Moonlight Scandals by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Rosie’s stomach took a tumble as a fine shiver skated across her shoulder blades. “Yeah. I think we just established that. I’m the woman who was super nice to you yesterday and brought you peonies.”

He stepped forward. “You’re also the woman who introduced Nikki to Ross Haid.”

Crap! That was true.

Damn it, if and when she saw Ross Haid again, she was going to straight up sucker punch the man in the throat.

She’d met Ross around two years ago, when he was doing a fluff piece on French Quarter ghost tours. He’d sought her out to do an interview, and they’d hit it off since she appreciated his quick wittiness and he found her snark humorous. She never in a million years would’ve thought he’d use their friendship in the way he did.

“A man who happens to be a journalist hell-bent on destroying my family.” Somehow, Devlin was even closer without her realizing it. “So, if you’re wondering if I for one second believe that you didn’t know who I was yesterday, you’d be mistaken.”

Rosie felt warmth swamp her face as she struggled to keep her voice low so they weren’t overheard. “Okay, let’s get a few things straight. I didn’t know Ross wanted to meet Nikki because of her working for your family or her involvement with Gabe. I would never do that to my friend.”

He said nothing as he tilted his head.

“Ross also knows better than to come anywhere near me now, because I was scarily angry when I learned that he used me to get to Nikki and you don’t want to see me scarily angry,” she said, stepping toward him. “And, for the last time, I did not know who you were until I saw you standing in front of the de Vincent tomb.”

Devlin was now so close that she caught the scent of his cologne. It was a crisp citrus scent mixed with the woodsy aroma of teak. In other words, he smelled really, really good and if he weren’t such a douche canoe, her lady parts would’ve appreciated the cologne.

There was a slight curve to one side of his lips. A smirk. “There’s something you need to know about me.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I need to know about you.” She unfolded her arms.

He let out a dry, sardonic sound that wasn’t much of a laugh. “Well, you need to know that I know everything and if I come across something I don’t, I find out. So, of course, I learned that Ross tried to go through Nikki to get to my family. It took nothing to discover that one Rosie Herpin was the connection between them. It was only your name I was given.”

Okay. That was officially creepy. The need to point out that his ego was about the size of Lake Pontchartrain faded. “Given by whom?”

He ignored that question as he dipped his chin a fraction of an inch. “I should’ve made sure that I knew what you looked like. That was my mistake, but now I know.”

“Who gave you my name?” she demanded.

Devlin smiled at her then, and it was a tight, cold one. “If you ever do anything again that jeopardizes my family, and that includes Nikki, you won’t just regret it. Do you understand me?”

That smile and those words were encased in ice and they should’ve scared her, but all they did was seriously piss her off. “Are you seriously standing in my house and threatening me?”

His chin came down even farther, lining their mouths up like they were lovers. “I do believe we’ve already established that this is not a house but an apartment.”

Rosie wasn’t quite sure what tipped her over the edge, leaving bitch-tigress mode behind and going straight into slap-a-bitch mode. Could’ve been the insinuation that she would somehow put Nikki in harm’s way or it could’ve been the fact that he had the gall to threaten her. Hell, it could’ve been his mere presence at this point that did it.

Either way, Rosie lifted her hand without thinking. She wasn’t going to hit him, even though that would give her enough satisfaction that therapists across the nation would be concerned. She lifted her hand to push him back.

But that didn’t happen.

Devlin had the reflexes of a damn cat, catching her wrist before she even had the joy of making contact. She gasped out of surprise and his eyes narrowed into thin slits. “Were you going to hit me?”

“No,” she seethed, wishing her eyes could shoot out death rays.

“That’s not how it appears to me,” he said, his voice deadly soft.

“Well, I have a feeling a lot of things don’t appear as they really are to you,” she shot back, tugging on her arm, but he didn’t let go. “I was going to push you since, you know, you’re in my personal space.”

“I’m not the one who got in your space.” A muscle flexed along his jaw. “You got in mine.”

Okay, that was kind of true.

“There’s something else you need to know.” He tugged on her arm, and before Rosie could react, her chest was suddenly flush against his. The contact was jarring, sending a riot of sensations through her. “I don’t make threats. I make promises.”

She drew in a deep breath and immediately regretted it, because it pushed her chest against his even more, and . . . God, her stomach was dropping and twisting in ways that were not unpleasant. She felt her nipples harden, and started praying that he couldn’t feel them through the incredibly thin and worn shirt she wore and the lacy, nearly nonexistent bralette she’d slept in.

She didn’t back down, though. “I don’t think you know how to use words correctly, because that, yet again, sounded an awful lot like a threat.”

“Does it?” he asked, and his voice seemed deeper, rougher. His eyes took on a sudden, hooded quality. “If it was a threat, it doesn’t seem to be working.”

“Why is that?”

Devlin shifted just the slightest, and the next breath Rosie took lodged in her throat. She felt him against her stomach, thick and hard, and unless he had something weird in the front of his pants, he was totally turned on.

So was she.

And they were both apparently freaks, because she’d just tried to shove him and he had just threatened her, but here they were, utterly aroused, and there was a really good chance she needed to find a therapist stat.

Those thick lashes lifted and his eyes pierced hers. It was like he waited for her to say something or to pull away, but she did nothing but hold his stare as a lick of heat curled low in her stomach.

Devlin’s gaze lowered and those full lips parted. “I think it’s doing something entirely different.”

It was. For a multitude of wrong reasons, it was, and Rosie bit down on her lower lip as her hips shifted of their own accord.

“Are we going to pretend like you don’t feel me?” he asked, rather calmly.

“Yes,” she snapped.

“How’s that working out for you?”

“Just great.” The moment those words came out of her mouth, she realized how ridiculous they sounded.

Devlin’s lips twitched, and she just wanted him to—

Footsteps sounded from her bedroom, and both of them reacted at once. Devlin let go of her wrist as if her skin scalded him, and Rosie turned into a kangaroo, because she jumped back a good foot.

The curtains parted, rattling as the beads knocked off one another. She hoped she looked somewhat normal as Gabe and Nikki entered the room and not like she had just been seconds away from rubbing all over Devlin like a cat that was not only in heat but one that also had rabies.

Gabe had his arm tight around Nikki’s shoulders and he didn’t seem at all surprised that Devlin was still there, but the moment she saw Nikki, she wasn’t thinking about whatever the hell had happened between her and Devlin. A little bit of shame rose in Rosie. While she’d been out here arguing and whatever with Devlin, Nikki had been in there, in pain and living a nightmare that had come to life.

Rosie cringed. Somehow the bruises looked even worse now. She hurried from where she stood.“Hey, honey. How are you feeling?”

Nikki tried to smile, but it was more of a grimace. “Better. I’m feeling better.”

“That’s good.” She glanced at Gabe as she felt Devlin move closer to them.

“I’m going to Gabe’s,” Nikki said, and if her face wasn’t so messed up at the moment, Rosie knew she’d see a blush.

“Okay. Is there anything I can do?”

“You’ve already done enough,” Nikki replied.

“Thank you for getting Nikki this morning,” Gabe chimed in.

“I haven’t done nearly enough, so there’s no need to thank me.” Rosie leaned in, carefully kissing the one unmarred spot on Nikki’s cheek. “Text me later, okay? When you feel up to it?”

“Will do.”

Rosie then turned to Gabe and met his stare. “Take care of my girl.”

“Always” came Gabe’s response.

She held his gaze for a moment, long enough for him to understand she would, without a doubt, find a voodoo priestess to hex him if he did Nikki wrong again.

A slow, small smile tugged at Gabe’s lips and then he turned, guiding Nikki to the door. Devlin was already there, opening it for them. Rosie trailed behind.

Devlin stepped out into the hall as Rosie gripped the side of the door. He turned and looked at her, opening his mouth.

“All the gossip magazines have it wrong,” she said, meeting his blue-green eyes. “They call you the Devil, but they should call you the Dickhead.”

And with that, she slammed the door shut in Devlin de Vincent’s face.

“Alive or dead?” There was a pause. “Or would you rather the subject simply disappears?”

Seated in the dimly lit private booth of the Red Stallion Sunday afternoon, Devlin de Vincent was currently deciding if someone lived, died . . . or, as Archie Carr had succinctly put it, simply disappeared.

Frankly, he wanted the subject dead and erased.

That would make him smile, but as he dragged his finger along the rim of the heavy glass, he knew he couldn’t let his personal feelings involving this person get in the way. He had questions and he needed answers.

“Alive,” he answered.

“That’ll cost more.”

Strange how taking a life would cost less, but then again, keeping someone alive posed risks. Dev understood that. “Figured.”

“A lot more.”

Slowly, Dev lifted his gaze to the man who sat across from him. Archie was his age, but life in private military armies had weathered and hardened the man, aging him well beyond thirty-eight. The man was finely tuned death, though, and Dev imagined that some of those deep grooves in the pale skin around Archie’s dark eyes were a result of the deeds he carried out in exchange for monetary gain.

People lied when they said money couldn’t buy you everything.

Money could secure anything. Life. Death. Love. Security. Protection. Absolution. Happiness, or at least, a facsimile of joy. It was Dev’s experience that anything could be bought or bartered. Only the naive and the emotional believed otherwise, and Dev had never met a person who couldn’t be bought one way or another.

“Figured,” Dev repeated.

Archie studied him a moment and then nodded. “What do you have for me?”

Using his forefinger, he slid the closed file toward Archie. “Everything you need is in there.”

The redheaded man took the file and opened it. A harsh, low chuckle sounded from him. “Interesting. Is this related to what’s been all over the news this weekend?”

Dev said nothing, which was answer enough. Word of Parker Harrington’s murderous intentions and subsequent death had dominated the news. It was only a matter of time before Parker’s sister, his ex-fiancée, was reported missing by her family. Sabrina was out there. Somewhere. And he was going to find her before anyone else did.

Archie closed the file. “And once I’ve located the subject?”

“You know the place, over in Bywater.”

“Same code?”

He nodded.

“Meanwhile, you’ve got yourself a gun, right? Just in case that crazy comes back to you,” Archie said.

“Of course. There’s something else I want you to do for me.”

“I’m all ears.” Archie tossed his arm along the back of the booth.

“I want you to look into something that involves my uncle.”

Archie’s brows lifted, wrinkling his forehead. “The senator.”

“He’s the only uncle left, isn’t he?” Dev’s fingers curled around his glass. “I want you to find anything you can on that intern of his.”

Interest sparked in his eyes. “The one who went missing? Andrea Joan?”

“Yes.”

He seemed to mull that over. “Do you think she’s dead?”

Dev didn’t answer for a long moment. “I hope she is. For her sake.”

“Jesus,” Archie muttered. He was one of the rare people who got what Dev meant, because he knew about one-tenth of what Dev knew, and Dev was guessing that was enough to keep the man awake at night. “On it.”

“Perfect.”

“Speaking of the senator. You did get my update about what you suspected?”

“The Ritz-Carlton while I was out of town?” Dev asked.

Archie nodded. “And many, many times before that from what my contacts have advised.”

“Yes.” Taking a drink, he welcomed the burn as the amber-colored liquid coursed down his throat. “I’ll wait to hear from you.”

Nodding, Archie scooted to the end of the booth and then stopped. He met Dev’s stare. “I’ve seen some shit. Stared evil in the face to know that real evil has a face. And there’ve been times I’ve been terrified by what I’ve seen and who’ve I met. You? Never once seen you break a smile. You scare me a little.”

Dev lifted a brow.

Archie grinned. “I’ll be in touch.”

Watching Archie slide out of the booth and disappear into the shadows, Dev finished off his glass of bourbon as he thought about what Archie had admitted.

“You scare me a little.”

Even his brothers were afraid of him. They had no reason to be, but he understood why. After all, he was willing to go there to protect his brothers, do the unthinkable. But they didn’t know what he knew, and it would stay that way.

He was their shield and that would never change.

“Another glass?”

Dev’s gaze shifted to Justin, one of the servers who’d been at the Red Stallion for years. “Yes. Thank you.”

Bowing, Justin plucked up the glass and disappeared. Dev glanced at his phone and started to reach for it, but stopped. His brother had his hands full at the moment. Both of them, actually. Letting his head rest against the tall booth, he exhaled a long, steady breath and for some damn reason, an image came to him.

Not just an image.

A person.

A person he’d met for the first time on Friday.

A person who searched him down in a cemetery to bring him flowers. A person who told him that his father’s death would get easier to deal with, and she had said that like she had personal experience in the subject matter. A person who turned out to be connected to that annoying son of a bitch journalist. And she was definitely someone not scared of him. Not even remotely. She had not been feeling fear when she’d been pressed against him.

And he’d definitely been feeling . . . something.

Rosie Herpin.

A Creole last name to match the tawny complexion.

Another glass of bourbon appeared in front of him, but he didn’t reach for it.

Beaded curtains?

The woman had the tackiest beaded curtains in her apartment. What grown adult with even a thumbnail-sized worth of taste would have cheap beaded curtains in their home? It wasn’t the sixties or seventies, and Rosie wasn’t a child amused by things that clanked together and made noise.

A day after his brother played the white-knight-in-shining-armor routine and retrieved their temporary housekeeper from what Dev was guessing was her best friend’s apartment, this was what was lingering on the edge of his thoughts.

Beaded fucking curtains.

Dev had no idea why he was even thinking about the woman.

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. If he was going to be honest with himself for once in his life, it was because Rosie . . . intrigued him on several levels. One of the reasons being the fact she had looked at him like his mere presence in her apartment tainted everything in it, including the beaded curtains.

No one, besides his brothers, looked at him like that or dared to glare at him.

That . . . interested him. And he needed to spend only a handful of minutes with Rosie to know she was nothing like that conniving—

He cut those thoughts off. Shut them the hell down.

Dev thought about where Rosie lived. Not too far from Jackson Square. How in the hell she lived there, with all the noise, was beyond him. His gaze shifted to the glass of bourbon.

There were two types of New Orleanians. Those who thrived on the sounds, the smells, the sights, and the whole atmosphere of the French Quarter. And there were those who avoided the Quarter at all costs.

He was guessing Rosie was the former.

He was the latter.

Dev didn’t know much about her. He could change that in seconds if he wanted to. One call and he could find out anything he wanted to know. Age. Birthplace. Family. Siblings. Education. Workplace. Anything. He could even find out exactly how this husband of hers had died.

Damn.

He’d been an asshole about that, hadn’t he?

His gaze shifted to his phone again. The strangest thing had happened when he stood in Rosie’s apartment that morning, waiting for his brother and arguing with her over what constituted real wood. He stopped . . . thinking.

Thinking about everything.

Dev couldn’t even remember the last time when that had happened, and well, that had been a nice break.

Devlin didn’t believe in coincidences, so there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that she knew exactly who he was when she found him in the cemetery. Had Ross been following him and sent her in? Quite possible since it was a favorite pastime of the reporter. Her apparent close relationship to Nikki and her association with Ross made Rosie dangerous.

So, of course, he’d become hard as a rock arguing with her.

He didn’t even want to know what that said about him, but he knew the whole time he’d been with Sabrina, and that had been years, never once did he get so turned on, so easily.

That was why sex, and it hadn’t been often, with Sabrina had been a chore, a means to an end that was never fulfilled. And there was no way Sabrina hadn’t felt his impassivity when it came to her. He was also a means to end for her.

Hell, he didn’t want to think about Sabrina. He’d rather think about the woman who glared at him like she wanted to kill him with a single look.

What had she called him?

Ah, yes. A dickhead.

His shoulders lifted in a silent chuckle as he reached for his glass of bourbon. A woman who owned fucking beaded curtains actually interested him. A woman with hazel eyes—eyes that shifted from brown to green depending on how angry she was becoming.

Damn.

Hazel eyes.

It made him think of when he was a young boy. His mother had this friend who’d come visit every Saturday. This was before his brothers and sister were born, when it was just him and his mother and . . . Saturdays . Mrs. Windham would always bring her daughter with her. The girl was Dev’s age, give or take a few months. All he could remember was that she had blond hair and hazel eyes. What was her name?

Pearl.

They used to play in the many rooms at the manor, because Lawrence was never home on Saturdays, and Dev could just be. One day, he was rushing from bedroom to bedroom, looking for Pearl. They’d been playing hide-and-seek or some silly game like that. He couldn’t remember that exactly, but he did recall finding Pearl. He’d also found Lawrence with Mrs. Windham in one of those rooms.

His mother’s friend didn’t come back after that afternoon. Dev never saw Pearl again, and Saturdays changed. Everything began to change that one Saturday afternoon, and it wasn’t until years later, when Dev was older, that he began to understand why.

When was the last time he’d thought of Pearl? Hell. It had been years.

His mind shifted back to Lawrence. The man was a virus that infected everything he touched, that much was true. Too many people who had business dealings with Lawrence, from his estate lawyer, Edmond Oakes, to several high-ranking city officials, had become tainted and twisted, either implicated or complicit in what Dev had suspected of Lawrence.

Hell, Lawrence was more than a virus. He had been a fucking cancer.

A shadow fell over the table, drawing his gaze. Justin stood there once more, holding a manila envelope. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. de Vincent, but this was left for you at the door.”

“Was it?” He reached for the envelope, taking it from the man. “By whom?”

“It appears to have been placed in the mail slot just a few moments ago. No one saw who left it there.”

Interesting. “Thank you, Justin.”

The man nodded and then scurried off while Dev looked at the envelope. His name was typed across the center of the envelope. Turning it over, he tore the top, unsealing it. At first he thought there was nothing in it, but as he reached inside, he felt something smooth. Dev pulled out an eight by eleven photograph.

What the . . . ?

A photograph of him and Lawrence de Vincent, his father . It was taken at the last charity function Lawrence had attended with Dev before Lawrence’s . . . untimely passing and only a few months after Dev’s suspicions about Lawrence had been confirmed in ways he could’ve never imagined.

Neither of them was smiling as they stood side by side. Neither of them looked like he wanted to be there. And neither of them was doing a good job hiding their immense dislike and distrust of one another.

Dev remembered the night of the Ulysses Ball. It was that evening, in the car to the event, the man who’d raised Dev and made him who he was today had scornfully told him that he and Gabriel were not his children. Only Lucian and their sister, Madeline, were.

Hell, Dev had never felt relief like he had right then. Some might believe that Dev was a monster, but if they knew what he did about Lawrence, they’d know what Archie had said earlier was true.

Real evil always had a face.

His brothers hadn’t known that Dev knew the truth before them. His brothers hardly knew anything.

Not even what Dev had learned before the night of the Ulysses Ball. A secret so fucking life-changing that he still, to this day, had no idea how to tell his brothers.

How to even deal with it himself.

If he could spare his brothers the knowledge of how evil, how spiteful the man who raised them was, he would. Damn, if he wasn’t trying to go to the grave with what he knew. It would be . . . better that way.

But it wasn’t the photograph that caused Dev’s jaw to clench. It wasn’t even what the photograph symbolized. It was the message scratched into the film by what looked to be a needle or some other thin, sharp instrument.

I know the truth.