When Gods Die

The smile faded. She had loved him since she was sixteen, when she was an unknown chorus girl and he a wild young buck not long down from Oxford. He’d asked her to marry him then, too. And because she’d been young and so desperately hungry to keep him in her life forever, she’d said yes. It was only later—after his father and her own conscience had made her realize what such a marriage would mean for him—that she’d sent Devlin away. What she’d seen in his eyes that night—the agonized disbelief of betrayal—had cut her heart in two and ripped out her soul.

She could remember wandering the fog-shrouded streets of the City, tears hot on her cheeks, heartsick with all the grief of youth and looking for death. But death hadn’t come, and those who’d told her that time lessens pain had in part been right. Because in time she’d found a reason to live and a cause to fight for. That was part of the problem now. But only part.

She told herself that the choices she’d made these last few years didn’t make any difference, that she would still have the strength to resist the treacherous weakness of her heart. It was a wonder to her that despite all Devlin had seen and done in the last seven years, in this way, at least, he hadn’t changed. He still believed he could count the world well lost for love. She knew better.

She knew what it would do to him, to find himself cut off from those of his own class, an object of contempt and scorn, pity and ridicule. Marriage to her would be a social solecism for which neither his father nor his sister, Amanda, would ever forgive him. She didn’t suppose Devlin would suffer overly much from an estrangement from his only surviving sibling. But the ties binding the Earl and his heir ran strong and deep.

She knew that. And still she was tempted.

That’s when she reminded herself that you can’t build a marriage on lies, and that while Devlin might know the sordid truth of her childhood years on the streets, he didn’t know about the other years, the years after she’d sent him away from her. The years she’d spent seducing important men and passing the secrets they spilled to the French.

In her weaker moments, a treacherous voice whispered that he need never know about those years. She’d had no dealings with the French since Pierrepont’s disappearance from London four months ago. And while she’d been told a new spymaster would contact her, the message she’d been dreading—a two-toned bouquet of flowers accompanied only by a biblical quotation—had never come. Besides, her allegiance had never been to France but to Ireland, to the tragic land of her youth and the scene of her mother’s death.

Yet in her heart of hearts, she knew that was mere quibbling. If Devlin knew the truth, if he knew she had aided the enemy he spent six long years fighting, he would turn away from her in disgust…or condemn her to the ignoble death of a spy.

She realized his eyes were open, watching her. He had the most extraordinary eyes, the color of amber, with an almost inhuman ability to see not only great distances, but also in the dark. His hearing was abnormally acute, as well. She liked to tease him, to tell him he was part wolf. Yet she knew that his preternatural abilities unsettled him, for there was no history of such gifts in either his mother’s family or his father’s.

“Darling,” he said softly, reaching for her. She went into his arms, a smile on her lips when she bent her head to taste his kiss. She loved it when he called her darling.

He tightened his arms around her, rubbed his cheek against her hair. And she pushed aside all her doubts and fears and impossible dreams, and gave herself wholly to the man and the moment.

FOR AS LONG AS SEBASTIAN COULD REMEMBER, the Earl of Hendon had begun each day he was in London with an early-morning ride in Hyde Park.

That Monday morning dawned cool and damp, with a heavy mist that drifted through the trees and showed no sign of lifting. But Sebastian knew his father: by seven o’clock the Earl would be in the park, trotting his big gray gelding up and down the Row. And so that morning Sebastian mounted the dainty black Arabian mare he kept in London and turned her head toward the park.

“Don’t usually see you abroad until midafternoon,” groused Hendon when Sebastian brought his mare, Leila, into line beside the Earl’s big gray. “Or haven’t you made it to your bed yet?”

Sebastian smiled softly to himself, because the truth was that as much as Hendon grumbled, he was actually secretly proud of what he called his son’s wildness, just as he was proud of Sebastian’s skill with sword and pistol, and as a horseman. Drinking, womanizing, and even gambling were just the sort of manly activities a gentleman expected of his son, excesses of youth to be indulged—as long as they weren’t carried to an extreme. It was Sebastian’s love of books and music, his interest in the radical philosophies of the French and Germans, that Hendon had never been able to abide or understand.