Angel In My Bed (9 page)

Closing the curtain to curtail the icy draft, Victoria looked over her shoulder at the man in the bed. He might have died had she not found him this afternoon. “Don't leave me, mistress,” his voice carried to her as she blew out the lamp on the dresser.

“I'm only going in the other room.” She stood at the end of
the bed. “But tomorrow I am going to take you to Widow Gibson's place. All right?”

Mr. Doyle's one eye focused on her in the dark. His voice came to her softly. “Will ye tell Bess? She'll expect to see me and won't know where I'm off to.”

Victoria moved to the end of the bed. “I'll tell your wife, Mr. Doyle.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“We were happy together, my lady,” he murmured.

Her heart pounding for some illogical reason she couldn't explain, Victoria stepped out of the room and, closing the door, leaned her head against the jamb. She never wanted to know that kind of love. The kind that made a person do foolish things like stand on a grave and talk to a headstone.

Or conceive a child.

Drawing her shoulders back, Victoria turned into the room and nearly leaped from her socks.

David was half leaning on the back of the settee, his coat draped beside him. Instinctively, her hand went to her pocket, where she now hesitated, waiting for her pulse to return to normal. “Mary and Joseph! Where's Mr. Rockwell?” she asked, alarmed as he unfurled his long body and came to his feet.

David had seen the movement and, by the hard look on his face, guessed that she carried a weapon. “I sent him back to your family. I told you never to leave without him.”

Despite the fact that she refused on principle to retreat before any man, she found her feet had taken a step backward. She bumped the wall, but he kept coming. Beads of water glistened on his hair, and she could feel the chill on his
clothes as if he hadn't been long out of the storm. “What are you doing?”

Without a word, he retrieved her derringer from her pocket before she had a chance to stop him. “Not that I don't trust you with a loaded gun.” His eyes on hers, he checked the load—as if she'd carry an unloaded gun. “But I don't.”

Folding her arms, she didn't argue his wisdom. She wouldn't trust Meg Faraday either when it was so tempting to shoot him and be done with it. Her eyes traveled down the length of him. The light caught the silver threads in his waistcoat and made him look expensive. “Why are you so angry?” she asked.

“Do you have a death wish?” His rasp came out sounding proprietary as if he had some claim on her or right to be worried. “You're not supposed to leave the cottage alone.”

“I can take care of myself. Rockwell stays with my family at all times, not with me.”

“That wasn't our agreement. Unless you are expecting a pleasant father-daughter reunion.” One finely arched brow shot up as he considered that possibility. “Come to think of it, you still haven't told me why you don't want him to find you.”

“What is
wrong
with you?” She pushed against his chest, knowing the instant she yanked her hand back, it was a mistake to touch him. Especially when he was standing so close, and the chill on his clothes had turned to heat.

They stood, neither moving, except to breathe. Barely. He was close enough to kiss her. Close enough to dig his hands in her hair and open his mouth over hers as he had last night. She wanted her anger back. Not this stark terror that she might do something stupid and step into his arms.

His jaw clamped tight. Then he shifted his gaze to the bed
room door and stuffed the derringer in his vest pocket. “Is Mr. Doyle all right?”

“He's suffering from hypothermia. I can't leave him tonight. I was on my way to make tea.”

Stepping a wide arc around her husband, she walked past the small maple dining table with its two spindle-back chairs and into the tiny kitchen.

She'd lit the stove earlier and set a kettle of water atop the fire to boil. She dragged three cups from the cupboard and set them on the counter next to the wicker basket that she'd brought earlier. She pulled out a wooden tray.

From her peripheral vision, she could see David settling a shoulder against the wall. Hovering with eyes that burned, watching her pour steaming water into a china pot. Somehow, she kept her attention on the tea in an attempt to quell the flutter of her pulse. The cottage was too small and cluttered for them both to spend a peaceful night beneath this roof. An uncomfortable silence settled between them as she rummaged through her thoughts for something relevant to say.

“Who owns the hounds that came through here last night?” he asked.

“Most of them are wild dogs. I can't prove it, but I believe Nellis is responsible for their presence. When I find out…”

David just looked at her, and some of her righteous anger faded. She was surprised that he'd even asked. Or maybe she was tired of fighting alone and appreciated that he seemed concerned. “The sleet will change over to snow tonight. If they come again, they'll be easy to track,” she said.

“I don't need snow to track them.”

She blinked away the urge to tell him tracking those hounds was not his responsibility. “They're dangerous, David.”

“As is your father. I prefer only one canine at my back.” He moved into the kitchen and leaned his backside against the counter. “How many tenants do you have left?”

“Seven families.” She arranged the sugar bowl on a tray but her movements slowed. Her knuckles still bore the scabs from her flight off the horse. “A few years ago, there were thirty families. Mr. Doyle takes care of the church grounds. We used to have four groundskeepers who cared for the parkland surrounding the bluff house.”

“Is there only one road leading up here?”

“No,” she said, knowing he asked purely for professional reasons, not because he was interested in Rose Briar. And a sadness came over her. For up on this bluff was everything that she loved. “One road comes up from the valley to the manor house. There is a more traveled road north over the ravine that comes in from Halisham and Salehurst and goes on to the coast. Then, of course, there are all the secret trails in and out of the woods.” She glanced his way. “I know them all.”

“In case you've thought about it,” he said, looking at her with absolute promise in his eyes, “there isn't anywhere you can go that I won't find you, Meg.”

She placed the lid on the teapot. “Because you hate me so much?”

“Hate was never the problem between us.” He turned his hip against the countertop. “Now I've somehow found myself owning land, a house, and a family that you love. Can you explain that?”

Her hand fell away from the pot to linger on the tray as she remembered the shooting star that first night he had returned to her, and the wish she had made for a miracle that would help her save Rose Briar. The adage that God worked in mysterious ways had never hit her so hard. “Perhaps some
thing once so alive doesn't deserve to die,” she said, looking up at David when he didn't reply. “Rose Briar really is worth saving.”

“Is that all worth saving, Meg?”

“There are the fields and orchards as well. The tenants have spent their lives up here. They consider this land their home.” The thought turned her away from the topic, and she studied a hairline crack on the sugar bowl. “Have you eaten supper yet?”

“Are you offering to cook for me?”

“There is a jar of boysenberry jam in the basket.” This time she spared him a coy glance. “I was planning to share my spoon with you.”

The corner of his mouth tilted. In the dim firelight, the smile caught Victoria.

“Maybe I should cook for us then,” he said.

“Can you?”

“Give me a potato. I'll make you a pie. Do I look underfed?”

Her gaze encompassed his shoulders and briefly touched the rest of him. For all of his shortcomings, David still had the kind of hard body that forced women to carry smelling salts. Again, her mind flashed memories of that kiss he'd given her last night—the same kiss that had kept her up all night.

As the silence stretched between them like a taut violin string, she suddenly had an urge to pluck out an entire symphony.

He'd awakened that wicked part of her she'd thought lay dormant beneath the prim Victoria. He was the only man she'd ever known who Meg Faraday could not control with her sexuality. That had always been part of the attraction. The challenge.

But only part.

“You should do that more often,” she said, placing one hand on the lid of the teapot and pouring.

“What exactly should I do more often?”

“Smile as if you mean it.” She slanted him a saucy glance. “You have nice teeth.” Like a wolf, she didn't add.

He shifted his body, and one hand went into his pocket. “I told Rockwell you wouldn't return to the cottage tonight. I was worried about the weather.”

“Then why didn't
he
stay and you return to the cottage?”

It was an impulsive schoolgirl question to ask. “On second thought,” she said, “maybe neither of us should evaluate that answer too much.”

His eyes told her he was thinking about that kiss, too.

And she realized this wasn't a battle she'd prepared herself to wage. Not ever again. But she couldn't breathe the same air David breathed without remembering what it had once felt like to know the heat of him against her naked flesh—to know all of him—as if she'd forgotten he was a first-rate charlatan.

As if she'd forgotten he was exactly like her.

“I need to stable my horse.” He shoved off the counter. “I'll make a round over the grounds before I lock up for the night. Shut the curtain behind you and lock the door.”

Of course, he would not let down his guard. He still had her derringer tucked away in his pocket. She looked over her shoulder out the window at the layer of ice caked on the glass, only to startle as he tipped a finger beneath her chin and turned her face into the light. He was standing so close, she could feel his warmth all over. It was suddenly obvious to her—as it must have been to him—that she was going to sleep with him again.

“Patience, love.” He rubbed the rough pad of his thumb across her bottom lip, before he cloaked the hot, possessive glitter in those eyes behind a wall of stone. Blunt. Predatory. “When I kiss you again, it won't be while you're playing Florence Nightingale in an old man's cottage.”

Victoria refused to respond. It was not concern about what he might do to her but worry about what she would allow if she followed the promise in his eyes. When he left the kitchen, she placed her palms on the smooth wooden counter and listened to the whisper of cloth as he slid his arms into the sleeves of his coat. She didn't breathe again until he shut the front door behind him.

“H
e's been out there most of the evening, mistress,” Doyle murmured from the bed behind Victoria.

Not realizing he'd awakened, she turned from the window. Doyle clutched the blankets to his chin. The only light in the room came from the woodstove in the corner. “His Lordship fixed a mighty fine soup,” he added, his one good eye brilliant in the faded orange light. “He ain't like other no-account lordships, mum.”

“No, he isn't,” she agreed. Because he was no true lord.

But he was an excellent cook. David had managed to make a delicious meal out of old potatoes, carrots, and the ham remaining in the smoke shed in back. But it was when he'd helped Doyle out of bed to perform his evening ablutions that something inside her shifted. He'd managed the task with the elderly man's dignity intact, as if he'd performed such tasks a hundred times before, his compassion contrary to everything
she remembered about him. She had looked away from him when he'd come out of the room, afraid of her confusion.

“I feel he'll be the one to bring back Rose Briar, mistress.” Mr. Doyle's eyes drifted shut as Victoria pulled the covers to his chin. “I feel it in my gut.”

“Why?” she asked, struggling to delve through her own conflicting emotions about David's character.

“He's out there chopping wood so we don't freeze tonight.” Mr. Doyle chuckled. “And I've seen the way he watches you when you're not looking. That young man has feelings for you.”

“Lord Chadwick?” she laughed at the notion.

David didn't watch her any differently than he would any other criminal who'd been handed over to his keeping.

Doyle peered at her from beneath bushy brows. “I'm not as blind as I look, my lady.”

No, he only sees spirits in an old burned-out church. Victoria stood next to the bed. “Are you warm enough?”

“Aye, mistress. I've not been so warm in a long time.”

After a moment, Victoria left the room. She walked to the hearth and put another log onto the fire before returning to the kitchen.

David had told her to keep the curtains closed, but she lifted aside one edge and looked toward the stable. The wind had slowed to an occasional gust, and earlier the sleet had turned to snow. Huge flakes fell and coated the ground in a layer of white. Light from the stable seeped out of the crevices between the slats, making the ground glisten gold. She could hear the muffled but steady
thwack
of an axe chopping wood. David had been outside almost two hours.

Grabbing a ragged mitten, she lifted the kettle from the
fire. She poured coffee into a chipped mug. At the back door, she wrapped David's heavy cloak around her shoulders and headed for the stable. Her boots squeaked in the snow. Once there, she gripped the wooden latch and edged open the wide door. The movement lifted David's head, and, despite her will and all the lies she told herself, her heart skipped a beat. Even without benefit of the shadows playing around his face, he was tall, handsome, and looked extremely capable with his hands wrapped around the long axe handle. Her estranged husband had enormous presence and the ability to become a part of his surroundings, even in a dilapidated old barn and wearing attire suited to a lord. She had to force her attention back to the coffee in her hand as she turned and shut the door.

“It's freezing out here.” Holding out the hot steaming cup, she offered a tentative smile. “No weapons. Promise.”

“Scalding liquid against this axe?” He smiled, but his wasn't nearly as tentative as hers. “I'd rather be holding the axe.”

“What a fine domestic couple we make,” she said. “Talking murder as easily as we talk about the weather.”

Straw littered the ground. Mr. Doyle's chicken had found a place to nest near the stall where the stallion mulled over a trough of hay. David wrapped his palms around the mug she offered and captured her hand. He wore his woolen coat unbuttoned, and it opened as he bent to inhale the steam. “Then you are reassuring me that I needn't have you take the first drink?”

Victoria edged the mug to her lips, aware that his eyes were on her mouth. She drank, not because he'd bullied her into doing so, but because the coffee was the only warm thing in the stable. “I make great coffee, if I say so myself.” She
stepped away, confident that she had at last made him uncomfortable. “I'll be taking Mr. Doyle to Widow Gibson's in the morning. They are good folk.”

David drank the coffee. Peering at her over the ceramic rim, he looked at the cloak she wore, but did not ask why she should be wearing something belonging to him. She could have told him because the cloak was warmer than anything she had.

“Is this weather common for this time of year?” he asked.

She studied a wood chip. “We get a storm like this every three or four years. Once, we had a hurricane come through. Brighton received most of the damage.”

“I remember. The Dublin rags carried news of that.”

She looked up and found his eyes on her. He had read about something that had happened to her, she realized, wondering if that was the same as looking into a sky filled with stars knowing those same celestial entities filled David's sky as well. Glancing away, she moved out of the lantern light nearer to the horse.

“You were very capable with Mr. Doyle tonight,” she said.

He put aside the axe, saying something inane to the chicken that brought a smile to her mouth. “You don't talk about yourself much, do you?” she asked as he moved beside her, stirring straw with his steps.

Don't panic,
she told herself, holding her hand out to the stallion behind the door. David's coat brushed her cloak. He set down the cup and turned to the horse as it leaned its neck over the stall in greeting. “I've worked in many a hospital. Not as a physician, but close enough to people sometimes to be one.”

“A far road from the one you traveled in Calcutta.”

“Roads have many forks,” he said.

“That's the beauty of roads,” she agreed. “They fork.”

One corner of his mouth tilted. “The more forks the better.”

He was skilled at keeping a conversation moving when he wanted to as he talked about everything except the topic at hand. She imagined that making love to him again would be about as breathtaking as burning up on a beach of hot sand. India had been like that. Sultry and tempestuous. Jasmine and sunlight.

Death.

“I don't want to bed you,” she said without looking at him.

His hands stroked the horse's ears and neck. “It's cold in here, isn't it, Old Boy?”

His presence achingly intimate, she felt pinned by the gentle movement of his hands, captured by the mockery of their circumstances and conflicting desire. “I mean it, David. Don't ask me. Especially when we both know why you are here.”

“Why did you venture out here?” he asked, rubbing his hand down the horse's neck.

She glanced up at his shadowed profile, knowing she couldn't answer that question, without admitting how easily he seduced her. The sensation left her dizzy.

“What's his name?” She nodded to the horse, and this time David grinned, the kind of smile that could light up a dark night, or in this case the inside of a frosty stable.

He looked directly into her eyes. “Old Boy.”

Her mouth crooked into a smile before she caught herself and frowned. Stepping around him, she walked toward the barn door, the cloak flowing around her like wings. “I wish I hated you.” She opened the door and turned. “But I don't.”

David remained where she left him standing, stroking the horse, aware that the blood rushed faster in his veins. He
could still smell his soap on her. The scent of her hair. He'd come out to the barn tonight to get away from her, and now found that he did not want to escape at all.

“Not good, Old Boy,” he murmured, distracted, the words as much a warning to himself as they were an admonition that the line he walked was thin indeed. “Not good at all.”

 

“She said ye like peppermint, my lord.”

David threw off the covers someone had laid over him in the night. He sat on a chair in front of the hearth. Mr. Doyle stood beside him, a cup of hot tea extended. The weathered, blue-veined hands shook with age. A glance around told him Meg was gone.

Furious, he slid his feet into his boots. “Did she also tell you to remain quiet until she'd left?” He walked to the kitchen window and looked outside at the stable.

Tracks led from the stable in the snow. She'd taken the horse. He dragged up his coat from the sofa and, walking outside, looked toward the church.

It was there he stopped. One set of fresh tracks left the churchyard from the old rectory. Yet there were no tracks leading inside, which meant they did not belong to Meg.

Someone had been inside that church since the snow had begun to fall after midnight. Shoving his arms into his coat sleeves, he looked across the field into a network of distant ravines and hillocks that eventually turned into woods. Old Boy's tracks joined the footprints a hundred yards out and disappeared over a hill.

“You were sleepin' like a babe when she left this morning,” Doyle said, standing inside the doorway wrapped in a blue-checkered blanket. “I told her last night I seen the spir
its in the church. Sometimes they glow in the rectory. Sometimes in the belfry. I told her. She believes me now.”

Muttering an oath beneath his breath, David stepped off the porch.

“Y-you won't be leaving me, will you?”

He pulled his gloves out of the pocket and turned to see the old man following him. “Pack what you will be taking to Widow Gibson's. I won't be gone long.”

“Bless you, m'lord.”

David decided it was a good idea Meg was taking Doyle to another place for winter—if he didn't wring her neck first, he thought as he trudged through snow toward the churchyard.

“Who are you today?” He paused to study the tracks. “Lady Victoria, good Samaritan? Or Colonel Faraday's protégée?”

Meg, Maggie, Victoria, Lady Munro. He'd never known a more talented chameleon than Margaret Faraday, beautiful daughter of a Bengali garrison whore and a convicted murderer. Except maybe her father.

Squatting, David splayed his hands over the footprints, studying the depth of the snow. A big man wearing large boots and a cloak had made the tracks. He could see the fabric striations atop the icy surface. A man's cloak usually touched his calves, which made this particular ghost of Doyle's at least six feet tall. Colonel Faraday was six feet tall.

David looked north and continued following the tracks, plowing through the snow, a lone figure in black wool and clothing too nice, certainly inappropriate for a winter stroll. Yet the farther he walked, the more time seemed to stand still all around him, the air breathtakingly silent, the landscape strangely beautiful encased in snow and ice.

Like Meg, he thought, an ice queen atop the lifeblood and
heartbeat of her soul. Fate and deception had made her his wife. The force of his own passion had brought her back to him. He had forgotten the true depth of that passion. The danger she posed.

This was the second time in as many days he'd allowed himself to worry about Meg. David laughed—a knife-blade edge of anger—a dead giveaway that he would bloody throttle her this time. It wasn't a reassuring sound.

Not when he wanted her as he wanted the warmth of sunlight at this moment.

“Too long in Ireland,” he murmured in disgust a half hour later, his breath clinging like a cloud to the air. He had difficulty catching his breath in the cold. He stopped to assess the tracks and to breathe. Bracing his hands on his thighs, he glanced over his shoulder, back at the cottage, surprised that he'd traveled so far. In front of him, in a wooded copse, long clump grass peeked through places bared of snow by the wind. Pushing off, he moved on, but slowed when he glimpsed another pair of smaller tracks.

A woman had met the man here. He found where a horse had been corralled behind a windbreak. Moving on, he followed the horse's tracks another hundred yards to the top of a hill that looked down over a sweeping valley.

In the taut silence of his thoughts, David saw the band of riders crest the knoll in front of him. They had seen him at the same time he stopped on the rise.

Bloody hell.

Out in the open as he was, he had no place to go. If he ran, the horses would be upon him in less than a minute. As the riders neared, he identified Stillings in the lead. Even in a heavy cloak, hat, and beard growth, the man was unmistak
able. Only eight to one, he mused aloud. Two men broke away, and the riders widened into an arch. David recognized a flank attack when he saw one, backed a step, and prepared to fight.

One horse bore down on him, the rider wielding a cudgel.

David ducked, rolled, then came up on his feet. Two men dropped from their horses and tackled him from behind. His body slammed against the ground. He felt a kick to the ribs, but evaded the second boot to his chest. David rolled to his feet, his coat swirling around his ankles as he turned and met the third rider holding the club.

“Bloody grab him, Franks,” Stillings shouted.

A man's bulky arms wrapped around his torso, his heavy breathing measuring a physical exhaustion that won David precious few seconds. He raised both feet off the ground and kicked the man holding the club, sending him sprawling on his backside. Lowering his chin against his chest, he touched both feet to the ground, gripped Franks's forearm, and flipped him flat onto his back into the snow. In one swift movement, David dropped to one knee, his arm a vise around the man's neck.

Breathing hard, he lifted his eyes to Sheriff Stillings. “Pull your men off me.” The words came out in a puff of steam. “Fooking now!”

The four men surrounding him stopped in their tracks, all of them looking to Stillings for direction. No one moved.