Page 94 of A Lady of Means
“You never lost me,” she said in an urgent voice.She wrapped a hand around his stubbled cheek.
“Moria,” he started to say something that would damn whatever they still had left to hell and she couldn’t hear it.She kissed him again, longer and slower this time.And then he pulled away.
Her pride was the only soldier she had left now, and so she let him let her go, and made him watch as the curtain fell behind her for the last time.
ChapterThirty-Eight
Devyn wassure now that he hadn’t fallen in love with a mere woman, but a goddess.
Only, before because she was beautiful, more than beautiful.Visually perfect in a way that made artists believe in God, and turned doubting heretics into believers.The kind of noticeable gorgeousness that men fought wars over.
And she had been his.
He had told himself while he thought he was rotting away that he’d do the noble thing and give her up, let her be happy, let her get all that she wanted that he couldn’t give her.He’d have sold his own soul to give it to her, but not his brother’s, and that was the cost.
But tonight, now that he’d had her again, he didn’t know that he could do it again.
Because she wasn’t just a woman, she was a goddess.
In that ethereal way in which you’re cursed, you meet a goddess in the woods, or in Devyn’s case, beneath a willow tree, and it fucks you up forevermore.There is no going backwards or forwards, because you’re in her grasp.And no matter how many mortar shells she throws in your life, no matter how bad you think maybe you’d like to hurt her back, you’re under her spell.
When she’d closed the curtain behind her and slowly let go of his hand digit by digit, Devyn knew that the spell was still cast all over him, and there was no cure.
“Whose perfume ye wearin’?”Calum asked, eyeing Devyn as he took a seat across from him in Peregrine’s club.
Devyn leaned back in his chair, propping his cane beside him, his brows going all cross and defensive.He pointed with one finger in his friend’s direction.“You’re taking the piss, man, I don’t?—”
“Oh my god,” Peregrine threw his head in his hands.“You didn’t.”
“He definitely did,” Calum argued, shit-eating grin on his swarthy face.
Devyn avoided both of their stares, taking a sip of his drink.Regrettably, the burn in the back of his throat as he swallowed wasn’t strong enough to wash the taste of her away.
“This is going to be the worst night of my life,” Peregrine said, throwing back his brandy.
Devyn pulled back, affronted.“Bit dramatic.You mean worse than when you thought I died.”
“Yes,” Calum and Peregrine said in unison.
Devyn looked between the two of them, obviously missing something.“Yeah?And why’s that?”
“Clairville!”A voice called from behind Devyn.The voice sounded the same as a mortar shell, a dinner gong that day at her manor house, a death rattle.It was the sound it was all over before he wanted it to be.
All three men turned in the direction of a tall, bronze-skinned man with stupidly green eyes, immaculately dressed.Devyn recognized him from the theater.Of course he would look like a storybook prince with a deep tan.
“Your Grace,” Peregrine said, standing to defer to the Duke.Devyn didn’t move.Calum didn’t either, his eyes on Devyn.“If you’re knee deep in shit, guess we both got dirty boots, then,”he’d said once.
“I don’t believe you’ve met my brother, Captain Devyn Winter, and his comrade, Lieutenant Calum Sterling.”
Devyn knew that Perry knew he wasn’t a Captain anymore.Didn’t know why he gave him a title he no longer held and demoted his best friend in the process, but fuck it.He’d never deign to contradict his older brother in Moria’s Conquest’s hearing.
“Your Grace,” Devyn said, chin high, eyes cold.Devyn knew that he could intimidate men when he wanted to.There was a place he went in his mind when he was facing an opponent, and this man, this Duke, definitely was one.
The other man looked him over, both a little intimidated and a little unfazed at the same time.Other men always seemed to note Devyn’s height, his shoulders, how large he was, how big his hands were.Some, itching for a fight and others desperate to avoid starting one.He’d love to put his fist through this toff’s face.He’d been on strict orders from the physician now that he was making so much progress not to overexert himself.Already disregarded that bit of advice in the alcove, hadn’t he?
Fuck it.He had nearly died in a rescue attempt of a comrade, a man with soft hands and floppy hair didn’t scare him.
“Heard you were hit in Bajgah, terrible business,” Moria’s Pretty Duke said, sitting next to him.
