Page 58 of The Duke of Deceit

He stopped in mid-pace and scoured his hand over his face, already feeling the light prickle from his midnight growth of beard. She’d caressed her cheek against his tonight, in that glorious moment right after she’d come against his hand, when she was lost to bliss and he was lost in her. Had she felt the scrape of his beard against her cheek? Would she have welcomed the same scrape of his beard against her inner thighs if he’d knelt before her and worshipped her with his mouth?

What an utter fool he was! To want what he could never possess… He might as well have admitted aloud that he believed he could find peace in her arms, that she could provide thesolace his black soul craved and somehow pull him back into the light of day. That she could redeem him.

That was what frustrated him most of all, even more than not being able to physically claim her right there in the grotto, exactly as he’d described to her—that he could never accept the absolution she offered.

For once in his life, he’d done the morally right thing, and for no other reason than because he didn’t want to hurt her.

And he’d been damned for it.

He walked back to his desk and snatched up the bottle of whiskey, no longer bothering with the pretense of measured pours in a glass.

His gaze fell onto the report sitting in the middle of the desktop, and he absently picked it up. It had arrived that evening from the investigator he’d hired on Shay’s behest to uncover whatever information he could about James Norton, the man who wanted to marry Sophie Winter, daughter of the Earl of Granville. But he’d been on his way out the door to Vauxhall and hadn’t had time to give it more than a cursory examination. Yet what the investigator had found…

“You’re not going to be happy about its contents, Shay,” he muttered into the dark room, as if his old friend were truly there with him.

But then, neither would the Earl of Granville, although for completely different reasons.

For a fleeting moment, he took a perverse solace in Shay’s situation with Sophie. After all, why should Lucien be the only one of the four best friends who couldn’t have the woman he wanted? He and Shay could grow bitterly into old age together, commiserating about the perfect woman they had both lost.

Lucien tossed the report onto his desk and took a large swallow of whiskey straight from the bottle.

A soft knock at the door echoed through the silent darkness.

“Come,” Lucien called out, cursing the interruption. Not that it mattered. There would be neither sleep nor peace for him tonight. He laughed.Tonight?For many, many nights to come. If ever.

His valet Dalton stopped just inside the room.Smart man.He knew where he wasn’t wanted.

Lucien collapsed back into his chair. “I don’t need to be undressed tonight.”

Dalton wisely said nothing about that, even as he reached down to pick up the discarded jacket from the floor. Instead, he took a deep breath and steeled himself. Lucien recognized the posture. It was the same one he’d seen countless times in soldiers right before they charged into battle.

“A note arrived by special messenger, sir.”

Lucien blinked. He hadn’t heard anyone at the front door. But then, his thoughts had been concentrated elsewhere, on a challenging, alluring, and frustrating golden-haired gel who somehow managed to bring out both the best and worst in him. For a moment, he desperately wanted the message to be from Jess and sat forward. “From whom?”

“Ealing, sir.”

The small bit of energy he still possessed instantly dissolved away, and he slumped back against the chair.

Dalton placed the note on the desk and retreated toward the doorway, to wait for a response.

Lucien stared at it. He didn’t have to read the note to know what it said. What the notes from Ealingalwayssaid. That the situation there with his brother Phillip had grown out of control, that he was needed immediately. And since the message was sent via special messenger at night, then he would most likely be away for days.

At the worst possible time, too. He needed to be in London now, to make amends with Jess.Somehow.She deserved theopportunity to vent her wrath upon him, and he deserved that wrath—and more.

He clenched his jaw against the weight that sat upon his chest like a lead cannonball. But there was no help for it, and never would be.

He couldn’t ignore the message and the fresh hell that awaited him in Ealing. He had no choice. He alone was responsible for Phillip and would be until the day one of them took his last breath. No—Lucien would be forced to be responsible even after that. After all, as his father had proven, his family’s actions could never be confined to a coffin. There would be no respite for Lucien, even in his grave.

Slowly, he stood and faced the fireplace. Then he furiously heaved the bottle of whiskey into it with all his might.

The glass shattered with an ear-splitting crash, and the whiskey flared the hot coals beneath the banked fire, bringing it instantly to life. Flames leapt high into the fireplace as if suddenly infused with hellish brimstone.

Fitting. He was certainly in hell.

For Christ’s sake!He didn’t deserve this life! He didn’t deserve to live in the shadows and keep the kinds of secrets that could destroy a dukedom and all the lives associated with it, from his all the way down to the lowliest worker in the meanest hovel on his estates. Was this his punishment for all he’d done during the wars? Or for not discovering his father’s evils sooner and putting a quicker end to them?

No—he knew the truth. It was all punishment for an original sin thrust upon his head before he was even born. A sin he would never be able to free himself from. This life and those secrets—and now, never to be with Jessamyn—they were the punishments he was forced to bear through no fault of his own.