alliance. She wanted to know what had possessed me to do something so plebian as to take part in a murder investigation.”
“You told her about the necklace?”
“Yes.” He held up the necklace so that the triskelion swung slowly on its chain, tracing a short arc through the darkness. “She was puzzled, but not surprised.”
Kat studied the shadowed lines and angles of his profile, but he had all his emotions locked away someplace where she couldn’t see them. “Perhaps the implications escaped her.”
One corner of his mouth lifted in a tight smile. “Oh, no. Amanda is nothing if not quick. She might have been puzzled that my mother would give up something she’d always held dear, but it never occurred to her to question what happened that day off the coast of Brighton.”
Kat drew in a deep breath. “What are you saying, Sebastian?”
He turned his head to look directly at her, and for one unguarded moment she saw it all—the bewildered mingling of anger and hurt, confusion and pain. “Amanda knows. She’s always known.” He let out a soft huff of laughter that held no humor. “That pleasure outing—the sinking of the yacht—it was all for show. My mother didn’t drown that summer. She simply left. She left my father and she left me. But she didn’t die.”
His hand closed over the necklace, his knuckles showing white in the first light of dawn. “She didn’t die.”
Amanda was seated at her breakfast table, the
The Countess of Hendon’s silver-and-bluestone necklace hit the newsprint beside her, the unexpected slap startling her enough that it was only with effort that she avoided flinching.
Holding herself composed, she lifted her gaze to Devlin’s. The blaze of emotion she saw there was so raw and powerful that her gaze veered away again before she could quite stop it.
“She’s still alive, isn’t she?” he said.
Amanda drew in a deep, steadying breath and defiantly stared into his terrible yellow eyes. “Yes.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since that summer.”
He nodded, as if she’d only confirmed what he’d already suspected. “And Hendon?”
“He knows, of course. He has known from the very beginning. He helped to arrange it.”
She saw a flicker of—what? Surprise? Pain?—in the depths of those strange, animalistic eyes. “And why wasn’t I told?”
Amanda gave him a wide, malicious smile. “I suggest you ask Hendon.”
IT WASN’T OFTEN Sebastian allowed his thoughts to drift back to that long-ago summer, the summer before he turned twelve. It had been hot, days of unrelenting blue sky and a sizzling golden sun that turned the crops to dust in the fields. Wells that had never failed in a hundred years or more ran dry.
The Countess of Hendon had spent most of that spring and summer at the family’s principal seat in Cornwall. His mother loved London, loved the excitement and mental stimulation of the political salons as much as the endless round of balls, breakfasts, and shopping expeditions that occupied most women. But Hendon considered London an unhealthy place for women and children, especially when the streets turned dry and dusty and the air hung close. His involvement in affairs of state might keep Hendon himself tied to Whitehall and St. James’s Palace, but that year he insisted that his wife retire to Cornwall, and that Sebastian and his brother Cecil join her there when they came down from Eton.
Sebastian tried to recall how Sophie had occupied herself that summer, but his memories were of tramping the fields and woods with Cecil and swimming in the forbidden cove below the cliffs. In his recollections, she was an atypically distant figure seen riding out each morning on her neat bay hack. He had one clear image of an afternoon’s tea served on the sun-splashed terrace, Sophie’s smile bright yet still somehow…distant. And then, in July, the family had gone to spend the month in Brighton.
Sophie adored Brighton, reveling in the concerts on the Steyne and the balls at the Castle and Ship. But that year, even Brighton was hot and dusty, and crowded with those anxious to escape from the stifling, unhealthy interior. Hendon grumbled that Brighton had grown as foul and noisome as London, and threatened to send the Countess and their sons back to Cornwall. The Countess alternately stormed and wept, begging to be allowed to stay.
And so they had stayed, until the morning in mid-July when Sebastian’s brother Cecil awoke flushed and feverish. By nightfall he had become delirious. The best doctors were called in all the way from London. They shook their heads and prescribed bloodletting and calomel, but Cecil’s fever continued to climb. Two days later he was dead, and Sebastian found himself the new Viscount Devlin, his father’s only surviving son and heir.
There followed tense weeks filled with loud voices and angry accusations. But whenever he was around Sebastian, Hendon kept a strange, tight silence. It was as if he couldn’t comprehend why Fate had taken his first- and second-born sons and left him only the youngest, the one least like their father.
For Sebastian, those days remained a painful blur. But he could remember quite clearly the sunny morning Sophie Hendon sailed away on what was supposed to have been a simple day’s outing with friends.
And never came back.
THE PAIN OF THAT SUMMER fueled Sebastian’s anger now as he took the steps to his father’s house on Grosvenor Square.
He found Hendon in the entrance hall, headed for the stairs. The Earl was dressed in breeches and top boots, his crop in one hand, and it was obvious he’d only just come in from his morning ride. “What is it?” he asked, his gaze on Sebastian’s face.
Sebastian crossed the hall to throw open the door to the library. “This is a conversation we need to have in private.”
