Devil Takes A Bride (43 page)

Quint stopped, his chest heaving from his sprint, as a beautiful little girl with big blue eyes and dark curls rushed toward Ginny.

“Sorscha, no!” Ginny shrieked. “Get out of here!”

“Ginny?” Quint queried, his voice turning strange.

Quint heard Carstairs walking up cautiously behind him. “Well, well, who have we here?” the earl murmured.

Ginny whirled around, hiding the child behind her. “Leave her alone. She has nothing to do with this. Go, Sorscha. Now!”

The girl clung to her. “I won't leave you, Mama! You can't make me.”

Quint stared at the child, his eyes glazing over. His memory swam. That last night they'd had together…

“Is she—mine?” he choked out, barely able to find his voice.

“Yes,” Ginny answered in a shaky voice. “Yes, Quint. She's yours. Don't let Carstairs hurt her.”

Quint didn't seem to hear. Staring at the little girl, the life he had not chosen flashed before his eyes. “Ginny, she's so beautiful.”

At his words, the girl made a small sound of anger and hid her face against Ginny's womanly form.

“Let me see you, sweeting. She's shy? What is your name?” The gentleness in Quint's voice came out foreign, jerky.

Ginny was insistent. “Let her go, Quentin. I will come with you, I swear. Just let Sorscha go.”

He looked at her in hurt. “Do you think I would harm my own child? Come here, little one. I am your papa.”

“The brat's not yours, Quint.”

“What?” He glanced over in confusion at Carstairs, who had spoken harshly.

“Look at her. Look closely.” The way Carstairs studied the girl sent a chill of foreboding down Quint's spine.

“W-what do you mean?” he asked uncertainly.

“It's just another of Ginny's desperate tricks. If she had borne you a child, it would be twelve years old. This girl looks to be about sixteen.” Then Carstairs paused, taking a few slow steps toward the pair. “I know this child. I've heard her screaming in my head for twelve long years.”

Sorscha suddenly lifted her head from the woman's shoulder, her blue eyes locking with the earl's with a sudden flare of recognition. “You.”

Quint looked at him, paling. “You don't mean—”

“The Strathmore brat. Ginny must have rescued her from the fire and raised her all these years. Sorry, Lady Sarah. Nothing personal,” he said, bringing up his pistol. “Yet again it is merely my unhappy duty to get rid of the evidence.”

“No!” Quint saw Ginny reach for something in her pocket, knocking the girl behind her body: His reaction was too slow.

Boom!

“Mama!” The girl's scream pierced the air, but Quint saw no blood on her clothing.

Ginny fell.

Quint stared, immobile, too stunned to breathe even as Miss Carlisle came rushing up the steps.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Carstairs calmly starting to reload.

The roar that came out of Quint started as a growl somewhere down in his solar plexus. The next thing he knew, he was seizing Carstairs, slamming him with all his might against the wall so that the plaster dented in and Carstairs grimaced with pain.

“Now, Quint—”

“I'll kill you!”

“I was aiming for the girl! She jumped in the way! Look, there's Miss Carlisle!” Carstairs pointed down the hallway, but Quint shook his head, his eyes narrowed in disgust. Did Carstairs think him such a beef-brained oaf that he would fall for a schoolyard trick?

“I am so
sick
of you!” Quint hauled back his mighty fist and smashed Carstairs's perfect nose, breaking it with one blow. God, he'd been wanting to do that for years!

Lizzie had run inside mere seconds behind Sorscha, but had stopped at the landing where the back stairs turned when she had heard Mary's quick-thinking attempt in the corridor above, trying to pass Sorscha off as Quint's daughter in order to buy the girl's safety. She had stayed hidden, knowing that if she showed herself, all hell would break loose and Mary's ploy would fail.

Now that Quint and Carstairs were turning on each other, however, she rushed into the corridor. Her face went ashen as she took in the sight of her fallen ally and hysterical charge.

Lizzie crouched down beside Mary, overwhelmed and fighting wild panic at the blood seeping out of the woman's side. She swallowed hard, but her voice came out shakily. “I'm so sorry, Mary. She heard the shot and got away from me.”

Mary managed a weak shake of her head. “It's all right. Just—keep her safe. Go—now, I beg you. Take this.” Furtively, Mary pressed her pistol into Lizzie's hands. “I never got to—use it. The bullet is still in it.”

Forgetting her sprained wrist again, Lizzie automatically took it in her right hand, then winced.
Wonderful,
she thought in frustration. Unlike her sporting friend, Lady Jacinda, Lizzie had never fired a gun in her life, and now when her life depended on it, she would have to do so using her left hand.

She glanced down the hallway at Carstairs trying to ward off Quint's next titanic punch, then rose. “Come, Sorscha. Any minute now, they'll be done with each other and they'll come after us.”

“Mama, it's all my fault. I'm so sorry! Why couldn't I listen?”

“It's all right, Sorscha,” Mary forced out with agonized effort, cupping her face. “I love you, darlin'—and you should know that what Lord Carstairs said is true. There is—noble blood in your veins. I should have told you…years ago. Forgive me. That's why I brought you to London. To restore you to your proper place in the world.”

“I don't care about that. I just care about you! Mama, don't leave me!”

“Miss Carlisle,” Mary said, sending her an imploring look heavy with pain.

Lizzie nodded and gathered up the weeping teenager. “Sorscha, come now!”

As Quint split Carstairs's cheek open with his sledgehammer fist, Lizzie struggled to drag Sorscha away though the girl's grief nigh broke her heart.

“No!” Sorscha wailed. “I want to stay with her!”

“You'll die! Listen to me!” Lizzie gripped her shoulders and shook her slightly, staring hard into Sorscha's eyes. “She fell to save you. If they get you, her sacrifice will have been in vain. Is that what you want?”

Sorscha absorbed this, her chin trembling, face red from crying. Forcing back her sobs, she took one last, longing gaze at Mary, who lay still now in a pool of blood and black silk. With a shattered look, she allowed Lizzie to pull her away once more.

 

Mary smiled with faint satisfaction when Quint's famed right hook knocked Carstairs out cold. The brute had finally come in use for something, after all.

He left the unconscious earl in a most unfashionably disheveled heap on the floor and ran to her.

She held up a feeble hand to stop him from going after the other two. “Stay with me,” she whispered. “Quentin, hold me.”

He fell to his knees beside her, staring at her in misery. “Oh, my love, I've ruined you,” he groaned, and gathered her tenderly into his arms. “Ginny.”

She shuddered with the pain of her wound, feeling consciousness slipping away from her. He was kissing her hair, running his thick, tough fingers down her scarred cheek. She was too weak to turn away from his touch.

“Forgive me, my darling. Can you ever forgive me?”

“Quentin, my love,” she murmured just before she blacked out, “go to hell.”

 

Johnny had proved surprisingly truculent, but Dev subdued him at about the same moment the second shot had gone off somewhere upstairs. He had heard a girlish scream and thought it must be some guest of the hotel, but he had no doubt that Quint and Carstairs were the cause.

As he pinned Johnny to the grimy flagstones of the pub, a knee in his back, the old fellows in the tavern hurried over with some sturdy hempen twine. They bound Johnny's hands behind his back while the landlord shoved his dirty dishrag into Johnny's mouth to keep him from calling out for his accomplices.

Gesturing at the wide-eyed old fellows in the pub for silence, his finger over his lips, Dev placed the fowling-piece in the landlord's hands. “If he moves, shoot him,” he ordered in a low tone.

“Let them mind 'im. I'll get them other ones with you,” the big man grunted, nodding toward the stairs.

Dev shook his head with cold murder in his eyes. “They're mine.”

Satisfied that everything in the taproom was in order, he glided up the stairs as soft as a shadow, taking them two at a time. As he neared the top of the stairs, he noticed that the ruckus with Mortimer had ended.

Sheathing his knife in favor of his pistol, he listened carefully, his back to the wall of the stairwell. Hearing nothing, he emerged from the shadows, pivoting into the upper hallway with the gun cocked and level in his grasp.

The corridor was empty, the dirty lanterns shining dully. Scanning the long row of guest rooms as he moved forward, step by slow, wary step, he wondered about the chair stuck under one doorknob, but passed the chamber for now.

Progressing in this manner, he came to the corner of the hallway. An odd sound reached his ears, a low, mournful crooning. His heartbeat quickened. Gathering himself, he flashed around the corner, legs planted wide in target-shooting stance, and beheld a very strange sight.

He scanned the hallway, narrowing his eyes in skeptical confusion. Carstairs sprawled in a heap against the baseboards, dead or perhaps only unconscious. His back to Dev, Quint was crouched down cradling the limp, black-clad body of a woman in his arms, rocking her slightly.

Ginny Highgate, Dev presumed. He recognized her widow's weeds as those of the woman who had been following him weeks ago. As he sized up the situation, he did not stop to wonder why she had been so interested in watching him; he merely noted in a bitter, final irony that the answers he had chased for so long had just expired with her last breath.

 

“Wake up, Ginny. Stay with me. Oh, Ginny, we can be together now, like we once were,” Quint whispered, but it was no use.

Her eyes fluttered closed, and he could not be certain whether she still lived or not. Resting her gently on the floor, he pressed his shaking fingertips to her throat, desperately feeling for the pulse.

His guilt was too damning. In this awful moment, there was no way to escape the truth. He had believed Carstairs's lie all those years ago when he should have believed Ginny. She had protested her innocence, denying Carstairs's allegation that she had cheated on Quint, trying to seduce his rich, handsome friend. Why should he not have believed it? Quint knew he was no prize. Carstairs was richer than he, smarter than he, and had always possessed a suave glamour that Quint could never hope to achieve. Carstairs said he had found her waiting for him in his bed…all those years ago. Before Quint the country bumpkin finally comprehended that the urbane Carstairs had no real interest in women.

The damage had already been done, and Quint did not know how he had lived with it all these awful, empty years. He had raped the only woman he had ever loved, had shot an innocent, unarmed man in his wrath, and had helped to burn alive a building full of people—all for a lie. If he were half the man Dev's father had been, the stranger he had slain in a moment's fit of rage, he would have turned himself in, or at the very least, snuffed himself out years ago.

Instead, with the heart rotting inside him, Quint had done his best to carry his crime in secret, living hard and fast, surrounding himself with rowdy mates, drinking and whoring like a sailor, cheerfully battering one opponent after another at the boxing studio, always looking for something innocent to ease his pain because, down deep, he knew he was one of the damned. For more than a decade, he had lived on the edge, half-wishing for death.

He did not know how near it was now.

 

Dev had a clean shot, but though his stare bored into Quint's broad back, he lowered his pistol.
Afraid not, old boy. You're not getting off so easily.
He craved more satisfaction of the man than one fleeting squeeze of the trigger could provide. Besides, he had never shot a man in the back in his life and did not intend to lower himself by doing so now.

With brooding hatred flickering in his eyes, Dev holstered his gun and unsheathed his knife, then alerted Quint of his presence by striking the wall with his blade.

Quint tensed, jarred by the sound. Then a low, deadly voice spoke from a few yards behind him: “You killed my father. It was you. Wasn't it.”

Strathmore.
Holding very still, Quint exhaled slowly. It seemed the time had come. Suicide by Strathmore. The viscount was sure to be obliging.

Quint's fighting anger came easily. One look at Ginny lying motionless was all it took to make his eyes flare with dangerous wrath.

“Get up,” Strathmore ordered.

Quint rose stiffly to his feet. “You bested Torquil?” he asked, turning around.

“Gutted him, actually,” the viscount said, his cheek smeared with Torquil's blood. “Just as I shall do to you.”

“I don't advise trying it, old boy.” Quint flexed his fists, cracking his knuckles in warning. “I've beaten you before.”

“Quentin, you fool.” Dev's eyes burned strangely, ice reflecting fire. “I
let
you win.”

Quint pulled out his dagger. The man gave him no other choice. “I'm sorry about your father. He should have known better than to insert himself into the midst of a lover's quarrel.”

“Am I supposed to accept your apology?”

“No,” Quint answered after a moment.

Dev's glance flicked to Ginny lying behind him on the floor. “You couldn't be happy till you had finished the job, eh?”

“I didn't shoot her. Carstairs did.” Quint shook his head, bringing his knife up in fighting stance. “I'm warning you, Strathmore, keep your distance. Carstairs has slain the only woman I've ever loved. I've got nothing left to lose.”