Page 107 of The Devil in Her Bed
Refuge.
The word drew her to the chimney, the stone hearth still relatively in one piece. She heard the frightened voices of children, a boy and a girl, echo from bricks inside. Memories, of course.
She had to duck, now, beneath the mantel she’d once thought as tall as her father. Standing in the chimney, she could barely lift her arms. How small they’d both been back then. How frightened and brave.
How insignificant she felt now.
Here was the first place she’d ever heard Chandler’s beating heart, where it soothed and comforted her. Newly orphaned, traumatized, and terrified.
And still… regardless of all the pain she’d felt over the years, it didn’t come close to touching his.
The first time everything had been taken from him, it had been with water.
The second had been fire.
She didn’t blame him for his distance, for his antipathy toward her… because the third time he’d had his hopes taken from him, it had been with little better than breath.
She’d given him hope and love and the tender starts of trust, only to crush it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to no one. To everyone. To the children who had once been right here.
The whinny of a horse preceded the galloping crunch of frozen grass beneath trotting hooves. That would be Ivan. She should go. Her goodbyes didn’t have to be protracted. She’d said she wouldn’t linger, and she shouldn’t be late for the train.
But when she would have left, something kept her here. A soft little brush at her heart, the tug she’d felt whenever Francesca had taken her hand as a child.
A gentle pull encouraging her back from doing something reckless or foolish.
Stay.The whisper echoed through her memory.Just a few moments longer.
She stayed, humming a little song she’d loved from the nursery as she wrote all their names with her fingertip in the soot of the chimney.FRANCESCA,FERDINAND,PIPPA, and…
She paused. Certainly not Luther; not Declan, either.
CHANDLER.He’d always be Chandler to her.
The sound of boots on the gritty marble filtered through what was now a very short chimney, perhaps only twice as tall as her, the second and third stories of Mont Claire having collapsed in the fire.
She took a bracing breath, wishing for longer. “I’msorry I dawdled, Ivan,” she sighed. “I’m just… saying goodbye.”
Impulsively, she drew a heart around Chandler’s name, and ducked back out of the fireplace, batting the soot from her dark traveling kit.
“Where are you going?”
She froze, her lungs seizing in her chest and her heart diving out of its cage in her ribs to land in her stomach.
There he stood, the Earl of Devlin.
His hair was longer, a bit more fashionable perhaps, and he was leaner, too, as if he’d not been eating.
He still radiated primal, masculine energy, and his form was fit as ever, draped in an extraordinary suit the shade of grey that brought out striations of gold in his darker locks.
Shadows lurked in the hollows of his cheeks, and smudges darkened the skin beneath his eyes. Eyes that pierced her like the point of a rapier, pinning her where she stood.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, suddenly breathing as if she’d run a league.
He just looked at her, his eyes raking down her body in such an inscrutable way she couldn’t tell if he was undressing her or sizing her for a coffin.
“H-have you ever been back?” she asked, desperate to fill the silence, to make him say something. Anything. “This is the first time…” She trailed off as his eyes left hers to touch the stones, searching the shadows created by the gloom of the overcast sky. “I couldn’t, before. But it felt as though I should say goodbye.”
