Page 5 of The Forsaken

Shoving the hair from her eyes, Andromena dropped onto her knees beside the viscount.

She gripped his heavy shoulder, her voice shaking. “You can’t lie down here, not like this. Please, get up.”

Confound it all!

She lowered herself onto her haunches beside him. Taking her lacy satin glove between her teeth, she fought in vain to free her fingers. Panic coiled tight in her stomach.

With a final, desperate tug, she got the covering off.

A hiss escaped her lips and hung in an eerie break in the howling winter wind.

“Kerr,” she whispered. And yet, at the same time, it wasn’t. Only three-quarters of the stranger’s face bore any recognition of the charming gentleman who’d come to supper once at Aunt Catherine’s. The other…a stranger.

It was as if God fashioned a masterpiece, then decided no mortal should possess such perfection, and had sabotaged his greatest work. Taking a blade to the right side of his face, He marred the pristine flesh with deep, pitted scars.

His face was startling. At first glance, it was jarring and, by conventional standards, ugly. But as a connoisseur of the beautiful, Andromena knew there was nothing conventional when it came to beauty. This warrior, marked with a rugged gravity to his features, stood as proof of that. The scars pitting him made him undeniably, strikingly beautiful.

Andromena played with her head’s positioning to find the artist’s light upon him, and took in the no longer straight line of his Greco-Roman nose—broken, at some point. The hollowing under his cheekbones and the jut of his angular jaw lent him a defiance, even in silent stillness. The bold slash of his lips set his face into a scowl at odds with the sunshiny gentleman who’d sketched her a bow and placed a kiss atop her hand.

She had never painted the human form. People were vapid—particularly members of the ton—especially members of the ton. Young ladies all in white. All the men in cravats, tailcoats, and trousers from Schweitzer and Davidson with shoes by Hoby.

But this man made her regret not trying her hand at the human form. Not the Impeccably Handsome Lord Kerr of the past, but the Lord Kerr of the present. This battle-scarred version felt more human than the god-like figure who’d captivated every McQuoid—including prim Aunt Catherine.

Her throat clutched. Beautiful though he may be—and he was, very much so—the pain he’d endured to bear such marks.

Swallowing around a flood of emotion, she returned her stare to his and gasped.

Lord Kerr stared at her. Glared, more like. Darkly. Terrifyingly. With the slight narrowing of his eyes, he’d become the wolf who devoured lasses in the woods.

“Do you have something to say?” he jeered.

Surrounded by male kin of all ages, she learned early on that men were proud creatures, stubbornly and bothersomely so.

Wind blew about them; her hair tangling with his face. “Indeed. I-I thought you’d gone and gotten yourself killed—eep!”

The viscount wrenched her down hard against him. Emitting a breathless gasp, Andromena tried to scramble out of his intimate embrace, but he anchored her with an arm around her waist, dragging her down flush against the heavy, unyielding wall of his chest.

She stared into the dark, dangerous, enigmatic pools of dark that sucked her in and threatened her very soul…

Andromena would cut off her arm before confessing the little puffs of white she spurted between her trembling lips were on account of him. Lord Kerr’s was the hardest, tallest body she had ever been near…and from a family of seagoing relatives who brought seafaring non-relatives about, she knew quite a lot of hardest, tallest bodies. This man was the hardest, biggest, and warmest—even through the multiple layers of their garments. Unlike the bulky, thickly muscled frame of Meghan’s husband-to-be, Hartwell, this man was chiseled from rock, his muscles dense and knotted.

He flashed a dangerous smirk. “Care for a kiss, darling?”

“You’re accustomed to giving them out, I gather.”

“Aye, darling.” He softened his rakish truth by rubbing more warmth into her no longer chilled body.

“I prefer the kisses of men who aren’t so free with their affection.”

She would never be swayed by a scoundrel like Lord Kerr. She also knew if she told herself this, she might make it true.

The ease with which he shifted from a snarling beast to a charming Corinthian was clearly a survival mechanism—and no doubt the reason those women fell for him, as she found herself just as helpless.

She had the irrational urge to kick something or someone. She told herself this was only because no lady liked being lumped in with a crowd of ninnies who didn’t know him the way she did.

Kerr’s deep laugh rumbled through her.

Then, the scoundrel did the worst, most wonderful thing. He held her more closely and rubbed warmth into her. Each deep caress stole her breath. “How fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I; And I will love thee still, my dear, Till all the seas gang dry. Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt with the sun…”