Page 102 of The Devil in Her Bed

“He wants to speak with ye now.”

“He’s in the room?” Chandler surged to his feet and Francesca sat higher, suddenly looking alarmed.

“Next room.”

He swallowed a refusal, locking eyes with the woman he loved. The concern and compassion he found there calmed him somewhat. He drank in the sight of her, desperately clinging to the miracle that was her existence. Just her presence gave him strength. Gave him life and hope and peace. His Francesca.

“Very well,” he agreed.

“Son.” The one word spoken in a voice as oily as the muck at the bottom of the Thames caused his blood to curdle.

“You don’t deserve to call me that,” he snarled.

“No, it’s best, I think, that we do not use words of kinship. We were always disappointments to eachother.” The bastard spoke as if he weren’t in chains. As if he were a man celebrating a victory rather than suffering a defeat.

If Chandler had been standing over him, he’d have struck him. Cut out his venomous tongue.

“What do you want?”

“You’ll be an earl soon,” came the reply. “And I want to make certain the Kenway line is untainted by common blood.”

It was the last thing he’d expected the earl to say. “What do you mean?”

“Are you looking at the Countess of Mont Claire right now?”

He was. He was staring deep into the verdant depths of her eyes, and he saw a glimmer of something there, something that lanced him with a dread no less than biblical. He felt a cold fear flushing the warmth of their lovemaking from his veins.

“You don’t have to say, I know she’s there.” Kenway suddenly sounded very young and relentlessly eager, like a youth about to receive his first kiss. “What a lovely woman she is,” he crooned. “So supple and skilled. Ruthless, like us. Brilliant, wouldn’t you say? And beautiful. Those long, lean legs that seem to go on forever—”

“I’m hanging up now, you fuc—”

“Those legs are not so smooth, my son. If you venture lower than what’s between them, you’ll find a scar on the left calf, just below the knee… a scar my men put there twenty years ago as the both of you ran from them into the woods.”

Chandler dropped the receiver as if it burned him.The chill of fear solidified to ice. Hardened in his veins and in the very fibers that knit his soul together.

“What did Ramsay say?” she asked anxiously. “Was that your—”

Chandler lunged forward, ripping the coverlet off her still-naked form.

Startled, she instinctively bent her leg up and crossed it over her body to cover her nakedness…

Displaying a shallow, faded scar to ultimate effect.

“Chandler! What the devil are you doing?”

A bleak, icy rage colored the night with an azure hue. Not red, not like murder. It was hotter than that, blue like the flames that burned at the highest temperature. Like the deepest parts of hell that even the souls of the damned couldn’t reach.

The chamber saved for the devil, himself.

He seized her calf, bending closer, letting his thumb test the knitted flesh. Someone had stitched it long ago, when the bullet had grazed it while they both ran for their lives.

He let it go as if the flesh had burned him, nearly flinging the offending appendage away from him. “Pippa.” Her name was an accusation. A curse. Nay, a profanity. How could she fuckingdare?

She rose to her knees on the bed, and he stared at her nubile form with more assessment than appreciation. Pippa fucking Hargrave? The short, chubby little blonde with the round cheeks and the talent for driving him mad. She’d turned a tragedy into a personal triumph, and had stolen the legacy of an entire bloodline. And for what?

“I can explain,” she whispered, reaching for him.

He reared away from her, turning to search the room for his trousers. “There is no excuse in the world good enough for what you’ve done.”