Page 79 of The Devil in Her Bed
He sighed, uncertain if he could claim the nobility she accused him of possessing. “Likely not,” he hedged.
Could he really have turned down what she offered?
He leaned over to kiss her bare shoulder. Only a fool would deny paradise once offered.
He opened his mouth to ask her how she’d fooled the entire ton into thinking her a wanton rakess when she beat him to the punch.
“Did you mean it? Were you truly unhappy at Mont Claire?” she asked.
They’d been the best years of his life, but he still regretted them. “Does that hurt you?”
She adopted a pensive expression, one that gave way to nostalgia as she looked into the past. “It’s only that, before the massacre, I have nothing but happy memories of the place. Of the festivals in the spring at the village. The playhouse with the comedies that the university students would stage for us. The scent of fresh bread beckoning me in the morning to wander to the kitchens to watch Hargrave pretend not to read the papers as he ironed them for Father…” Her eyes adopted a curious sheen and she cleared it away with a blink and a cough. “I always loved summers, romping in the maze and mucking out the fountain—”
“Hargrave ironing the paper?” he scoffed. “Since when did you ever get up before the crack of noon?” He gave a mirthless chuckle and chucked her chin, his thumb grazing at the indent there. “Pipand I mucked out the fountain. You only ever watched.”
Her lashes swept down over a guilty look, and he instantly regretted saying so. He charted the curve of her shoulder and drew his hand down the smoothness of her arm until he laced his fingers with hers. “I’d have not dirtied your hands for all the world.” He lifted herfingertips to his lips for a kiss, and she watched him do so as if it caused her physical pain.
“I only meant that it was hard to have known such happiness and to see it so utterly and completely destroyed.”
She nodded, though she didn’t seem quite mollified. “Are we certain everyone else died? It is quite possible someone else could have survived the massacre?”
He shook his head, remembering that he’d hoped the very same. “I got Pippa out, but they shot her in the leg and the poor thing couldn’t run. I stashed her in the tree and diverted them back through the forest when they shot me.” An ancient well of pain rose within him as the memory of the moment made the scars on his back itch and ache. “There were many more gunshots, even while I lay there thinking I was about to die. I heard them conclude that they’d finished off anyone who’d attempted escape and thrown them back into the blaze.”
He’d done his best not to think of poor Pip. After all they’d done to escape the flames, the idea of her being tossed back to them was simply untenable.
“You never witnessed her death. What if…” Francesca paused, toying at her hair that was more escaped from her braid than contained in it. “What if she did escape? What if she survived?” The earnest light in her eyes was difficult to see, and so he looked away.
“Then I hope she is far away from here… and at peace.” So she didn’t have to face the shame of what her parents’ actions had wrought.
“You were a hero, for saving her,” Francesca said. “For holding and comforting her through the ordeal,for making her feel less alone. Do you… remember her ever?”
A chuff of laughter escaped him. “I remember that she was stubborn and reckless. She was loud. Unkempt. Wild.”
“You don’t remember her fondly… then.” She sounded so glum, he regarded her carefully.
He’d never wanted to do this. To remember. But it seemed she did, and maybe it was time for that. Time for trading war stories with someone who’d been through the fire with him. Literally. They’d been close, Pippa and Francesca, he remembered that.
He wondered if she did all of this for her childhood friend.
Pippa Hargrave. He summoned the girl into his mind’s eye. A sturdy thing, on the brink of portly as her older parents denied her nothing. She’d been fair-haired, overindulged, and endlessly opinionated. But she’d smiled brilliantly, often with gaps of missing teeth, whenever he entered a room. As a boy largely unused to his presence being anything but a bother or a burden, he’d liked her for that. She’d laughed at all of his japes, and she’d done anything he asked of her.
She was a favorite of Ferdinand’s, which he always found ridiculous because she outweighed and outmatched the sickly boy in almost every respect. He’d always imagined their future, her hoisting little Ferdy around the estates running after a bushel of bastards, as the old earl would have never let them marry. But Pip… she was the loyal sort, and just about as robust as anyone.
“I was plenty fond of her,” he said honestly. “Shewas like the little sister I—I never got to have. I recall that she quarreled just as ardently as she loved. She was… fearless until the end, and even then, she was so goddamned brave.”
When he focused on Francesca again, tears gathered like gems in her lashes, and he lifted her face, though she wouldn’t look at him. “She loved you like a sister, that I remember. She would have been very proud of who you’ve become, I think.”
She just shook her head, swallowing three successive times against his hand. “She lovedyou, you know. To an obsessive degree.”
He remembered the last time he’d seen her. The moments before her death. She’d flung her strong arms around him and kissed him.
I love you, she’d whispered.
Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.“If that is the case… it is better that she died.”
“I insist you stop saying things like that.” She pushed at him then, releasing her frustration physically, as he was learning she was wont to do. “Whathappenedto you? Why are you like this? You’re not culpable in the massacre, and you couldn’t have stopped it from happening, so why do you constantly fight such immense guilt? Is it because of Pippa? Because you didn’t save her? Because if that’s the case I… I’ll tell you—”
“You are fighting for your legacy, Francesca. To see if it’s worth protecting, and that is a noble thing.” He forced a frustrated breath through his throat, hating everything about what he couldn’t say. “I’m constantly escaping mine. I come from nothing. From lower thannothing. And I am doing my best to… to atone. Does that make any sort of sense?”
