Page 57 of What Angels Fear

“What makes you think I went to see Pierrepont?”

“There weren’t that many masquerades in Mayfair tonight.” She shifted subtly in her seat, so that her thigh just brushed his. “What sent you there?”

“According to Hugh Gordon, Pierrepont is a French spy master.”

She sat very still and quiet for a moment, then said, “And do you believe him?”

Sebastian shrugged. “Gordon had no proof, of course. But I found a code cipher in Pierrepont’s library.” What Hendon had told Sebastian, he would keep to himself.

“What has any of this to do with Rachel?”

Sebastian turned away to swing off his cloak and hang it on a hook beside the bed. “I think she might have been passing Pierrepont information. She seems to have shared her favors with an interesting collection of men. Men in positions to know tidbits they might easily let slip, things like troop movements and shifting alliances and the thinking of those close to the King.”

“They say someone stole Rachel’s body from the churchyard,” she said. “Was it you?”

“Yes.”

Any other woman would have felt the need to affect a feminine display of shock and horror. Not Kat. She watched him strip off his doublet and shirt, then go splash cold water from the basin over his blood-encrusted face and neck. “What do you expect to learn from it?”

The room’s towel was coarse and stiff, and he dabbed gently around his cuts. “I don’t know. But I’ve already learned one interesting little fact: whoever killed Rachel York slit her throat first. Then he sexually assaulted her.”

“That’s a nasty little perversion.”

Sebastian tossed aside the towel. “What kind of man likes to have sex with a dead woman?”

“A man who hates women, I should think.”

Sebastian looked down at the bloodstains he’d left on the old towel. He hadn’t thought of it that way, that Rachel’s rape was an act of hate rather than lust, but he suspected Kat was right. Whoever killed Rachel York had taken joy in her destruction, had been sexually aroused by the act of slitting her pale throat and watching the life ebb slowly from her pretty brown eyes. Most men felt the need for at least some measure of response in the women with whom they copulated—it was, after all, the reason behind a prostitute’s little moans and gasps of simulated pleasure. But Rachel York’s killer was the kind of man who could find his release in the unresponsive, empty shell of what had once been a living, breathing woman.

Sebastian thought about the significant men in Rachel’s life, about Hugh Gordon and Giorgio Donatelli and Leo Pierrepont. Were any of them that twisted, that consumed by hatred for women? Or how about the others, that continually shifting parade of well-placed men such as Admiral Worth and Lord Grimes from whom she had, perhaps, coaxed sensitive information? Suspicion of all things feminine—one could easily label it a basic dislike of women—was so common as to be almost a tradition amongst the gentlemen of England, with their elite boys’ schools and stuffy men’s clubs and addiction to such masculine sports as boxing and cockfighting and hunting. But it didn’t lead most of them into murder and mutilation. What kind of man crossed that line? When did mistrust and dislike shade into something darker, something dangerous and evil?

Sebastian listened to the flutter of the wind beneath the eaves. He knew it again, that fear that he was never going to find Rachel York’s killer, that the man who had slit her throat and indulged his lust on her dead, bloodied body was some chance stranger, a random shadow from the night that Sebastian was never, ever going to track down.

He heard a whisper of movement, a rustle of cloth. Kat came to stand before him, her touch gentle as she cradled his face between her hands. “You’ll find him,” she said softly, as if he had spoken his fears out loud. “You’ll find him.” And even though he knew she spoke out of a need to reassure rather than from conviction, he found comfort in her words. Comfort, and the echo of an old but never forgotten desire in her touch.

He caught her to him, his fingers twisting in the dusky fall of her hair. His mouth sought and found hers, her breath coming now as rapid and shallow as his. He kissed her eyes and touched the smooth, warm flesh of her neck, and felt his body quicken with a need that was more than physical.

With increased urgency, his lips captured hers again. A shower of hot coals settled with a murmur on the hearth beside them as he bore her down on the bed, her arms wrapping around his neck, her body rising up to meet his touch.

Fevered hands tore away cloth, found the pleasures of smooth warm flesh beneath sliding fingers. And in that moment, he didn’t care about the nature of her association with Leo Pierrepont. He didn’t even care about the things she had said on that dark day six years before. He needed her.

With a soft sigh, Sebastian buried himself inside her. They moved as one, slowly at first, the tempo rising as he felt the coldness and the fear inside him fade away into the gentle rhythms of her body and the warmth of her keening breath mingling with his.

Afterward, he lay on his back in the firelit softness of the night. He held her nestled close, kissed her hair, listened to the sounds of the city settling to sleep around them, the distant rumble of a lone carriage and, nearer, the slamming of a shutter. He let his hand drift down her side, over the naked swell of her hip, and breathed in the unforgettably warm and heady fragrance of this woman.

After a time, she shifted her weight, rising up on her elbow so she could look down at him. She said, “What would an angel fear?”

He laughed softly, running his hand up her bare arm to her shoulder. “What kind of question is that?”

She traced an invisible pattern across his naked chest with her fingertip. “I was thinking of that line from Pope—you know the one? ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ What would an angel have to fear?”

“Falling from grace, I suppose. I don’t know. I don’t believe in angels.”

“An immortal being, then. What could an immortal being possibly fear?”

He thought about it for a while. “Making a wrong decision, I would think; choosing badly. Imagine having to live with that for an eternity.” He turned his head to look at her profile, beautiful and unexpectedly serious in the firelight. “Why? What do you think an angel would fear?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Love. I think an angel would fear falling in love with a mortal—someone who could be theirs for only a short time and then would slip away forever.”

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