Page 24 of The Duke and the Darkness

Whoever the woman was, she was gone, once more slipping away like a ghost into the fog.

Who the hellwasshe? Because that dark beauty who was working to destroy him couldn’t possibly be the shy Peyton Chandler he remembered.Impossible.She was dead, for God’s sake! He’d seen the graves with his own eyes.

But apparently, the dead were rising, and he feared this ghost had returned from hell to take his soul.

Chapter Six

“Good morning.”

The soft female voice gently penetrated the cocoon of deep sleep engulfing him, but not enough to wake him completely.

“Devlin?”

With a grumble, he turned over. Sleep’s oblivion beckoned him back, a fuzzy euphoria heightened by the warm, soft bed around him.

“Devlin!”

A hard shove to his shoulder brought both eyes wide open. Then he promptly squeezed them shut again with a groan.

“Go away, Megs,” he muttered against the pillow.

But his younger sister Margaret wouldn’t be deterred and gave him a good, long shake. “Wake up.”

“No.”

She gave an aggravated huff, and from behind his closed eyelids, Devlin could imagine her sternly crossing her arms as she’d done since she was a child whenever she didn’t get her way. Which was hardly ever, considering how much he doted on her and his youngest sister Theodora.

“It’s almost ten,” she reported.

He groaned. Less than four hours of sleep.

Haunted by ghosts last night, he’d spent the first half of the evening being rebuked by the Earl of Northrop and apologizingprofusely to Lady Catharine and the rest of it hunting down his contacts in St Giles and Seven Dials to find out anything he could about the Chandler family. But he’d learned nothing past the night of the attack. They were all dead and buried in Bayswater. He’d made a point of stopping by the graveyard himself just before dawn. Short of taking a shovel to the grave, there was no way to prove the mysterious woman who reminded him so much of Peyton Chandler wasn’t her, and he hadn’t had nearly enough sleep to seriously consider doing that.

He ordered in a grumble, “Go away.”

“No.”

The bedroom drapes flung open. Bright sunlight streamed into the room like a beacon.

He cursed and sat up so quickly that he nearly shot out of bed. With one hand covering his eyes, he gestured wildly with the other for her to close the drapes. But it was too late. A pounding ache reverberated through his skull like the strike of a hammer on iron, so painful he winced.

Margaret stood in front of the window, arms crossed and refusing to put him out of his misery by closing the curtains.

“Good God!” He squinted and turned his head away, but even half-awake and hurting, he instinctively kept his bare back from her sight. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“I am trying to wake you.”

“You’ve succeeded.” With an angry scowl, he flopped back down and threw the counterpane over his head. “Now go away and let me sleep in peace.”

“No.” The mattress sank as she plopped down beside him. Then she grabbed the blanket and yanked it down, exposing his eyes to the brutal sunlight. “You were out all last night.”

“I was. Which is why I need rest.” As soon as possible, he planned on proposing a bill in the House of Lords to make waking a man before noon a hanging offense. After all,Parliament might as well be good for something. “Go away so I can go back to sleep.”

For more than a few hours, too. Because he planned on spending tonight once again tracking down that woman who reminded him so much of Peyton Chandler but who couldn’t possibly be her. No, this woman was someone else. Someone who had been hired to go after him simply because she bore a passing resemblance to the dead girl whose death hung over his head.

The question was no longer who she was but who had hired her, and he would need to have his wits about him when he found her.

When he put the covers back over his head, only for her to pull them away again, he gave up, and simply squeezed his eyes shut.