Page 21 of The Devil Baron

“So yes, you did enjoy it.”

She didn’t reply.

The ass was insufferable, thinking he knew her thoughts. What she felt. Pitying her.

They traveled on in silence, not another word from Rafe until they crested the hill.

“Can I say, you looked lonely.” His voice had softened, almost apologetic, and it was the tone more than the words that made her look at him.

“I did?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

Her eyebrows angled inward. “When?”

She hadn’t sat in a corner by herself in a long time. For how she knew no eligible gentleman would dare approach her, she always had crowds of people around her. If it wasn’t one of her friends or acquaintances, it was one of her aunts or uncles or her stepmother. There was always someone new to meet. She’d made herself generally quite likeable merely because she didn’t care to be lonely at those events.

“It was after our conversation ended. You stood out on the terrace for the longest time and I watched you because it was cold out and your arms were bare. I wondered how long you would last.”

“Tell me, did you enjoy watching it?” She said the words with bite, throwing his earlier words back at him.

“No. I didn’t like watching it.” His voice had gone unusually soft, like he didn’t understand his own reaction. “It looked like a raw loneliness.”

He wasn’t wrong, and that fact alone sent a lump into her throat.

Eva saw her loneliness, but she was the only one. To everyone else, Victoria was the light, bright, well-read, well-bred, entertaining daughter and niece that they would expect out of the Troubant and Wolfbridge lines.

Her look swung away from him and she had to watch the passing field with a splattering of goats in it for long seconds so the lump in her throat didn’t manifest into tears in her eyes.

When she had control again, she glanced at him and then set her look forward. “I am the unfortunate recipient of people attempting to make up for lost time. I’ve harbored a lot of lost time in my life and in attempting to reconcile it with me, it comes out wrong. From my father. From my Uncle Reiner.”

“You said the duke raised you—how is there lost time there?”

Interesting. He wanted to know more about her uncle.

She turned her face back to him, meeting his eyes, studying him for a long breath. She wasn’t sure what she found.

Mere curiosity in an effort for conversation to pass the time?

Or a play for more information on her Uncle Reiner? It wouldn’t be the first time a man had tried to flirt information out of her regarding her uncle.

Or was it something more in his eyes that she couldn’t quite place?

Like maybe he had just seen her for who she truly was and he wanted to acknowledge that fact.

She took a deep breath, her gaze shifting forward. “My Uncle Reiner did raise me. I was born to a dying mother and a missing father. So he had his sister’s newborn babe thrust on him. But I don’t blame him at all for those early years in my life. He didn’t know what to do with the babe he’d inherited. And he knew even less what to do with a precocious young girl. He was, at best, disinterested. He didn’t know anything about how to raise another human being until Sloane came into our lives.”

A soft smile came to her face. “But that—that had been everything. Sloane became my mother and showed him exactly how I needed to be loved. She brought family and love and life into Wolfbridge Castle where it had never been before.” She paused, swallowing hard. “But there were lost years in there between Reiner and me. Too many of them.”

She glanced at him to find he hadn’t looked away, his stare still settled on her. His brown eyes looked warm, the chill that always held steady in them just a mere flicker. He looked almost…concerned.

His right fingers flipped up from his reins, urging her on. “And your father?”

She let out a bitter chuckle. “Well, he owns the crowning glory of lost years. He was on the other side of the world and he knew that my mother had died in childbirth. He assumed I had died along with her. And he was devastated, so he just never came back to England. Was presumed dead. By the time fate finally brought him back to us, I was eighteen. He’d missed everything. Everything that made me. Everything.”

“That is harsh.”

“And truth. There is no getting all those years back, no matter how hard one tries. And he tries really, really hard.” Her lips pulled inward for a long moment. “Both of them are desperate to make up for those lost years. But that is the thing about lost time. It will always be lost. There is no making up for it. It is just…gone.”

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