Kathryn Smith (33 page)

His fingers went to the back of her skull, but instead of pushing down, he plucked pins from her hair. He was far from gentle, yet she didn’t stop what she was doing. She simply raised her own hands to the thick coil of hair and removed the pins herself. She allowed him to comb the silky mass with his fingers, spreading it around them, feeling it brush against his hips as it cascaded around them. He held it back with one hand so he could continue to watch her love him with her mouth.

“I’m going to come,” he muttered hoarsely when the pressure grew to that familiar level. He wanted to give her plenty of warning.

She lifted her head; his cock quivered at the loss of the hot, wet suction of her mouth. He thought she was going to climb on top of him, take him between her legs, but she didn’t. She merely smiled—a seductive, loving smile—and lowered her mouth to his trembling erection once more.

Oh God. She was going to finish him with her mouth. She wasn’t going to take the pleasure he offered her, not right now. She was going to be selfless, thinking only of his gratification rather than her own. She was truly showing him that
she loved him, by giving him something no other woman had ever given him—pleasure without the expectation of anything in return.

Her lips and tongue continued to stroke him, bringing him closer and closer to the edge until he cried out in release, waves of emotion washing over him.

It was, without a doubt, one of the most incredible sexual experiences he’d ever had. He lay there, unable to move as she came up to curl her body against his.

“Why?” he asked when he regained the ability to talk.

She didn’t make him elaborate. “Because I wanted to.”

Good enough.

“Has any other woman done that for you?”

Not for free, no. He almost smiled at the uncertainty in her voice. Sometimes it was easy to forget that she needed reassurance too. She seemed so strong at times, it was hard to remember that she was just as vulnerable inside as everyone else. “Only you.”

There was pleasure in her expression. “Good.”

“Thank you.” Not for the climax, but for the unselfishness of the act.

Her eyes grew misty. She understood. There was a quiver to her chin as she spoke, “I love you.”

Devlin nodded. “I know.”

“Does it still frighten you?”

“The only thing that scares me is the thought of losing you.”

“You never will,” she promised, and he wanted to believe her, but he couldn’t change completely all at once. He would simply be content to have her now and try not to think about the future.

He didn’t want to think about the past either. So many things had changed since he first met Blythe. So many things he thought of as truth had been proven false, and lies believed too long were hard to forget. It had been hard to believe old Sam’s casual remarks about his parents loving him,
worrying about him, being proud of him, but earlier that morning Brahm had assured him it was all true.

His oldest brother had been astounded to learn that Devlin had felt unwanted. Perhaps the circumstances surrounding his conception had been unfortunate, but he had been as loved as any child of their parents’ ever could be. Neither the viscount nor his viscountess was an affectionate person, enjoying parties and social engagements more than time with their sons, but they loved each of the boys in their own way.

Brahm had even shown him their father’s box of newspaper clippings and other keepsakes, which included a miniature of North’s mother as well as a curl from each of his sons’ heads cut when they were but children. They’d spent an hour going through it before starting their fencing match.

It was impossible for Devlin to dissect how he felt having the truth put before him in such an undeniable fashion. Everything was happening so quickly—too quickly to think about. All he could do was sit back and let it happen.

There was one thing, however, that he couldn’t allow to continue, and that was his distrust of Carny. This feeling of dread where his friend was concerned had to stop. It was getting to the point that every time Blythe told him she’d seen Carny, he waited for her to announce that Carny had made advances toward her. It was ridiculous and grounded in nothing more concrete than his own jealousy.

Except that now it seemed Teresa feared the worst as well. She believed Carny to be unfaithful. How long would it be before she suspected Blythe was the other woman? He didn’t doubt Blythe’s fidelity to him, not one bit. She loved him and she would never do anything intentionally to hurt him, but Carny had been her first love, and when held up against that, Devlin couldn’t help but feel lacking. That cowardly part of him, that fearful part that he had been on such close terms with lately, didn’t see how he could possibly compete.

He was going to have to speak to Carny; that was all there was to it. For God’s sake, he’d held the man’s life in his hands at one time; he should be able to speak to him about such a delicate manner. He didn’t want Blythe to come between them—no more than she already had—but he’d be damned if he’d let Carny come between him and Blythe.

He’d kill again before he let that happen.

Blythe pulled a blanket over them, curling herself into his side as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. The combination of the morning’s exercise, the hot bath, and Blythe’s lovemaking made his head heavy with pleasant fatigue, despite the direction his thoughts were taking.

“I could stay like this forever,” she said sleepily.

Devlin yawned. “Mm hmm.” He was already drifting off.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise then, that the dream came once he’d drifted off into slumber, but the dream was always a shock when it came lately, because it seemed to change every time, and this time was no different.

This time when he killed the soldier there was no shock or horror at what he had done. This time there was a certain satisfaction to feeling the hot stickiness of blood flowing over his hand, especially as he yanked the blade upward. The knife digging at his own hip only spurred his blood lust onward. He was going to live. He was going to survive. He was going to
win.

What was so shocking about this version of the dream was that he felt nothing for the man dying before him. There was no guilt, no remorse, only the slackening of muscle as the soldier’s life slowly drained away.

What else was shocking was the fact that unlike every other time the dream came, Devlin did not awake with a start, or a cry of denial. His body didn’t even give a jerk of awareness. He simply opened his eyes to find that afternoon had crept up on them and that his wife was still asleep in his arms.

But the most shocking realization was the identity of the
man in his dream. It hadn’t been the French soldier he’d killed without feeling. It had been Carny.

And that realization didn’t surprise him at all.

They took the carriage to Wynter Lane as it was raining and spent the drive laughing as Devlin entertained her with stories about himself and his brothers and the mischief they got into as children. It was amazing the change that had come over him recently. It would take a while before he came to terms with everything—a lifetime of negative thinking couldn’t be dispelled in a few days—but she was confident that her husband would soon learn to accept the truth about himself and see things as those around him did.

He still refused to consider the knighthood, but admitted he was considering going into medicine as she had suggested. It would be something satisfying to keep him busy when they returned to Devon, and she knew he saw it as a way of atoning for all the violence he’d been a part of. If it made life easier for him to live, she supported it entirely.

They entered Varya’s blue and white sitting room only to find her brother and sister-in-law weren’t alone. They had Teresa with them. A very visibly distraught Teresa, who was sobbing in Varya’s embrace on the sofa.

Blythe met Miles’s worried stare with one of her own. “What has happened?”

“Carny did not return home last night,” her brother answered, rising to his feet. “No one seems to know where he is. Has either of you seen him?”

Both Blythe and Devlin shook their heads, but while Devlin gravitated to Miles for more information, Blythe headed straight for her sister-in-law and friend.

She knelt by Teresa’s feet, but the smaller woman was crying too hard to talk. “When was the last time she saw him?” she asked Varya.

“Yesterday morning.”

Yesterday morning, but that was when Teresa came to visit Blythe. So then she hadn’t been able to tell Carny how she felt, or about their child. And if Carny truly felt his marriage was over as he indicated to Blythe, he could have gone just about anywhere in the last twenty-four hours.

Varya’s expression was plaintive as she laid a comforting hand on Teresa’s shoulder. “He told her he had business to take care of, so she didn’t think anything of his absence until late into the evening.”

“Did he take any clothing with him?”

Teresa shook her head, obviously trying to regain control of herself. She pressed a crumpled handkerchief to her face. “Not that I know of, unless he came back for some while I was gone.”

Blythe placed a hand on her friend’s knee. “Teresa, did you notice anything out of the ordinary about the way Carny was acting? Did he do or say anything unusual?”

Another shake of her head, her ebony curls bouncing around her cheeks. “Nothing. Oh Blythe, I just know he is with another woman!” Her sobbing began anew.

Varya and Blythe exchanged troubled glances.

“He is not with another woman,” Blythe insisted. Carny would never betray the woman he loved, but if he thought she didn’t return that love, she believed him capable of great stupidity in the name of self-pity.

Standing, Blythe crossed the cream and robin’s-egg blue carpet to where Devlin and Miles stood.

“We have to find him,” she told them. “Teresa is convinced he’s with a mistress.”

Both men raised their brows in mirror expressions of astonishment.

“Did he take anything with him?” Devlin asked.

Blythe sighed. “No, but if he does indeed have a mistress he might already have belongings there.”

Miles ran a hand through his russet hair, mussing it even
more. “I refuse to entertain such an outrageous notion. Carny would never take a bit of muslin.”

“Regardless, he spent the night somewhere,” Blythe reminded him. “I will stay here with Varya and Teresa for a bit longer, then I will return to the house and ask Piotr if Carny’s been there.”

Devlin nodded. “I’ll go over to Carny’s and see if he’s returned home.”

“I will come with you,” Miles said in a tone that brooked no refusal. “I cannot stand to stay here and be useless another moment. If he hasn’t been home we can check the clubs and his usual haunts.”

Blythe could only imagine how helpless Miles felt. He despised being powerless and ignorant. If the apocalypse happened tomorrow, he would fight it just because he would have to try.

“We’ll come for you when we are finished,” Devlin told her. “If Carny hasn’t turned up by then, the three of us will return here and decide what action to take.”

She met his determined gaze with a loving one of her own. If anyone could find Carny it would be Devlin—especially with Miles’s assistance. Neither of them would rest until their friend was found, and the fact that they included her in their plans made her realize just how much she was respected by both of them.

It also reinforced just how much she adored them both. She couldn’t imagine either of them simply vanishing on her as Carny had on Teresa.

When Miles went to tell Varya their plans, Devlin wrapped his fingers around Blythe’s upper arm, squeezing gently as he leaned down to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

She nodded. “I know. Just find him.”

The look they exchanged was charged with a multitude of emotions, and Blythe felt as though she was sending him off
to battle even though she knew the opposite to be true. It was the situation itself that made them all so grave. This just wasn’t like Carny, and it was hard to keep one’s mind from turning to the macabre for possible explanations.

After the men left, Blythe sat with Varya and Teresa. She poured Teresa a cup of hot sweet tea and forced her to drink it. Holding the cup gave her something to focus on other than her husband’s disappearance and gave her a chance to catch her breath and dry her tears.

“Devlin and Miles will find him,” she assured both women as she poured herself another cup. “They’ll no doubt find him at a coffee house where he’ll have spent the night talking politics with his cronies.”

Varya’s expression was dubious at best, but Teresa looked at her with such hope in her eyes that it very nearly broke Blythe’s heart. Carny had better be lying somewhere bleeding because she was going to kill him for putting Teresa through this if he wasn’t.

She sat with them for another half hour, until she was fairly certain Teresa wasn’t going to burst into tears again anytime soon and that Varya would be able to handle it on her own even if she did. Then she set her cup and the saucer on the table and stood.

“I should get home in case Carny comes by the house.”

At Teresa’s startled glance she added, “He might think to come see Devlin.” Teresa knew Carny had called before, and Blythe told her he had discussed their marriage, but it was obvious Teresa had been ignorant of just how often Carny came calling—and didn’t know that it was Blythe he was truly coming to see.

“I will let you know immediately if he does. He may have stopped by already and be on his way home.” It was unlikely, and she hated to give Teresa false hope, but she’d rather see her hopeful than weeping as though he were already dead.

Varya walked her to the door.

“Where do you think he is?” she asked as Blythe pulled on her gloves.

“I honestly have no idea, but if he’s simply been off moping for the last twenty-four hours I will personally kick his posterior up between his shoulders.”

Varya smiled slightly. “I believe you will have to get in line behind your brother for that.”