The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (46 page)

He turned to Will. “I came here on foot. How many coaches did you bring?”

“Three,” said Will, instantly suspicious. “And we need them all,” he added hastily. “We have the bodies to move, and seven men—” But his voice already had a note of resignation.

“You’ll manage with two,” commanded Sebastian. “Rachel and I have urgent need of the other.”

It took him a moment to realize he’d slipped and said her name.

But it didn’t really matter.

Rachel had won her life back. She was Salomé no more.

Epilogue

I went mad.

I knew it was madness, but I could not shake myself free. I knew she was cruel, that she had no heart with which to love me. And yet, when she called, I answered like a spaniel. In exchange for that, I have lost the most loving heart I have known in this life. I have betrayed what is truest and best in me.

My usefulness to that witch is nearly done, and she will be glad enough in a few short weeks to see my friends kill me, which is a fitting enough end for me, after what I have done. Perhaps these pages will serve as some penance for my sins. I hope it galls her that I have betrayed her in turn, with what I have copied here. May this cost her even one one-hundredth the suffering she has caused me.

My one true heart, forgive me. It is for your sake I write these words. Forgive me for encoding them, but I cannot bear to have you read them while I still live. I know you will find a way soon enough, as you always find a way to bend the world to your purposes. I know you will make proper use of what you find here, and more importantly, my beloved Henry, I pray you will understand that sanity returned to me, though too late.

Your own beyond all things,

Robert

Rachel set the notebook down once again, atop all the pages of transcription. Most of the sheets were crammed with lists of French agents, of weapons caches, and safe houses—and the names of more than a few men and women who served both England and France.

Robert Ehlert had been exceptionally skilled at what he did.

And he had proved loyal to England in the end.

And loyal to Henry Walters as well.

Copies of the information in the notebook had already been sent to Whitehall, and Will and Diego Escobar were making active use of it here, rooting out French supporters, planting loyal Spanish agents in their places to undermine Napoleon’s coming regime wherever they could.

Rachel sighed. “It’s terribly sad.”

Sebastian came to sit beside her, straddling one end of the bench at the small table she’d been using as a desk, up in the attic of Rosa’s sister’s farmhouse, where they’d spend one more night before the
Calliope
returned them and Eva to London. Sebastian would be heading up efforts back home to use the notebook’s information against the French.

Without a word, he lifted the curls from her neck and pressed a kiss against her skin, up at her hairline, and then brushed more all across the side of her neck. She felt the feather-like touch down to her toes.

She sighed with pleasure, but still she asked, “Do you think Helm will allow that message to be passed along to Lord Henry? It’s why Robert Ehlert wrote down the contents of the book. It’s what Lord Henry was so desperate to hear.”

“I don’t know if he’ll ever see it,” Sebastian answered, turning his attention to the sensitive lobe of her ear. “I hope he will. But Helm is not a romantic by nature.”

She was wearing one of his silk dressing gowns, and he wore only the breeches he’d pulled on quickly after they rose from their bed the last time. His hands were making their own explorations again, skimming over the contours of her breasts, her waist, her thighs, slowly, tenderly, mapping every curve, every sensitive hollow beneath the silk.

Soon his hand would venture between her thighs, and she’d be lost to thought. Before that happened, she still wanted to ask him something. “Lord Henry told me he has nothing soft in him, that he is a cruel and merciless man. But he had this. He loved Robert Ehlert, I’m sure of that, and clearly Robert loved him. Did you have any idea?”

With a soft groan, Sebastian stilled his hands. “I knew Robert took both men and women to his bed,” he said. “It was a useful predilection for a spy to have; he gained access to a remarkable range of information, more than any of the rest of us. But that he loved Lord Henry Walters—no, I had no idea. Robert only let people know what he wanted them to know.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Typical of you spymasters. Inveterate secret keepers, every one of you.” She let her head loll against his shoulder, and he seemed to take that as an invitation to press his mouth to her earlobe, capturing it between his lips this time and nipping at it until she gasped.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he murmured. “Seems to me I’ve been sharing nearly all of my secrets with you recently. But if you like, I’ll teach you more.” His fingers went to the sash of her dressing gown, and made quick work of slipping loose the knotted sash. “It seems to me we haven’t yet finished with those lessons I promised you.”

She laughed deep in her throat. “You mean there’s something you still haven’t shown me?”

“Hmm, many things. An infinity of things. It may take years to get through it all.”

She bit at her lip as his hand slipped through the opening of her robe and skimmed tantalizingly along the flesh of her belly. “For instance?”

His other hand cupped her cheek and turned her face toward him, his thumb tracing the lower line of her lip. His eyes glowed with desire, and something else—a new tenderness he had never before shown her. “I’ve taught you how a man takes his pleasure with a courtesan. But
this
—this is how a man kisses the woman he cherishes.”

And his mouth found hers.

The kiss was slow, gentle, almost worshipful, tasting each corner of her lips, then the plump curve of the middle. He deepened it gradually, tilting her head to give him better access, until his tongue whisked along the seam of her mouth, demanding entrance. The hand on her belly stroked down to the curve of her hip and pulled her closer against his body, until her side pressed against his chest, and she thought she could feel the thunder of his heart against her ribs.

“Ah. I like that,” she whispered, when at last he pulled away.

“I like that, too.”

She wanted to touch him as well. Late afternoon sunlight streamed through the high attic window, gilding his bare chest and shadowing the intriguing contours of his muscles. She rose and turned, straddling the bench as he did so she could face him directly. Her hands slid up over the hardness of his abdomen and along the furrow of his breastbone, sweeping out again to grip his broad shoulders. And then she made her own slow exploration down again, kneading at him, skimming her thumbs over all his marvelous grooves and ridges, feeling his muscles bunch beneath her touch and his nipples harden as her thumbs flicked over them. He was so utterly beautiful to her. She still marveled that he was hers to enjoy, hers to be with.

He groaned and shuddered as her fingers went lower still, tracing the waistband of his breeches. Beneath the buttons of his fall, he was huge and hard, his flesh already straining demandingly.

He gripped her hands then, pulled them away, brought them to his mouth and kissed them. “Slowly,
ma nonnette
.”

My little nun
. The term was loaded with irony now—and with undisguised affection.

“Now pay attention. This part is especially important. This is how a man tells his beloved how he treasures her, how nothing in the world matters but her happiness.”

And he stripped the dressing gown from off her shoulders, letting it slide and pool around her waist, laying her breasts bare. And he kissed her reverently from her jawline to her collarbones to the cleft between her breasts, his hands lifting the swells as though they were precious, the last handfuls of water left to a man dying of thirst.

Her heartbeat raced. Her nipples tightened and throbbed. She wanted his mouth
there—
and in another moment, he readily obliged.

His lips came down on the center of one breast, his tongue whisking its way over her nipple just where she needed it, so a jolt of hot pleasure stabbed down between her thighs. He licked, he nipped, he drew the rosy peak between his teeth and sucked, drawing pangs of sweetness up through every nerve.

He no longer needed two hands to lift her breasts. One swept its way back down over her ribs and her belly to caress her thighs in long, lingering strokes—the outer curves down to her knees, and then, oh sweet heaven, over the tops and back up between her legs to the most sensitive flesh inside.

She began to tremble, moaning.

But he wouldn’t rush. His mouth lavished the same attention on her other breast, and the hand stroking her thighs teased her inch by inch, brushing up the little channels where her legs met the lower curve of her belly, feathering through the nest of curls at the center, without ever quite reaching between her spread thighs, where she was going molten at the core.

Impatience made her groan. She thought she heard him laugh, enjoying the teasing, and to hurry him along she pushed her hand between his legs, pressing her palm around the hard ridge of flesh that surged there.

The laughter died instantly, and he was groaning, too. His mouth still laved her breasts, but his other hand now released her breast to move below her waist, this one going behind her buttocks, slipping down the groove between them to knead and grip her, pulling her hips more firmly forward against the pressure of his other hand—which now, at last, went where she wanted it most.

He turned his hand palm up so his thumb could work its sizzling magic against her most sensitive spot, while his long fingers skimmed her cleft, stroking her top to bottom, again and again, spreading her slick moisture.

Heat raced through her, a rising urgency. She couldn’t help herself; she braced her hands on his shoulders and rose up off the bench. He didn’t have to bend his head now to suckle her breasts, and his fingers could take a different angle between her thighs, driving straight up inside her, first one, then two, then a third, filling her, stretching her.

She rode his fingers then, wantonly, pressing down against the thumb that now ground ceaselessly against the center of her pleasure, sending sparks of light up through her belly, through her breasts, down through her legs, as though a shower of shooting stars had erupted everywhere inside her.

She was going to burst apart.

“Please, Sebastian,” she heard herself cry. “I want you inside me. I need you inside me now.”

Almost before the words were out, he stood, lifting her beneath her bottom with the hand that had gripped her there. The other hand slid out of her just long enough to sweep aside the papers on the table so she could lay her out along it, naked, on her back, as he wrestled open the fall of his breeches.

The table was tall enough that her bottom was just below the level of his hips. He shoved the fabric of his breeches down, and his shaft thrust freely upwards, dusky red and straining to the limits of what his flesh could endure.

She stretched out her arms for him, encouraging him to come into her embrace.

He was panting, but he gave her a rakish smile and said, “Not yet. Not yet. Remember, I’m demonstrating how a man shows a woman that only her happiness matters.”

Setting his hands to her inner thighs, he eased her legs more fully apart. And then he knelt down himself, and bent his head between her legs and breathed her in, and set his mouth and fingers to giving her pleasure.

His tongue swirled, his hands caressed. There was heat and silk and light and sleek moisture at the core of her as he nuzzled and licked and stroked her, driving her wild.

The muscles of her body seemed to tense and dissolve all at once. Her head fell back, eyes closed, and her arms fell limp; her calves fell to rest on his shoulders, yet her belly and buttocks contracted with almost painful force as her pleasure rose, her toes curled, and her hips seemed to rise up off the table, bucking against him.

And then her head was thrashing madly, her hands were clenched into fists.

Sounds were coming from her mouth that would surely wake the whole farmhouse. She was ready to explode, she wanted to explode, but she wanted Sebastian to come right along with her.

“Damn it, Sebastian,” she cried out with the last of her sanity, clamping her fingers in his tawny hair to try to make him stop. “
Come here
.”

He looked up at her then, blue eyes shining, chest heaving with his own arousal. “My Rachel,” he said. “My beautiful Rachel.” And at long last he stripped off his breeches completely and stretched the hard length of his body over hers. He kissed her full on the mouth, and she tasted the tang of her own arousal there.

“Sebastian,” she whispered against his lips.

“And this,” he said, pulling back for just one more moment, “is how a man tells a woman he wants to share every moment of his life with her. This is how a man gives himself completely.”

And in one long, hard thrust, he sheathed himself inside her.