The Devil in Her Bed (Devil You Know #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,74

satisfied.

She gazed down at him with direct and open affection that sent curls of ludicrous warmth to the coldest parts of him. “You look like him when you’re sleeping,” she noted shyly.

His mood darkened, the warmth immediately quelled by a cold stab of panic. “Like whom?”

“Declan. Who else?” Her hand moved to rest idly on his biceps before making a curious path of discovery up toward his shoulder. “Innocent and mischievous all at once, you were, with a healthy dose of melancholy. I remember always thinking I wanted to make you laugh, but I couldn’t because you didn’t know how.”

She waited for him to reply, and when he couldn’t think of anything to say to that, she remarked, “You were dreaming, I think. Just now. You were breathing so hard, I wanted to wake you.”

He ignored her casual observation, not wanting to discuss nightmares when he’d woken to a fantasy. “I never should have become Declan. I regret everything that came from my existence at Mont Claire.”

Her caress stalled, and she jerked her hand away as if he’d burned her. “Everything?”

“Everything but you.” He recaptured her hand and set it back where it was before, encouraging her to finish. No one ever stroked him, not in this way. Without lust or guile. Just … because she so obviously enjoyed the feel of his skin.

She resumed, but a troubled crease remained between her brows.

A foreign guilt lanced him, and he turned to face her, adopting her posture by propping his head on his knuckles. “You should have told me your secret.”

Her eyes grew round, and her fingers stilled once again. “Which secret?”

He wondered at this. How many were there?

He’d deal with this one first. “Had I known you were a virgin, I could have prepared you. I was such an animal—” Shame clogged his throat, cutting off his words.

To his utter astonishment, a smile lifted her wide mouth and he’d the sense she was relieved. “If I’d told you, you’d probably not have done it at all.”

He sighed, uncertain if he could claim the nobility she accused him of possessing. “Likely not,” he hedged.

Could he really have turned down what she offered?

He leaned over to kiss her bare shoulder. Only a fool would deny paradise once offered.

He opened his mouth to ask her how she’d fooled the entire ton into thinking her a wanton rakess when she beat him to the punch.

“Did you mean it? Were you truly unhappy at Mont Claire?” she asked.

They’d been the best years of his life, but he still regretted them. “Does that hurt you?”

She adopted a pensive expression, one that gave way to nostalgia as she looked into the past. “It’s only that, before the massacre, I have nothing but happy memories of the place. Of the festivals in the spring at the village. The playhouse with the comedies that the university students would stage for us. The scent of fresh bread beckoning me in the morning to wander to the kitchens to watch Hargrave pretend not to read the papers as he ironed them for Father…” Her eyes adopted a curious sheen and she cleared it away with a blink and a cough. “I always loved summers, romping in the maze and mucking out the fountain—”

“Hargrave ironing the paper?” he scoffed. “Since when did you ever get up before the crack of noon?” He gave a mirthless chuckle and chucked her chin, his thumb grazing at the indent there. “Pip and I mucked out the fountain. You only ever watched.”

Her lashes swept down over a guilty look, and he instantly regretted saying so. He charted the curve of her shoulder and drew his hand down the smoothness of her arm until he laced his fingers with hers. “I’d have not dirtied your hands for all the world.” He lifted her fingertips to his lips for a kiss, and she watched him do so as if it caused her physical pain.

“I only meant that it was hard to have known such happiness and to see it so utterly and completely destroyed.”

She nodded, though she didn’t seem quite mollified. “Are we certain everyone else died? It is quite possible someone else could have survived the massacre?”

He shook his head, remembering that he’d hoped the very same. “I got Pippa out, but they shot her in the leg and the poor thing couldn’t run. I stashed her in the tree and diverted them back through the forest when they shot me.” An ancient well of pain rose