Because We Belong

briefly.

“What is it?” Ian asked, noticing Lucien’s reaction.

Lucien opened his eyes with a resigned air. “It’s nothing. I was just waiting for you to ask ever since you arrived at Belford Hall. I was shocked when you didn’t ask me straightaway.”

Ian’s pulse began to throb at his throat, although he remained outwardly calm. “I felt guilty about asking. I know you’ve just recently met Fatima,” he said, referring to Lucien’s mother. “I realize how discovering she’s alive and forming a relationship must be very sacred for you.”

Lucien met his stare. “You want to speak with her, don’t you? Ask her about your mother? About Trevor Gaines?”

“Yes,” Ian said honestly. “I do. I won’t without your permission, though. You wouldn’t have spoken to my mother about her past—about a vulnerable time in her life—without my permission, and I wouldn’t speak to your mother without your agreement.”

Lucien looked away. “What you have to understand,” he said quietly. “Is that my mother’s religion is highly prohibitive at the concept of a woman taking a lover outside of marriage, let alone having a child out of wedlock. Her family is a rarity for continuing to accept her even when she told them the truth about me. It wasn’t an easy thing for her to open up and talk about my origins. Her shame is palpable. It’s very difficult to witness her guilt.”

Ian’s heart paused in his chest. “You mean you’ve already spoken with her?” he rasped. “About Trevor Gaines? About my mother?”

Lucien looked at him with the gray eyes he’d inherited from Trevor Gaines, yet the degree of compassion he saw in his gaze was nothing that Gaines could have ever begun to pass on to his child.

“Yes,” Lucien said.

“What did she say? Did Gaines force her into being with him?”

“No,” Lucien replied starkly. “My mother is under the impression that everything Gaines did in regard to moving Helen and her to France was for her—Fatima. She was duped into believing he loved her while they were still in Britain. She’d caught his eye while he’d been visiting Helen, and then he accidentally ran into her while she was marketing in the town. He wooed her carefully. My mother was charmed by him—a handsome, accomplished, wealthy man. Their love affair was carried out clandestinely and lasted several months before he disappeared from her life.”

Ian absorbed all of this, picturing the scene of seduction in the tiny town in Essex, Gaines wooing both women at once, the mad gentlewoman and her servant. But not just wooing. Gathering information about them of an intimate nature, their likes and dislikes, gauging their vulnerabilities, ascertaining their cycles. By now, Ian understood that Gaines’s fascination with mechanical things, especially clockworks, bizarrely paralleled this obsession he had with women’s reproductive cycles. He must have realized early on that the cycles of women who lived together often synchronized. Ian had a sick feeling it excited him, being in the know of such feminine intimacies, using that knowledge for his perverse aims.

“Did Fatima realize that Gaines was seeing my mother during the same time period?”

“No. As a matter of fact, Fatima had the distinct impression that Helen didn’t care for Gaines. She assumed it was because of her increasing illness. Helen could be very withdrawn at times.” Lucien’s stare turned fierce. “And I don’t want my mother to know until I have the chance to tell her. At this point, my mother is under the impression she was taken advantage of by a philanderer. If anyone has to reveal to her that Gaines was much, much worse than that, it will be me.”

“Fine,” Ian said distractedly, fixated as he was on what Lucien had said earlier. “But what did your mother say about my mother? Lucien?” he prompted roughly. Lucien still hesitated, but then seemed to come to a decision when he met Ian’s gaze.

“My mother said that when they went to France, your mother decompensated considerably,” he said quietly. “Helen used to be functional enough that my mother could leave her alone for an hour or two at a time. Your mother could see to her own basic needs, and she didn’t pose a threat to herself. One morning, my mother returned from a shopping errand in the town where you grew up in France, only to find Helen missing. She searched, growing increasingly frantic. She eventually found your mother in the backyard in what sounds like a near-catatonic state, curled up in a ball, unresponsive. Helen was unable to speak, walk, or recognize familiar faces. My mother called the local doctor and the police. They undertook an investigation. It was determined Helen had recently had sexual intercourse, and there were some bruises on her body. But they were hesitant to call what had occurred rape. Helen was unable to testify as to what had happened, and she’d been occasionally witnessed in . . . erratic behavior by the townspeople since arriving. She might have gotten the bruises from falls, or even taken part in consensual rough sex—”

“How is a psychotic woman able to give informed consent?” Ian interrupted furiously.

“I’m just telling you the police’s thinking,” Lucien said, his gray eyes making Ian clamp his mouth shut. “No charge was ever officially made.”

“She was raped,” Ian grated out.

“My mother agrees,” Lucien said regretfully. “Unlike the police officials, she was familiar with the cycles of Helen’s schizophrenia. She’d never seen your mother decompensate to the level she fell to during that time period. It was clear to my mother she’d experienced a severe trauma. Helen didn’t speak for nearly a month after the incident. My mother thought for sure when she discovered Helen was pregnant that she wouldn’t be able to carry the child to term, she was so debilitated. All signs point to the conclusion that when Helen denied Gaines, he eventually resorted to rape. It’s not as if there isn’t clear-cut proof that he was familiar with those tactics,” Lucien said bitterly.

Ian’s grandmother laughed in the distance, the sound echoing off the walls of the Great Hall. It took Ian a few seconds to even recognize the familiar sound for what it was.

“And your mother gave birth nine months later,” Lucien finished heavily.

“I can see why you wouldn’t want your mother seeing me,” Ian stated after a pause. He and Trevor Gaines looked appallingly alike, after all. If it weren’t for the difference of their eyes, they might have been twins. Lucien’s mother obviously remained ignorant of the fact that her seducer and Helen’s rapist were one and the same man. If she were to meet Helen’s son, however, the truth would be slammed home by the simple, blatant evidence of Ian’s face.

“I do want you to meet my mother someday,” Lucien said fiercely. “Of course I do. I’m just trying to convey to you the complexity of the whole thing.”

“I would never let her anywhere near me, if I were you,” Ian said, walking past Lucien to the Great Hall.

He suddenly wanted nothing more than for this whole conversation to be over. Lucien halted him with a hand on his upper arm. Ian looked at his brother, anger—that old, familiar companion—starting to bubble beneath the surface of his calm facade. Not anger at Lucien, but at some unknown, vague grayness that seemed to return in that moment to press down on him like a suffocating pall.

I can’t escape it, no matter how hard I’ve been trying to for the past week, since the second you looked into Francesca’s startled, glistening eyes as she stood in that reception line.

“You’re my brother. She’s my mother,” Lucien hissed. “Of course I want my family to meet someday. You’re not Trevor Gaines, Ian.”

The fury reared in him, seeming to constrict his throat. He jerked Lucien’s hold off him, a snarl shaping his mouth. He had that tight, hot feeling in his chest again that made breathing difficult. When he turned, he saw Francesca standing in the hallway, a startled expression on her face. He froze. Half of her face was radiant from sunshine, the other cast in a shadow from the grand staircase.

“Lucien? The car is here.” Her gaze narrowed on Ian. She took a step toward him. “Ian? Are you all right? What is it?”

He didn’t reply. Too much emotion had erupted in him too quickly. He walked ahead of both of them to the Great Hall and started up the stairs, taking two at a time. He’d already said his good-byes to Elise, and he couldn’t force himself to take part in small talk at the moment. He did his best to ignore the sensation of Francesca’s dubious, worried stare at his back.

* * *

It was technically too cold to ride a motorcycle, but Ian dressed for it, and the winter day was sunny and