Angel In My Bed (3 page)

Tears welling in her eyes, her arm lashed out, but he easily caught her wrist.

“You're a cold-blooded bastard, Donally.”

“Temper, temper, sweet, docile Margaret.” He held her easily. “You always did like disparaging my paternity.”

“And you haven't changed.” Shoving away from him, she swiped the back of a fist across her cheeks.

“Something you will do well to heed.”

Aye, she should be afraid, he pondered as she turned and took flight up the hill, sending leaves and dirt skittering in her wake. “Where do you think you can run, Meg?”

He took the time to empty the gun chamber, letting the bullets plop to the ground, before he flung the gun into the woods. He was upon her in three steps and flipped her onto her back. He knew he was close to physically hurting her and forced his temper back, reining it in as he did the passion she'd so aptly roused in him.

She lost the ground she'd gained. Something like pain groaned out of her. “To think that I ever loved you!” She scrabbled harder to escape him, but her fight had weakened. “I hate you. I truly do.”

“No doubt. That explains why you tried to kill me. Twice.”

“I didn't try to kill you earlier.” Breathing hard from the exertion, she flung a handful of dirt and leaves at his legs. “The gun discharged when you pulled me off my horse.”

“You're a liar, Meg.” He gripped the tree limb above her for balance. “You lied to me in India. You're living a bloody lie now, taking on someone else's life like the con artist you are. How many people around here believe you are some kind of saint?”

“I've built a real home, David.” Her eyes glistened with entreaty. “Margaret Faraday is dead. She died nine years ago off the coast of India. Can't you please let her go?”

“Did you murder the woman whose identity you stole?”

Her eyes snapped wide. “No!” She scooted another two feet up the slippery incline. “Lady Munro…I met her on the way to Bombay. Her husband had died after only a few weeks of marriage. She was returning to England to her husband's family. She had no one else. We became traveling
companions. When the boiler room blew, when the steamer sank, she was not among the survivors. I was given a chance to change my life. I took it.”

“Along with a hundred thousand pounds worth of stolen artifacts and treasure? Where is that? At the bottom of the Arabian Sea? Or somewhere closer?”

“You have no idea what you've done by coming here.” She kicked at him. Then the tears began to squeeze out from beneath her lids. “No idea at all. I hate you for doing this to me. I truly do.”

David stared at the top of her bowed head, the desperation in her eyes no longer shielded by the tangled cape of her hair, and it seemed as if something inside him softened. She'd fought him, plied him, spat names at him, now she would call upon his sympathies. She had to know that her fight was as futile as it was over. “Oh, I have a fairly good idea I'm not the only one you've been hiding from for all these years. No telling the termites that will come out of the woodwork now to hunt you down.”

“Then if you ever felt anything for me at all, let me go.”

The words grabbed at his chest like a fist closing around his heart and roused his fury, along with memories he had no business revisiting. Unable and unwilling to go down that path ever again, David surveyed the trail far above them for a way out of here. “Let's hope the horses are still up there.” Wrapping the length of his cloak around his forearm, he pulled her to her feet. “Walk.”

“I can't.” She stumbled to her knees. “You really did hurt me.”

“Aye,” he said with bittersweet humor, lending his shoulder for her to walk. “Wasn't that always the problem between us, Meg?”

Once they reached the road, she was trembling. He gave his cloak a thorough shaking before applying it to her shoulders. “Unfortunately for you, I need you alive.”

“I don't want anything from you.” She struggled to throw off the bulky cloak. “I would rather freeze to death.”

Despite her height, the cloak swallowed her, making her look frail, and a protective, possessive part of him reared its head. “Just take the damn cloak,” he said, brushing aside her hand as he worked the clasps at her neck, attempting to discard the sudden surge of his emotions. “It's too cold. You need it more than I do.”

Her eyes locked on his, and his hands stilled.

His gaze slid up from her wind-reddened mouth to swim in her eyes, and he fought the pull to touch his lips to hers, the travesty of his position mocking him.

He could not have foreseen her effect on him, could not have realized how much he wanted to touch her. To hold her. Still.

He could never allow himself to forget what she had done to his life, or that she was wanted for treason and murder. He could not forget why he was here. Indeed, their past marked them both, and it would never allow him to make the same mistake twice in one lifetime.

“Thank you,” she murmured, “for the wrap.” Her chin lifted as if in a show of strength. But she was not all of a piece and faltered.

He hated that he cared. One arm under her knees, the other beneath her shoulders, he lifted her against him.

He hated that even after everything that had gone before them, he still mourned her. For in his heart, Meg Faraday had died on that steamer nine years ago. She had been correct about that. And he had never stopped thinking about her. Or forgotten how much he had loved her. “Don't thank me for
anything,” he said, his eyes steady on the path as he felt her head loll against his shoulder.

For Meg Faraday would never be free again.

 

Victoria awakened groggy and sore in a warm bed. Turning her head, she peered at a fire crackling from the hearth. The rococo-style bedstead where she lay was half-hidden beneath gold velvet hangings that dominated the room. Her gaze moved over the well-appointed chamber, then followed where her senses led to the pillow beneath her head, last night's memory cascading over her. No matter the years past, she would recognize David's scent beneath the spicy soap he used. She was in his room.

His bed.

Confused and struggling to her elbows, she tried to separate the calm logic from the cloud that had settled in her throbbing head. She wore nothing beneath the sheets except a bandage that wrapped her ribs.

No wonder she could barely breathe. She must have cracked her ribs when she tumbled from the horse. And he'd drugged her, she realized as her fingers tested a bruise on her temple. She could taste laudanum and feel its liquefying effects on her muscles.

Daylight slivered through a crack in the drawn drapes. Moving to the edge of the mattress, she sat up, but didn't wait for the room to quit spinning before dragging a blanket off the bed. The room gliding through her senses, she staggered for balance, determined only to reach the door. And run.

“I wouldn't go out there if I were you.”

She whipped around at the sound of the familiar masculine voice. David stood framed in the dressing room archway,
shrugging into a shirt, acting as if she were a paramour he'd left in his bed. Her heavy-lidded gaze roamed up his arms, encompassing the pull of white fabric against his shoulders as he tended to his buttons, his movements no longer casual as she met his gaze and, for a moment, neither moved.

He had shaved—she could smell his soap permeating the air. She blinked to clear her head, for what she had seen in the darkness behind his beard last night could not compare to his clean-shaven countenance now.

David Donally was undeniably the most attractive man she had ever known. And still was. The stark white cloth of his shirt contrasted with his coffee brown hair, cut short at the nape. Shorter than he used to wear it. Black trousers shaped his long legs and tucked into high riding boots adding another inch to his imposing stature.

He was her husband.

And she hated him.

Yet, even after all these years, she was aware of him in a way she remembered. The physical kind of awareness that made her conscious of her femininity. In that regard, time had erased nothing and only seemed to ignite the embers inside to flame. She had married him ten years ago because she had been in love with him to the point of blindness. He had used her then. Her instinct for survival warned her to run from him now. Her hand tightened around the glass doorknob at her back, and she opened the door.

“Let me give you some advice, Meg,” he said, tucking the shirt into his trousers. Wary of his approach, she lifted her chin rather than retreat. “You're a beautiful woman. I wouldn't leave here wearing only my blanket. You'll never make it to the end of the street.”

Her mind seemed to float around his presence. Caution and fear. These things no longer asserted themselves. “Leave it to you to find humor in my distress, Donally.”

He stopped in front of her. “I have to admit, I always did like you best wearing nothing more than a sheet. Or nothing at all. I remember when you were the most beautiful woman in all of Calcutta and knew it, too.”

“Don't blame me for your lust. It's not my fault you couldn't keep your hands off me.”

“Ah, Meg.” He tilted her chin. “You still have a wee bite with that lovely mouth.”

“And what of
your
mouth, David? Do you still possess that legendary…vigor?”

He reached over her shoulder and shut the door none too gently. “You were right about the cracked rib and the concussion.” He turned her face from side to side and looked at her eyes. “I believe you've also suffered brain damage.”

Suddenly so hot in his presence, she stared up at him, vaguely wondering if maybe she was dreaming after all. “Is that your expert diagnosis?”

“I know enough of medicine,” he said neutrally.

“So do I.” She traced a finger along the faint pattern of delineated muscle beneath his shirt, finding renewed fascination with his body. “I once sewed up a man's scalp that had been lacerated from temple to neck. A terrible mess.”

The look in his eyes told her he didn't believe a word she was saying, but she didn't care. “Where have you been living these past years?”

He didn't answer at first, then, “Ireland.”

“Alone?”

It was all she dared ask him, all she wanted to know, though she used to look at the stars and wonder if he also
looked up at that same sky and thought of her. Or wondered what they might have had with each other if she had been different.

His palm remained on the door, trapping her against the heat and scent of his body. “What are you doing, Meg?”

“Did I ever tell you opiates make me do and say insane things?”

His eyes pinned her where she stood, clasping the blanket to her breast. She was annoyed that she couldn't read his thoughts.

But then, she had never been able to read his thoughts, and in her laudanum-induced reality she found herself resenting that strange sense of bliss she'd always felt in his presence. “Where have you brought me?”

“A safe place for now.”

“Safe?” She laughed, a contradiction if she'd ever heard one when she stood in front of him aware of her own nakedness and a strange burning inside. Leaning her head back against the door, she closed her eyes. “So this is God's great jest on me. Only the angel hails from Ireland.” Her eyes flashed. “Be content that you have ruined my life. Be content that I will never laugh again. That you have won at last.”

“Are you finished?”

His quiet voice, his complete and utter control ravaged hers.

“No.” Seized with a fortuitous recklessness to take control, abetted by the laudanum swimming hot through her veins, Victoria raised her arms to his neck. “Are you?”

His reflexes more honed and practiced than hers, he caught her wrists. But not before the blanket tumbled to the ground at her feet. She trembled as the fire in his eyes burned her to the quick. “Not even for old time's sake, David? You and me?”

Lowering her hands to her side, he bent and picked up the blanket, returning it to her shoulders. “You insult yourself, Meg.”

She hated that he pitied her. “I don't want your mercy, David.” Bewildered by the tightness within her, she turned her face away from his. “But when they hang me,” she whispered, “I want you there.” Despite her instant and instinctive desire to dig her fists into his shirt and pummel him with all the fear and frustration knotted inside her, she could say nothing else as the dormant memories she'd buried so long ago began to awaken.

“Is there anyone you wish to contact?” he quietly asked. “Your family, perhaps?”

“My family?”

His family. The son he'd never met.

She no longer felt protected by the numbness in which she'd encased her life for so long. A place she had retreated where she could love her son and know peace, where she had tried to make up for what she had done in her past, pay her debts to society and, in her own way, deal justice to those who had deserved to pay.

Her secrets would go with her to the grave.

Sir Henry had shown her too much kindness to suffer because of her. He loved Nathanial and her.

Except he loved Victoria Munro, not Meg Faraday. No one had ever loved Meg Faraday.

David least of all.

She had already lost any chance to keep her son. But neither could she bear to see Nathanial ripped from the arms of his family and put into the care of a heartless stranger.

A heartless stranger who now managed to hold her despite her struggles and let her weep into his shirt.

A heartless stranger who, with his strength, managed all over again to pull the foundation from under her life. She had not wept like this since she buried Zeus's mother two years ago, she thought irrationally, remembering the cat she had fished out of shark-infested waters off Bombay. She'd brought that rangy black feline with her to England, the only companion to a pregnant nineteen-year-old with no where else in the world to go. They had been such a pathetic pair.