Page 63 of Bargaining with the Devil

“No. They don’t. If ’twasn’t Gráinne, ’twould as easily have been another girl. Someone else’s sister.”

Some might call it cold-blooded murder. She was glad for it. Glad for one less man in the world taking advantage of a girl’s naïvete.

“You did the right thing.” And she meant it.

“Killing a man, wasn’t part of the job?” There was a challenge in his voice.

She’d thrown what he did at him the night he’d been sharpening his knives and struck a nerve when he challenged her drinking whisky. “Except you didn’t do it without provocation.”

“Aye, ’twas that,” he said in a more level tone.

“Justified provocation. I’m glad you did it.”

He acknowledged her words with a slight smile.

“But I’m so terribly sorry about Mairéad.” She was also sorry that she’d been inadvertently pressing up against those wounds with her own actions ever since he’d been here. From the first moment he saw her, that first day when he came out to her in the bay.

“Me too,” he said so softly she might not have caught the words had she not been looking down at him.

Another tear spilled over. He reached up and caught it with his thumb. She wouldn’t voice it aloud just now, wouldn’t turn this moment away from his grief for Mairéad back onto herself, but she was so horribly, horribly sorry for everything.

“I’ve never told anyone that part,” he said after several quiet minutes. “About Lorcán’s death. I’m the only one, knew it was him. The only one besides him who knew she was carrying a babe. So I was the only one knew he was responsible for it. When he went missing just after Mairéad, no one made the connection. He’d been sly about it, courting her. Such as ’twas.”

“Was he never . . . found?”

“No. Nor will he be. I made sure of it.” Quinn looked directly up at her. Calm. Not hiding it, not apologizing for it. Stating facts. It sent a chill up her spine. Not because she was afraid of Quinn but because it was such a stark reminder of what else he was. She hadn’t . . . forgotten it, exactly, but it had been easy to mentally set it aside at times: the stolen moments in the hut on Heston Isle, the past few nights in her bed here.

But he had the eyes and hands of a killer even if they were also the eyes and hands of her lover.

She drew a deep breath, almost afraid to ask. “Why have you involved yourself with me? Beyond what sent you up here?”

He accepted the change in topic without question, turning his head to nuzzle at her thigh. “I like you, a stór. And so you don’t mistake my meaning, ’tisn’t just for this”—he pressed a kiss just above her knee, raising a frisson on her skin—“although ’tis part of it, sure.”

She wanted to melt into it, to let him slide his lips somewhere else and raise chills that had nothing to do with difficult emotions, but she also wanted an answer, especially after what he’d just shared about Mairéad’s death and the man he’d killed for it. “I mean it, Quinn, I—I told you I wasn’t a broken creature, but I’m also not . . . as I should be.”

He turned his head back to look at her. “Are any of us? ’Tis a rare person, I think, goes through their allotted years without life rewriting the story a bit.”

“I don’t much like who the story rewrote me as.”

“What life has thrown at you, well, ’tisn’t you. And you’re not done being rewritten, a mhuirnín. The story isn’t over.” He yawned. “And to answer the last, I don’t know what you were like before. I know what you are now. And I like you, even when your sharp edges poke me.” His smile was eclipsed by another yawn.

She let his last comment pass. “You’re tired.” She brushed fingers through his hair again.

“’Twas a busy morning out with Blackmore. I wish we had another man or two to help us.” He shifted, his lips tilting into his devil’s smile. “And the truth is, I’m not sleeping sound. Something had me up very early this morning, kept me from my rest.” His hand slid down her leg, finding her calf under her skirt.

She’d woken him in the dark hours before dawn by sliding one hand up his thigh and then higher still.

She ignored his fingers. “Sleep now then. It will be a little while yet before Isobel and Nathaniel return. Sleep here if you can.”

He smiled at her again before his eyes shut, but this time it wasn’t the devil’s smile. It was the one he’d given her waking up on Heston Isle.

And this time it made her throat hurt.

Chapter 20

Nathaniel was a quiet man. He was less guarded now than he was when he first showed up, seeking out Isobel a year and a half ago, but he was still a man of few words. He’d also been a master at interrogation once, so her sister said.

He’d turned it on her fully just once, in France, in the hours after he and his men got her free from Cuvelier and Compton. Although she’d willingly given him every scrap of information she had that might be of any help in his investigation. What came before her time in France truly hadn’t been relevant. Not most of it anyway. However deeply incisive Nathaniel’s questions at the time, they’d had only to do with information relevant to treason.