“It’s a gruesome and deep cut. Were they trying to sever your arm?” she said, her own attempt at humor falling flat.
“They were after the mark,” he said, every syllable uttered in a carefully controlled monotone as if any inflection would cause him further pain. “I knew these blokes. Ne’er-do-wells from my past life. Said that the person who hired them wanted to make sure I was good and dead this time and needed proof.”
“‘This time’? That suggests someone had tried before.”
“Aye. That’s been puzzling me, too.” He squinted his eyes closed and hissed in a quick breath as she reached the deepest part of the cut and had to tug a little for the skin flaps to meet.
He continued after a minute, his voice edged with strain. “The first person who ever talked about the mark, outside of the foundling home, was Mr. Devons. When he shackled me inside that cupboard that last time, he told me that he was finally going to get something worthwhile out of me. Said he’d mentioned his workhouse boys once or twice in a pub and that someone perked up at the tale of the lad with the raven on his arm. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. My thoughts were on the hole at the back of the cupboard. All I know, is that he left to meet this person and it was the last I ever saw of the Devil.”
“Do you think the person who queried him about your mark was responsible for his death?”
He shrugged reflexively, then stiffened, biting down a groan before he took a healthy gulp from the bottle. “Dunno. I’m sure he had enemies.”
Jane kissed him on the shoulder after she finished the first set of stitches, tying off the thread. Only two more sets to go.
“Then there was the attack on the wharf,” he mused. “I found it peculiar then and even more so now that they never tried to rob me. And I’d had a few pounds tucked in my pocket from”—he stopped and appraised Jane carefully, glancing down to the needle—“well, it doesn’t matter who.”
Jane instantly knew it was that horrible Mrs. Devons who’d paid him. But she managed to keep her stitches light and easy for his sake.
“There were two that got me—one from behind and the other dead on. My arms were caged before I got much use out of them. The first bloke pulled down my coat as the other ripped my shirtsleeves. Seeing the mark, the second bloke said, ‘This is him.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t want to find out either. When I saw that pistol, I knew my life depended on getting away, but I still caught the ball in my ribs.”
This news didn’t sit well with her. She finished the second set of stitches, feeling more anxious than before.
To her, these accounts cemented his legitimacy. But they also left her shaken. “So, in other words, there is someone who knows who you really are. And this person is willing to kill you in order to keep anyone else from finding out. Who could know about the mark and is threatened by it?”
“There’s only one person I can think of who’d stand to gain from my death.”
They shared a look.
“Lord Herrington,” she said. “But that would mean he’d have known about you all along. That would mean he knew that the legitimate heir had survived the fire.”
Thinking back to the letters, this made sense. If Herrington knew about Raven, then he likely saw him as the only obstacle to the earldom.
“I’d thought about that, too. But, by all accounts, there wasn’t another survivor of the fire. So then who pulled me out? If it was Herrington, wouldn’t he have just let me burn with the others?”
She shivered and burrowed nearer to Raven’s heat.
Knowing that he’d been so close to death, and so often, it was too much to think about. And yet, it was all she could think about.
“I d-don’t want to t-talk about this anymore,” she stammered, fear and agony clogging her throat.
She was glad she’d finished the last set of stitches, because her eyes began to flood, her vision obscured. She blinked and the hot deluge streamed down her face in wet runnels. Blindly, she swiped at the strips of linen and began wrapping his arm, knotting the ends.
“Shh . . .” he said, holding her face tenderly, kissing the tears from her cheeks, her eyelashes, her lips. “It was really you who saved me tonight, you know.”
“Me?”
“Mmmhmm.” His lips grazed hers in intensely slow sweeps. “But I knew I couldn’t die yet. Not when everything was just starting to go right. Not when I just found you.”
His intention was likely to keep her from crying again, but tears flowed from beneath her closed lashes regardless.
“But there was a moment—” His voice broke, the sound of it hoarse and lost in a way she’d never heard before. He locked eyes with her, the gray filled with rife panic as he fisted his hand in the back of her dress. “There was a moment when I was afraid I’d never see you again. Ever. And I thought of my body being locked in a coffin, lowered into the cold ground and never feeling your warmth. I couldn’t bear it, Jane.”
He kissed her again, frantic and desperate, pulling her closer, as if she could never be close enough. Shifting beneath her, he rearranged her legs to straddle him. The position forced her knees higher, tucked under his arms, until she was curled flush against him, heartbeat to heartbeat. And seated on his hard, insistent heat.
His aroused state shocked her. But what surprised her even more was the way her body instantly responded in urgent, fluid pulses, hips rocking forward. It felt so primitive—this sudden overwhelming need for intimacy. The need to prove that he was alive and safe and hers.
She fused her mouth to his, craving to be closer still. Raven’s thoughts seemed to match her own. He reached between their bodies and jerked at the fastening of his trousers. He kissed her hard. Lifted her. Then impaled her deeply in one slick thrust.
A primal, feral sound roared from his throat as her gasping body gripped his flesh.
They moved together in a wild, panicked rhythm, both seeking assurance. One driving harder and harder. The other willingly impaled over and over again . . . until they both cried out, clutching and breathless, locked tightly in a torrent of thick liquid shudders.
For long moments after, they simply breathed together, lungs rising and falling in perfect harmony, their heads bowed toward each other as if in prayer.
Chapter 33
Three evenings later, the Marquess of Aversleigh’s ballroom brimmed with music and gaiety and the glimmering light of a dozen chandeliers.
Officers, tradesmen, and haute society all mingled beneath the golden glow as a crush of lively dancers reeled and twirled on the floor. There was so much laughing and clapping and foot-stomping that even Jane’s smiling parents were caught up in the merriment.
She stood with Ellie near the archway between the ballroom and the winter garden—an octagonal room with a glass dome overhead and a reflecting pool below. Together, they furtively tossed biscuit crumbs from a small tin Jane carried in her reticule to the shimmering Amur carp.
“Do you think he decided not to come?” Ellie asked, her voice raised to be heard over the din.
Aside from Duncan and Bess, Ellie was the only other person who knew about Raven’s injuries from earlier in the week. But no one knew that it might have anything to do with the mark on his arm. Or his claim to the earldom.