Stranger in Camelot (17 page)

He grabbed the chain where it trailed down the front of his chest, stared at it in shock, then swiveled on his rump and noted the chain’s path to the wall, where its other end was padlocked to the iron eyelet. The chain was long enough for him to move around the corner, even stand up if he wanted to, but nothing else. Agnes watched him with sharp misery.

He turned toward her again, searching her face for answers. She didn’t say a word. Neither did he. Finally she saw the explanation sink in. For a moment his expression was suffused with emotions that shocked her. She wouldn’t believe they were sorrow and pain.

He shut his eyes. His jaw clenched hard, and sinews stood out along his neck. But when he opened his eyes he was suddenly in control, and a cold, harsh sheen had dropped over his gaze. Her knees went weak. Was she meeting the real John Bartholomew for the first time?

“How did you find out?” he asked. Even his voice had changed. Its cultured tones had a hard, streetwise edge. It mocked his story about having a London town house and hinted at where he really lived, a cheap apartment above an escort service. He might as well live over a brothel, Detective Herberts had told her.

“Your lies caught up with you.” She described her conversation with Herberts.

Disgust flared in John’s eyes. “He told you the truth. But he doesn’t know the whole truth.”

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” she recited in a flat, bitter tone. “That’s what I want from you.”

“No, you don’t. You’ve already made up your mind.”

“You lied to me. You used me.” Her legs collapsed and she sat down weakly in the corner. She wanted to sob again, but fury kept her back rigid and her chin up. “You didn’t go to Oxford, you weren’t on the British Olympic equestrian team, and you sure don’t own any hobby stores. So introduce yourself. I want to meet Scotland Yard’s Inspector Bartholomew.”

He inhaled sharply. “Be accurate. Ex-inspector. Ex-convict. Sent to prison for three months last year for taking bribes from the terrorist groups I was supposed to be spying on. I can see the distrust on your face—everything you think you know about me, and everything you hate.”

“I hate lies. I hate being deceived. I hate going to bed with a man who was using me the way he’d use one of his downstairs neighbors from the so-called escort service.”

“You find it pretty damned easy to jump to conclusions about me and my habits. And about what I was ‘using’ you for. You hate lies, well, so do I. But I also hate losing my inheritance to a thieving American army captain who took advantage of my grandparents during World War Two.”

“That’s not what happened!”

“I’m willing to give you a chance to explain. More than you’ll give me.”

“You lied to me about everything in your background. I’ve never been anything but honest with you. That’s the difference between me trusting you and you trusting me.”

“Honest? Then why didn’t you tell me about the books hidden in your desk?”

“I would have, soon! I’ve been scared to tell
anyone
!” She gasped as she realized how he knew where they were located. “You went through my desk!”

His hard, unwavering gaze told her yes, he had. Aggie
leaned back against the stall’s corner and said numbly, “You were spying on me.”

“I wanted to learn the truth without frightening you. I wanted to get the books back, and I thought you’d deny having them if I demanded them outright. I wasn’t even certain you had them. What else could I have done?”

“The honorable thing.” Her voice broke. “Be honest.”

“And what would you have done? Hand over a small fortune without a fight? Apologize for what your grandfather did almost fifty years ago? Tell me to take what’s rightfully mine?” John grimaced with disgust. “Like hell.”

“My grandfather didn’t steal those books! They were given to him to take care of! After the war he couldn’t find the owners. He tried for years!”

“Says who?”

“He left a letter for me when he died! He’d never told anyone about the books! He was afraid someone would accuse him of stealing them. Besides, he loved them. He spent years studying the diary and trying to learn more about Sir Miles. He left me all his notes. He didn’t think of those books in terms of how much money they were worth!”

“Oh? Then why did he try to sell them last year?”

“What?”

“Last fall he wrote to a rare-book dealer in London. Told him about his ‘gift’ from an Englishman during the war. He asked about selling the books to a private collector.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Is that how you found out about them?”

John smiled thinly and nodded. “Scotland Yard keeps records on stolen art objects and rare manuscripts. I listed the books years ago, in case they ever showed up on the market. Dealers check those records to make certain they’re not buying stolen property.”

“So the dealer came to you and said he’d found out who had the books.”

“That’s right. I was tangled up in the little matter of defending myself from criminal charges at the time, or I’d have come here sooner. Be glad I went to prison. Otherwise, I’d have chased your beloved old grandpaps down. And I wouldn’t have played nice.”

“You’ll wish you were fighting him instead of me, when I’m through with you. You’ll wish you were back in prison.” She spoke as if the words made her sick. “Nothing’s too disgusting for you, is it? Taking bribes from terrorists. A shark has more conscience than you do.”

“I was cheated out of my reputation, three months of my freedom, and my career with Scotland Yard,” he told her, his voice soft and strained. “Everything that meant a damn to me. All because some people in high places knew I suspected their connections to a terrorist political group. To get me out of the way they set me up. I was ‘framed,’ as you Americans put it. I never took any bloody bribes. But you aren’t going to believe that, either, are you?”

“No.” She nearly spat the word. “There’s not any reason for me to.”

“We’re at a standstill, then.” He jerked at the chain. His eyes narrowed. “Take this thing off me.”

She rose and left the stall without looking at him. Agnes heard the chain rattle as he leapt to his feet. Tall, handsome, nearly naked John Bartholomew, ex-Scotland Yard detective and consummate con artist, was chained to her barn wall. She intended to keep him that way.

“Agnes, you’re not going to get anything out of this revenge,” he called. His voice was calm, but rang with authority.

She ignored him and went out back to the water spigot. Agnes turned the water on full blast then dragged an
armful of coiled hose down the barn’s hallway. She stopped in front of the open stall door, shoved the floor fan aside with her bare foot, then angled her thumb over the hose’s spout and plastered John with a long spray of cold water.

“I can’t clean up your mind, but I can rinse off the rest,” she told him sarcastically.

He stood still, because there wasn’t much else to do, considering how short the chain was. John looked astonished and raised a hand only to shield his face when she aimed the spray at his head. His briefs turned into a translucent white skin over the bulge between his legs.

She prided herself on having the kindness not to aim at his crotch.

When he was soaking, with sheets of water running off him from head to foot, she carried the hose back outside and turned the water off. In the back of her mind she wondered what he’d do to her if he were freed at this moment.

Despite her fury, Aggie couldn’t imagine him hurting her. She leaned against the side of the barn and, overcome by misery, covered her face.
Get real
.

When she returned to the stall he was naked. Giving her a black look, he tossed his rolled-up briefs at her. She was so startled that she let them smack her in the chest. They made a sopping wet trail as they slid down the front of her red shirt. She slapped them to the floor.

“If that’s the way you want it,” she told him, deliberately staring at his body. Anxiety, anger, and poignant memories made goosebumps on her skin. The man was never soft. Even now he mocked her with his arousal, or complimented her, if she continued to think like an idiot.

“A rabid dog doesn’t need underwear,” he said in a seething voice.

Aggie raised tearful eyes to his face. She’d admired
his body and his passion so much in the past few days. Now she had a hollow spot of despair inside her. “At least you’re honest about some things.”

“This won’t work. You won’t get anything out of me this way.” He was losing his composure. He grabbed the chain between his hands and popped it. Muscles flexed violently in his arms.
“Unlock this damned leash.”

“Calm down. You’ll be out of here and on your way back to England before you can say Buckingham Palace.”

“Unlock the chain
now,
” he said very slowly, emphasizing each word.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

She took Sassy out of her stall and put her back in the pasture with the other mares. Sassy had served her purpose in Aggie’s plan. Distraught and exhausted, Aggie stumbled to the house, rummaged through her kitchen, and returned to the barn with a sack full of food. John was pacing as well as he was able in his tiny corner of the stall. Seeing him again was a fresh shock.

She had him chained to her barn wall. Naked. Really.

He halted and stared at her the way a panther suddenly notices its prey—his dark eyes narrowing, his stance tense as if he were preparing to leap.

Aggie tossed a clean milk jug filled with fresh water to him. He caught it, dropped it like a rock, and looked at the grocery sack with challenge. “Keep the damned food and water. I don’t want it.”

“My food and water has got to be better than what you were accustomed to in prison.”

His silence was unnerving in its intensity. Setting the grocery bag on the floor, she pulled out a package of cookies, not looking at him. But his next words speared her with guilt. “You wouldn’t joke about prison if you’d ever been there, Agnes. Especially if you knew you didn’t deserve to be there.”

Aggie kept her head down. She fought the constant
tightness in her throat. “I have an ex-husband in prison. I’ve got an idea what it must be like.”

“The hell you do,” he said, his voice becoming lethal. “The worst things you’ve ever had to face were humiliating articles about you and your husband in the newspapers, and parents who gambled away every penny you earned.”

Her head shot up. “You looked up old articles about me?”

“Yeah. So I know the truth.”

“You knew all along!”

Looking satisfied, he rubbed both hands up and down on his wet torso. “I wasn’t considered one of the best detectives in London for nothing. I’m
very
thorough.”

“You pretended that you didn’t know!”

He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against a wall, then propped one foot over the other. Even naked, with his sex lying against his thigh like a soldier who never stood at less than parade rest, he looked casual. “I assumed you’d tell me eventually. You trusted me. I deserve to be trusted, Agnes.”

Aggie threw the bag of cookies at him. They bounced off his shoulder.

Surprise flashed across his face but he quickly subdued it. “Make you feel better?” he inquired.

“Not even close.” She reached into the grocery bag then hurled a package of bologna at him. He intercepted it with one hand then tossed it aside.

But the overripe tomato she threw next caught him squarely in the stomach. He winced as the pulpy tomato pieces slid down his belly. The bulk of the tomato fell onto his sex and hung there precariously, then tumbled to the stall’s bed of wood shavings.

Next Aggie threw a dripping slice of cold watermelon at him. Fierce with dignity, he stopped defending himself and, standing with his feet braced apart, endured
the watermelon slice bouncing off his stomach. She followed it with an open cup of vanilla yogurt that splattered white goo on his chest, and finally a bag of pretzels that burst against his hard thighs.

“Enjoy your lunch,” she told him curtly. “I’ll be back around dark.”

“You can’t leave me here.” He lunged forward, barely stopping before he choked himself. Only John Bartholomew could look anything but ridiculous covered in food stains. With a roguish beard shadow darkening his jaw, his dark wet hair tousled as if by the turbulence inside him, and his hazel eyes blazing challenge above a mouth set in granite, he hadn’t been humiliated.

“Oh, can’t I?” she countered. “Watch me.”

“What are you after?” he asked in a soft, deadly voice. “I deserve your hatred for deceiving you, but not for who I am. Those books belong to me. Don’t forget it.”

“If it weren’t for my grandfather, they’d have been lost in the war. So they’re half mine!”

“Bloody hell! If that’s what you expect me to agree to, give up.”

“Before I found out the truth, I expected miracles from you. Congratulations. You had me believing that chivalry wasn’t dead.”

“You loved it. All that was left was for me to get a suit of chain mail and a white charger, and you might have loved me. But I was never Sir Miles of Norcross. I was just the modern stand-in, a man who played out your fantasy, and you wanted the fantasy.”

Stunned, she shook her head weakly. Hadn’t he seen how much she’d cared about
him
, even when he was brutally human, even that night he’d fought the muggers? “You don’t really believe that. You’re trying to make me feel guilty.”

“Admit it, Agnes, you used me. You set impossible standards for the ideal man—the only man you were willing to trust. You couldn’t find that man anywhere
but in an ancient book. I was an acceptable substitute, but second best.”

“Do you have any idea what Sir Miles wrote about in his diary?”

“No.” He scowled. “Forget about that bloody fantasy and talk about your feelings for me. That’s all I need to know!”

“My feelings for you?” Tears were creeping into her eyes. “You don’t have any right to ask about them. You don’t have any rights at all, at the moment.” She went outside the stall, where she’d piled his clothes and shoes. Grabbing his khaki shorts and their belt, she went back and slung them at him. “There’s a little of your dignity back. That’s all you’re gonna get from me.”