Chapter 27 #2
The afternoon was for renewing bonds, and for smiling.
By bedtime Merry was hoarse, April was hoarse, Aline was hoarse, and Devon said teasingly that his ears were hoarse.
April and Devon’s mother had heard a carefully sketchy version of Merry’s story from Lord Cathcart in London.
Merry and Devon embroidered it upon request with details to support its basic fallacious premise: that Devon had rescued Merry from a pair of knaves who had stolen her off the Guinevere intending to hold her for ransom.
The falsehood was the same one that would be let out to society at large, and it was designed, strangely enough, to protect Merry from the kind of tasteless speculation that the insensitive are likely to inflict on female captives.
In protecting Merry the story also couldn’t avoid protecting Devon, and for that Lord Cathcart and Devon both had apologized so profusely that Merry had been secretly amused.
She might have told her aunt the truth; Devon had left the choice to her, but what would it serve beyond her aunt’s suffering?
Aunt April had already suffered enough worry.
There might be a small part of Merry that was afraid she had not forgiven Devon everything, but she couldn’t use her aunt to exact revenge.
And when Devon drew her into his bedchamber that night, undressing her in a crystalline fog of moonlight, kissing each revealed part of her and whispering his love, her exulting body had no thoughts of vengeance.
He left her at dawn because, as he had told her the day before, they would be expecting him at Whitehall to explain his copious bundles of reports and the raft of conclusions he’d drawn, which were not likely to be very popular with anyone except General Wellington, who was coming to oppose the American war himself, according to Cathcart.
And though Devon did not tell her so, he was seized by a desperation more fierce than any feeling he’d ever known to find Michael Granville and make certain Merry’s safety, although he too had lost all thoughts of vengeance.
There was a dark sucking spot in his conscience in the place where his hatred for Michael Granville had been, and in it lived the fear that he might lose Merry.
On St. Elise when she was ill, he had never believed she would die, no matter what the surface of his logic had told him.
He had taken Cat’s concoctions to offer his own life for hers, and he had been so clothed in the mantle of self-certainty that afflicted so many of his blood—his father, his grandmother, his half brother—that he had been convinced, truly convinced, that the focus of his will must preserve her life.
That blind arrogance stunned him now. What had ever made him think he was more than any other man?
Last night as she slept he had moved downward in the bed to enfold her waist in his arms, catching the downy softness of her thighs against his tightening belly, and to lay his cheek carefully on the undercurve of her breast. Drowsiness had begun to drift through the churning excitement of the past few days, but he had kept himself awake, listening to her working heart.
Moments had passed in utter peacefulness.
Then a nameless dark feeling had crept from the blank folds of night, and the muffled thrum within her chest had taken on a frightening fragileness.
His arms had tightened around her, his lips pressing into the musky warmth beneath her breasts, over her heart.
He was not a man given to surrender to the morbid fancies of his imagination, and yet a steely coldness crept into his stomach as the macabre idea came to him that she would be taken from him to pay for his brutalities to her.
Sleepless, he had sent a barrage of humble prayers spiraling toward heaven, probably to a stern God who was thinking with a twisted smile that it was a long time since he’d heard much from this quarter.
In the silence of his mind Devon promised, and begged, and pleaded, until the blankness of slumber had overwhelmed him, and he had awoken before sunrise with the vague idea that an exasperated God had heard enough nonsense and put him to sleep.
Waking Merry with gentle kisses on her eyelids, he had made love to her sleepy, hot body, and to her winsome mind, and then left her after another aching kiss.
He had stopped once in the airy bedchamber where his mother slept, to touch her cheek and smile, seeing that she was chewing on the lace cuff of her nightshirt, remembering his father teasing her about the quaint habit.
Thank goodness Cathcart had been here to look after her while he’d been gone.
Thinking that never again would he allow another human being to suffer for his own obsessions, Devon left the house, praying that when he returned he would have cured himself of the most dangerous one.
And Merry sat up alone in Devon’s wide bed, hugging her knees with naked arms, and began to worry.