A Perfect Storm (22 page)

“I think so too.”

Feeling light as air again, Sophie smacked the table and hooted. “Well, then, let’s not keep this footage of Owen in the snow for your mom waiting. If you give me about twenty minutes, I can finish eating, and then I’ll go round up my laptop. If you can go find Owen—he was outside with Cale last I saw him—we’ll meet back here and get that montage together and off in an e-mail.”

“Thank you!” Jade popped out of the seat and hugged Sophie around the shoulders once more. “I’ll go track him down right now.” With that, the stunningly beautiful woman darted out of the kitchen like a kid.

As Sophie went back to her lunch, she smiled to herself. The heaviness she’d entered the kitchen with no longer sat so weighty on her chest. If Lucien felt the need to avoid her, she could not search him out and demand he spend time with her. The knowledge that he didn’t want to be with her after what they’d shared the last few days pricked at Sophie’s heart. At her pride too. She couldn’t deny it. Yet the people who worked for him were so genuine, and such kindness ruled their actions, that they continually fed her logical side that told her if they were such good people, then Lucien must be too.

If you’re directing these people in such a way, Mr. Cabot
—Sophie chuckled and shook her head—
and I can’t detect deceit beneath the sincere gazes and encouragement in them, then you are doing such a fine job of planning your trap that I deserve whatever I’m willingly walking into.

Lucien might have successfully kept himself secluded today, but because of his people, Sophie wasn’t ready to give up on him.

Not quite yet.

* * * *

Lucien paused at the entrance to the kitchen, unable to ignore the bittersweet pang in his chest at the sight before him. At the table, Owen sat in Sophie’s lap, and Emma, Jade, and Cale surrounded her chair. All of them were laughing at something on Sophie’s computer, looking too much like a goddamn happy picture of a family.

Phantom tentacles wiggled down Lucien’s legs, pushing him to move and join in, but he willed himself to hold back and maintain distance. Lucien told himself it was part of his plan to remain withdrawn and lure Sophie to him, but the stab in his gut called him out as a liar. When Sophie eventually understood the part she’d play in his revenge, it would tear through her like wildfire and rip her very foundation out from beneath her. She would understand this joyous inclusion she’d briefly felt at Ravenstoke had all been a lie. As cold as Lucien needed to be in order to succeed, he didn’t have the stomach to witness her happiness up close and know that within days he would single-handedly tear it all away from her.

 “You don’t have to do this.”
Magnus’s daily advice rang in Lucien’s head, constantly pushing against his choices. At the same time, the words
“He said to take them. Take them all. That he wished I would just go away and die”
in his little brother’s voice lived in Lucien’s blood. That voice had become a part of Lucien’s very DNA for too many years and would not release him from his promise to Josh:
“Your murder will be avenged.”

With a coiling ball growing bigger in his gut, Lucien squeezed his eyes closed and clutched his stomach. He counted silently to ten and with each number let the soul-stealing image of his dead brother grow more vivid in his mind. When he felt properly sick, he opened his eyes and found Sophie watching him with an intensity that matched the forever-open gaze of Josh in his head. Something Lucien could not identify skittered down his spine and made him shiver where he stood. The sensation squeezed at his windpipe too. Without conscious thought, he spun away and strode down the hall, away from prying eyes.

She would follow him, though. Lucien knew it as surely as he knew how to draw a breath of air. That uncomfortable feeling of fingers playing down his spine remained, pushing Lucien to erect the familiar droll facade that served him so well in uncomfortable situations. Yet even as his psyche automatically started to slip on that mask, Lucien forced himself to shove it away and leave the wound exposed. Sophie’s warmth moved in closer behind him. She continued to gain ground, and Lucien felt like nothing so much as a soldier without a weapon entering an unknown territory. His back was vulnerable to predators. Hell, his entire being was.

As Lucien entered the solarium, he shoved the protective barriers creeping up deep inside him again and left his flanks weak for Sophie’s brand of attack.

It didn’t take long for Sophie to join him. Lucien leaned against one side of the double doors that led to the outside, and she propped her shoulder against the other. From the corner of his vision, he could see her rubbing her hand against her gauzy blue skirt, and the tell tweaked against his conscience in a way he could not afford to feel.

“You needn’t have followed me,” he told her, the gruffness in his voice quite real. “I’m fine.”

Sophie inched closer. As she looked up at him, the murky skies hovering outside washed shades of gray into her blue gaze. “You didn’t look fine.” She studied him with a clarity that sent spikes of adrenaline into his bloodstream. “You looked…I don’t know, stricken. I just want to assure you I wasn’t trying to lure your people into my web in order to get them to tell me secrets about you. I promise you that.” The storm clouds outside suddenly couldn’t conceal the spark in her eyes. “Anything personal I want to know about you, Mr. Cabot, I’ll ask you directly.”

“It wasn’t that.” Turning away from Sophie to look outside once more, Lucien rubbed at his neck where the brushes of awareness had now crept up into his nape. “I didn’t think you were grilling my people.”

With another step to him, Sophie took away the brief reprieve Lucien had given himself by turning away from her stare. “That implies there was something that did bother you. Can I ask what it was? Scratch that.” She grazed her hand against his cheek and jaw, fingers trembling against his skin, and drew him out of the shadows. As she let her touch fall away, the openness in her gaze took his breath away. “Will you tell me what it was?”

Unable to look away this time, Lucien slipped into a dance with a woman he suddenly wished with everything in him he’d met in innocence rather than with the taint of revenge. “Every time I see Owen, particularly when he’s so happy and having fun like he obviously just was, I’m reminded of the fact that my brother will never see him like that. Josh will never know his son. He’ll never get to know what a great kid he has.” More sincere scratchiness scuffed up Lucien’s words. “Some days that truth hits me with more force than others. Just now it punched me pretty hard.”

“I’m sorry.” Sophie touched his forearm, sending too much drugging warmth through his shirt and into his very flesh. “I’m sorry for you and for Owen.”

Yanking away, Lucien said, “It’s fine.” Her gentleness seeped into his blood and ate at him like the most volatile poison, and he could not let an antidote form and change his course now. “I’m fine.”

A glint of steel he’d come to know pierced through Sophie’s stare. “I don’t think the situation is fine. And it doesn’t appear as if you’re in any way fine about your brother’s death either.” As quickly as that fire had burned in her eyes, she softened her stance once again. “Will you tell me how long ago Josh died?”

Lucien didn’t even have to close his eyes to see his once-vibrant brother slip away from this world that terrible Monday night. “Almost eight years ago.” Christ, Lucien had been able to hear a Braves and Mets game on a TV in the background, and to this day he couldn’t listen or watch baseball without the desire to vomit.

“He must have been a young man,” Sophie murmured.

“Yes.” Lucien practically growled the agreement. “Still too full of piss and passion to slow down and embrace all the gifts he had in his life.” An avalanche of memories, ones of anger, disgust, and impatience Lucien couldn’t bear to see or share shoved at his conscience. Internally, in silence, he fought to mute them and force them back into the darkness where they couldn’t color the facts of how Josh had died. “Josh didn’t get the chance to become a man.” Lucien clung to the hard choices he’d made those many years ago, designed to push Josh to do just that. Heat grew in Lucien’s belly, and he glared at the woman next to him, the one who would unknowingly assist him in putting balance back into the universe. “He needed more time to settle himself, and he would have excelled, but he wasn’t given the chance.”

As Sophie reached up and cupped Lucien’s face, a sheen in her eyes made her gaze glitter with too much brightness. “Nobody wants to hear about silver linings, but you can take some solace in that he at least got to see his son born and have a few years in his life before he passed away. That’s something. More than a lot of fathers and children get.”

Pictures of a delivery room without Josh in it because his lover was too good a seducer, and how Josh could understand nothing more than pleasing that bastard, threw more tinder on the inferno growing in Lucien. Grit coated his words as he said, “He needed more time to grow and understand what was important, and it was stolen from him.”

Sophie swiped at a tear sliding down her cheek. “I understand that.”

Her sympathy stabbed betrayal deep into Lucien’s heart. “You still have your brother”—viciousness slipped into his tone—“so I seriously doubt you do.” He shoved her hands off him and strode across the solarium, the flames of failure licking hot at his heels. His emotions had full control right now, and succumbing, letting that all-consuming heat get a grip on him, might very well have just lost him the justice he’d waited so long to achieve.

Stop
! The order rang louder in Lucien’s head than the gong of a bell going off while standing in a church tower. As Lucien jerked to a stop at the solarium entrance, he grabbed on to the wall to steady the vibrations his emotions triggered in his body.
Get control. Right now
. Lucien breathed through the blaze eating its way through his insides and swallowed down the nasty taste of self-disgust that came as a side effect of his choice to lure an innocent person into his life’s primary driving force—a messy world of revenge.

An uncomfortably long silence stretched between him and Sophie. He didn’t have to turn around to feel her presence across the room; her stare bored holes into his back. Each breath Lucien took settled a bit more of the adrenaline buzzing inside him, until finally he felt normal—for him, anyway—once more.

Upon turning around, Lucien forced himself to meet Sophie’s true blue, sincere gaze. “I apologize for my tone.” Looking at her, absorbing her pure beauty, made his chest burn with sweet need. Years of hiding himself ignited a silent order to cover his desire, but he ruthlessly let his genuine need for this woman go unchecked. She needed to know his hunger for her existed in order to make the next move.

“We got off track,” he told her, making his voice as sedate as his stare was hot, “but my original intent when I searched you out was to tell you that my investigator tracked down a descendant, a young woman, of Jane Bainbridge. This woman does not have any letters in her possession, but she’s fairly certain her great-grandmother did once upon a time. She’s going to contact her grandmother to see if they were passed along to her. If the young woman finds anything, she has been instructed to contact you as well as me. I gave Giles permission to pass along your e-mail address.”

New life sparked Sophie upright. “Thank you. That’s wonderful news for the story.” She beamed, and in another life, Lucien would have basked in her warmth, feeling like a goddamn giant.

“You may very well have uncovered the piece of the puzzle I could not,” Lucien said neutrally instead. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” The woman could not contain her smile, and Christ, it was so fucking arousing, she never should.

Years of dominating his body’s needs allowed Lucien to conquer the blood rushing to push his cock to full erection. “I’ll leave you to get back to”—once again, Lucien had to pause as his heart snagged on the image of Sophie with Owen on her lap in the kitchen—“whatever you were doing with Owen and the others before you came looking for me.” With a bow, Lucien turned to leave. As he walked away, he theorized he now only had to allow her time to bask in the connection they’d just shared—more real than he’d wanted—and let her come find him in order to deepen it. Hopefully tonight. Knowledge of his enemy told Lucien he didn’t have a whole lot more time.

Halfway down the hall, footsteps clicked softly behind him. He picked up his pace, but then Sophie called out, “Lucien, wait.”

Shit
. Lucien stumbled. His chest banded so tightly it squeezed all the air right out of his lungs. Hearing her say his name snaked deep into a place he didn’t want to acknowledge existed, more so than any sexual act he’d done with her thus far. Without turning around, he said, “Yes?”

Sophie did not move in front of him, but she stood close nonetheless. So close her breath brushed the thin knit of his black sweater and left his hairs raised on his arm. “You’re right,” she told him, almost in a whisper. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose a sibling, so I can’t empathize on that exact level. But I do understand what it’s like to grieve and work your way through loss back to a place where you don’t feel guilty for continuing to live. I know when I see sadness in a person too. I can also feel when someone is certain solitude is the only armor he has as a way to survive that pain.”

She grazed her fingers down his arm to hold his hand, and her gentle touch rocked a shudder through Lucien. “You’re not as alone as you think you are, Lucien,” she told him. “You won’t weaken or tarnish the love you have for Josh by letting yourself talk about him. Allowing yourself to feel lightness when you think of him or share stories about him, rather than cloaking yourself in this unending heaviness, doesn’t mean you’re letting go of him or betraying his memory. It just means you’re looking back on the better, good times you had with him instead of constantly living in the painful moment of losing him. You have lots of people in this castle who are willing to listen and take that journey with you.” Finally, she moved to stand before him, her eyes as full of life and light as anything of beauty he’d ever been privileged to meet. “Me included.”