Nicholas stood naked before her, his wet skin running with blood—so much blood, she couldn’t tell which was his, and which belonged to the twitching animal breathing its last on the carpet. Sara dropped the poker, and went into his arms.
“Your gown is torn!” he panted. “Tell me he hasn’t bitten you, Sara!”
“N-no . . . he hasn’t, Nicholas,” she murmured. His eyes were wild and terrible, searching her face—her body—again and again, as though he didn’t trust her.
“I’m just . . . overextended,” she murmured, forcing a smile. He crushed her close in a smothering embrace.
“Here,” said Mills, thrusting Nicholas’s clothes toward him. Shouts from the corridor and frantic pounding on the door could no longer be ignored. “There’ll be time enough for that later, my lord. Let me help you. This is not over yet.”
“I’ll do that in the dressing room,” said Nicholas, snatching the clothes. He led Sara to the lounge. “Have Dr. Breeden come at once,” he said to Mills. “Tell the others that we have shot the wolf that killed Nell. Bring them in and let them see—now, Mills! Before it dies, or they will likely see something else lying there!”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Sara begged, taking his measure. “There’s so much blood . . . !”
“It’s not all mine,” he murmured. “Dr. Breeden will tend me later. Do as Mills says, until I return.”
The next few minutes were a blur of gasps and sobs and milling voices, as Smythe, Mrs. Bromley, footmen, and all poked their heads in to view the fallen animal. In the midst of the inspection, it wasn’t Nicholas, but Nero who pranced through the dressing room door and a collective gasp filled the room. It was a brief appearance. Sara’s jaw fell slack, as he padded to her side, wagging his tail and offering her his paw. Then, trotting about the room, he stopped and nuzzled Mills’s hand before he bounded back through the dressing room door as though nothing untoward had occurred.
“There now, do you see?” said Mills, triumphant. “Two dogs, not one—and you lot had all condemned poor Nero. ‘Twas Nero who helped me put that creature down.”
Minutes later, dressed, the wounds in his arms and shoulders hidden beneath his shirt and waistcoat, his face splashed with water from the dressing room pitcher, Nicholas emerged and sent all but Mills and Dr. Breeden from the room.
The doctor knelt beside the wolf, probing its neck and body through the fur. “It’s dead,” he said, getting to his feet on stiff, unsteady legs.
“What now?” said Mills.
“We wait,” said the doctor.
“What are we waiting for?” Sara murmured.
Mills had stripped the bed, and made it with fresh linens. Nicholas lifted Sara off the lounge and laid her down, propped against what remained of the pillows. He tucked the fresh counterpane around her. Then sitting beside her, he gathered her close in his arms. They were strong and warm, and she went into them murmuring his name.
“We are waiting to see if he changes back,” he told her.
It wasn’t a long wait. All at once, the blood-matted fur began to melt away before their eyes. The barrel-chested wolf profile shifted, lengthened, and took another form—one that scarcely resembled the Alexander Mallory Sara remembered. He was thinner, wizened. Deep shadow stains wreathed his eye sockets. His festered arm was black and swollen with gangrene, and the mark left by the poker dented his brow.
“Oh, my God, Alex . . .” Nicholas moaned. Sara turned her eyes away from the anguish in his staring down at the barely recognizable remains of what had once been his steward and his friend, and Mills threw the soiled counterpane over the body.
“We cannot show this to the guards,” said Dr. Breeden, nodding toward the corpse. “How would we ever explain it?”
“We don’t have to,” said Nicholas, struggling for composure. “That’s why I had you bring the staff in, why Nero made an appearance. They all saw two animals, and they all think I sacked Alex long ago. As soon as you’re sure none of them are still lurking about, we’ll take him down the back stairs and bury him in the graveyard. I shan’t have Mills brought up on charges over this. Consider what has just occurred here a duel, because that is just exactly what it was.”
“The bullet didn’t kill him,” the doctor flashed. “It was the blow to the head that did it. That’s why he took so long to die. He hemorrhaged to death. Look at the body.” He threw off the counterpane. “The pistol ball is lodged in his hip, hardly a mortal wound. That’s twice my lady’s saved your life, my lord. I think it’s safe to say you owe her that life now . . . and all her heart’s desires.”
Nicholas folded Sara closer in his arms and she met the promise in his hooded gaze with breath suspended.
“Forever,” he murmured, sealing the vow with a lingering kiss, soulful and deep.
Sara’s heart quickened. Something was different, and she surrendered to the silken fire it ignited at her very core. It was a provocative foretaste of what was to come.
Epilogue
Spring came soft with rain again along the coast. Sara lay cocooned in her husband’s strong arms, listening to the ebb and flow of the sea on the strand below in the darkness before dawn. It was hard to believe nearly a year had passed since the post chaise carried her up the treacherous incline to Ravencliff. So much had happened since.
She no longer occupied the tapestry suite. Now, her rooms were situated on the newly renovated third floor, nearby the master suite, in apartments once occupied by Nicholas’s mother. Adjoining was a bright and cheerful chamber that had served as Nicholas’s nursery. Another baby occupied it now. Theodore Arthur Michael Pembroke Walraven, such a daunting name for a child only two months old. Sara smiled each time she thought of it. They called him Ted, a beautiful boy, with hair as black as a raven’s wing and eyes the color of blue seawater.
Nicholas reached for her breast. His lips were warm on hers. It was a brief, tantalizing kiss that promised so much more. He pulled her closer still, nuzzling against the hollow of her throat.
“You have given me happiness beyond belief,” he murmured. “Beyond imagining.”
“Not without a struggle,” she murmured, through a playful chuckle, and a hug to match.
“We still don’t know,” Nicholas said, clouding up. “And we won’t until he reaches puberty. . . .”
Sara laid a finger over his lips. “If needs must, we will deal with it together . . . and so will he, just as you have done, my love,” she said. “But there is one thing . . .”
“Yes?”
“Isn’t it time you introduced our son to Nero?” she said. “Either way, he needs to get to know him, don’t you think? And I miss him so.”
Nicholas laughed. “I still think you love that scruffy old wolf more than you love me,” he complained.
Sara smiled. “I think I did love him first . . . because of your stubbornness,” she said. “But you should be flattered that I fell in love with a part of you that all else shunned. I want our son to fall in love with that part also.”
“And so he shall,” said Nicholas. “But not tonight. There is so little left of it.” He reached for her breast again, and the lips that took hers now were hungry, searching, drawing her closer to the promise of ecstasy.
Sara opened to him happily. Then she took him deep inside her, riding the white-hot surges that sparked and flared and flamed between them . . . and that always would.
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