To Desire a Devil (Legend of the Four Soldiers #4)(18)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

“You’re not listening to me.” She paced from the window of his bedroom to where he sat on the edge of the bed and stood before him, arms akimbo like a cook scolding the butcher’s boy. “Even if Uncle Reggie wanted to kill you—which, as I keep telling you, he never would—he’d not be stupid enough to stage an assassination in front of his own house.”

“My house,” Reynaud growled. She’d been haranguing him for the last half hour and showed no signs of stopping.

“You,” Miss Corning stated through gritted teeth, “are impossible.”

“No, I am correct,” he answered. “And you simply don’t want to acknowledge the fact that your uncle may not be nearly as sweet as you think.”

“I—” she began again, her tone indicating she might very well continue the argument until doomsday.

But Reynaud had had enough. He threw aside the knife and whetstone and rose from the bed, nearly in her face. “Besides, if you really did consider me impossible, you would never have kissed me.”

She skittered back, and he felt a spear of rage shoot through him. She should not fear him. It wasn’t right.

Then her lush mouth parted in what looked like outrage. For a moment she couldn’t speak, and then she burst out, “It was you who kissed me!”

He took a step toward her. She took a step back. He stalked her silently across the room, waiting for fear to turn her eyes dark. Hadn’t she realized what he’d shouted, out there by the carriage?

Didn’t she know he was mad?

He bent over her, leaning down until the wisps of hair near her ear brushed his lips, inhaling the scent of sweet English flowers. “You returned the kiss; don’t think I didn’t notice.”

And he had. Her soft lips had opened beneath his for just a fraction of a second before he’d turned and run toward the wounded footman. That kiss would be burned in his memory forever. He angled his head and looked into her eyes.

Instead of going dark with fear, they were snapping with green sparks. “I thought you were about to die!”

Foolish girl.

“Tell yourself that if it assuages your delicate sensibilities,” he murmured, “but the fact remains that you. Kissed. Me.”

“What an arrogant thing to say,” she whispered.

“Granted.” He inhaled. Her skin smelled clean and womanly, with that hint of a flowery soap that Indian women never had. It was a nostalgic scent for him, conjuring the memory of other civilized women he’d once known—his mother, his sister, forgotten young girls he’d squired to balls long ago. She smelled of England itself, and for some reason he found the thought unbearably arousing and at the same time utterly frightening. She had no defenses against him.

He no longer belonged in her world. “But did you enjoy the kiss?”

“And if I did?” she whispered.

He brushed his lips—softly, delicately—against her jaw. “Then I pity you. You should run screaming from me. Can’t you see the monster I am?”

She looked up at him with brave clear gray eyes. “You’re not a monster.”

He closed his eyes, not wanting to see her face, not wanting to take advantage of that purity. “You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“Then tell me,” she said urgently. “What happened in the Colonies? Where have you been for seven years?”

“No.” Brown eyes stared up through a mask of blood. He was too late. He pushed away from her, afraid she’d see the demons laughing behind his eyes.

“Why not?” she called. “Why can’t you tell me? I can never understand you until I’ve heard what happened to you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped. “There’s no need for you to understand me.”

She threw her hands in the air. “You’re impossible!”

“And we are back where we started.” He sighed.

She frowned at him, her gray eyes sparking with displeasure as she tapped one small foot. “Very well,” she said at last, “I’ll lay aside the matter of your past for now, but you can’t ignore the fact that someone tried to kill you today.”

“I’m not.” He turned and gathered the knife, whetstone, and the piece of leather he’d been using to sharpen the knife. “I don’t think it’s any of your concern.”

“How can it not be my concern?” she demanded. “I was there. I saw that third shot. The first two might have been random, but the third was most definitely aimed at you.”

“And again, I say that this is none of your business.”

He stowed the whetstone and leather in the top of a chest of drawers, but he hung the knife at his waist. He’d had it for seven long years, used it to butcher deer and bear, and once, years ago now, he’d killed a man with it. The knife wasn’t a friend—he had no emotional attachment to it—but it had served him well, and he felt safer, more whole, with it at his side.

He looked curiously at Miss Corning, still standing by the bed across the room. “Why do you persist?”

“Because I care,” she said, “no matter how much you try to hold me at arm’s length, I still can’t help but care. And because I am the only one who might get you to understand that Uncle Reggie had nothing to do with the shooting. Think: If it wasn’t Uncle Reggie, then someone else has tried to kill you.”

“And who do you think that might be?”

“I don’t know.” She hugged her waist and shivered. “Do you?”

He frowned down at the top of the chest of drawers. It held only a basin and a pitcher of water—nothing like the furniture that’d been in his old rooms in this house. But then again it was richly appointed compared to the wigwams he’d lived in for many years. For a brief moment, he felt dizzy with displacement. Did he belong anywhere anymore? The demons surged forward to take control.

Then he shook his head, shoving them back. “Vale said he’d been looking for the traitor for a year now. He’s obsessed with the search. And he said the traitor had a French mother. My mother was French.”

“Would Lord Vale have you killed if he thought you the traitor?”

Reynaud remembered the man he’d known, a laughing man, a friend to everyone he met. That Vale would never have done such a thing, but then again, that Vale was from the past. Would Vale kill him if he thought he’d betrayed the regiment at Spinner’s Falls? A man might change in many ways in seven years, but could Vale turn into a killer of friends?