Page 58 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Gratitude for Roman’s assistance with the scheme to protect The Gentle Rogue from being brought to justice was tempered now with the returned memory of every bitter word and harsh accusation he and his uncle had flung at each other.

The morning he made Lucy leave, Roman had found him standing in the middle of the dining room, in the wreckage of his life. To his credit, his uncle had tried to reach out.

But Thorne had shut down everything inside himself, every vestige of emotion, simply to get Lucy to go. He couldn’t turn it back on, just like that.

Unable to get more out of Thorne than blank, one-word responses, Uncle Roman had given up.

Dominic was another story. Dominic, he couldn’t seem to get rid of.

Groaning, Thorne hung over the washbasin for a long moment, taking stock. His head hurt, but he was reasonably sure that was due to having drunk more than two-thirds of a bottle of whisky the night before.

The whisky had been necessary, Thorne thought, meeting his own dull gaze in the looking glass, still dripping with water.

He’d needed the alcohol to blunt the bright, flinching rawness of the evening.

They’d gone to Sharpe’s, which had felt altogether too loud, too coarse, too full of men braying laughs and shouting bets and slavering over the heavily painted women who strolled the card room floor.

Dominic had tried to get him involved in a game, or to take one of the women upstairs for a quick tumble to “take your mind off things,” as he so delicately put it, but the very thought of touching another woman made Thorne feel ill.

So he’d sat in a corner and poured out glass after glass, and it had been almost tolerable. In the sense that he’d been able to force himself to sit there and not knock over every green-baize-covered table in the room, scattering cards and roaring in the face of anyone who tried to stop him.

But it had taken the better part of a bottle of whisky.

And this was what he had to look forward to, he knew.

Night after night after night, he would go out and see people and drink himself insensible and maybe one day, his pent-up needs would force him to fuck one of the women who always seemed to be there, on the edge of his consciousness, willing and available, and if even the idea of it now made him want to retch, well.

What did Uncle Roman use to say? Oh yes.

Your desires need not enter into it.

What did it matter what Thorne wanted?

Thorne wanted the impossible. What he wanted was to be…not himself. To be the man Lucy loved.

To never have hurt her.

“You were saying something about the papers,” he said, unable to muster up a facsimile of interest as he shrugged into a silk banyan and wandered over to drop into one of the chairs by the fireplace.

“Disgraceful.” Dominic shook his head. He, of course, looked as though he’d been awake for hours, shaved and pressed and full of the sort of boundless energy that made Thorne long to crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over his head.

Instead, Thorne held out his hand imperiously, twitching the broadsheet from Dom’s grasp when it was within reach.

It was already folded open to the gossip column, a scurrilous bit of nonsense about the anatomically implausible escapades Thorne absolutely had not gotten up to the night before, but he supposed “The Duke of T--- brooded in the corner all night, alone” wouldn’t sell a lot of papers.

He’d always been good business for the newspaper publishers and printers. It was one of his more legitimate streams of income in the early days after he’d signed over the farms to his tenants, long before he’d come up with The Gentle Rogue as a way of generating cash.

The idea had come from his uncle, oddly enough. Roman had used his power and influence to quash any mention of his nephew’s abduction in the papers. Thorne had learned how easy it was to manipulate the press, to control the flow of information, once one understood what the news publishers wanted.

The scandal sheets paid well for information, so Thorne kept his ear to the ground. And he wasn’t above stirring up a scandal if none appeared organically. Half his own exploits had been embellished or invented out of whole cloth, for the price of a fat little purse from some newspaperman or other.

So Thorne couldn’t pronounce himself shocked at the misrepresentation of last night’s events. Bored, he tossed the papers aside and rang for coffee.

Dom sat in the chair across from him, crossing one booted foot over the opposite knee, and leaned down to pick up the discarded paper. “That wasn’t actually the article I meant you to read. But before I give this back to you, I want to say something.”

Thorne pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Can’t it wait until I’ve had my coffee, damn you?”

“No, it can’t, because you’re going to have someplace to be once you read this.” He tapped the paper on his knee and regarded Thorne expectantly.

Thorne sank down in his chair. “Fine, have at it. God knows you always do exactly as you please, anyway.”

“You think so, do you?” Dom looked annoyed.

Good, Thorne thought savagely.

“You think I wanted to go live in the wilds of Yorkshire, and never see or speak to my best friend, for years?”

Tension coiled through Thorne’s muscles, though he didn’t move. “Forgive me if I’ve got it wrong, I’ve recently suffered a blow to the head. But the way I recall it, it was only Roman I forced out. You went with him entirely of your own volition. Ergo, it was what you wanted to do.”

“What I wanted was for my father and my brother to talk to each other, for once, instead of fighting like wolves, with me getting torn to pieces in the middle,” Dominic ground out.

Despite himself, Thorne felt warmed by Dom referring to him as his brother. Thorne had felt that way himself, and had even described their relationship thusly to others, but it wasn’t something he and Dom had ever put into words with each other.

It made him soften the harsher edges of his tone when he said, “It was a long time ago. When I lost my memories, I had a taste of what it was like to live unencumbered by the past, and it felt…good. Easier to breathe. I want that back.”

“But can you truly let go of the past without understanding it?” Dom demanded, leaning forward intently. “Roman wouldn’t talk about it, and now you won’t listen. But there are things you need to know.”

Flinging himself out of the chair, Thorne paced to the door and opened it to bellow into the hallway, “If I don’t have my coffee in three minutes, I’m setting fire to the drapes!”

One of the urchins employed as runners and all-around errand boys by The Avalon, where Thorne kept his suite of apartments, shimmered into existence bearing a tray laden with cups and a silver coffee urn.

Thorne snatched the tray from him. Jerking his head at Dominic, who grudgingly rose and pulled out his purse to hand the boy a tip, Thorne concentrated on setting the coffee things up on a side table and pouring his first, much-needed cup of the bitter, steaming stuff.

“All right,” he said irritably over the rim of his coffee cup. “I’m listening. Say what you have to say.”

“You know what the real problem is between you and Roman, don’t you?” Dominic went back to his chair and waited until Thorne had sat back down also. “You’re too alike.”

Thorne snorted. “We’re nothing alike. I spent a good portion of the past dozen years making sure of that.”

“Sorry to report that you failed,” Dominic said dryly.

“You’re each as stubborn as the other, both so unwilling to admit you made a mistake, or that you let your hurt keep you from seeing the truth.

In Roman’s case, it struck him to the quick when you said you’d even entertained the notion that he might have been the one to arrange the abduction himself.

I don’t think he’s ever truly recovered. ”

Guilt pricked at Thorne, making him want to lash out. “What was I supposed to think, when instead of arriving home to find my uncle searching frantically for me, I found him petitioning Parliament to retain control of the dukedom?”

“You were supposed to let him explain that he’d gone to London to search for you—he went out with his men, every day, to rip apart the slums of St. Giles for leads as to your whereabouts—and he went to Parliament to argue against you being declared officially deceased…

which would have meant the Thornecliff lands and holdings would revert back to the Crown. ”

Thorne carefully set down his coffee cup, obscurely proud that he didn’t spill a drop. A hundred details rearranged themselves in his head, shuffling like a deck of cards into an order that made more sense than he wanted to acknowledge.

“Why didn’t he just say that?” Thorne said, the words feeling ripped from him like he was being drawn and quartered.

Dom sighed. “Because he was already racking himself with guilt over his inability to find you—it never occurred to us they were keeping you on a ship. And because it wrecked him that you would ever think he could betray you like that. So he left, because it was what you said you wanted and because he wanted to punish himself, and exile was the perfect way to do it. And I went with him, because if I hadn’t, if he’d lost both of us at the same time… ”

Dominic looked away, clearly unwilling to complete the thought, but Thorne knew what he meant.

“We aren’t blood,” Dominic said, with visible difficulty.

“Not like you and Roman are. But he’s my father in every way that matters.

I had to go with him. But I didn’t want to leave you behind.

I didn’t want to watch you put more and more distance between us with every drunken rout, every scandalous affair, every insane risk you took.

I didn’t want—” He broke off, looking immeasurably tired.

“I didn’t want any of it. But what I wanted never entered into it. ”