Page 98 of The Devil in Her Bed
Francesca cleared the emotion out of her throat and looked down so he couldn’t see her heart in her eyes. She had a feeling if he truly looked at her in that moment—he’d know.
Would that be so bad?
“Do you think she could have?” she whispered. “Stolen your heart, I mean.”
“Hard to imagine it, she bothered me so much.” He gave a wry chuckle and took another sip and was quiet for a few breaths. “I guess we’ll never know.” His voice hardened. “My father took that from us.”
Quite suddenly, he folded at the waist as though he’d been punched, startling her as he sat up and threw his legs over the opposite side of the bed.
Francesca stared at the scars in his back. Little holes left by the pellets of a shotgun at long range. One whose trigger might as well have been pulled by his own father.
“God, how can you even look at me?” he agonized. “I’m the bloody reason your entire family is dead.”
“No.” She abandoned the knife and crawled across the bed to him, wishing she could close the distance she felt growing. “No, no, you can’t think that.” She pressed her cheek against his back, locking her arms around the breadth of his shoulders and smoothing the mounds of his chest.
She could hear his heart. God… was it real? The rhythm she’d thought was forever lost to her pounded at his back with suppressed emotion.
“I wondered why the letter from Hargrave piqued you so…” She readied herself to broach this subject, hoping he finally would. “You were… hiding from your father at Mont Claire, weren’t you? And the letter, however innocently meant, revealed you to him.”
He nodded, his jaw clenched too tightly for speech for a moment. “Mont Claire was burned to the groundfor the sole reason that it sheltered Luther Kenway’s last remaining son and heir. He murdered everyone only to send me a message. To tell me nowhere was safe from him. He was—” His voice broke for a moment, and he grappled with his composure before finishing. “He was calling me home.”
“I’m glad you didn’t go.” She pulled back, but his hands caught hers, as if he wasn’t ready for her to pull away from the embrace.
“We still don’t know the certain reasons for the attack,” she soothed, pressing her body closer to him, settling her breasts against his back and her chin against his shoulder. “The Cavendishes were a part of the Crimson Council. Did you know that Lady Cavendish was once courted by your father?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. When I was a boy, I was ridiculously ignorant of anything like that.”
She went on, eager to assuage his guilt and pain. “I’ve subsequently found out that the Earl of Mont Claire was Kenway’s fourth cousin, and the countess chose him over Kenway rather publicly. That must have rankled a man like your father to no small degree. He could have been taking revenge on Mont Claire on her behalf.”
“I must have known, somehow, that our families were linked. I must have been to Mont Claire before, though I don’t remember when,” he said.
“Chandler.” She hesitated. The question hovering on her lips kicked her heart faster. “I read a great deal about Kenway when I investigated him. I combed through reports and found one on… Kenway’s countess. Your mother? It reported that she… drowned her three children.”
His jaw worked to the side for a moment, and he turned his face from the light.
“She did.”
A hard pebble of grief landed in her middle, and she steeled herself for this conversation. “I always remembered their names,” she ventured. “William, Arabella, and—”
“Luther.” He said the word as if it tasted of ash and filth on his tongue. “Luther Beaufort de Clanforth-Kenway.”
The magnitude of this knocked the wind from her. “De-clan-forth,” she echoed, her heart aching. “De-clan.”
He nodded.
“You… didn’t drown?”
He made a gruff, caustic noise. “No, no, I did. I remember it well. I fought the water in my nightmares.” He put a hand to his chest and filled his lungs, his wide ribs expanding as if he had to prove to himself that he was still able to inhale. “I still do.”
“It’s why your mother died in the asylum.”
“Yes.” His chin returned to touch his shoulder, brushing against her fingertips as if searching for solace. “She was a fragile woman, my mother. Kenway liked to toy with her, to torture her with his cruelty, without even touching her.” He gave a suspicious sniff. “I remember she thought she was saving us from him. She said as much before she… pushed me under.”
“Holy God,” she whispered. “How did you… How are you still…?”
“My father found my mother, I was told. He grappled her away as the servants pulled my… the children out of the tub and dragged her somewhere else, I’m not certain where. I wasn’t conscious.”
She could tell the story agonized him. His muscles twitched and his fingers were restless. Cold sweat bloomed on his skin, and his breaths were slightly uneven.
