Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,31

disappointment. He wanted Mercy with an ache he’d never known, but on an evening as momentous as this, he should be there for his brother.

“Do you want company?” he asked. “Let’s get a round, yeah?”

“Not tonight.” Gabriel fished his pipe out of his pocket and packed it with an expensive tobacco he was fond of. “I’m going to check a few things.”

That brought Raphael to attention. “What things?”

“Never you mind.”

Raphael rolled his eyes. There was no talking to him when he was like this. “Well, I’ll be off then.”

He pointed his shoes in the direction of Cresthaven Place.

“What are you about tonight?” Gabriel asked, as if it had only just occurred to him to do so.

“Never you mind.” Raphael threw the answer over his shoulder.

“Raphael Thierry Sauvageau.” His brother’s glare was an uncomfortable prickle along his spine, so he turned to face it.

“I’m going for a woman, if you must know, you insufferable nag.” They’d always japed and jibed and poked at each other. Gabriel knew he had women. That he was somewhat a lothario, but they never really discussed it.

It had always seemed insensitive to do so.

Tonight, it felt especially so.

He put out a hand. “Gabriel, I’m sorry. I—”

“Don’t be.” The words were released into the night like a puff of smoke over gravel.

Impatience warred with guilt in Raphael’s chest. “Why don’t you just put on an entire mask and pay some strumpet to at least suck your—”

“Go, Rafe.”

He put his hands up. Feeling both awful and relieved.

Were he making any other decision regarding his own future, he’d have insisted they abide.

Were his life expected to be any longer than a couple of nights... he’d have spent it all gladly with his brother.

But Gabriel had been right about one thing. The men of the underworld—and the officers of the law—would never believe them truly dead without a body to identify.

And that body would be his.

Gabriel had never lived a life before, and Raphael had devoured whatever he could from his own existence.

Now, he’d the opportunity to give his brother a second chance.

But first...Raphael would taste a bit of heaven before hell claimed his restless soul.

Mercy Goode would be the name on his lips. Nay, the taste lingering on his tongue when he met his death at the Midwinter Masquerade.

Chapter 9

It wasn’t a noise that woke Mercy.

But her body.

It came alive, rousing her from restless, wicked dreams. Banishing them from memory the moment her eyes flew open.

And found Raphael Sauvageau silhouetted against her window.

The wispy white drapes stirred around him, reaching as if disturbed by a shade, or by the very potency of his atmosphere as he stood.

Watching her.

The light of the lone lamp she’d left burning painted shadows on his face, casting one single expression in both stark and savage relief.

Hunger.

She remained burrowed to the neck beneath her plush blue blankets, shivering not only with cold, but with vulnerability.

One look from him threatened to strip her bare. Expose her in ways she’d not prepared for.

He’d come for his pound of flesh.

He’d come to claim her.

Mercy cast about for something erudite and worldly to say, some greeting that a temptress, a lover, would tantalize him with.

“Erm—hullo.”

Well...Shelley she was not.

“I was going to let you sleep.” His voice rumbled into the air of her room with a foreign vibration, splashing against her nerves with all the threat of thunder in the great distance.

A man had never entered this room, certainly not at night.

“I wasn’t sleeping.” She yawned against the back of her knuckles.

“Oh?” He drifted inside, shutting the window behind him.

Locking them in together.

“Do you often snore whilst awake?”

“I don’t snore,” she protested.

A smile toyed with the corner of his mouth, though he didn’t argue the point. “Forgive me for being tardy. I had urgent business with my brother to attend, and it took longer than I hoped. An eternity, in fact. When I knew you were here. Waiting.”

“You weren’t tardy, as I didn’t know when to expect you.” She would have shrugged if she were not curled on her side, swaddled in a pile of blankets. “If I’m honest, I expected a messenger at first. I thought it would be tidier to meet somewhere other than Cresthaven, where we might be discovered.”

He conducted a quick study of her room, the rich blue accents contrasting with clean white walls gentled by gilded paintings and tapestries. “Here is as safe as any place. Your parents are not in residence and your sister is in the next room fast asleep.”

Should she be disconcerted