“B
ut you are injured, Devlin, and supposed to be resting. I’m not going to lift my skirt for you!”
With the laudanum racing through his system, making his head buzz, Devlin laughed at Grace’s concern and indignation. She stepped back from his bedside, to where he couldn’t reach her without bringing on severe pain, and wagged her finger.
“Sweetheart, I’m going to pass out soon from the laudanum, but first I want to put my tongue to use. I’m hungering for you.” He lusted for her in a way that was madness. Was it because he could have been shot and killed? Facing death normally aroused him, but he’d never taken a woman while wounded.
His earlier worries—that he had no right to be trying to seduce her, not when he had to let her go—could not conquer his need now. His blood was on fire; his brain flooded with desire to the point of madness.
Grace frowned. “Are you certain that Mr. Kennedy is a good doctor, that he knows what he is doing?”
“He’s patched me up dozens of times. I trust him and pay him well. Now come here and don’t make me get out of bed.”
Her words still echoed in his head. The lovely, soft, beautiful tone of them was like a song.
All I want is to keep you safe.
No woman had ever said such words to him. No one ever had.
Grace pushed aside his green velvet bed hangings and returned to his side. Her knuckles gently brushed his bare shoulder. She slipped her hand around to caress him with her palm.
He kissed her fingertips, tasting the slight rose flavor of soap—given his house was filled with women, it had been simple to find soap for Grace. Beneath the bandage his side ached, but laudanum dulled the pain. His only thought had been indulging in sensual pleasure, but then he saw the shadowed worry in her eyes. “What’s wrong, love?”
“Lord Wesley tried to kill you and he will escape without punishment, won’t he? It’s madness, utter madness, that he should not pay for that.”
“I lodged a dagger in his arm, love. If I do not have to pay for that, I’ll be content.” He flashed a grin, hoping it would prompt her to smile.
“Do you think he will come after you again? Or bring the magistrate on to you?”
Devlin rubbed his jaw, considering. He was getting tired, and he had something he sorely wanted to do before he drifted into sleep. “Wesley won’t, love.” He fought a yawn.
She chewed her lip, the gesture so innocent and sweet. “I heard what you said to Lord Wesley—”
“Don’t bother using his title with me, sweetheart.”
“What you said about being a legend whereas he is not. Is that why you became a pirate? Is that why you rob carriages? To be a mythical man that people serenade in stories?”
The drug dragged at him, pulling him down into sleep, but Devlin fought to focus and give an answer. Grace deserved an answer. “I became a pirate because I got drunk one night, extremely drunk, and woke up in the hold of a ship.”
“You were pressed?”
“No, that’s the navy, love, and I was swift enough, even piss drunk, to avoid them. But I owed Captain Jack Hawk for the large quantity of fine French brandy that I’d quaffed.”
“He blackmailed you into becoming a pirate?”
“No, I was more than willing—I wanted to escape to the sea. The
Black Mistress
had a reputation for speed and its captain had one for being more than just a ruthless thief. Hawk plundered ships for the pleasure of it, for the sport, and I learned just how powerful it is to do what you love.”
To his surprise, she nodded and her eyes were frank with understanding. “You discovered where you belonged.” She sighed. “Everyone I know has done that. My father always knew he intended to pursue his art and that nothing would stand in his way. But now he has realized that he wishes to pursue my mother, so my mother is now pursuing freedom in Italy with him. My sisters had talents, and they have the freedom to pursue them. But I do not know where I belong, Devlin.”
“Sometimes it’s more than just finding a place to belong, Grace. It is having the courage to carve your own path. I thought that seducing well-bred ladies would make me a happy man, but it was like jabbing poison-tipped arrows into my heart. I was fighting for what I could not have.”
“And you complained to me about caring about my grandmother’s opinion.”
“I was speaking from experience. I let the quality hurt me. It took a long time to learn that the pirate Captain Hawk had more nobility in his little finger than a dozen men like Wesley possessed. I don’t want you to be the way I was once. I don’t want you to do what my mother did.”
“Have an affair with a noble.”
He’d never spoken of his mother with anyone. But he had to, to make Grace understand. “My mother took every blasted insult my father used to hurt her and swallowed it up. And do you want to know why she did it? Why she let him abuse her until she was paralyzed with pain?”
“W-why?”
“Because he was bloody quality. Sweetheart, noble blood runs in my veins, but if I’m a moral man, it’s because of my mother’s damned blood.”
With one arm he jerked her to him, and rolled onto his good shoulder. “Now let me eat your sweet pussy, my love.”
He tugged up her heavy and awkward skirts, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he bared her skin and saw she wore no drawers. He let her skirts fall, fashioning a tent around him and her quim. Her sweet mound, shielded by soft, golden curls—how it enticed him. He loved to breathe in her scent, loved knowing that she was wet, glistening, and juicy for him. Traveling to the south seas had taught him that a woman’s cunny was as delicious as succulent, ripe fruit and that a lucky man was the one who indulged himself in the pleasures of licking his lady’s quim often.
But his body ached as he pressed his mouth to her moist pussy and searched for her clit to suckle. He had to roll onto his back, pulling Grace with him.
Unbalanced, she swung out her leg and, to his relief, her knee hit the mattress instead of his chest. He clamped his hands to her naked arse and held her to his mouth while he suckled, savored, and took his fill of her earthy, salty taste.
“Devlin—oh! You must stop! I want to ask you a question.”
He must have been doing something wrong—it must have been the laudanum dulling his skills, for why else would Grace have asked him to stop eating her pussy?
She pulled back and he wasn’t strong enough, with the drug rushing through his veins, to keep her pinned to his mouth.
“Oh God, Grace,” he muttered. “I was enjoying that.”
“I have to know this, Devlin. Lady Prudence told me that you murdered the gentleman that she loved. Is this true? You’ve told me you are noble, and I believe it—I know that you are. But why, then, would you kill a man?”
“It was a duel—”
“Prudence claims it was murder.”
“Lady Prudence believes what she wishes to, because she was in love. For a start, her suitor was no gentleman—he was the youngest of four children born to the Duke of Kingsmere. He was a shiftless lout with a charming manner and a penchant for young women. Very young women. Girls, wide-eyed, innocent girls and, for all accounts, the more frightened they were, the better. This was in the summer of 1817, and Prudence was a mere seventeen. I had returned to England, and had been invited back to the house by my father since he had magnanimously decided to acknowledge the infamous pirate Captain Sharpe as his own son. I had played in that house as a child, while my mother was still his lover. He even paid for me to go to school…up until their affair soured. Lady Prudence and Lord Wesley were furious to have me return. They hated me, as could be expected, but I rather liked Prudence. She was quite a bit like me—”
Grace gaped with a mystified expression. “Prudence is like you?”
“Rebellious to the point of being stupid. She’d fallen for Kingsmere’s boy, and he was leading her on a merry dance, trying to get her into his bed so he could marry her. But then, one night, Prudence was hurrying home from an assignation and she ran into me on the path.”
The night flooded back to him: Prudence’s stark horror as she saw him, the desperate way she had turned her face.
He’d grasped her arm as she tried to run by him, knowing from experience what she wanted to hide. Bruises bloomed on her pretty face at her right eye and her cheek, sickening splotches of blue and purple and yellowish-green. Blood had dribbled from a cut in her lip and made dry streaks on her pale skin.
His gut had roiled.
His mother.
He had found her lying limply on the bed, her expensive lace-trimmed shift in tatters around her. He’d been fourteen, with stolen ale racing through his blood. She was dead; he had been certain she was dead.
He’d touched her arm and the chilled flesh made him jerk away and toss the ale-soaked contents of his gut onto the bedroom floor.
Bruises had covered his mother’s body. He’d never seen a person bear so many marks of violence. Some, at her slightly rounded stomach, were the shape of a boot.
“Someone killed your mother?” Horror laced Grace’s words.
He was slipping into the power of the laudanum now, too weakened by emotion to fight the blissful peace anymore. “Yes,” he croaked.
“Did you—did you know who?”
“I found him eventually. He was the first nob I robbed on the Great North Road. I intended to shoot him that night, playing the highwayman to give me the excuse to blow his head off—” He broke off. “Hell, sorry, sweeting,” he muttered.
“It is fine, Devlin. Did you shoot him? He deserved it. Was he like Lord Wesley then, well born, and thinking himself immune to justice?”
“I didn’t shoot him. In the end, I couldn’t take his life in cold blood.” After years of living with the pain and guilt over not being able to save his mother, he had not been able to pull the trigger. After all those days of believing he couldn’t stand to see another sunrise, he’d found he could not kill the man who had put him in hell.
“What happened?” Grace urged.
“He found me, bent on vengeance. It had consumed him for months, the need to destroy me for humiliating him. He ambushed me as I left a tavern, accompanied by a half-dozen hired men armed with bats. I saw then the beast who had killed my mother. She must have
humiliated
him in some way; perhaps she ended their affair because she feared him, and he killed her.”
“But how did you escape?”
“Simple, love. I offered his men more money to go into the tavern and drink. In his rage, he picked up one of the bats and rushed at me. To defend myself, I had no choice but to break his neck.”
Fog crept in around the edge of his vision and he could barely lift his lids. “Do you hate me, Grace? Do you think I’m a murderer?” His voice shook with vulnerability.
“You challenged Prudence’s suitor to a duel because you believe he would beat her, as this horrid man did to her mother. You did it to protect Prudence.”
“S-she wouldn’t listen. She thought, as my mother did with that damned viscount, that her lover’s rage and violence proved the depth of his love. She believed that if she devoted herself to him, if she pleased him, if she worked to make him happy every moment of his life, that he would love her and never hurt her. And I didn’t murder the young blackguard—he shot first, he cheated, and fortunately, his cowardly nerves sent his pistol ball into a tree trunk.”
Hell, he was fading and there was more he wanted to say, needed to say. “I told you I ended up on a ship because I was drunk, Grace, but I let myself get drunk because I thought I was in love with a titled woman, the Countess of Arran.”
Dimly, he saw Grace’s mouth flatten into a pained line.
“I wasn’t in love with her, angel. But I thought I was.” Haltingly, fighting exhaustion, he told her all of it. Of wanting to be worthy to be seen in public with the countess. Of her dismissive note ending their affair.
Grace let her hand rest against his face and he savored the feel of her skin, the support he took from her touch.
“I thought I loved her with all my heart, and it drove me mad that she made me feel like I was unworthy, that I was less of a man because of who I was. She turned my world on edge, twisted my heart in knots until I never knew a moment’s peace, until my heart and soul tormented me every waking moment.”
“And that was how you defined love?” Grace’s voice floated to him from somewhere above.
“Don’t look so shocked. You do that to me.” He licked his lips, tasting her creaminess on them, wishing he had the strength to bury himself between her thighs again. Then he turned his face and kissed her hand. “I know I never loved the countess and I know I love you, Grace. She made me believe I was less of a man. You make me hunger to strive to be more.”
“Miss, we’ve come to help you undress. Could we please come in?”
Grace paused. She had been fighting hopelessly to reach the ties of her corset and had sorely contemplated sneaking into Devlin’s bathing room and taking a straight razor to them. His snores floated in from the adjoining bedroom. He was completely knocked out by the laudanum.
He had also told her not to allow anyone into her room.
And, of course, she hadn’t even thought of having him undo her annoying foundation garments. He’d been far too tired and, just when she had thought of it, he’d said that remarkable thing.
You make me hunger to strive to be more.
Was it true? How could it be when he had told her that he couldn’t give up being a highwayman?
The edge of her corset, twisted by her struggles, jabbed into her breasts.
Ouch!
She couldn’t stay in this garment for the night.
What if the women at the door were naked, as so many of them ran about the house?
And how she wished she could be too.
Well, not be nude, but be without her corset.
Devlin’s world was a world without corsets, she saw. Whereas, the one she had longed to belong to, the world of her cold and condemning grandmother, was so tightly laced that no woman dare crack a smile or draw a breath.
“Miss?” The voice at the door repeated.
No pretense that she was anything other than unmarried.