Devil's Daughter (The Ravenels #5)(39)

“He’s a handsome, elegant fiend who bites his wife’s neck every night.”

His brow cleared. “Oh, that’s all right, then.”

“But he never drinks enough of her blood to kill her,” Evie continued.

“I see. He keeps her conveniently on tap.”

“Yes, but he loves her. You make her sound like a cask with a spigot. It’s not as if he wants to do it, but he—did you just ask something?”

“I asked if you can undress any faster.”

Evie huffed with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. “No, I can’t. There are too many b-buttons, and they’re very small.”

“What a pity. Because in thirty seconds, I’m going to rip away whatever clothing you have left.”

Evie knew full well not to take the threat lightly—he’d done it before, on more than one occasion. “Sebastian, no. I like this dress.”

Her husband’s eyes glinted with devilish humor as he watched her increasingly frantic efforts. “No dress is as beautiful as your naked skin. All those sweet freckles scattered over you, like a thousand tiny angel kisses . . . you have twenty seconds left, by the way.”

“You don’t even h-have a clock,” she complained.

“I’m counting by heartbeats. You’d better hurry, love.”

Evie glanced anxiously down at the row of pearl buttons, which seemed to have multiplied. With a defeated sigh, she dropped her arms to her sides. “Just go on and rip it off,” she mumbled.

She heard his silky laugh, and a sluice of water. He stood with streams runneling over the sleek, muscled contours of his body, and Evie gasped as she was pulled into a wet, steaming embrace.

His amused voice curled inside the sensitive shell of her ear. “My poor little put-upon wife. Let me help you. As you may recall, I have a way with buttons . . .”



Later, as Evie lay beside him, deeply relaxed and still tingling in the aftermath of pleasure, she said drowsily, “Phoebe told me about your conversation during the walk back to the house.”

Sebastian was slow to reply, his lips and hands still drifting over her gently. “What did she say?”

“She was unhappy about your opinion of Edward Larson.”

“No more unhappy than I, when I learned he’d broached the subject of marriage with her. Did you know about that?”

“I thought he might have. I wasn’t certain.”

Propping himself up on one elbow, Sebastian looked down at her with a frown. “God spare me from having to call another Larson ‘son-in-law.’”

“But you cared very much for Henry,” Evie said, surprised by the comment.

“Like a son,” he agreed. “However, that never blinded me to the fact that he was far from Phoebe’s ideal partner. There was no balance between them. His force of will never came close to matching hers. To Henry, Phoebe was as much a mother as a wife. I only consented to the match because Phoebe was too bullheaded to consider anyone else. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, she would have Henry or no one.”

Evie played with the light mat of his chest hair. “Whatever Henry’s faults, Phoebe always knew he belonged to her alone. That was worth any sacrifice. She wanted a man whose capacity for love was unqualified.”

“Does she claim to find the same capacity in that spineless prig Larson?”

“I don’t believe so. But her purposes for marriage are different this time.”

“Whatever her purposes, I won’t have my grandsons raised by an invertebrate.’

“Sebastian,” she chided softly, although her lips quivered with amusement.

“I mean for her to partner with Weston Ravenel. A healthy young buck with sharp wits and a full supply of manly vigor. He’ll do her much good.”

“Let’s allow Phoebe to decide if she wants him,” Evie suggested.

“She had better decide soon, or Westcliff will snap him up for one of his daughters.”

This was a side of Sebastian—high-handed to the verge of being autocratic—that almost inevitably developed in men of vast wealth and power. Evie had always been careful to curb such tendencies in her husband, occasionally reminding him that he was, after, a mere mortal who had to respect other people’s rights to make their own decisions. He would counter with something like, “Not when they’re obviously wrong,” and she would reply, “Even then,” and eventually he would relent after making a great many caustic observations about the idiocy of people who dared to disagree with him. The fact that he was so often right made Evie’s position difficult, but still, she never backed down.

“I like Mr. Ravenel too,” Evie murmured, “but there’s much about his background we don’t know.”

“Oh, I know everything about him,” Sebastian said with casual arrogance.

Knowing her husband, Evie thought ruefully, he’d read detailed reports on every member of the Ravenel family. “It’s not a given that he and Phoebe are attracted to each other.”

“You didn’t see them together this morning.”

“Sebastian, please don’t meddle.”

“I, meddle?” His brows lifted, and he looked positively indignant. “Evie, what can you be thinking?”