Free Never Deceive a Duke by Liz Carlyle Page A

“But I can buy you a ball, yes?”
    “And I want someone to play with.”
    “Then keep to your own kind!” Zayde seized his hand and set off across the grass towards their house. “They don’t want us, Gabriel. When will you learn, eh?”
     
    That night, the heat broke and a rainstorm hammered across Surrey with a vengeance. Gareth went to bed to the sound of howling wind and the incessant rattle of overflowing drainpipes. Inordinately weary from the day’s travel—and the thoughts of the duty which lay before him—he fell at once into a deep but uneasy sleep. He awoke sometime after midnight in a cold sweat, caught in a tangle of sheets, unable to catch his breath. He jerked upright, terrified and disoriented.
    Selsdon Court . He was at Selsdon. A burning sconce in the passageway beyond limned the outline of his door. A very wide and very solid door. His cousin was finally dead, thank God. There was no ship, no chains. But the dream clung like damp, moldering sailcloth. He could smell it thick in his nostrils, along with the stench of tarred rope and the press of rancid, unwashed bodies. The Saint-Nazaire ? Good God. He had not dreamt of that rotted old hulk in months.
    He did not realize until that moment just how badly he was shaking. Dragging a hand through his tousled hair, Gareth tried to steady himself. Lord, what did it mean that he should dream of his lost youth tonight, of all nights?
    Nothing. It meant noting. He was not a child any more. He could defend himself now. But at the moment, he needed a drink. Yes, a generous tot of brandy—Rothewell’s infamous cure for all ills. He extracted himself from the sheets, sat up on the edge of the bed, and wiped the sweat from his brow. Beyond the windows, lightning flashed; once, then again. Seconds later, thunder rumbled, but far in the distance.
    The brandy sat on a side table between the windows. Gareth lit a lamp, pulled on his dressing gown, then poured a glass. And then a second. He was well into his third, and growing impatient with himself for brooding, when the restlessness struck. He looked at the mantel clock. Half past two. Why did it seem another lifetime?
    It was this place. Returning conjured up too many memories. He thought, strangely, of his grandmother, and of Cyril. His life here, by and large, had been one of childhood misery. But he had not realized how relatively pleasant misery could be until he’d ended up in hell—on the Saint-Nazaire .
    Abruptly, he tossed back the last of the brandy, savoring the burn as it slid down his throat. Good Lord, Rothewell would laugh to see him now, cowering in the gloom like some timorous boy, and slightly sotted from a mere fraction of what the baron himself might put away before breakfast.
    Gareth, however, had never been much of a drinker. He’d always believed it a habit for blue bloods, men who need not rise at dawn to work for a living—a category which, he abruptly realized, now included him .
    On that thought, Gareth jerked from his chair and began to roam restlessly through the room. His grandfather had been right; he had never been meant for this sort of life. So how had it happened? For a time, he was lost in a whirl of thoughts and half-wrought memories; he could not later have said what, for at last he found something which could thoroughly distract him. He drew open the heavy draperies and looked out across the courtyard below.
    Selsdon Court had begun as a Norman keep, which had become a fully crenellated castle in the reign of William II. Eventually the castle had become an elegant mansion, which had retained many of its original features, amongst them the south and east bastions, which were connected by a towering curtain wall, the oldest part of the house. Gareth could see it looming across the inner courtyard, its rough stone walls yellow-brown in the flickering light cast upward by the gate lamps. From his vantage point just above, he could make out the crenellations, but the