Angel In My Bed (22 page)

Straddled across him as she was, his erection pressed between her thighs, she felt a wicked stir of desire. Her chest heaved as she continued to pull air into her lungs and, in a breathtaking rush, returned her focus to the staff in her hands. “You asked me to tell you something that you didn't know. Are you willing to answer my questions in return?”

He could easily have tossed her off him with very little force. But he had been careful not to hurt her thus far. He had always been careful, she realized, protecting her in a way she'd never been able to protect herself.

He brought the staff over his head, pulling her arms straight until she was stretched taut over him, her lips nearly level to his. “Tit for tat?” He raised a dark brow.

The fact that he was allowing her to manhandle him brought a surge of confidence to her actions. “Tit for tat.” Still holding the staff, she pressed his hands into the mat. “To the victor go the spoils. I get to ask the first question.”

He slid his gaze across her lips down to the point where her shirt gaped opened, but she wasn't about to play modest and lose her edge. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

A hint of myrrh permeated his body heat. Victoria met his gaze, wary of her own raging desire. “What happened between you and Kinley that you distrust him so?”

“We've never been close. Fourteen years ago, Kinley blew my cover on a job in Prussia and nearly cost me my life, not counting jeopardizing the mission we had been working on for almost a year. In Calcutta, he cost me one of my team when he acted too soon to spring the trap on Colonel Faraday. And he cost me you. Had he waited…”

“Had he waited, nothing would be any different.”

“Everything would have been different. I would have had time to get you out.”

She shook her head. “And turned traitor to save me? I don't believe it is in your nature, David.”

“Then my nature is a mystery even to me.”

Not to her, she realized. David had always possessed an inherent integrity and honor that she had not.

Her braid fell against his shoulder. “Are you in love with me?”

“A man's heart is his greatest weakness. If I were in love with you, I would be a fool. Would I not be?”

“Were you ever unfaithful to our vows?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Tit for tat.” Her grip tightened on his wrists. “Were you?”

“No.”

“Not even after you thought I was dead?”

His eyes narrowed. “Then I could not be unfaithful, could I?”

She knew by the look in his eyes there had been other women in his life after her.

In one powerful move, he turned her over onto her back, stilling her fight with his body. His eyes tenderly brushed her face. “You have to take some of the blame. Your supposed demise was more than convincing. And it was two years before I became a priest.”

“Get off me.”

He studied her compressed lips with grim amusement. Surprisingly, he did as she asked, but there was something in his gaze that did not match the ease of his movement. As she struggled to stand and snatched up her staff, Victoria became acutely aware that he was furious.

“If you think you can fob me off with your injured airs, think again, love.”

Forcing an artificial laugh, she walked to the window. “Who was she?”

“What does it matter?” His answer was barely audible above her racing heart. “I was never interested in keeping your memory alive. I was interested only in killing it.”

Victoria didn't have to turn to know David had left, for the
studio felt suddenly empty of his presence. Her eyes drifting shut, she leaned against the cooling glass.

For nine years, she had wondered about his life. She had lived, knowing he had never belonged to her. She was not angry that he had found sanctuary in another woman's arms, no matter how brief. She was angry that she had not fought harder for what she had.

David was lying on the bed in his bedroom when Victoria found him fifteen minutes later. His hair was damp as if he'd washed his face. He wore a black silk robe belted at the waist, his fingers linked behind his head as he stared at the heavy tapestry that bordered the high tester. She raised her hand to knock but her movement in the doorway brought his gaze around.

“Did it work?” she asked.

He sat up and slid his legs over the side of the bed. Whatever he'd been thinking when she entered the room no longer showed on his face. He came to his feet. Clearly, he had not expected to see her in his doorway.

“Were you able to kill the memory?”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Why not?”

She needed to know because in seeking his answer, she hoped to find her own. But David did not reply. Instead, in the wake of his silence, the knot in her stomach tightened.

Looking around the room, she saw David as if for the first time as a permanent fixture in her life and in Nathanial's. “You're really a baron, aren't you? With your castle in Scotland. Your sister is married to a duke, and you have thirteen nieces and nephews. Is Pamela your mistress?”

“No.”

Hot tears stung her eyes. Chiding herself for not being
calmer, she pulled the leather vest over her hair. Her shirt was damp and clung to her chest. “That last day in Calcutta, when my father knew the authorities had closed in on us and he gave me that earring, the last thing he told me…was that he loved me. No one had ever told me that before,” she said. “On the same breath he then calmly told me that if you were still alive, he was going to find you and feed you your heart for breakfast for what you had done to me.” She laughed, knowing now that threat had been a lie, since her father knew who David was before she did. “I remember thinking that you would be safe because you had no heart. Yet, I was also afraid that he would kill you. So I found a way to turn him in. Then I cut my hair, packed a valise, and boarded the first train out of Calcutta with a group of missionaries.”

She realized, though she was still very much afraid of her father, she was more afraid that she could never rectify her past. “A part of me always knew my father couldn't love me. I was too much like my mother. I looked like her. I was impulsive and had to be forever reined in. But I never allowed myself to see how much of a monster he truly was until you came into my life, and I saw beauty. When your partner told me who you really were, I wanted to die. Maybe if you hadn't come home at the moment you did, I might have. Instead, I aimed the gun at you. If you had just walked away…if you hadn't moved when you did…”

“You were never supposed to be in the house when that raid went down. But you changed your routine that day. You were not at the consulate…”

Victoria shook her head, remembering the nightmare that had set her running for nine years, making no more excuses for her actions or condemnation for his. She had not been at
the consulate because she had been visiting the physician about her condition. “After I left you”—she couldn't voice the word
shot
—“I realized all that I had become was all that I despised in my father. I had someone growing inside me who depended on me to survive. I didn't want my baby to suffer my own legacy. But even as I made the decision to turn in my father, a childish part of me wanted to believe he had not always been so evil.”

Or that she was nothing like him. For nine years, she strove to be everything for Nathanial that her father had never been for her.

“Your father couldn't love you because he didn't know how.”

She cocked her head. “You say that as if from experience.”

“Does either of us really know what love is? You were eighteen when I married you. For all of your worldly experience, you were naïve about men.”

“Was it all a lie?”

For a long time he said nothing, and she thought he wouldn't answer.

“None of it was a lie, Meg.”

Her tears blurred his face. Somehow, he had moved nearer, and when she straightened, she was looking into his eyes. “You ask that I take my first step with you,” she said. “I already did ten years ago. And you gave me Nathanial.”

They remained suspended in time, neither speaking. It came upon them slowly, the way the years seemed to fall away and into bittersweet crumbs to her feet. Breathing became hard. Caught by the shifting sunlight warming the room, she was suddenly standing apart from everything she was, everything she'd become these past years.

The dam was suddenly cracking.

What was the point in trying to protect herself when she wanted to kiss him. When she wanted to feel his hands on her body and the whisper of hope against her heart. Then he put his palm on the doorjamb at her back and her uncertain eyes held his.

“Kiss me, Victoria.”

He sealed her name with a tender kiss that turned all too quickly into something more. And the dam that had cracked now shattered in a flood of emotions. Why couldn't she listen to her head instead of her heart, she chastised herself, dropping the vest at her feet and looping her arms around his neck.

When they broke apart, there was no teasing glint in his eyes, nothing to drain away the building tension. They were both breathing rapidly. She felt her body's response and, leaning against him, pulled him back into the kiss. She opened his mouth to her thorough exploration, taking his groan deep into her throat. His harsh stubble abrading her flesh, he threaded his fingers into her hair, sifting them through her braid, and tipping her face to deepen the kiss.

Having lost her focus completely, she felt her head fall against her shoulders, frustrated by her own lack of self-preservation. She had not realized the depth of her need and barely registered his action as he turned the key in the lock.

“I am too soft, I think,” she murmured, when he drew back to settle his mouth on the hollow of her throat.

She felt his hardness against her abdomen and the smile in his voice. “I am not soft at all,” he rasped joining his mouth again to hers, his fingers scoring a path from the curvature of her shoulders to her hands.

He wrapped his fingers around her wrists and raised them
to the door. His dark blue eyes burned into hers. “And if you don't stop me, I will take you to my bed and finish what I want to do with you at this moment.”

She sank against the length of him, intensely aware of the hunger they both shared. “People will miss us downstairs, David.”

Their gazes met and held. “God's truth, do we care? What do
you
want?”

Victoria felt the door at her back, felt trapped by more than its barrier to freedom. The heat of his hands enfolding her wrists and the turbulent blaze of his eyes all conspired to rebuke her resolve. She didn't want to examine her needs, for she was no longer sure of anything, least of all herself.

Yet there was too much between them to deny the physical and emotional connection. They still had a thousand miles to travel before they reached the middle, but somehow the distance was not as far as it had been when she'd awakened that morning.

She belonged to him. And as that primitive reality swept through her, a bubble of giddiness threatened to overtake her senses. “I want to see you naked.”

His breath was warm against her lips, and, divining her resolve, he bunched her shirt in his fist and drew it over her head. “Then I endeavor to make it so.”

He swept her into his arms, conveying her to the bed, where he sat her on her feet beside the mattress. This was not the rush and desperation she'd felt before, but a wanton need to touch and feel all of him. She eased her palms across his taut shoulders, opening the robe over his arms where it fell in a caress of black silk to his feet. He wore nothing beneath. David had the kind of body a woman didn't forget, and ten years had honed his muscles. He was hard and rigid, polished
perfection that sprang from the dark juncture between his thighs. As if he didn't even know he was standing in front of her naked and magnificent, he worked his hands over the ties on her trousers and slid them down her legs with her drawers. But standing beside him in her stays and camisole, she considered the ugly scar forming on her waist, and her hesitation made him raise his eyes.

There was something hot in the force of that look. Something that burned over her and made her buttery inside. Then he was easing her down onto the bed and they lay entwined, her leg over his hip. “Do you trust me not to hurt you?” he rasped, as if struggling to breathe.

She didn't want to evaluate that sentiment. She knew what he meant. He didn't want to hurt her wound. But he was also speaking about the wound in her heart that he had put there. He was asking her to believe in him as if he understood there would come a time that they would both be tested.

Rolling with her, he pulled her across his hips, speaking the words again as he opened her mouth to a plundering kiss, his hands expertly disarming her of her will but halting with her stays. Only because she recognized that he'd sensed her vulnerability, and waited for her to let him remove her camisole.

One hand splayed her back. He closed the other over one breast, then suckled the second through the frail fabric. She could feel his need in the way his hand curved down her spine, over her hip and along her thigh to claim the hot, humid center of her. Her lashes lowered. She arched, aware of his tongue on her breast and the moistness he created with his mouth. She reveled in the freedom.

Drawing his hands to her breasts, she kissed him with a torrent of pent-up need, her body ebbing with the tide of her
emotions. The rasp of their breathing flowing between them, back and forth as his mouth returned to hers with her same urgency.

Dimly in the back of her mind, she had expected to feel in control. Not this wild hot rush that he let loose inside her. She had never been ashamed of her body and had always been aware of the power her beauty could hold over a man. But she had tucked that part of her away for so many years that her gradual awakening flashed like quicksilver between them.