With a sudden gasp, she recalled Dmitri. She pulled out of Seb’s arms and surged toward the corner where he’d fallen, expecting to find him dead on the floor. But with a low groan, he pushed himself to his feet. Anya hurled herself into his arms.
“Anya!” Dmitri hugged her back as tightly as a bear.
Words came pouring out of her mouth in gasping, halting jerks as she tried to understand the incomprehensible. “Itisyou! You’re not dead? How is this possible? Oh, thank God, you’re here! You’re here.”
Dmitri buried his face against her shoulder then pulled back, smoothing her hair away from her damp face withshaking hands. He gazed at her, his eyes roving over her features as if greedy for the sight of her, then he pressed a hard kiss to her forehead.
“I always knew I’d find you! They said you were dead, in Paris, but I knew you were too stubborn for that.” His voice was a hoarse croak. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you? Months and months! Why didn’t you come back to St. Petersburg? Where have you been all this time?”
Both of them were talking at once, each one staring at the other as if afraid they might disappear again, each one cataloguing the changes a year of separation had wrought.
Anya felt light-headed, unreal, as if she were in some fantastical dream from which she never wanted to wake. She could scarcely draw a breath around the ball of incredulous joy welling in her chest. “What happened to you? I thought you’d been killed at Waterloo.”
He gave a watery laugh. “Almost. Bonaparte gave it a bloody good try. As did Petrov.”
He lifted his left arm so the wide sleeve of the priest’s robes slid down to his elbow and casually inspected his wrist. A bloom of red stained his shirtsleeve. Anya’s heart almost stopped.
“You’re bleeding! He hit you!”
Dmitri shrugged and squeezed her with his free arm. “He grazed me when he fired wide, that’s all. It would have been my head if you hadn’t distracted him, clever girl.”
Anya felt faint at how easily her impulsive move could have backfired, but a noise from behind them interrupted her self-recrimination. Elizaveta stood in the doorway, her eyes brimming with tears and her smile wide, despite her split lip. Wolff, Harland, and Wylde all wore identical expressions of fascinated curiosity.
Well, Anya amended silently, Harland and Wylde looked curious. Wolff looked like he wanted to tear Dmitri limb from limb. He glared at her brother’s arm, which was still around her waist, and lifted his brows in haughty inquiry.
“And who on God’s green earth areyou, sir?”
Chapter 37.
It took everything Seb had not to stride across the cabin, pry Anya from the handsome stranger’s arms, and carry her off into the night. He wanted to take her back to the Tricorn, strip her naked, and inspect every inch of her to convince himself that she’d come to no serious harm.
God, the sight of Petrov’s gun to her head had almost stopped his heart. And when the fake priest—whoever he was—had stepped between himself and Petrov, blocking any chance of a clear shot, he’d almost pulled the trigger anyway and risked going through some nonvital part of the man on the off chance the bullet would have enough velocity to hit Petrov too.
If the Russian hadn’t been holding Anya so closely, he would have done it. Thank God she’d created a diversion and given him a clean shot straight to Petrov’s heart.
Anya wiped her eyes and stepped toward him. She looked dazed, but so happy she was almost glowing.
“Oh, my goodness. I never thought I’d get to make this particular introduction, but Sebastien, I mean,Lord Mowbray, this is my brother. Prince Dmitri Alexei Denisov.”
Seb’s temper ratcheted down a notch. Brother. Of course. He hadn’t caught the connection amid all that frenetic Russian.
He couldn’t throw the bastard overboard after all.
Bollocks.
The man held out his hand, and Seb reached out and grasped it, noting the subtle similarities between the two of them. Same blue eyes, the same wide cheekbones. There was a definite family resemblance.
A whole raft of conflicting emotions battered at his chest. Relief that Anya was safe mingled with pleasure on her behalf because the beloved brother she’d thought was dead had, by some miracle, been restored to her.
Hot on the heels of those sensations, however, came a crushing wave of defeat. With her brother alive, she was no longer unprotected. Why would she needhim?
Seb wanted to hit something again. He glanced down at the lifeless body of Vasili Petrov and could summon not an ounce of remorse for the fact that he’d just killed the man. He would have been tried and hung as a traitor, anyway. He’d just done the Tsar a favor and saved him the embarrassment of a publicly damaging court case. No doubt Sir Nathaniel at Bow Street and Lord Castlereagh at the Foreign Office would approve of such an expedient outcome to their investigation.
The real priest, a doddery old fellow with a wispy, greying beard, shuffled forward and knelt by Petrov’s side, presumably in the hope of administering last rites, but there was no chance of that. Petrov had been dead before he’d hit the ground.
A shot to the heart had been too quick, considering the torment he’d inflicted on Anya, Seb thought savagely. If he’d had the chance, he would have made surethe bastard suffered long and painfully for his actions. It was a shame he couldn’t kill him all over again. Still, the threat to Anya had been eliminated, which was what he’d set out to achieve.
God, this was the second time she’d seen him kill. First, those kidnappers back at Hounslow, and now Petrov. She must be utterly repulsed by him. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but Alex beat him to it.
