Angel In My Bed (5 page)

“He's right, Kinley,” the blond Adonis agreed. “If Faraday wants her, it makes sense to keep her here.”

Panic infused every limb in her body, but she froze as David returned his attention to her. “Rockwell, send a note to Lady Munro's family and tell them she left last night to deliver a baby. Then tell them she had a riding accident on the road.”

“They won't believe you,” Victoria whispered. “I've never fallen off my horse.”

“Maybe Meg Faraday isn't as skilled a rider as Victoria Munro thinks she is.” His unfathomable eyes seemed to challenge her. He was handsome, devastatingly so, and if she was not convinced that he was taunting her on purpose, she would have flown at him. “What is there not to believe?” he asked. “I've seen the bruises myself.”

“Naturally. Do include my concussion with the accounting of your brutal behavior toward my person as well as drugging me senseless.”

His eyes were on her. “As well as your attempt to shoot me?”

She answered with equal focus. “If I had ever wanted you dead you would not be standing here now. There is nothing you can do to entice me to help you.”

“Nothing?” he asked. “It is common knowledge that Sir Henry's estate went up on the block for overdue taxes.”

“Overdue?” she scoffed, wondering how he would know such a thing. “The chief magistrate would steal from his own uncle.”

“What if we could get Sir Henry's estate back, Meg? Would you help us then?”

“Bloody hell with that,” Kinley protested, the epitome of skepticism. “An hour ago you were ready to roast her on a spit. This is insane.”

David folded one arm loosely over the other. As he awaited her reply, she was aware of his eyes on her face, and looked away. His hands were dark against the white of his sleeves, and he wore a gold wedding ring on his right hand. Her fingers went to the loose band on her own hand. She had not noticed the band on his finger before, and clearly he had not been thinking enough to remove it, for he lowered his hand. “I need a place to live and work,” he said when she again raised her gaze. “Lady Munro can use a long-lost relative at her back. It would behoove her to cooperate.”

“You won't be able to fight Nellis Munro. He wants Rose Briar.”

“Let me worry about your local politics, Meg. I'm not without my own resources.”

“Sir Henry knows I haven't any relatives.”

“And you never keep secrets?”

He said nothing else, the charge coursing between them now electric, knowing she was trapped by the consequences of her own sins and mindful that he was also the only person standing between Kinley's brand of interrogation and maybe the end of a rope. Any observer would have thought them longtime lovers, trusted friends, not mortal enemies.

Yet she sensed the strangest tension had seized his limbs.

“Are you so anxious to be hanged then?” he quietly asked.

Victoria clutched the robe's fabric against her chest, her desolation growing. Of course she did not wish to be hanged. But David was as dangerous to her as her father.

“She's in my custody,” he told Kinley. “I'll bring her in when it's time.”

Kinley moved in front of her. “Everyone eventually talks, Miss Faraday. Everyone.”

“Kinley.” The quiet warning came from David. “I suggest you move away from her before she gives you a black eye.”

“And I'll trust you not to turn your back on her. Next time she may not miss when she tries to kill you.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

“Do. Find Faraday.” Kinley snagged up his coat on his way out of the room.

In the silence that followed his departure, the beautiful blond woman brushed her palms. “Well,” she said with flair. “That went well for us all.” Looking at Rockwell, she plopped her fists on her hips. “What were you thinking, Ian?”

The man rose to his feet. A head taller than the woman, he glared down at her. “I was thinking we have a job to do, Pamela.”

He strode from the room, the same path Kinley had taken. Victoria had not moved. As if her silence could enfold her in a mantle of invisibility, she was not even aware that she had fallen back into an old habit until she saw David watching her, and straightened.

“This is the Countess Cherbinko's town house,” he said, introducing Pamela. “Our own faux Russian royalty, trained at the consulate in St. Petersburg. She took you in last night to help you recuperate from your injuries. She is our eyes and ears in this town. Nothing will get by her.” He fixed his gaze on Pamela. “Will it, countess?”

In a rustle of emerald silk, Pamela slid her arms around his neck and pressed her mouth to his ear. “Tell me not to worry about you up on that hill by your wee lonesome, David.”

But Victoria had had enough of their cozy little love scene. Tears burning in her eyes, she returned to the bedroom and
slammed the door. She did not understand her reaction, only that she would never again look at the stars and wonder what David had done with his life since leaving India, or whom he'd been with for business—or for pleasure. She would never wonder whom he might have loved.

She didn't care.

For all his upright principles, everything about him still screamed of duplicity. He was a clever, manipulative, and experienced spy who played life like a game of chess. And she was just another move on the chessboard, as he maneuvered his way toward the conclusion of a game that should have ended nine years ago.

None of them knew what they were asking her to do.

She thought of her father roaming free, and attempted to harness the pace of her heart. Outside, gray clouds darkened the sky over the bluff as an early winter storm hovered over the channel. Catching herself on the window casement, she looked down into the empty courtyard below, then leaned nearer to the glass, searching for a way to escape. Her gaze ran up the length of heavy draperies across the thick wooden dowel and down the other side. She tested their strength before turning her attention to the armoire for suitable clothing. She would have been better off taking her chances with Kinley.

She had to escape now. Her father was out there.

He frightened her. Her father finding Nathanial terrified her.

She had known people who had no sense of moral right and wrong. She had known people who drank because their bodies craved the libation or opium-addicted sufferers who could not live out a day without the drug. As a little girl, she met many of them in her father's circle of acquaintances. But
her father suffered no such moral ambiguity. He knew the difference between right and wrong. He just didn't care. Playing the game had been his opium. Name the hunt and it became his sport. He'd always loved the chase, the game of fox and hound, cat and mouse.

He and David were alike in that respect.

“Damn you, Donally!” Frustrated beyond belief, she crossed her arms over her midriff, turned back into the room, and froze.

David stood with his back against the door, looking much as he had that morning when she'd thrown herself naked at him. “You would not have escaped Kinley, Meg.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I would have been with him.”

She gritted her teeth, truly aware of how much she disliked him. The firelight burned in the dark depths of his eyes as he continued to watch her. “Who is Nellis Munro to you?”

“He is Sir Henry's nephew. He wants control of all Munro holdings.”

David pushed off the door. “All?”

She was unable to meet his eyes. “Does everyone know that you and I…?”

“Share the sanctity of wedlock? My circumstance is no secret.”

“Then they must appreciate the terrible sacrifice you made for God and queen.”

He stopped in front of her. “Not all of it was a sacrifice, Meg.”

She tried to push past him. “I don't want Sir Henry involved. You can't protect him. My father is a master of disguise. He could walk into a room and his own mother wouldn't know him unless he wanted her to know—”

“What happened between you and your father?” He touched the bruise on her temple.

The contact was hardly threatening; yet she recoiled. “Why are you doing this?”

“Look at me.” He slid his palm around her jaw and tilted her face. She could have sworn she heard his heartbeat pounding almost as loud as her own. “Give me your word you won't run,” he said. “Or I will take you to Kinley tomorrow and do this myself.”

He would, too, she realized, knowing she would promise him nothing. Margaret Faraday still had it in her to fight him, even if Victoria Munro did not. For Meg, being the more streetwise of her two selves, trusted David no farther than she could throw him. But if he was anything at all, he was a man who carried through with his threats.

“What are the odds,” she asked, “that some jeweler would recognize that earring, then bring it to Kinley, the very person who would know what to do with that piece?”

“I only know that Kinley received the original before he came to me.”

“The original?” It had been so dark that night Stillings had come to the cottage. She hadn't noticed that the earring was fake. “Of course, you wouldn't hand a priceless antiquity belonging to the treasury of India over to someone like Stillings.”

“The forgery was very well done. Don't berate yourself over the fact you didn't recognize the earring was a fake and got yourself captured. Nor does it take away the value of the matching one still somewhere in your possession.”

With a sigh that pressured her ribs, she sank to the floor, and sat with her back to the armoire, painfully aware that she would not win this battle as they squared off again like two
enemy combatants. She should hate him more. “Wouldn't you rather tie me to the bed and torture me? Do I have to make promises to you?”

He crouched in front of her, the lean hard muscles of his thighs smoothing out his trousers. “I would rather tie you to the bed. But I doubt you will let me have my way with you now that you are in a more rational state of mind.”

She looked into his eyes—eyes like the twilight, so dark blue they were nearly black. He had stolen her anger and her thunder, and Victoria stared in awe at his transformation.

She narrowed her eyes. “How could you be so arrogant to come into this room and remind me of my boorish behavior this morning?”

“Maybe I thought it was endearing. So much like old times.”

“I don't want to like you, David. So don't even try to be charming. It won't work.”

“Do I have your word you won't run?”

What did her word mean to him, anyway? Faraday blood ran in her veins. “I won't run,” she yielded, knowing she had him on a semantic loophole.

“Nor walk,” he clarified, “nor ride a horse or a cart, nor row a boat, nor skip out of this town with the sole purpose of escaping. I'm dead serious. If you run, I will hunt you down.”

“All right,” she snapped. “I give you my word, for what it has ever been worth to you. But you had better protect my family.”

“Your family won't be left unprotected. Ian Rockwell will join your household staff,” he said. “And I will see that Sir Henry does not lose the estate. I give you my word.”

That thought and the hope it inspired served to halt her protests. She thought of Sir Henry. A man who was more of a
father than hers had ever been. He had taken her in when she'd had no other place in the world to go, and given her life focus and purpose. Maybe when this was over, she
could
give something back to him after all. And Rose Briar was the only home her son had ever known. The land was his future.

“Mr. Rockwell looks barely out of nappies,” she relented.

One corner of David's mouth lifted. “He's not so young. And he knows his job.”

“Like you?”

“There are worse men out there than me, Meg.”

“Not to me,” she whispered, aware of a strange ache in her chest where her heart used to be, and she suddenly found herself staring up into the breathless beauty of that gaze, wanting desperately to believe in someone, wanting to believe that David wasn't worse than her own father was.

“Are you really a midwife?” he asked.

“Are you and that child who was hanging all over you lovers?”

“That child, as you call her, is a very skilled operative.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

His eyes captured hers and smiled. “Nor do I intend to.”

He brought her to her feet, but she pushed his hands away. “Please don't…touch me.”

He caught one wrist and easily captured the other, bringing both to the flimsy armoire door at her back. The heat thickened between them. He was tall, but so was she, and even at four inches over six feet, he did not tower over her. “Just don't tempt me to put my hands around your throat, Meg. We have an agreement.”

“Are you sure my throat is where you want your hands, David?”

The other corner of his mouth lifted, but whatever he'd been about to say was cut short when a knock sounded.

“My lord?”

An older woman wearing a mobcap and white apron over a black dress peered around the corner of the door. “I didn't mean to be disturbin'—”

“It is of no concern, Agatha.” David shifted his gaze to the nervous servant, and his eyes lost their stoic command. “You weren't disturbing us.”

“You told me to bring Her Ladyship victuals and a bath.”

“Go ahead and send in everything.”

After the woman left, Victoria raised a slim brow. “You are no lord.”

“You are no lady. I imagine that gives us some common ground.” He swept into a cocky bow, ever the debonair gentleman, before his long stride took him to the door. “What is mine is yours, Lady Munro.” He made a flamboyant gesture of his hand. “Enjoy your meal as if it were your last. Rockwell will return you to your humble cottage in a few days when everything is in place.”