as easily as a man under one of those fine kid leather shoes.
How shockingly indiscreet it had been of the landlord to reveal her full identity in order to persuade him to give up the private parlor for which he had paid. If the man had only realized it, Gabriel would have been far more willing to relinquish it to a Miss Nobody-in-Particular than to the privileged daughter of a duke. It was what came of having spent the last thirteen of his thirty-two years in America, he supposed.
Lady Jessica Archer.
Sister of a duke.
Arrogant. Entitled. Unlikable, at least upon first encounter.
But . . .
But considered another way, she was perhaps perfect.
So perfect that he might marry her.
He chuckled aloud at the absurdity of the thought.
It felt strange, unfamiliar, to be back in England. Of course, he had been gone all his adult life—since he was nineteen, in fact. But he liked America and had had no intention until recently of leaving it. When he had arrived in Boston, using his mother’s maiden name of Thorne, he had had no more than the clothes on his back, one small bag, and only enough money to pay for room and board for a couple of weeks if he found somewhere cheap. He had called upon Cyrus Thorne, a widowed cousin of his mother, and the man had given him employment as a junior clerk in one of his warehouses and a dark little room in the cellar of his home in which to sleep. From those lowly beginnings Gabriel had proved his worth and risen to become his cousin’s right-hand man by the time he was twenty-five. He had also been moved upstairs to a spacious room of his own. Most important, Cyrus had officially adopted him as a son since his marriage had produced no children before his wife died. Gabriel’s name had been legally changed to Thorne, and he had become the official heir to everything Cyrus possessed.
It had been a dizzying rise in fortune, but Gabriel had given hard work and gratitude in return, and affection too. He had come to understand why Cyrus had been a great favorite of his mother and why her heart had been broken when he had decided to go to America to seek his fortune. Gabriel’s father had told him about that. His mother had died giving birth to his stillborn sister. And Cyrus had had fond memories of her too.
A little over a year after adopting Gabriel, Cyrus had died from a fall at the dockside during the loading of one of his ships. It was an accident that ought not to have been particularly serious but had in fact proved fatal.
Shockingly, Gabriel was a very wealthy man by the time he was twenty-six and had huge responsibilities for one so young. He owned a large home, a thriving import-export business, and what amounted to a small fleet of ships. He had several hundred employees. He was a somebody in Boston society and much sought after, particularly by matrons with daughters in search of successful young men of fortune and industrious habits.
He had enjoyed the attention. He had dallied with a few of those daughters, though never to the point at which he felt committed to offering for any of them. He had enjoyed his life in general. The work suited him and filled his days with challenge and activity. Boston was bustling with energy and optimism. Within a few years he had expanded the business, added another ship to his fleet, and made himself wealthier than his cousin had ever been. In addition, he had raised wages for all his workers and improved working conditions. He had given his employees, even the lowliest of them, benefits to cover doctors’ fees and lost wages when they were sick or had been hurt on the job.
He had been happy, though he had never thought to use that exact word at the time. He had been too busy living the life that hard work and sheer good fortune had brought him. Yet he would have given it all to have Cyrus back. It had taken him a long time to recover from the grief of losing him.
He might have forgotten about his life in England, or at least let it slide into distant memory, if it had not been for the letters that came two, sometimes three, times a year from Mary Beck. She was the only person to whom he had written after