Page 66 of Dangerous Exile

For the wear of time on the dowager countess’s face, she moved about the room swiftly, her robust form spry from one task to the next.

Ness’s hand had eventually failed, setting the teacup back down onto the saucer without taking a sip.

Finally, the dowager sat across from him and Ness at the round card table where she’d had tea brought in and settled them.

The dowager’s hands were empty now and she poured a cup of tea for herself. For long moments that stretched the silence, her bare fingers skittered to and from the edge of the saucer under the cup, about to pick it up, then thinking the better of it. Again and again.

Just drink the damn tea.

Maddening, the whole of it, for how little she’d said once they’d arrived at the house. A house that manifested no memories for him upon entering.

He cleared his throat. “May we come straight to it, my lady? You believe you know me. Correct?” Direct, but they could waste the whole day watching this woman fiddle about. He could be back at the coaching inn right now with Ness in his bed, enjoying her naked body on top of his. The preferable option, since they were going to be stuck in the area for another day waiting for the roads to become passable.

The whole of this was a mistake.

The dowager finally committed to the tea and picked up her cup and saucer, taking an elongated sip, her look bouncing between him and Ness. “I do know you. I cannot deny it. What have you remembered?”

“I can be blunt?”

“Please, it would make the whole of this easier.”

His lips pulled back tightly, not sure his flavor of bluntness was appropriate for the woman, but then he forged forth, discarding the thought of delicacy. What happened to his parents, to him, was brutal and he wouldn’t sweep over the truth of it.

“I remember my father being shot and my mother murdered in front of me after hours of watching her be tortured. I remember being beaten to near unconsciousness and then choked until I left this world. That is what I remember.”

The dowager winced, her teacup clattering on her saucer as she dropped it onto the table, brown liquid bouncing and sloshing to splatter onto the inlaid wood. Her hand went onto her chest and she took several long breaths, appearing to get her composure only slightly back. “I feared that. What else?”

“Nothing. Nothing before that. Nothing after.”

Her brow wrinkled, half of it disappearing under the turquoise turban. “Nothing after? But you are here, before me. Where have you been?”

“I woke up ona Royal Navy warship thirteen years ago. I lived at sea for seven years. London for the last six years.A sailor named me, for I had no name I could recall. Talen Blackstone. That is my name. All of that, I remember.”

Her head bobbed up and down, her turban slipping slightly forward as her fingers pressed into her chest. “But…you don’t remember me, sweet lad?”

The nerves along the back of his neck spiked at the term of endearment. He was the farthest thing from a sweet lad. “No.”

“I saved you.”

His head angled down, his glare slicing into her. “You what?”

“I saved you.” She puffed an exhale, her weathered brown eyes darkening with memories. “They were choking you, those awful, awful men and you—you look so much like my Clayborne and I had to stop them. I was too late for your mother, for your father, but you…you I had to save.”

“Who in the hell did you save me from?” The words barked out, harsh and loud, and Ness reached out and set her hand on his thigh, squeezing his leg.

Calm.

She wanted him calm when there was no margin for calm after what the woman had just told him.

The dowager knew. Knew exactly who had killed his parents. Who he now had to hunt down and slit from throat to gut.

The dowager blanched, cowering across the table from him and it took her a moment to speak, her stare on the table between them, her finger tracing a line beside the spilled tea.

“I must first start with who I am. I am your aunt, married to your Uncle Fredrick, the younger brother of your father. There were three boys, and the eldest, Walter, was dying of consumption during the summer that your parents died. Your father was the second son. And your grandfather, the earl, had just died the spring before.”

Her eyes darted up to him, then slid back down to the table. “My husband was convinced…well, he believed your father, Thomas, was insane, that the loss of his leg in the war had made his mind mad. Fredrick believed that Thomas wasn’t fit to hold the title should Walter die. They argued about it endlessly that summer, the three brothers.”

“My father lost his leg in Boney’s war?”