Sebastian smiled as she rubbed the soap around his side and over his chest. He himself wasn’t so sure. “According to his mother, Varden was at home until that evening,” he reminded her.
“Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?” Kat pushed to her feet and took a step back as he stood up, water streaming down his torso.
He stepped from the bath, one hand reaching for the thick cotton towel Kat had set on a nearby chair. “I’m obviously missing something. Something I should be seeing.”
She came to help him shrug into the silk dressing gown she kept for him. “If it’s there, you’ll see it,” she said simply.
He turned toward her. In the soft light of the kitchen fire, she looked so peaceful, so sure of his abilities, that for a moment, he felt humbled. He reached to comb the loose tangle of her heavy dark hair away from her face. “Sometimes I find myself wondering, what’s the point? Even if I do find who killed her—and why—it won’t change anything. She’ll still be dead.”
“I think she would want to know that the man who killed her and her child didn’t get away with it.”
“Is that what this is all about? Revenge?”
She pressed her cheek against his chest, her arms warm around his waist. “No. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of avenging her death. It’s also about protecting the memory of who she was by not letting people distort the truth to protect themselves. And about making sure that whoever did this won’t have a chance to do it again.”
He took her face between his hands, felt the pulse in her neck beat against his palm. She seemed so fragile beneath his touch, so vulnerable that for a moment his heart caught with fear and he knew the urge to sweep her into his arms and hold her close—hold her
“Marry me, Kat,” he said suddenly. “There isn’t a reason you can come up with for refusing me that doesn’t sound weak and absurd when you think about how quickly death could take either of us.”
Her lips parted, her intense blue eyes widening with pain as she looked into his face and shook her head. “We can’t live our lives as if we were to die tomorrow.”
“Perhaps we should.”
“And spend a lifetime in regret?”
“I wouldn’t regret it.”
A smile touched her lips, then quickly faded. “You think that now.”
He touched his forehead to hers and said again, “I wouldn’t regret it.”
Waking early the next morning, Kat lay for a moment with her eyes closed and listened to the gentle rhythm of Devlin’s breathing beside her. A smile touched her lips. He had stayed the night.
Pushing herself up on her elbow, she let her gaze drift over him. She knew every line and sinew of his body, the rare brilliance of his mind and the even rarer nobility of his soul. And she knew, too, what it would eventually do to him if she followed the aching longings of her heart and married him.
The smile faded. She had loved him since she was sixteen, when she was an unknown chorus girl and he a wild young buck not long down from Oxford. He’d asked her to marry him then, too. And because she’d been young and so desperately hungry to keep him in her life forever, she’d said yes. It was only later—after his father and her own conscience had made her realize what such a marriage would mean for him—that she’d sent Devlin away. What she’d seen in his eyes that night—the agonized disbelief of betrayal—had cut her heart in two and ripped out her soul.
She could remember wandering the fog-shrouded streets of the City, tears hot on her cheeks, heartsick with all the grief of youth and looking for death. But death hadn’t come, and those who’d told her that time lessens pain had in part been right. Because in time she’d found a reason to live and a cause to fight for. That was part of the problem now. But only part.
She told herself that the choices she’d made these last few years didn’t make any difference, that she would still have the strength to resist the treacherous weakness of her heart. It was a wonder to her that despite all Devlin had seen and done in the last seven years, in this way, at least, he hadn’t changed. He still believed he could count the world well lost for love. She knew better.
She knew what it would do to him, to find himself cut off from those of his own class, an object of contempt and scorn, pity and ridicule. Marriage to her would be a social solecism for which neither his father nor his sister, Amanda, would ever forgive him. She didn’t suppose Devlin would suffer overly much from an estrangement from his only surviving sibling. But the ties binding the Earl and his heir ran strong and deep.
She knew that. And still she was tempted.
That’s when she reminded herself that you can’t build a marriage on lies, and that while Devlin might know the sordid truth of her childhood years on the streets, he didn’t know about the other years, the years after she’d sent him away from her. The years she’d spent seducing important men and passing the secrets they spilled to the French.
In her weaker moments, a treacherous voice whispered that he need never know about those years. She’d had no dealings with the French since Pierrepont’s disappearance from London four months ago. And while she’d been told a new spymaster would contact her, the message she’d been dreading—a two-toned bouquet of flowers accompanied only by a biblical quotation—had never come. Besides, her allegiance had never been to France but to Ireland, to the tragic land of her youth and the scene of her mother’s death.
Yet in her heart of hearts, she knew that was mere quibbling. If Devlin knew the truth, if he knew she had aided the enemy he spent six long years fighting, he would turn away from her in disgust…or condemn her to the ignoble death of a spy.
She realized his eyes were open, watching her. He had the most extraordinary eyes, the color of amber, with an almost inhuman ability to see not only great distances, but also in the dark. His hearing was abnormally acute, as well. She liked to tease him, to tell him he was part wolf. Yet she knew that his preternatural abilities unsettled
