “I’m not denying anything except your insinuation that I’m somehow working with that man to catch The Gentle Rogue. That is absurd.”

“Is it?” Uncle Roman’s tone was silky, with an underlying threat that made Gabriel frown warningly in his direction.

“Yes, it is,” Lucy insisted, her eyes narrowing.

“Then why did you meet secretly with the Crown’s operative, a Sir Colin Semple, several weeks ago at a gambling den?

After which, my nephew—who is many things, not one of which is clumsy —took an unfortunate tumble from your window, whereupon you were suddenly engaged to be married and whisked him off to his ancestral home so that you could…

what? Search through his belongings for proof of his crimes to turn over to your associate? ”

Despite himself, despite what he wanted to believe, Gabriel found his innards roiling at the cool summation of the chain of events as laid out by his uncle. It was far too plausible.

Far more plausible, in fact, than that a woman as bright, lovely, intelligent and good as Lady Lucy Lively would ever have chosen to spend time with a rake as awful as Thorne was reputed to be. And a highwayman, no less! Good God.

Did it really seem likely that Lucy would agree to marry such a man? Maybe, if she loved him. But she’d never as much.

Everything in him wanted to reject his uncle’s quiet words, to spit them out like poison, but when Gabriel looked at Lucy, he felt as though he’d swallowed that poison instead.

“I…I…” She faltered, her eyes wet and her cheeks as pale as milk. “No, you’re twisting it. That’s not what happened!”

“You didn’t meet with Sir Colin?” Gabriel demanded, grasping for hope like a drowning man.

“No, I did. I mean, he asked me if I could identify The Gentle Rogue, but I told him no,” Lucy cried. “You have to believe me! I didn’t betray you. I wouldn’t.”

“Then why is Sir Colin Semple staying at The Prancing Pony in Hazlemere village?” growled Uncle Roman, with the triumphant air of one laying down a trump card.

“What?” Lucy brought her hand up to her forehead as though her head ached as badly as Gabriel’s. “Oh dear. I must have led him right to you. Inadvertently! Gabriel, I’m so sorry?—”

Gabriel couldn’t stand it. He pulled her into his arms, ignoring his uncle’s frustrated sigh, and kissed her softly. “It’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault,” she said, muffled against the side of his face.

His cheek was damp now from her tears, and it made him want to hit something.

“I don’t blame you,” he said instead. “How’s that?

I wish you had told me, so that it didn’t feel quite so much like every time I think I’ve found out the most outrageous thing I’ve forgotten, something else comes along to point the way to a new low.

But you didn’t make me become a highwayman, and if I were to get caught, you wouldn’t have made that happen, either. ”

“I’ll never understand what possessed you in the first place,” Uncle Roman said, stalking over to the tufted leather armchair and sitting down. Evidently, he’d decided he was staying. “I know you take delight in dragging the Thornecliff name through the muck, but this?—”

“Oddly enough, I believe I can answer that one,” Gabriel said, his brain making a connection he hadn’t seen before.

“I was studying the estate books earlier, and it appears that over a period of years, I have slowly divested the dukedom of all its interests in foreign trade. I also signed over the farms on our lands to the tenants. All the farms—we only own the house now, Lucy. And the one in Town, Wycombe House, although we seem to employ no servants there and we pay for no upkeep, so I can’t imagine it’s in a very good state of repair.

But without the income from the farms and those other investments, I had to find new ways to make money.

I invested heavily in things like railroads, it seems, which take years to be completed and are only recently beginning to show promise.

And I invested in those same farmers who were once our tenants, with an influx of money for improvements to the farms and equipment, that sort of thing.

The cash for those investments had to come from somewhere, but until now I didn’t understand where. ”

“You robbed the rich to feed the poor,” Lucy murmured, picking her head up far enough to stare at him, glassy-eyed. “I always said! I knew it.”

“Knew what?” Gabriel asked huskily, caught by the expression on her face. No one had ever looked at him like that before.

“The Gentle Rogue is just like Robin Hood,” she said dreamily, her fingers curling in the hair at the nape of his neck as though she couldn’t help herself. “Robbing the rich to feed the poor. A hero.”

This was too much for Gabriel, who grimaced and shifted Lucy to sit sideways across his lap, her skirts a froth of yellow-sprigged muslin all around them. “Let’s not get too excited. The money I invested in those farms is being repaid, with interest. It was an investment, not charity.”

“Yes, dear,” Lucy cooed, batting her eyes up at him like a debutante who’d just curled her lashes for the first time, and Gabriel had the strong urge to bite her. Not hard. A love bite.

As if he could read Gabriel’s desires and was well acquainted with his lack of impulse control, Uncle Roman cleared his throat.

Lucy shot him a look full of animosity. “And how do you know so much about The Gentle Rogue?” she asked accusingly, her chin doing that adorable lift into the air.

“I can answer that, too,” Gabriel said, laughing again, though it had an edge this time. “My uncle has no doubt had his spies following my every movement since the moment I tossed him out on his ear.”

“How can you know that?” his uncle growled, his hands like talons on the arms of that chair. “If you’ve lost your memory?—”

“I don’t know for certain,” Gabriel said with a shrug, finally feeling himself on solid footing again.

“But earlier you mentioned that reports had reached you about my injury, and, well. I do remember some things. When we were children, nothing happened that you did not know about. You knew what we would do before we did it. I would have been more astonished to discover you didn’t have me watched. ”

“Might we refocus this conversation,” Uncle Roman said, steepling his hands before his grim face.

“There is still the matter of Sir Colin Semple, and the fact that he has no doubt followed the trail of Lady Lucy’s connection to The Gentle Rogue to her engagement to Thornecliff—whose recent illness has, not coincidentally, coincided with a complete cessation in The Gentle Rogue’s activities. ”

“When you put it like that, I’m surprised he hasn’t already shown up here with an arrest warrant,” Gabriel said dryly.

“He will not dare to accuse a duke without proof,” Uncle Roman said. The even one so degraded as you was merely implied. “But how best to throw him off your scent?”

Of course , Gabriel thought, feeling weary and unutterably sad. Of course Uncle Roman is only here to safeguard the Thornecliff name.

Oh, and to attempt to somehow convince Gabriel that Lucy was a poor choice to be his duchess. Best of luck with that, old man.

Likely feeling his grip tighten on her waist, Lucy looked up at him with a tentative smile. “I may actually have an idea for that. But I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”