realized it was blood.
Her vision swirled. “Oh, God. Is he dead?”
“Extremely.”
Sebastien came striding across the cabin, pistols still in his hands, and the next thing she knew, she was caught in his fierce embrace. He pulled her tight against his chest and angled his body to obscure her view of Vasili’s corpse.
“Don’t look,” he ordered harshly.
His words vibrated against her, and Anya melted into the welcome comfort of his arms. Eyes closed, she clutched the front of his shirt in her fists and pressed her nose into his chest, sucking the scent of him into her lungs on a shuddering intake of breath. Her chin throbbed where Vasili had hit her, but she concentrated on Seb’s fingers threading through her hair and the hard press of his lips on the top of her head. A tremor ran through his muscles, like that of a racehorse after a fast run.
She shuddered too. “I stabbed him with a map pin.”
“Good girl.”
“It’s not true. We weren’t married.”
With a sudden gasp, she recalled Dmitri. She pulled out of Seb’s arms and surged toward the corner where he’d fallen, expecting to find him dead on the floor. But with a low groan, he pushed himself to his feet. Anya hurled herself into his arms.
“Anya!” Dmitri hugged her back as tightly as a bear.
Words came pouring out of her mouth in gasping, halting jerks as she tried to understand the incomprehensible. “It is you! You’re not dead? How is this possible? Oh, thank God, you’re here! You’re here.”
Dmitri buried his face against her shoulder then pulled back, smoothing her hair away from her damp face with shaking hands. He gazed at her, his eyes roving over her features as if greedy for the sight of her, then he pressed a hard kiss to her forehead.
“I always knew I’d find you! They said you were dead, in Paris, but I knew you were too stubborn for that.” His voice was a hoarse croak. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you? Months and months! Why didn’t you come back to St. Petersburg? Where have you been all this time?”
Both of them were talking at once, each one staring at the other as if afraid they might disappear again, each one cataloguing the changes a year of separation had wrought.
Anya felt light-headed, unreal, as if she were in some fantastical dream from which she never wanted to wake. She could scarcely draw a breath around the ball of incredulous joy welling in her chest. “What happened to you? I thought you’d been killed at Waterloo.”
He gave a watery laugh. “Almost. Bonaparte gave it a bloody good try. As did Petrov.”
He lifted his left arm so the wide sleeve of the priest’s robes slid down to his elbow and casually inspected his wrist. A bloom of red stained his shirtsleeve. Anya’s heart almost stopped.
“You’re bleeding! He hit you!”
Dmitri shrugged and squeezed her with his free arm. “He grazed me when he fired wide, that’s all. It would have been my head if you hadn’t distracted him, clever girl.”
Anya felt faint at how easily her impulsive move could have backfired, but a noise from behind them interrupted her self-recrimination. Elizaveta stood in the doorway, her eyes brimming with tears and her smile wide, despite her split lip. Wolff, Harland, and Wylde all wore identical expressions of fascinated curiosity.
Well, Anya amended silently, Harland and Wylde looked curious. Wolff looked like he wanted to tear Dmitri limb from limb. He glared at her brother’s arm, which was still around her waist, and lifted his brows in haughty inquiry.
“And who on God’s green earth are you, sir?”
Chapter 37.
It took everything Seb had not to stride across the cabin, pry Anya from the handsome stranger’s arms, and carry her off into the night. He wanted to take her back to the Tricorn, strip her naked, and inspect every inch of her to convince himself that she’d come to no serious harm.
God, the sight of Petrov’s gun to her head had almost stopped his heart. And when the fake priest—whoever he was—had stepped between himself and Petrov, blocking any chance of a clear shot, he’d almost pulled the trigger anyway and risked going through some nonvital part of the man on the off chance the bullet would have enough velocity to hit Petrov too.
If the Russian hadn’t been holding Anya so closely, he would have done it. Thank God she’d created a diversion and given him a clean shot straight to Petrov’s heart.
Anya