by Zoë Archer
“Don’t want to be here, either,” Leo muttered, “when there are questions that demand answers. Come.” His hand clasping Anne’s, they hurried toward Lord Whitney and Zora. “Can you run?” he demanded of the other man.
“Aye.”
“Then we move.”
“What about Edmund?” Anne asked.
Leo looked grim. “He will be found, and ... tended to.”
The four of them ducked into the mews just as throngs of men crowded the street. Anne and the others ran down the dark streets, and time blurred as she forced her body to move through the night-shrouded city. Finally, they reached a weedy, overgrown burial ground. Some of the headstones tilted precariously, and a freshly dug grave awaited its occupant.
Gasping for breath, she braced her hands on her knees. She felt Leo’s warm hand on her back, steadying her. Brittle earth and dead grasses crunched beneath their feet as their group drew together in a close circle.
The wind shook the bare branches of the trees, the sound mournful, ominous. Surely the Devil would come for them again, send more and more demons, run them all to ground. No wonder Lord Whitney had such caution and alertness in his gaze. He and Zora were hunted, as she and Leo would be. And the four of them together presented a substantial target.
“We have to part,” Leo said, as if hearing her thoughts. “Safer that way.”
“There is a band of Rom near the Scottish border,” said Zora. “They will take Whit and I in for a time.”
“And what of you?” asked Lord Whitney.
“I’m a saddler’s son,” Leo answered with a small, wry smile. “That makes me well versed in being inconspicuous.”
Anne almost laughed at that. Leo could never be inconspicuous. He radiated presence, whether he was dressed in silk or tattered muslin. She had known that from the moment they had exchanged marriage vows—he was a man of uncommon strength.
“I shall believe that when the proof stands before me,” said Lord Whitney. Clearly, he also knew Leo well.
“We cannot run and stay hidden forever,” said Anne.
“And we won’t,” Leo answered. “A bigger battle is coming, and we must be there to fight it.”
“What became of Livia?” asked Zora.
“No idea,” said Leo. “But of a certain, we will need her for that battle.”
“It’s to happen, then.” Anne rubbed her hands on her arms against the chill. Leo moved to offer her his coat, then stopped when he realized he had none to give her. His borrowed coat was now soaked with Edmund’s blood, pressed uselessly to the fatal wound. “The fight between us and the final two Hellraisers.”
“That it will,” said Lord Whitney, somber. “I do not know what happened with Bram, but John’s power has grown terribly. Of that, I am certain.”
“With his influence in Parliament,” muttered Leo, “God knows what kind of chaos he will lead us into.”
“We’ve faced demons,” Zora countered, “and won.”
“John and Bram are by far more dangerous.” Lord Whitney spoke with certitude. “They are the demons we know.”
“Then that should make them easier to vanquish,” said Anne.
“I know my own evil,” Leo answered. “Defeating that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It will be the same for John and Bram. The darkness, it countermands everything. Devours everything.”
She shivered at the hard-won experience in his voice. “It cannot be hopeless,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as the others.
“There will always be hope,” Leo replied.
Silence fell as each of them considered what lay ahead. It was to be a struggle, one they were not confident of winning, yet they had to try.
At last, Lord Whitney extended his hand to Leo. “It does my heart good to have you my ally again.”
Leo took the offered hand and shook it solemnly. “The loss of our friendship haunted me, Whit. I’m glad to have it back again.”
After releasing Leo’s hand, Lord Whitney offered Anne an exquisite bow, and kissed her knuckles. “Madam, you surpassed my every expectation.”
“I surpassed my own, as well,” she answered, then added feelingly, “My greatest thanks, Lord Whitney.”
“Whit, if you please. Those who slay demons at my side I consider my greatest friends.” He added lowly, for her ears alone, “And for what you have done for Leo, I consider you an angel.”
“Hardly an angel.” She was all too human, too fallible.
“Whatever you call yourself, you’ve earned my gratitude. And his soul.”
The moment Whit released her hand, Anne found herself pulled tight to Zora in a fierce embrace. “Sister,” Zora said, “I take back everything bad I ever said about gorgies.”
Anne was not certain she wanted to know the bad things Zora might have said about gorgies, whatever they were. But she returned the Gypsy’s embrace, knowing that she could rely on her far more than any of her own kin.
As Whit and Zora headed off into the night, a pang of sadness threaded through Anne.
“I hardly know them,” she murmured, “yet I will miss them.”
“We’ll all meet again.” He took her hand in his. “We’re an army now. The four of us fought together, and won.”
“We won this battle. But what about those yet to come?”
He brushed his thumb over her ring, and waited. After a moment, he exhaled. “It’s gone—my power to see the future.”
“You miss it,” she said flatly, fearing his regret.
Yet he shook his head, and his eyes were bright in the darkness. “Its loss holds no value. There is only one thing, one person, I cannot lose.”
Emotion burned her throat, and she struggled to speak.
He thought her silence meant doubt, and he continued, his words low and fierce. “Tonight, I saw my friend murdered. Edmund sacrificed himself for something he wanted desperately. Something he saw in us.”
“Love,” Anne whispered.
Rare uncertainty knotted through his voice. “You said that we can never get back what we once shared. Do you still believe that?”
After a moment, she spoke. “I do.”
He seemed to turn to marble, his face and body rigid.
“You and I,” she continued, “we aren’t the same people we were. Both of us have changed.”
“I love you. That hasn’t changed.”
“And I love you,” she answered. “But my love has changed. It’s stronger now—because I know who you truly are. Just as I know who I am.”
“You are remarkable.”
She felt remarkable. “And you are a very complicated man.”
“A complicated man and a remarkable woman shouldn’t be apart.” He gazed at her as though he did not ever need to look upon anyone or anything else.
This man had fought demons and his own dark self this night, yet here, with her, he showed his vulnerability. To her, this made him all the more powerful.
“We cannot go back,” she said, “but we can go forward. We can build something even stronger than before.” She stared at the rips in his shirt and the bloodstains. “I don’t know what the future holds. We’ll face it together, though.”
Even the shadows could not hide the blaze of pleasure in his face. He drew her close, and kissed her. Despite the chill night, his lips were warm and firm. “My love,” he murmured, “the future is ours to write.”
Did you miss DEVIL’S KISS,
the first book in Zoë’s Hellraisers series?
A HANDSOME DEVIL
1762. James Sherbourne, Earl of Whitney, is a gambling man. Not for the money. But for the thrill, the danger—and the company: Whit has become one of the infamous Hellraisers, losing himself in the chase for adventure and pleasure with his four closest friends.
Which was how Whit found himself in a Gypsy encampment, betting against a lovely Romani girl. Zora Grey’s smoky voice and sharp tongue entrance Whit nearly as much as her clever hands—watching them handle cards insp
ires thoughts of another kind ...
Zora can’t explain her attraction to the careless blue-eyed Whit. She also can’t stop him and his Hellraisers from a fiendish curse: the power to grant their own hearts’ desires, to chase their pleasures from the merely debauched to the truly diabolical. And if Zora can’t save Whit, she still has to escape him ...
Sussex, England, 1762
The Gypsy girl cheated.
James Sherbourne, Earl of Whitney, could not prove it, but he knew with certainty that she cheated him at piquet. She had taken the last three hands, and his coin, brazenly. Whit did not mind the loss of the money. He had money in abundance, more, he admitted candidly, than he knew what to do with it. No, that wasn’t true—he always knew what to do with money. Gamble it.
“How?” he asked her.
“How what, my lord?” He liked her voice, rich and smoky like a brazier, with an undercurrent of heat. She did not look up at him from studying her cards, arranging them in groups and assessing which needed to be discarded. Whit liked her hands, too, slim with tapered, clever fingers. Gamblers’ hands. His own hands were rather large, more fitting for a laborer than an earl, but, despite their size, he had crafted them through years of diligence into a gamester’s hands. He could roll dice or deal cards with the skill and precision of a clockmaker. Some might consider this a dubious honor, but not Whit. His abilities at the gaming table remained his sole source of pleasure.
And he was enjoying himself now, despite—or because of—the cheating Gypsy girl. They sat upon the grass, slightly removed from the others in the encampment. Whit hadn’t sat upon the ground in years, but he did so now, reclining with one leg stretched out, the other bent so he propped his forearm on his knee. Back when he’d been a lad, he used to sit this very way when lounging on the banks of the creek that ran through his family’s main country estate in Derbyshire. Years, and lifetimes, ago.
“How are you cheating me?”
She did look up at him then. She sat with her legs tucked demurely beneath her, a contrast from her worldly gaze. Light from the nearby campfire turned her large dark eyes to glittering jet, sparkling with intelligence. Extravagantly long black lashes framed those eyes, and he had the strangest sensation that they saw past his expensive hunting coat with its silver buttons, past the soft material of his doeskin waistcoat, the fine linen of his shirt, all the way to the man beneath. And what her eyes saw amused her.
Whit wasn’t certain he liked that. After all, she was a Gypsy and slept in a tent in the open fields, whilst he was the fifth in his line to bear the title, lands, and estates of the earldom that dated back to the time of Queen Elizabeth. That merited some respect. Didn’t it?
“I don’t know what you are talking about, my lord,” she answered. A faint smile curved her full mouth, vaguely mocking. The sudden desire to kiss that smile away seized Whit, baffling him. He enjoyed women—not to the same extent as his friend Bram, who put satyrs to shame and even now made the other Gypsy girls at the camp giggle and squeal—but when gambling was involved, Whit usually cared for nothing else and could not be distracted. Not even by lush, sardonic lips.
It seemed he had found the one mouth that distracted him.
“I know you aren’t dealing from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “I have had the elder hand twice, the hand with the advantage. We know what twelve cards we both have. Your sleeves are too short to hide cards for you to palm. Yet you consistently wind up with one hundred points before I do. You must be cheating. I want to know how.” There was no anger in his words, only a genuine curiosity to know her secrets. Any advantage at the card table was one he gladly seized.
“Perhaps I’m using Gypsy magic.”
At this, Whit raised one brow. “No such thing as magic. This is the modern eighteenth century.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” the girl answered, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Whit started at hearing Shakespeare from the mouth of a Gypsy. “You’ve read Hamlet?”
Her laugh held more smoky mystery. “I saw it performed once at a horse-trading fair.”
“But you do believe in magic?” he pressed. “Gypsy curses, and all that.”
Her slim shoulders rose and fell in a graceful shrug. “The world is a labyrinth I am still navigating. It is impossible for me to say I don’t believe in it.”
“You are hedging.”
“And you’re gorgio, and I always hedge my bets around gorgios.” She gazed at him across the little patch of grass that served as their card table, then shook her head and made a tsk of caution. “They can be so unpredictable.”
He found himself chuckling with her. Odd, that. Whit thought himself far too jaded, too attuned only to the thrill of the gamble, to enjoy something as simple and yet thrilling as sharing a low, private laugh with a beautiful woman.
She was beautiful. Perhaps under the direct, less flattering light of the sun, rather than firelight, she might not be as pleasing to the eye, though he rather doubted it. Her cheekbones were high, the line of her jaw clean, a proud, but proportioned nose. Black eyebrows formed neat arches above her equally black eyes. Her mouth, he already knew, was luscious, ripe. Raven dark and silken, her hair tumbled down her back in a thick, beribboned braid. She wore a bright blouse the color of summertime poppies, and a long, full golden skirt. No panniers, no stiff bodice or corset. A fringed shawl in a vivid green draped over her shoulders. One might assume such brilliant colors to jar the eye, but on the Gypsy girl, they seemed precisely right and harmonized with her honey-colored skin.
Rings glimmered on almost all her slim fingers, golden hoops hung from her ears, and many coin-laden necklaces draped her slim neck. Whit followed the necklaces with his eyes as they swooped down from her neck to lie in sparkling heaps atop her lush bosom. He envied those necklaces, settled smugly between her breasts.
Whit had a purse full of good English money. He wondered if this girl, this cheating, sardonic siren, might consider a generous handful of coins in exchange for a few hours of him learning the texture and taste of her skin. Judging by the way she eyed him, the flare of interest he saw shining in her gaze, she wouldn’t be averse to the idea.
“For God’s sake, Whit.” Abraham Stirling, Lord Rothwell’s voice boomed across the Gypsy encampment, tugging Whit from his carnal musings. Bram added, “Leave off those dull card games for once and join us.”
“Yes, join us,” seconded Leopold Bailey.
“We’ve wine and music in abundance,” said Sir Edmund Fawley-Smith, his words slurring a bit.
“And dancing,” added the Honorable John Godfrey. Someone struck a tambourine.
The men’s voices blended into a cacophony of gruff entreaty and temptation. Whit grinned at his friends carousing on the other side of the camp. True to form, Bram had his arms around not one but three girls. Leo and Edmund busily drained their cups, whilst John received instruction from a Gypsy man on how to properly throw a knife.
Hellraisers, the lot of them. Whit included. So the five friends called themselves and so they were known amongst the upper echelons of society, and with good cause. Their names littered the scandal sheets and provided fodder for the coffee house, tea salons, and gentlemen’s clubs, their exploits verging on legendary.
Bored with London’s familiar pleasures, the Hellraisers had all been staying at Bram’s nearby estate, spending their days hunting, their nights carousing. Yet they had soon tired of the local taverns, and the nearest good-sized town with a gaming hell was too far for a comfortable ride. It seemed more and more lately that the Hellraisers grew restive all too quickly, Whit amongst them, seeking novelty and greater heights of dissolution when their interest paled. He was only thirty-one, yet he could gain excitement only when gambling. Lounging in the gaming room of Bram’s sprawling estate, Whit and the others had considered returning to the brothels, theaters, and gaming hells of London, but then Bram had learned from his steward that a group of Gypsies had taken up te
mporary residence in the neighborhood, and so an expedition had been undertaken.
The Gypsies had been glad to see the group of gentlemen ride into their camp, even more so when liberal amounts of money were offered in exchange for a night’s amusement. Trick horse riding. Music. Dancing. Fortune-telling. Plenty of wine. And cards.
“How much wine have you drunk?” Whit called to Leo.
It took a moment for Leo to calculate, swaying on his feet. “’Bout four or five mugs.”
“Ten guineas says you don’t make it to six before falling arse over teakettle.”
“Done,” Leo said immediately. The nearby Gypsies exclaimed over the absurdly high amount of the wager, but to Leo, and especially to Whit, the amount was trivial.
Whit smiled to himself. Leo was the only son of a family who made their fortune on the ’Change, and he was the only one of the Hellraisers who wasn’t a gentleman by birth. He felt this distinction keenly and, as such, met any challenge with a particular aggression. Which meant that Leo took any bet Whit threw his way.
“Your friends seem eager for your company,” the Gypsy girl said wryly.
Whit brought his gaze back around to her. “We do everything together.”
“Everything?” She raised a brow.
“Nearly everything,” he amended. Bram might have no shame, but Whit preferred his amorous exploits to be conducted in private. He wondered how much privacy he could secure for himself and the girl.
A striking older Gypsy woman walked up to where he and the girl sat and began scolding her. Whit could not understand the language, but it was clear that the older woman wasn’t very pleased by the girl’s behavior. The girl replied sharply and seemed disinclined to obey. The older woman grew exasperated. Interesting. It seemed as though Whit’s saucy temptress proved as much as a termagant to her own people as to him. Though Whit wasn’t exasperated by the girl. Far from it. He felt the stirrings of interest he had believed far too exhausted to rouse.
