AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There you two are.” He grinned at his friends, relieved for the distraction. “I’ve barely seen you in days.”
Craven grunted, which was his usual response to everything. Crestwood chuckled. “We’ve been busy wooing ladies.”
Ash scrubbed his neck. “I’d noticed.”
“And you?” Craven asked, one of his heavy brows rising. “What have you been doing?”
Did he tell them about what he’d asked Cordelia? Some part of it? Likely not. They were men, after all. They didn’t share their feelings. “I have been trying to leave this village, but you two keep getting in my way.”
Craven grunted again. “Liar.”
The word rang in his head. Why was everyone so intent on calling him out? “I’m not in danger of falling in love, if that’s what you’re asking.” They were right, he was a liar. But the truth was that it didn’t matter if he did or didn’t.
Craven lifted the other brow. “I am curious. What happened to you that you are so dead set against love?”
Ash’s mouth fell open. Then he snapped it shut, his jaw snapping together. “I like you better when you don’t talk.”
Crestwood chuckled. “A woman shattered my heart into a million pieces. Adrianna is putting it back together. Piece by piece.”
Ash nearly choked on his own tongue. “This is what we’re doing now? Sharing our feelings? Are we going to hug next and fix each other’s cravats?”
Craven let out a bark of laughter that sounded rough, as though the sound was rusty. “Someone is in the throes of indecision. It’s difficult to let go of the past and open up to real affection.”
Ash staggered back. What the bloody hell had happened to his friends? In the five years they’d been acquainted, they’d never once shared their feelings. Not even close.
Crestwood crossed his arms. “Whatever happened to us, it was worse for him. Did you know that he pays whores to not sleep with him?”
He felt the blood drain from his face. Who had told them his secret? And if Crestwood knew, who else had gotten a hold of that information? “How did you know that?”
Crestwood’s brows dropped down low again. “You don’t prefer men, do you?”
“No,” the word came out strangled. His fists clenched at his sides. “If you two don’t shut your fucking…”
“There he is,” Crestwood smiled. “After all these years, the real Dashlane.”
The words ripped from his throat, hot and angry as his brain buzzed. “You don’t know the first thing about the real me. My mother worked in a—”
Both men dropped their arms. “Worked? Your mother wasn’t the viscountess?”
“She was.” He scrubbed his face, lead settling in his stomach. “After the first died and left the viscount without an heir.” He left out the part where he found her in a whorehouse that she cleaned in exchange for room and board, or that his father had already sired him out of wedlock several years prior.
“Not a happy union between your parents, I take it?” Craven asked, wincing as though he understood.
“No. Not at all. But my mother was beautiful. I remember that before she died.” Before his father wore her down into an early grave. He’d been ruthlessly mean to the woman whom he considered beneath him.
“Did she have your same blonde hair and blue eyes?” Crestwood asked.
Dashlane nodded. His mother had died when he was just five. She looked like an angel. Though he had his mother’s hair and eye color, everything else about him favored his father’s likeness. From his jaw line, right down to the odd curve of his largest toe. In fact, his father had stared at his feet upon their first meeting. An easy thing to do, since Ash hadn’t had shoes. His father had known of his existence and allowed his own child to live with barely enough to eat. Let alone providing serviceable clothing. Until the man had needed him, that was.
“So your father took a shine to your mother and then married her when the first countess died?”
Ash scrubbed his face. His father tried for years to produce an heir, and not just with the countess. For whatever reason, he was only successful with Ash’s mum. He married her in secret to make me legitimate and then passed me off as his first wife’s child. “Something like that.”
Despite living in a den of sin, shoeless, and sleeping in the ash, that was the happiest time in his childhood. “He was a cruel bastard and—” He stopped. He wasn’t ready to share this with anyone.
Craven sat in one of the other chairs, silently assessing Ash for some time before he finally spoke. “You don’t plan to marry because you hated him so much.”
Ash shrugged. Obviously, he’d said enough. “That’s about the meat of it.” There was so much more, of course, but these men had been highborn and would never understand what it meant to be sired in Cheapside.
