Must Have Been The Moonlight (24 page)

She pulled him down to her lips and in the softest of whispers said, “Maybe some deeds committed are worth the consequences after all.”

He pulled away to look into her eyes, and all the light in the room settled in that brilliant blue gaze.

“How did you beat me in three moves?” she asked.

Moving one hand to her waist, he teased her bottom lip, if only to hide the tilt of his mouth. He’d beaten her because, as dark as the night, he’d cheated.

N
ot yet dawn, the sky was still flecked with a smattering of stars as Brianna pulled Alex and Gracie through the throng of passengers to squeeze into a place at the rail. People frowned at her alacrity, but she didn’t care. The decks on the
Northern Star
were crowded with those gathered to disembark. Brianna felt the planks vibrate beneath her feet. The engines churned the water, as the huge wheel seemed to reverse in power.

They were home.

The last time Brianna had seen these shores, she’d been leaving her life. Now she was returning a duchess. Nothing had gone as she’d planned, yet every incident had been a step toward this very moment in time. If any event had not occurred as it had, if she’d never met Stephan, she would never have met Michael.

As she watched the sky turn amber, her heart raced in anticipation. “Do you see them, my lady?”

Alex was dressed in a white fur cloak. Her breath hung in the frosty January air. “The docks are too crowded.” The hood of her cloak framed her face as she searched the shore. “I can’t tell.”

Christopher had wired Ryan and Johnny before their departure. Surely, her family would be here to take Alex home. Surely, old feuds had been forgiven in the wake of Christopher’s absence for the past four years. She would never forgive her family if they snubbed Alex.

Never!

“Wait.” Alex stood on her toes. “Yes,” she whispered. “They’re here. I see them, Brea! At the end of the docks standing near that carriage.” Her hand went to her mouth and she laughed. “They came.”

Suddenly Brianna couldn’t bear to waste a moment of this new day. Looking around her, she searched for Michael. When she returned to the cabin, she found her luggage already moved. She pressed through the crowded corridor as she hurried along the length of the ship toward where her mare was berthed, and stopped at the rail to search the lower deck.

Two men were preparing to move her horse. Michael stood to the side, overseeing the proceedings. He wore black trousers and a burgundy silk paisley waistcoat, his sun-bronzed strength tamed beneath a heavy overcoat. A hand rested on his hip. She’d seen him brushing out the suit of clothes that morning. Now, as her gaze went over the tall unmistakable length of him, she marveled at the change, his ability to transform so easily. His dark hair curled at his nape and blended with the coat he wore over his jacket.

The engines quit rumbling and, in the abrupt silence, the steamer drifted into the dock. As Michael turned to look toward the shore, Brianna’s hand paused at the rail.

How did one feel returning home after so long? Except for the one time in Cairo, Michael never talked about his family. It was impossible to think that they could not love him or would not be waiting to see him. Almost as if sensing her, he turned his head and saw her standing on the upper deck.

He slid his hands into his pockets. His sleeves rode up to
his wrists. There was something in the way his gaze could grab onto hers and pull. He knew it, too, and smiled.

Brianna smiled back. Yes, indeed, she decided. It was a fine thing that today would begin their courtship.

“Ryan and Johnny are here,” she said when Michael met her at the bottom of the stairs.

“And Lady Alexandra was worried no one would show.”

Standing on the bottom step, Brianna could easily see into his face. “My family is hardly that vindictive.” She absently brushed at her skirts, restraining her hands from wandering beneath his coat. “Temperamental and rowdy, yes, but after today I can strike vindictive off my list of familial faults. Will you be here much longer?”

A shout behind him drew Michael around. Her mare was about to be removed from the stall. “Will she be all right?” Brianna asked.

“I need to arrange for her dispatch to Aldbury Park.”

“Lord Ravenspur.” A ship’s officer approached, a thick fellow with a red beard and Scot’s accent. He was winded. “The captain, he will see you now. He is apologetic that he missed you earlier, your Grace.”

“I had a slight mishap the other night,” Michael said, answering the question in her eyes.

“Nearly got hisself washed overboard, when the door latch stuck,” the officer said. “Wouldn’t do no good if we lost ourselves a duke.”

Michael’s gaze when he met the officer’s was less conciliatory than in his words to her. “Go join your family, Brianna.”

“I’ll go with you, Michael.”

He smiled down at her worried expression. “I’m a big boy,
amîri
.” His hand went to button up his jacket. “I’ll find you later.”

“Jaysus, Brea.” Ryan sat back in his chair. His riding boots squeaked as he laid one ankle across his knee. “Do
you think you might have let me buy you out of the company before you’d wed?”

Breakfast platters sat on the elaborate sideboard against the wall. They had arrived at the inn over an hour ago. “Even if I’d wanted to exercise that option, it was hardly possible,” Brianna said, passing the butter to Johnny, on her left.

Ryan leaned forward. “Did Chris finally put his foot down and make someone do the honorable deed by ye, Brea?”

Buttering a biscuit, she looked up to see the young serving girl blushing over her brother as she poured him coffee, and practically rolled her eyes. “It’s just like you to be crass, Ryan.”

The most uncompromising of her brothers and the sibling most responsible for seeing her sent off to Egypt, Ryan had confined his dark hair in a queue. Women gawked at him. Brianna didn’t understand the attraction. In her opinion, his only redeeming quality, other than the fact that he was one of the top civil engineers in the world, was his affection for his little girl. He’d lost his wife a year ago, and now Mary Elizabeth was everything in his life.

Johnny turned to Brianna. “He’s been like this since he received word of your marriage.” His voice lowered. “He has no trust for the aristocracy. No offense, my lady,” he said to Alex. His mouth crooked boyishly. “But then I never took offense with ye.”

Alex returned Johnny’s grin with warmth. “Thank you. And Ryan,” she added, taking them both into her all too innocent gaze. “I’ve never doubted your heart-felt generosity either. Not for a moment.”

Ryan folded his arms as he observed Alex with a spark of humor. “It is difficult not to feel generous when one is threatened with castr—When one is warned to behave.” He grinned. “Still, it would be nice if we departed Southampton knowing that we’re leaving our precious sister in the hands of a man she won’t be apologizing for at family gatherings.”

“Major Fallon was involved in trying to shut down the opium and slave trade in Egypt.” Alex stirred sugar into her
tea. “I warrant she won’t be apologizing to anyone for his grace.”

Ryan sipped his coffee, considering Brianna with an amused smile resting lightly on his lips. “So how did the two of you meet?”

“They met in the desert,” Alex said.

“Actually…” Brianna smiled in good cheer. “Lady Alexandra smashed him over the head with the butt of her rifle. Then he tried to kill me. It was quite romantic, really. Love at first sight.”

Ryan sat forward. “Then you’re in love with him, and he with you. I’m relieved to know that it was not the butt of Chris’s fist that convinced him to make an honest woman of ye, Brea.”

He’d said the words in brotherly jest, but inadvertently or not, Ryan had touched her most tender spot. Perhaps if he had not nailed down events with such precision, the banter would not have hurt.

“He was the one who brought you both out of the desert,” Johnny said. “The story made the papers here. Chris wasn’t specific with details in his letters. Except that Lord Ware contacted him recently.”

“Lord Ware heads the Foreign Service.” Brianna turned to Alex. “Why would your father contact Christopher?”

“There is a theory that the attacks that were occurring in Egypt are connected to the trafficking of antiquities in London,” Johnny explained when Alex didn’t answer. “It’s big business and big news.”

“Maybe you should talk to your husband, Brea,” Alex said.

“Maybe we should just finish breakfast,” Ryan suggested, and the topic at the table quietly slipped into news from home.

A fire crackled in the marble hearth. Brianna didn’t know what had happened to Michael. She left the dining room to check the hotel registrar, and discovered that their luggage
had been delivered to the room an hour before. Gracie had not seen him.

The Westgate Inn proved to be a palatial three-story brick mansion with a colonnaded entrance and surrounding veranda that overlooked a garden. She was thankful now that Ryan had secured the private dining room. Her brother’s gaze gentled considerably on her when she returned. “We packed all of Mam’s porcelain and lace,” he said as the breakfast dishes were cleared away. “Christopher told us to make sure your dowry was ready to be delivered when you were ready.”

Brianna looked between her brothers. She didn’t want her family to feel sorry for her. They were thinking that she’d married some boorish oaf who’d wed her only because Christopher had beat him to a pulp. To show disappointment in Michael’s absence would be a further criticism to him. Instead, she smiled her thanks. “I’ll send for everything when I’m settled. Are you in London?”

“We’ve moved most of our operations north to Carlisle—” Ryan’s gaze suddenly went to a point over her shoulder. Brianna’s heart began to pound. “He’s here, Brea,” Ryan said, and she turned in her chair.

Michael stood in the doorway.

Tall and dark, in that silent dangerous way that gave people cause to notice him, he was handing his coat to the host before his gaze found hers. The clouds shifted and sunlight spilled into the room from the window behind him. It was all so perfectly melodramatic and timely that Brianna knew a sudden lightness of being.

“I apologize for my tardiness,” he said to everyone, but most specifically to her. “But I had a mare to dispatch to Aldbury.” Then introductions were made and Michael shook hands with Ryan and Johnny.

Fit to his clothes, Michael looked every inch a peer. And if Brianna had been worried that her husband couldn’t take care of himself with her family, he quickly proved himself
charming and self-assured, his arm resting across the back of her chair, one ankle on his knee as he casually conversed as if he weren’t two hours late.

Brianna could only stare as Ryan, who had verbally incinerated the aristocracy, carried on a conversation with Michael in a way he’d never done with her. And she found herself reassured that Michael was not a man who needed anyone to apologize for him—least of all her.

Brianna wept only a little when she finally said good-bye to Alex. “I’ll see you in April, before the babe is born.”

“I’m staying at the country estate near Epping,” Alex said. “We aren’t so far from one another that we can’t visit.”

They hugged and held onto one another while Ryan waited on his horse and Johnny stood outside the carriage, shivering in the cold. Finally, Brianna stepped off the drive and watched her family ride away. Michael remained leaning against the wall on the veranda, leaving her alone. It was strange, but she didn’t want to be alone. She turned and walked up the steps to where he stood, his collar raised against the cold. She braced her hands against the rail at her back, six feet separating them.

“Ryan and Johnny behaved themselves,” she said.

“Did you think they wouldn’t?” he asked, his voice gently amused. “They were respectful of me because of you, Brianna.”

The simple words and what they meant hit Brianna as nothing else had that day. Or perhaps because of everything, the sentiment weighed that much more. She looked down the road, now empty of her family’s presence, and for the first time in her life, they were no longer a rallying force around her. She was no longer a Donally. Her world as she’d known it was truly gone, and all of her uncertainty, her need to understand her life, her husband, and her heart meant nothing compared to the reality that Michael was her future. And she was already afraid of losing him.

Courting him suddenly seemed incongruous in the mix of
her feelings, when all she wanted to do at that moment was crawl inside of him. He had not made love to her since she’d lost to him in chess.

Brianna folded her arms beneath her cloak. “Why would Lord Ware contact Christopher?” she asked after a moment. “Alex implied that it had something to do with you.”

Michael’s brows pulled together. “If I knew my business half as well as everyone else in this godforsaken world, I’d need a secretary to keep track of my bloody life.”

Brianna waited for his answer. Michael was not pleased to give one.

“My integrity and that of my office was brought into question,” he finally said. “Some at the consulate went so far as to suggest that I should be investigated for any links that I might have had to the caravan attacks.”

“Who would say that?” Brianna was incensed.

“I wasn’t privy to that information.” Michael walked to where Brianna stood, pleased that she could go no farther than the rail at her back. “My office had prior knowledge about every caravan detail that was attacked. I was conveniently absent when Pritchards took my place on the caravan that held the payroll shipment. I conveniently appeared in the same place you had run. And Omar’s death conveniently coincided with my departure from Cairo.” Michael lifted a dark curl from Brianna’s shoulder. “In reality, the few brains in government have
conveniently
misplaced the facts. Captain Pritchards reported regularly to the consulate. There have been no other attacks since his death.”