Page 38 of To Hunt the Hunter

Lucian laughed, turning back to her. “Oh, he’d have adored you, and you him. He was tremendously funny and charming. Everyone loved him. I’d have been horribly jealous, no doubt, but he loved pretty things. Pretty things and everyone happy, everyone smiling....” He gave a wistful sigh. “Poor Thomas.”

“Did… Did he kill himself?”

Lucian shrugged. “Yes. Perhaps not intentionally, not on the night he died, but that was his goal. It was going to happen, no matter what I did. I’d come to town a week earlier, looking for him. I was worried. Pippin would have you believe it was some sixth sense, and perhaps there is truth in that. I don’t know. I just knew I had to find him.”

“You couldn’t?”

Lucian shook his head. “We did not mix in the same circles. Thomas had turned his back on respectable society years earlier. I barely saw him, no matter how I pleaded with him to come home. He believed he was beyond redemption, tainted by his sins and unworthy of my forgiveness. Strangely, that night, he’d gone to his club, though, not that it was any less a den of iniquity, just a fashionable one for the wealthy to entertain their vices in comfort. He hadn’t been there in months, but I had paid the staff to send me word if he appeared.”

“You went after him.”

“Too late.”

Matilda shifted closer, sensing his tension, though his voice remained calm.

“I’d been looking in lower hells, his usual haunts. No doubt he hoped, by going to such dreadful places, someone would do the job he was trying to accomplish and murder him.”

“I’m so sorry, Lucian.”

“He looked rather peaceful. There was this strange smile on his face, like he’d discovered the answer to a fine joke. I’ve never been able to shake the image from my mind.”

Matilda lay down beside him, holding him as best she could. She felt the warm weight of his arm go about her, resting on her hip.

“You were there. That night.”

Matilda looked up. “What?”

“It took a great deal of money and organising to hush it up. There were still whispers about his death, naturally, but I took his body home with me. I waited as long as I dared, almost a week, and then put it about that it was a riding accident at Dern. But that night, the night I found him, I had sent for men who worked for me, men I trusted implicitly, to come to the club and get him, to take him home. I intended to wait until the place was closed and then have Thomas taken out the back. As I was waiting in one of the private rooms… you came in.”

“That was the night?” Matilda repeated, hardly able to believe it, and yet she remembered.

She remembered walking into that room and not knowing he was there because it was so terribly quiet, and then she had turned. She had almost screamed, uncertain if he was real. He was so still, unearthly, standing by the window in the moonlight. The most beautiful man she’d ever seen, like a fallen angel. She’d known something was wrong, though. It was as though he wasn’t there at all, as though something was missing, some evidence of life. In the nights that had followed she’d ascribed it to cruelty and indifference, a callous nature that didn’t give a damn for lesser mortals. She had not even considered….

“I’m sorry for how I behaved.” His expression was unreadable, but his words were sincere, heavy with remorse. “I… I simply couldn’t think. I was so consumed with Thomas, with sorrow, with how to keep my brother’s name from being dragged into some sordid scandal and… I couldn’t think, Matilda, about anything, and… I’m ashamed to say I didn’t care.”

“It’s all right,” she said unsteadily, hearing the anguish in his voice.

“No.” He shook his head, his anger palpable. “It is not all right. It’s hard to understand it myself now, but I… I blamed you. Your scandal put me at that bloody club when I needed to keep everything quiet. It made it so much harder to cover up the truth and I was furious with you. I hated you for that, and… I wanted to punish you for your own stupidity in being there at all.”

He took a deep breath and Matilda tried to do the same, but her lungs did not seem to be cooperating.

“I’m not proud of what I did, Matilda. The truth is I’m sick with shame, and I would not blame you if you could not forgive me. I don’t even know why… it makes no sense why I hated you so much. Only that… that you were so damned beautiful, so innocent in… in the place where my brother had died.”

His voice broke and he closed his eyes.

“Lucian,” she said softly. “Lucian, it’s all right. I had already forgiven you, and this… this makes it so much easier to understand. You were grieving for your brother. How were you to think of anything else?”

He turned onto his good side, moving carefully and wincing, but pulling her into his arms. “You are too good, too forgiving. I believe you could forgive the devil himself.”

“No,” she said at once, furious at the idea. She pulled back a little so she could look at him. “That I could not do. Pippin has told me, in part at least, about your uncle, about what he did to you, and to Thomas. I have never known what it is to hate someone before, not really. I believed I hated you for a long time, but it was nothing to what I feel for him. He won’t hurt you again, I won't let him.”

She watched the astonishment grow in his eyes as she spoke. He reached out a hand and stroked her face.

“You would protect me?”

There was amusement in his expression, sorrow too.

“Yes.”