Angel In My Bed (11 page)

Yet another lie so easily spoken.

Even to herself.

“I
'll fetch His Lordship at once, mum.” David's stoic butler eyed Victoria's attire, clearly not trusting her alone in the foyer. “If you will await him here.”

“Rest assured I won't steal anything,” she promised facetiously beneath her breath as he walked up the staircase to the second floor.

Even as she wondered where David had found someone so perfectly persnickety in such a brief time, the balding man disappeared. She glanced nervously at the tall clock in the entryway, the
tick-tick
counting seconds in the silence.

After a moment of restless pacing, she walked into the drawing room and set her cloak on a chair, surprised and a little saddened to see the furniture still draped in ghostly canvas. Dust layered everything. Throwing open the golden damask draperies, she let in the sunlight. Beyond the low stone wall, the white valley below stretched into the old orchard. Victoria traced a finger over the painted red rose
stained glass at the top of the door, before wrapping her arms around her torso and turning back into the room.

Rose Briar once contained a beautiful collection of Flemish Mortlake tapestries and paintings. Walking to the middle of the room, she stopped beneath the Venetian chandelier and, making a slow turn, raised her gaze. The ceiling motifs still shone gold, made even brighter in the afternoon sunlight. This wasn't her home, yet it was. For it had become the keystone on which she had built the last nine years of her life.

With a sigh, she looked toward the sound of approaching footsteps.

David walked through the archway, saw her, and stopped. His hands gripped the ends of a towel draped around his neck. His hair, almost black against the white of his linen shirt, was tousled and damp with sweat. He didn't look pleased to see her.

“No apple pie from Esma this time?” he asked.

Victoria pushed her chin up a notch and managed to smile. “Thank you for bringing Bethany back home yesterday.”

A dark brow rose slightly. “For some reason, I don't believe that is why you are here. Should I be worried that you're armed?” he asked, looking her up and down.

Her boyish attire revealed more than it hid. He could have been born an aristocrat, she thought then, letting him look. It was in the way he held his head, his uncompromising bearing, and the dark fire in his eyes. Never mind that those eyes had the ability to strip her bare. Easily they could. For they knew what lay beneath her clothing.

She tightened her arms over her chest. “Are you still a priest?”

He gave her an indecipherable look, then something in his eyes softened. “No,” he said after a moment.

“Why would you do that, David? Become a priest? When you were so well-trained in the art of seduction, death, and bedlam?”

He cocked a brow in barely veiled amusement. “Why don't you tell me?”

“Guilt?” she queried. “Atonement for your sins? Why not become a faceless champion for the hapless souls who need you?”

“We all have sins to atone for. Do we not?”

“Anyone who goes to so much trouble to find me after nine years must still feel something.”

He did not move, but neither did he dispute her conclusions. Just what he felt, she was no longer sure. “Does your job also include hiring your own men? Men who have no connection to the Foreign Office. Isn't that above and beyond the call of your duty to me?”

“I am a man of my word, Meg.”

It had suddenly become difficult to look at him. She ran her hand along the back of the settee. The gold wedding ring on her finger captured the daylight surrounding her. “Nellis will attempt to find some way to disclaim your purchase of Rose Briar.”

“Have you considered he might have a right to Rose Briar?”

“Sir Henry inherited Rose Briar from his mother, who was Nellis's father's
stepmother
. Nellis holds no blood tie to Rose Briar, hence no claim to the land.”

“But then neither do you, love.”

The irony did not escape her that she was more mistress of this place now as his wife than she ever was as Lady Munro. “Why haven't you removed any of the coverings on this fur
niture?” She stripped the canvas sheet away, revealing a worn yellow damask sofa. “How do you expect to make yourself at home in a place filled with ghosts?”

He didn't reply, so she stripped the canvas from both of the high-backed Queen Anne chairs, then others from the chairs beside the glass door. Today she would not allow his barriers anymore than he allowed hers. “You must learn that touching everything is essential to owning a new identity. Once you have staked your claim, it will be harder for someone to recognize the mask for what it is.”

For one brief moment, she believed that her words had connected to something inside him. He gripped each end of the towel. “What do you want, Meg?”

Looking at him standing in the doorway, she suddenly knew exactly what she wanted to do and how many times. He was her damnation. Her secret salvation. And everything he made her feel combined to create one more question mark in her future.

“I've just figured out something about you today.”

“Only just?” He stepped into the room and shut the double doors behind him. “That is slow for you.”

“I want to know why you involved yourself with a case you left years ago. Pamela said you retired shortly after I—”

“Kinley brought me in.”

“That's it?”

“That's it, Meg.” He drew closer. “No secret motive. No clandestine need to make right the wrongs of the world. I came in to finish something I began over ten years ago.”

“Because you thought I was alive.”

It was a statement. One he didn't answer.

“Tit for tat, David Donally,” she challenged.

He stopped in front of her. Theirs was a familiar dance. One that he knew how to lead with the skill of a master. She couldn't let him. Not this time.

He spoke without touching her. “You mean you'll answer my questions if I answer yours?”

She didn't reply. Instead, she closed the small distance separating them. “Were you in love with me?”

Something dark seemed to veil his eyes. “Is this the part where you try to seduce me in earnest?”

“Do you ever regret not having a family, David?”

“As a matter of fact, I have a very large family.”

The thought startled her. “I don't believe you.”

“Because I never talked to you about them? Why would I do that? If it appeases your curiosity, I never told them about you, either.”

She had never considered that he had another family. Never thought that she might be completely wrong about him. “I can see that I shouldn't have come here today.”

“No, you shouldn't have.” Lifting a strand of her hair, he tilted his face. “But since we're tit for tat and you're so interested in me personally, don't you want to know more about them?”

More appalled by the memory of the deep marks he'd left on her soul, she wanted only to leave. She tried to move around him, but he stepped in front of her, suddenly seeming dangerous. “My oldest brother is married to an earl's daughter,” he said. “My sister is a duchess. My youngest brother holds two seats on the London stock exchange. I have two other brothers and thirteen nieces and nephews. So I ask you”—he'd followed her retreat as if they were dancing a waltz—“what do you have to offer me in return for your fu
ture, madam, that I don't yet have? I've already taken your virtue.”

“Bastard!” She raised her fist to shove him away, but he caught her wrist. “Why do you insist on ruining everything that I try to do?” The glass door was suddenly behind her.

He clasped both her wrists in one hand above her head and frisked her. “Tit for tat, Meg, remember?” He shoved his knee between her legs and pinned her to the thick glass, immobilizing every inch of her body with his. “A heart-to-heart between a husband and his wife. Isn't that what you want? Unfortunately, I don't want to find myself maimed.”

“I didn't bring a gun this time.”

She ceased struggling when he found the shiv inside her boot and removed it. “That's what I like about you, Meg. Your dishonesty is predictable.”

“You can't keep taking my weapons, David.” She followed his hand with her eyes as he stabbed the knife in the paneling high above her head.

She tried to hit him with her other hand, but he caught that one in his grasp as well. “Tit for tat, Meg. Questions first. Before we get on to other things.” She met his angry gaze, felt his breath on her lips. “For your sake, I'll begin easy.”

“Oh, please.” She pushed against the grip on her hands, furious that he had so easily outmaneuvered her. “Why play easy now? When rough is so nice.”

To her surprise, he was in no mood to play at all. He just held her, waiting until she stopped fighting. He watched her for a moment, not even breathing hard. “Have you ever killed a man with a knife, Meg? Looked into his eyes as you feel his lifeblood seep away into your hands?” He finished patting her down. “Because that is what you do. It isn't clean and it
isn't pretty, and you wear the smell of blood for a long time.”

“I know the smell of blood,” she said, horrified to feel his knee beneath the vulnerable apex of her thighs, even more horrified by the tenor of his words and what the revelation meant. Had he killed men in his past?

“That morning after the storm, when you decided to follow those tracks from the church, did you get off your horse?” he asked. “Did you meet anyone?”

“I thought the tracks belonged to someone in Stillings's group. I didn't see anyone.”

“Why would you go after anyone in Stillings's group?”

She hated the tears that welled in her eyes. “You would never understand.”

“Try me, Meg.”

She could not move her gaze from his face, from the seductive promise offered in his eyes, the promise of peace and security she longed for. At least a war with Stillings gave her the illusion that she was not powerless. If she could vanquish just one evil, maybe she could vanquish them all. “Not everyone is bad. Sometimes…people have a reason for what they do.”

“Aye, Meg. Give me a wee violin.” He laughed, and it was an honest sound. “I've witnessed firsthand Stillings and his merry men. Or were you referring to yourself?”

“Spoken like a self-righteous puritan,” she said between her teeth, mad to think he had an ounce of compassion. Mad to have come here at all.

“I don't need to understand a man's reason for committing a crime to know it is still wrong.”

“And here I'd thought you'd gone all soft in the heart, David. Or maybe you care about everything more than you want to admit.”

He lowered his voice. “
Soft
isn't exactly how I would describe my state of mind…or anything else at the moment.”

Leaning his palms against hers on the door, he imprisoned her between his arms. “You're a sham, Meg,” he said against her lips. “A bloody born liar. But God help me, at the moment, I don't care.”

The smallest sound escaped her as his lips slanted across hers.

She had meant to turn her head—or maybe she didn't—but as soon as his mouth touched hers, she kissed him back, a tempestuous reminder that passion thrived between them. It heated and burned like the hottest fire. Sheer perfection and mind-melding electricity. He slid his fingers into her hair, cradling her nape—and deepening the kiss with a primal sweep of his tongue. She felt like laughing and crying, embarrassingly close to finding release astraddle his knee.

Surely there were worse things than losing this battle.

Then he broke the kiss.

Her mouth wet and swollen, she lifted her gaze and, touching his, saw the darkness within their indigo depths. She could see he was fighting his own losing battle. And in that brief connection, she recognized they were both in the same unholy place.

“Victoria.” He said her name as if testing the fit of it on his tongue, his arousal hot against her softness. “Who are you right now?”

She no longer knew and, closing her eyes, no longer cared. She used her freed hands to cup his face and pull his mouth back down to hers, attempting to take him as completely as he'd abandoned himself to her.

Whatever was happening was not what he'd planned, or it was proceeding too fast, she sensed, as she heard him swear
under his breath. Then he was kissing her again, hard and deep, one of his hands against her jaw, the other on her breast. He jerked her shirt out of her waistband. This was insane.

“David…we…should talk—”

Shouldn't they?

“Not bloody likely.”

His reply sent a sense of satisfaction coursing through her veins—that familiar and seductive sense of the power Meg Faraday could still wield.

Meg Faraday, that sleepy dark shadow that still clung to her life and refused to go away. Meg taunted and flirted with danger as she'd always flirted with death, and David had so aptly let her out of her cage to play. David, who could also rein her in with merely his presence. She reached up and touched his hair, traced his ears with her thumbs. He didn't pull away when she followed his tongue into his mouth, refusing to grant him room to retreat.

He slid his free hand up the small of her back, over the ribbed stays she wore, and bunched her shirt in his fist. “God rot the bloody thing, Meg.” He stripped the thing over her head.

Her bottom hit the small curio table between the glass doors, then he was pressing her hard against the pillow of heavy draperies at her back, and she was pushing against him, seeking more of the growing sensation building inside. This was not what she'd expected to feel. She must have made some sort of noise, because he lifted her and she wrapped her legs around his hips. He was fully aroused and hard against her and she rode him for sheer physical pleasure. Her body wanted him.