Page 26 of Gabriel: Duke of Bencalor

“Do you know how many times I thank God I’m not you?” Gabriel asked.

“Be­cause I’m a jack­ass?” Raul man­aged a crooked smile.

“Well, there’s that, of course.” Gabriel gave him a brief an­swer­ing smile. Then he grew se­ri­ous. “You’ve never had a choice about your re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. Even that night in Barcelona you made the hard de­ci­sion to let me go in your place.” Gabriel shook his head. “I couldn’t have done that.”

“Your de­ci­sion was just as hard.”

“No, mine was ob­vi­ous.” It had only be­come hard once he’d been ly­ing on the floor of the van, his wrists and an­kles bound to­gether with zip ties, his head cov­ered in a cloth bag that had smelled of sweat and his own fear. The ab­duc­tors had been silent, even when he’d tried to pro­voke them, so he’d had too much time to imag­ine what his fate would be.

Raul’s voice jerked him out of the dark mem­ory. “I’ve missed you, primo. You’re the brother of my heart.”

“As you are mine. Al­ways.” Which made their re­la­tion­ship com­pli­cated. Sib­ling dy­nam­ics al­ways were.

“Gabri, we can do bet­ter. We will do bet­ter.” He held out his hand in sup­pli­ca­tion, and Gabriel took it. For a long mo­ment, they stood still. The warmth of Raul’s palm seemed to ra­di­ate into Gabriel’s chest, loos­en­ing a tight­ness there.

Raul re­leased his grip with a sud­den smile. “Be­sides, I need some­one to tell me I’m a jerk. The older I get, the fewer peo­ple are will­ing to do that.”

“Now there’s a job I’m happy to vol­un­teer for.” Gabriel slung his arm around Raul’s shoul­ders. “Let’s ride down to that crap bar in Jaca and get drunk be­fore we go back to the palace. Since we’re on horse­back, we can’t get ar­rested for drink­ing and driv­ing.”

Raul laughed. “Ge­nial. That will piss my fa­ther off even more.”

Chap­ter 9

“Uncle Pete?” Quinn stopped dead on the side­walk and stared at the man loung­ing on the steps lead­ing up to her town­house. If the acrid smoke from his cigar hadn’t made her want to sneeze, she would have thought he was a mi­rage. “How did you get…? What are you do­ing…? Is my fa­ther with you?” She glanced around as anger and dis­be­lief roiled in her stom­ach.

“Quin­nie, I can’t be­lieve you’d think such a thing. Bren­dan’s a man of his word. He said he wouldn’t come here, and he hasn’t.” His voice lilted with that dis­arm­ing Irish ac­cent.

Within her fa­ther’s self-de­fined pa­ram­e­ters, she sup­posed he was a man of his word. “Did he send you?”

Pete Glee­son pushed up from the steps to his sub­stan­tial height and laid a meaty hand over his heart. “I’ve come en­tirely on me own to see how my fa­vorite niece is far­ing out in the mid­dle of the At­lantic Ocean.”

She wasn’t his niece, and she wasn’t sure he was re­ally Irish, but he’d been one of the few kind and semi-sta­ble pres­ences in her child­hood, tak­ing care of her when her fa­ther had had to “go away for a while”—Bren­dan’s eu­phemism for serv­ing a prison sen­tence. She loved Pete and tried to over­look his ut­ter lack of moral prin­ci­ples.

“Aren’t you go­ing to give your un­cle a wel­come hug?” He held out his arms, and she no­ticed that he’d gained some weight around his mid­dle.

She crossed the dis­tance be­tween them and was en­veloped in his still-pow­er­ful grasp, the smell of the cigar per­me­at­ing his tweed jacket and even his gray-and-red beard. “How on earth did you get here?” she asked into his chest.

He held her away from him and smiled. “On an air­plane. How else?”

“You know what I mean. It’s not ex­actly on the way to any­where.”

“I used my fre­quent-flier miles.” He winked, and she won­dered how he’d scammed them out of some­one.

She shrugged men­tally be­fore she turned to walk up the steps to her front door and laid her palm against the se­cu­rity panel.

“Very fancy,” her un­cle said from right be­hind her.

“My boss is a se­cu­rity ex­pert.” She pushed open the bright blue door and stepped into her foyer, plunk­ing her bag on the carved wooden side ta­ble.

“You’ve done very well for your­self,” Pete said, tak­ing in the spa­cious en­try­way with its rough stucco walls and azure blue tiled floor. “I’m proud of you, dar­lin’.”

“Do you still pre­fer rye to Irish?” Quinn led him to the kitchen at the back of the house.

“Aye, that I do.” He whis­tled as he sur­veyed the col­or­ful gar­den out­side the French doors. “You didn’t plant this.”

“No, and I don’t main­tain it ei­ther. I have a gar­dener.” She loved say­ing that. Tak­ing down a rocks glass, she poured a gen­er­ous serv­ing of rye whiskey and handed it to her un­cle.

He glanced at the bot­tle’s la­bel and nod­ded his ap­proval be­fore he took a swal­low. “Ahh, I was a wee bit parched, truth be told.”

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