by Chloé Duval
He frowned.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m not going to steal it, relax. I just want to give you my number; it might spare you a few gray hairs next time.”
He pulled it out and unlocked it then slid it across the table. I dialed my own phone and waited for it to ring before hanging up.
“Let’s hope you actually answer this one,” he grumbled.
“Come on, will you stop being so negative?” I protested as I returned his phone.
“I’m not negative.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Okay, maybe I’m a little sarcastic,” he acknowledged.
“That’s the understatement of the century. I’m pretty sure if I looked up ‘killjoy’ in the dictionary I’d find a picture of you.”
He smiled. “Nah. I’d be under ‘irresistible.’” He gave me a flirtatious look.
Hot damn, he was even more attractive when he gazed at me in that sultry way, and he knew it. My heart stuttered slightly.
“Yeah, right. Watch your feet, I think you’re getting too big for your boots and I’m not sharing my crutches,” I retorted, hastily hiding behind my menu.
I barely had the time to see a satisfied smile spread across his face, and my heart began to beat faster in spite of myself.
Chapter 18
Gabrielle
Castle of Ferté-Chandeniers
December 1899
“He wasn’t…your father?” Gabrielle repeated, astounded.
Thomas shook his head.
“Neither in blood nor in spirit… Not in any way, in fact, except on paper,” he amended bitterly. “He never wanted me, and upon my mother’s death he hastened to send me away. I was a thorn in his side, a burden he did not want and that he discarded as soon as he could. The black, monstrous stain on the pure lineage of the Saint-Armand.”
Speechless, Gabrielle took in the enormity of Thomas’s confession. She had expected many things, but not that. Yet if she thought about it the clues were all there: the utter lack of resemblance between Thomas and the other barons de Saint-Armand, the fact that he changed his name to his mother’s, the apparently irreconcilable issue between him and Victor de Saint-Armand, the way he had cast away his inheritance…
Thomas was not the son of the baron, and the man had known and made him pay for it.
“I am sorry, Thomas.”
“I am not.” His tone was cutting. “He was not a good man. I would rather not be related to him.”
Gabrielle nodded and steered the conversation away.
“Do you know who your real father is?”
Thomas inclined his head.
“His name was Frederick Andrews. He was English, like my mother.”
Gabrielle froze.
“‘Was’?”
“He…died too. Around the same time as my mother did.”
How could the universe be so cruel to one person?
Gabrielle’s heart bled for him, and she only just held herself back from throwing herself at him and holding him tight.
“I am so sorry,” she breathed. “It is very unfair.”
“Life is rarely fair, you know.”
Gabrielle sighed. “I know.…” She hesitated. “May I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“How did you find out that the baron wasn’t…”
“My father? By happenstance, a few years after my mother’s death.”
“Was that also when you were…injured?” Gabrielle asked.
He paused.
“Yes.” He looked away, as though his scar were a mark of shame he had to hide.
Gabrielle thought she could feel a hand close over her heart and squeeze it, and along with it her chest, throat and soul. A deep-seated, fierce need to protect him arose from within her.
“Would you… Would you like to talk about it?” she offered.
“It is not…a pretty story,” he said after a pause. “I do not think you really want to hear it.”
“The question isn’t so much whether I want to hear it as it is whether you wish to tell it,” she gently replied. “It is said that a burden shared is a burden halved. And with all my heart, I wish to help you. Maybe…maybe it would relieve you to speak of it?”
“I do not know whether I can.”
“Why? Do you not trust me?”
“Of course I do. More than any other. But…”
He broke off, and Gabrielle could read in his eyes his inner struggle. Part of him wanted to tell her, she could see. Yet something held him back, some measure of fear that she could detect in his gaze.
“What are you afraid of, Thomas?” she whispered.
His eyes searched Gabrielle’s, hesitant, unsure.
“No one has ever looked at me the way you do,” he confessed, with the vulnerability he only exposed when he was alone with her. “And when you know I will lose that. You will no longer look at me the same way.”
“Why? Why do you think that? Are you going to tell me you killed the baron?”
She immediately regretted her poorly thought out words when silence greeted her words. It lasted for so long she began to wonder whether she had somehow uncovered the truth.
“No,” Thomas finally murmured, “but I have often wished to over the last twenty years.”
Gabrielle drew closer.
“Thomas, we have all one day dreamed that someone who hurt us would…disappear. A few minutes ago, I would have thrown Mr. Choiseul to the wolves. That does not make you a monster! It makes you…human.”
In that moment, his gaze was undecipherable, full of emotion, hesitation, vulnerability and something Gabrielle could not identify. Her heart clenched a little tighter.
He averted his gaze.
“I have never told this to anyone. Even Céleste does not know the details.”
He glanced up, and Gabrielle nodded at him encouragingly.
He motioned for her to take the love seat, and she did so, transferring the books to the floor. But instead of sitting down next to her as he so often had over the past few days, he stood next to the fireplace and laid a hand on the mantelpiece. The expression on his face grew distant, as though he were trying to detach himself from what he was about to tell her. Gazing into the flames, he began his tale.
“Once upon a time there was a prince. He was fair of face with sky-blue eyes and a perfect smile, and all of the young princesses in the world wished to be his lady love. He was also a skilled wordsmith, on par with the best poets of the kingdom. He had ascended the throne early, having lost his father when he was little more than a child, and ruled as sole lord and master over his domain.
“In a nearby kingdom, a rich cloth merchant had several sons who ran his business, and a daughter. Adaline was the light of his life and his greatest pride. She was beautiful, kind, loving and generous. She was a romantic, dreaming of her Prince Charming. She had been protected by her father and brothers all her life and knew little of the real world. She was sweet and naïve, and wondered at everything—a butterfly, a flower, a snowflake. It was said that she had the sweetest smile in all of creation.
“One day, the cloth merchant traveled to the prince’s kingdom. When the prince saw Adaline, he immediately wished to marry her. Not because he had fallen in love with her at first sight, no. He wished to marry her because her beauty was without equal and underneath his fair appearance, the prince hid a dark soul and heart, rotten with vanity, pride and an insatiable desire to possess everything beautiful and precious on earth.
“He coveted Adaline from the moment he first saw her.
“Adaline believed his smooth words, his promises and vows, allowing his handsome appearance to fool her. She fell in love with him, and begged her father to let her marry him. But she did not know that once he had
obtained his heart’s desire, the prince soon grew bored with it.
“Soon after their wedding, young Adaline discovered her prince’s true nature. He was violent, easily brought to anger, and instead of the fairy tale she had dreamed of, Adaline’s life became sadness and disappointment. Fearful of displeasing him and suffering his wrath, she obeyed his every whim, fading to a shadow of her former self. She lost her smile, the light in her eyes, her joie de vivre. She came to eagerly await the times when he would leave in search of a new treasure, for solitude was a thousand times sweeter than living with her prince.
“Adaline kept her torment silent. She kept the weight of her unhappiness and sadness to herself, hiding the breadth of her misfortune from her father and brothers, assuring them she was the happiest of women.
“And as time went by, she slowly withered, like a flower deprived of water and sunlight.
“One day, a fancy struck the prince; he decided to have his castle expanded. He called for a renowned architect from his wife’s country. He was a strong, tall man, as dark of hair as the prince was fair, and his soul was as light as the prince’s was black. While the architect worked on the castle, the prince continued his travels, searching for treasures he immediately discarded.
“Adaline soon came to develop true and sincere feelings for the architect who reminded her of her homeland. She could speak her language with him, and he shared her love of books and poetry. His feelings were equally passionate. She could feel herself come alive again. Like a fire that burns and lays waste to all in its wake, she loved him as she had never loved before.
“Blinded by his arrogance, the prince saw nothing. And when the architect left the finished castle, he took young Adaline’s smile with him, but left her part of him in exchange. Nine months later, Adaline gave birth to a boy as dark haired as his father. She named him Thomas and loved him even more than she had loved her architect. And when the prince saw how little the child resembled him, his joy upon learning he had an heir vanished along with his interest for the woman who had carried him.”
Thomas’s face hardened, and his jaw clenched.
“Whether he confronted her and forced her to admit that the child was not his or whether he nurtured doubt within him for the following years is not known. But in the salons he attended, he began to hear unpleasant rumors behind his back that fed his raging temper and turned his disinterest into hatred. He was satisfied with nothing and held his wife responsible for his fall from grace, beating her often. To protect her child, Adaline endured without a word. And the child grew. He began to notice the silent tears on his mother’s cheeks, the grimaces of pain she would allow to escape when she believed herself alone. And his heart broke anew every time.”
Gabrielle’s own heart cracked in her chest, and she thought she could feel the cracks up to her throat. “Dear Lord…,” she breathed. Céleste had told her that Thomas’s story was grim and tragic and that the events of his childhood had left scars upon him, but she had been far from imagining the truth of it.
“And so it went for ten years. Then, one January day, everything came tumbling down. Adaline received from a trusted friend of her architect a letter announcing the death of her beloved. Upon reading the words she turned pale and clutched her child to her so hard he thought he might suffocate. Then she locked herself in her bedroom while the cook, who was her sole friend and confidante, took her son into the kitchen. The news had broken Adaline’s last resolve. Unable to bear the hell in which she lived any longer, Adaline decided to seek shelter with her family and impulsively began to pack a suitcase, taking only the barest necessities for her son and herself. But the prince caught her in the act and grew angry. No one knows what happened exactly, but the prince and Adaline left the room and continued to argue in the corridor. The child suddenly heard his mother cry out and ran out of the kitchen. When he reached the foot of the stairs he found her lying there in a pool of blood.”
Oh Lord! Gabrielle almost could not breathe.
“The prince claimed she had tripped and fallen, that he had tried to catch her but been too late.
“Yet there was neither tears nor regret in his eyes.
“Adaline was buried a few days later in the family vault to preserve appearances, and the following week, the prince had the boy shipped to a boarding school. And he forgot him there. The child never returned to the castle.
“Three years went by in total solitude; three years during which the boy dreamed of his mother’s bloody face every night. He withdrew into himself until the other children nearly forgot he existed.
“Life had almost become bearable when one day a new boy came to school. He was the son of a neighboring prince, an odious brat very full of himself. He recognized the child’s name and began to proclaim that he knew his shameful secret—that the boy was nothing but a bastard that no one wanted, a disgrace to his rank. That he was only a monster, too big and too ugly. That it was no surprise his mother had preferred to die rather than live with him and that his father could not bear the sight of him. He was nothing and no one. A reject.
“And the school laughed at the child.
“For days, weeks, the child endured the mockery and jeers in silence. But one day, when he could bear it no longer, he challenged the young arrogant boy to a duel. Just like in the books his mother had loved, old-fashioned combat at the break of day. He secretly stole the antique swords the fencing master kept in his study and waited for his adversary at dawn.
“The boys fought. The child was strong with uncontrollable rage and anger, and he won, only barely holding back from running his opponent through. But the prideful boy would not admit his defeat and waited for him to lower his guard to slash at his face. The wound grew infected and the child almost lost an eye.
“In three years, it was the only time the prince deigned to come and see him, not out of worry, but to beat the urge to duel with higher-ranking people such as the other boy and his family out of him. Thomas’s wound reopened. And as blood poured down his face, the boy looked at the man he still called Father then and asked for the truth.
“‘Is it true? Am I a bastard, a reject and a monster?’
“The disgust he saw in the prince’s face was all the answer needed. The instant his face was healed, he did as his mother had tried to do. He sailed to England to find an uncle whose address he had received from the cook. The uncle took him in and gave him a home and a family, and over the years, a job and a position of trust in the family trade.”
Thomas blew out a breath and fell silent, still staring at the fire, his hands on the mantelpiece, clenched so hard his knuckles were white.
“For seventeen years there was no contact between the prince and the young man. Until one June day when he received a letter from a notary informing him that the baron Victor de Saint-Armand had passed away.
“And despite all of his hatred, despite everything his mother had suffered because of him, the young man cried that day. Maybe it was out of relief or sadness. He did not know. And because it was his duty, he retraced the steps he had taken seventeen years earlier to stand before his mother’s grave and cut once and for all the last ties to a past he could not forget, no matter how he tried.”
Tears streamed down Gabrielle’s cheeks. She could not tell when she had lost the battle and ceased to hold them back. All she knew was that she was distraught, horrified and utterly furious all at once.
A sob shook free from her throat, catching Thomas’s attention. Realizing her distress, he rushed toward her and knelt in front of her, cradling her face in his hands. He wiped her tears with his thumbs and gently brought their foreheads together. Eyes closed, Gabrielle relished the proximity, laying her fingers on his wrists as though to keep him there.
“I am sorry,” he whispered. “I did not mean to make you cry. I should not have told you.”
“You should!” she immediately protested, her voice ho
arse. “You should. I just…feel so hurt for you. So very, very hurt.”
“It’s in the past now,” he murmured, his gaze on Gabrielle’s. “And it is a past that does not deserve your tears. I am all right, Gabrielle. Everything is all right.”
She wasn’t so sure. He still carried the scars of Victor de Saint-Armand’s abuse on his soul, and she hated the baron for it. So much that her rage almost suffocated her. She was not a violent person, but she would have made an exception to protect Thomas.
“I know it is in the past, but I cannot help it. I feel so…angry. I wish—”
Thomas laid a finger over her lips and gently shook his head.
“Do not. He does not deserve your hatred or your sorrow. Do not stain your beautiful soul with such a man. Dry your tears, Gabrielle. I do not wish you to weep because of me, and even less so because of him. He is not worth it. I am not worth it.”
“Of course you are worth it!” she cried. “You are worth everything in the world. You—I—”
And in that moment, as she groped for words to defend Thomas’s worth to him, a truth that she had known deep inside for some time revealed itself to her. She had fallen utterly and hopelessly in love with him.
“Thomas—” she began, not entirely sure of what she was about to say.
Everything in her head was awhirl. Emotions, desires, thoughts.
She wanted to kiss him, feel his lips on hers, his hands on her body, his chest against hers. But she also wanted to hold him in her arms and comfort him. Comfort the child he had been, who had suffered so much. Tell him that he was no longer alone. That she was here.
She wanted to tell him she loved him. To kiss away the sadness, the bitterness that darkened his life away.
She plunged her gaze into his, hoping he would see everything she had in her heart and mind that she did not have the words to express.
“You are worth it,” she whispered fiercely, hoarse with emotion. “You are so very, very worth it.… Can’t you see it?”
The air in the room shifted, charged with electricity, and some deeper, more primal emotion blazed in Thomas’s eyes. His hands were still on her face, gentle and reverent, his thumbs rubbing circles into her cheeks, but millimeter by millimeter, their lips were drawing closer.
