The Devil in Her Bed (Devil You Know #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,106
the hand and pulled me inside. Fed me your tea, and then dragged me to the kitchens, where you commanded your parents to feed me and take me in. You bullied a footman into giving me his son’s trousers and then you bullied me into bed.”
She’d rather forgotten that. Not the first sight of him, but everything after.
His other hand joined the first, cupping her face as if it were a delicate thing. A treasure.
“When I look back now, you’re all I can remember,” he said. “That girl in the fireplace, clinging to me. She ran by my side. She took a bullet in the leg, meant for me. She always tried to save me, even if it was just from the dark. She set aside an extra peppermint from her father’s pockets, or an extra hour of work by laboring at my side, knowing I despised the fountain. That the water made me miserable.
“She spent her entire life trying to avenge my memory, and theirs.” He gestured to the ruins around them. “And … when I thought I’d found my damsel again, she tried to save me from her loss a second time.”
Her breath hitched as her heart began beating once again.
“I never stopped to consider how much a secret like that must have weighed year after year. How oppressive and frightening it would be.”
The weight of it pressed on her now, pressed her throat shut against any reply.
His eyes, full of his heart, glimmered down at her. “That is love … I know that now.”
Did he? Was it possible that he finally saw, that he understood the depth of her devotion? She curled her fingers around his wrists, keeping them there. Wanting to reply but not being able to. Not yet.
He seemed to understand. “It took me too long to do this, I know. I … I was humiliated by my father and he used you to do it. I couldn’t come to terms with that until he died, and then after … I couldn’t imagine that you’d want to give me another chance. I’ve been setting my house in order, and finishing what we started. And the entire time, I wanted you there with me. I realized you were right, that you have been by my side from the very beginning, and when it was my turn, I failed you.”
She shook her head, wanting to say that she wasn’t angry. That she was so happy he’d come to this conclusion, but it had taken so long. Almost too long. He’d almost missed her.
“And then Ramsay told me you were leaving…”
She nodded. How did she tell him? How did she say that she couldn’t abide in the same city, the same country with him and not be at his side?
His eyes became pools of sentiment, his face softening. “I haven’t stopped thinking of that girl, the one who clung to me in the fireplace … I … have a proposition for her. For Pippa, for Francesca, for whoever she wants to call herself. I’ll be whoever she wants me to be. Whoever she fell in love with. Because it is impossible to be worthy of such a woman, but I can try. All I know is that if I am a spy, a scoundrel, or an earl, none of it matters. I am no one if I am not hers. And I have nothing, if she is not mine.”
Francesca surged forward and collapsed into his arms, not sobbing this time, but simply breathing. Taking in deep lungsful of his wonderful scent, and releasing months of pent-up misery.
He petted her hair with one hand, smoothing his other down her back. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I was a stupid, angry, blind fool—”
Still unable to say all the words that leapt to her lips, Francesca she did what she always did in these desperate situations. She drove her mouth against his.
The kiss opened her heart and her soul, released pain and fear and sadness and torment like a flock of dark and awful birds to dissipate to the sky. He tasted good, like forgiveness and pleasure and soft things neither of them had allowed themselves.
Like home.
Finally, after they did their level best to devour each other, she pulled back, finding her words.
“I … I did hate keeping anything from you,” she said, shaping her hand to his jaw. “You are the only person alive who can shame me. Somehow my love for you gave you that power, and I’ll