Promise Me Heaven

by Connie Brockway

  He loved her.

  Thomas smiled, the hollowness of the preceding months vanishing with acceptance. He laid his lips on the silky tangle of her hair. He would be to Cat mentor, guardian, rake, confidant, fool. He would be anything she wanted or needed. And if she needed him gone, he would even do that. But he would no longer try and convince himself that his heart was a spurious betrayer. As long as they lived and beyond even that, Thomas conceded, he would love Cat Sinclair.

  The cold was finally gone. Cat nestled deeper into the encompassing warmth, lulled by the deep tempo beneath her ear. She started to stretch, but her movement was stymied.

  “Cat.”

  She was dreaming. She had to be. Half a nightmare of flight and exhaustion, cold and fear, and half undiluted fantasy. For it was Thomas’s voice that whispered to her.

  “Love.” His voice again, a welcome sanctuary in the black, threat-riddled night. She wasn’t surprised. So many nights he waited just beyond slumber’s door, to hold her just as he was doing now, to whisper the word he had just spoken. She ignored the trace of sadness she felt. She did not care if it was just a dream.

  Wrapping her arms around the hard warmth, she refused to relinquish this dream to consciousness. Strong arms tightened around her. She turned, and her mouth pressed against smooth, warm skin where a phantom heart beat beneath her lips. She smiled.

  In her dream Thomas cursed. Or was it a prayer? It was impossible to say. She snuggled closer, pressing her length more fully to his. He shuddered and her body answered.

  Even in dreams where she was chased by terror and danger, he had the power to ignite her senses, to call from her body the shivering response that only he could. Her hands slowly measured the breadth of his shoulders, palmed the slope of his chest, tested the hardness of the ghostly arms that held her. She sighed.

  His heart was a thick, mesmerizing rhythm beneath her ear, his unyielding embrace at odds with the shivering gossamer brush of unseen fingertips. Something velvety and warm trailed across her forehead, over her cheeks, and down her throat. A languid, yet somehow fervent movement. He was kissing her! Cat purred in delight.

  “Cat, wake up. We have to leave soon.”

  Leave? How could one leave a dream? Cat opened her eyes and blinked, foggy headed as she tried to accustom her vision to the murky light. The bed shifted beneath her. She bolted upright, banging her head painfully on some overhead projection.

  “Ow!” two voices erupted.

  She struggled in the bedclothes and, becoming more entangled, pitched forward. Strong hands caught her, hauling her back upright. He was real. Thomas. She stretched out her hands to touch him, to reassure herself he was no exhaustion-induced fantasy. “Thomas?”

  “Your hardheadedness is no longer open to debate, m’dear,” he said, sitting down on the single chair and rubbing his chin.

  His voice dispelled the lingering enchantment of her dream. But even his sardonic tone could not erase her joy.

  “How did you find me?”

  “First things first.”

  She heard the scrape of a flint and the sudden flash of light caused her to squint. She could not see his face beyond the flame. He had gone very still. “Thomas? What is it?”

  “Ahm. You have, I take it, been masquerading as your aunt?” He was laughing! The drat great beast was laughing at her after all she’d been through!

  “Yes. Why are you laughing?” She sniffed with offended dignity. “I assure you it was not an easy—”

  “Cat. Take a look.”

  He nodded at the large, broken triangle of mirror propped against the wall next to the bed. Ringing the end of a blanket over her shoulder, Cat leaned over from the waist to see what was causing him so much amusement.

  A hideous, filthy hag stared back at her. The greasepaint she had applied that morning had frozen then thawed. Oily dark streaks bracketed her nose and encircled her eyes. Straw and hayseeds had become fixed in the thicker layers of paint, pebbling one cheek in a bizarre approximation of a beard. Her hair hung in long, snarled ropes. In horror, Cat covered her mouth with her hands. They gleamed bishop’s blue.

  She turned to Thomas, her eyes wide. “There wasn’t a water basin or a cloth, and I was too tired to do more than rid myself of those sodden dresses, and I never so much as realized there was even a mirror to look into, and I…”

  He regarded her with amused smugness.

  “And I will be damned if I explain why I do not look as though I were about to attend some cursed musicale when I have spent the entire day banging along in an open wagon while the skies poured ice on me!” She reached out, braced her hand against Thomas’s chest, and shoved him, hoping to topple him literally and figuratively from the chair.

  She might as well have tried to push an oak tree over. He looked at her hand pressed open on his now-stained shirt and captured it in his own. Turning her hand over, he bent his head and placed his lips on her palm.

  “You are intelligent, brave, courageous, and resourceful, and I am filled with admiration for you.”

  Sudden tears spilled from her eyes, leaving glistening tracks in her ruined makeup.

  “I am not! I am none of those things!” The words tumbled out. The words she had to say. Ridiculous now to even think them, but they were impossible to contain. They had haunted her throughout the entire terrifying, horrendous day. “I am a liar. I lied to you, Thomas. I haven’t had any lovers.”

  He didn’t seem to know how to respond. He stared at her.

  “Not a one.”

  “I know,” he finally said, smiling oddly.

  Her perceived sins loomed in front of her, making confession a necessity. “And I ran, Thomas. I fled like the most base coward. I could not think where to go to find you… I left without… Oh, Thomas! I didn’t know where to look for you!”

  Thomas was stunned. Even as he gathered Cat to him, rocking her gently, the impact of what she had just said overwhelmed him. No other woman he knew would have had the ingenuity to escape past the blockades. But more astounding still, no woman he had ever known would have then tortured herself for having left behind an unrelated man of twice her size and experience.

  Foolish heart, he chided himself, to read something in that. It was just Cat, who, having assumed responsibility for the welfare of so many, had unthinkingly added him to her long list.

  “It’s all right, Cat.” He withdrew a square of linen from his pocket and carefully daubed at her messy face.

  “… and Hecuba!” She gulped, trying to gather her composure. “I haven’t the least idea where she is!”

  “Ah, yes, Hecuba. I admit, I expected to find her beneath that pile of blankets and be back to chasing you to ground by now. Where is Lady Montaigne White?”

  “Eloped.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “She eloped, and I swear, Thomas, if you start laughing again…”

  “Forgive me. It is merely the result of extravagant relief.”

  She eyed him suspiciously.

  “Really. Now tell me the details. Some pretty young French cicisbeo, I expect. Well, she’s a canny old thing. She’ll protect her assets well enough.”

  “Not at all. She eloped with the Marquis de Grenville.”

  “Grenville?” He eyed her with open disbelief. “You’re gulling me. He died of the French pox a decade ago!”

  Cat disengaged herself from her comfortable position tucked under Thomas’s chin and threw her hands up in mock surrender. “You’re right. I am teasing you. Sitting here, freezing to death in this drafty hole, without a guinea to pay the landlord, not knowing if you were alive or dead, or if I should ever see you again, I got bored. So I thought to myself, ‘If perchance Thomas should reappear, however shall I entertain him? I know! I’ll tell him some Banbury tale about Hecuba eloping with an ancient marquis!’ ”

  Thomas grinned at her sarcasm, relieved to have the despair gone from her eyes. This was his Cat. “Point taken.”

  She fidgeted a second b
efore settling herself once more against him. He pushed her upright.

  “Sorry, Cat. We haven’t time for you to take a nap. We have to be off before the other guests awaken and bribe, buy, or steal their way out of here.”

  “Do you have a carriage?”

  “No. Just a farmer’s plow horse which, at this point, is worth more than any blooded steed at Tattersall’s. I rode astride. We will have to find something to hitch her to.”

  “I have a wagon.”

  Thomas stood up, carefully lowering Cat to her feet. “Why doesn’t this surprise me? Well, then, we’d best be off. We need to get you back to England. In the best of worlds, with your reputation intact.”

  Her brow furrowed with perplexity.

  “Did you think that your mother’s marriage to my half brother would sanction our unchaperoned trip across France? No matter what the circumstances, my notoriety would negate far more than such a dubious a family connection.”

  “What will we do?”

  “Hecuba’s elopement suggests a plan. You shall remain in guise as a rich, elderly woman and I shall masquerade as your French ‘companion.’ Not only will we protect your identity, but we also stand a better chance of making it quickly across the country. The French are a nationalistic but practical people. They won’t be averse to helping an unthreatening old woman, even if she is English, and her opportunistic French lover. For a fee.”

  “And you think you can give a creditable performance as a French ‘companion’?” Cat asked, openly doubtful.

  “I have some experience at this sort of playacting.”

  “Ah yes, your foreign service, no doubt.”

  Thomas looked at her, startled. “What do you know of my foreign service?”

  “Only that you were involved in some information gathering capacity here in France.”

  “And who told you this? Daphne Bernard?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  Thomas took a deep breath. “Pray listen, Cat. My past is not a particularly savory one. I have done things unfit for your ears—”

  “Your past found you in Brighton, Thomas,” Cat broke in, failing to meet his eye. “Daphne Bernard is part of that past. Whatever your relationship with her, no matter how unsavory, I know it was necessary. But please, I don’t want to discuss it any further. Ever.”

  Thomas watched her closely, reading the telltale stain rising beneath the greasy smears on her cheeks. If only Daphne were the most sordid piece of the history he could have related to her. If she caused Cat’s cheeks to flame and her eyes to dart away from his in embarrassment, how would she react if she were to hear about Mariette Leons and her son? He refused to think of it.

  Her form beneath the thin muslin was silhouetted by the candle. The sway of her full breasts as she bent over was a sensuous motion revealed in tantalizing clarity by the backlighting. All thoughts of Daphne and Mariette and every other woman he’d ever known slowly dissolved as he stared at Cat. He felt his blood pound to his loins in instant appreciation.

  Damnation. He might as well be a sixteen-year-old virgin himself instead of a man on the brink of his middle years as she’d once pointed out. She wasn’t even aware of it. Her actions were without calculation, utterly unselfconscious. And why should she fret over his avuncular presence? How could she know he fought his body’s urgency as he stood beside her?

  “I have to get dressed,” Cat said patiently, obviously misreading the absorption in his gaze as woolgathering.

  “Yes.”

  “Thomas, you were the one who was exhorting me to speed a few minutes ago.”

  “Yes. Of course. I’ll meet you down in the public room in quarter of an hour?”

  Cat sighed as she picked up one after the other of the still damp bust improvers.

  “Better half of an hour.”

  Chapter 24

  Thomas had already hitched one of the horses to the wagon and was waiting outside the inn beneath the ebony sky by the time Cat appeared, slipping from the shadows at the back of the inn by way of the maid’s exit from the attic and a stout pole ladder. She fretted a moment over leaving Sally Leades and her brother, but Thomas reassured her in a hushed voice, telling her they were safe with their countrymen.

  He waited until she nodded, his greatcoat billowing in the wind about his broad shoulders, his dark head bare to the elements. Wordlessly, he handed Cat into the cart, his black eyes scanning the horizon as he tucked her under the blankets and lap rugs he had somehow procured.

  As they traveled slowly northward, the rain gave way to sleet. Buffeted on relentless winds, the wet snow churned in the air until the difference between the thick, white sky and the frost-rimed ground became negligible. The wind made conversation impossible.

  Cat, wedged onto the narrow seat next to Thomas, was conscious even through the layers of wool of the press of Thomas’s leg against hers. She determined herself to adopt the casual familiarity that came so easily to him but she could not. He had come for her. He had searched until he had found her. He meant to insure her safe passage through this suddenly hostile countryside. All of his actions spoke eloquently of duty and responsibility. There were no lingering glances, no passionate declarations. The dream she’d had of his tender kisses and lover-like embrace faded in his self-possessed presence.

  The occasional smile he flashed at her was sympathetic and encouraging and nothing more.

  The incongruity of it! Her knowledge of this “libertine” was so utterly incommensurate with society’s. And yet an image of a woman, her hands on Thomas, his head thrown back in sensual ecstasy, was burned in Cat’s memory.

  She wasn’t even certain of what she had seen, nor what “intense pleasure” Thomas had denied himself, nor even why he had ordered Daphne Bernard from his room. Cat had no reason to trust Daphne’s assurance that Thomas had rejected her. Yet she had no reason to distrust it. She only knew she wanted more than anything to believe the Frenchwoman.

  Not that it truly mattered. Whatever Thomas had done, or chose to do, he would always be to her more than some notorious title. He was a onetime spy and a onetime libertine very likely. But, more important, he was honorable, kind, clever, and a thousand other qualities that set him apart from and above other men.

  It was well past dusk. They had watched the sun breach the low hills and climb to its apex in the winter sky and then watched its slow, remorseless descent. He glanced down at Cat, snuggled against him. She shuddered in her sleep, her lips a bruised blue in her pale face. Her lashes fluttered with agitation against the ivory flesh.

  “Cat!” Thomas said urgently. “Cat, wake up!”

  Her eyelids opened, and she stared at him for a moment, her gaze without recognition.

  He hauled the mare to a stop and lifted her from the seat to bury her in the hay, piling the blankets on top of her. Snapping the lead on the mare, he drove toward the light of a farmhouse tucked between two hills. He had to warm her up. Before she died.

  In the farmyard, fear for her made him careless. He tucked another blanket around her before vaulting from the seat. Mounting the steps, he pounded his fists against the farmhouse door.

  “What?” a voice called from within.

  “Open, monsieur! I have a sick woman outside!”

  “Go away!”

  “No! She must get warm!” Thomas called, on the brink of kicking the door down.

  A crack appeared in the solid portal. A small, aged man peered up at him. “Be you English?”

  Thomas quickly dismissed the idea of him and Cat impersonating a Frenchman and his aged mistress. He was unsure of what Cat would say in her present condition. And also, he could not allow her to suffocate beneath those awful veils. One look at the beautiful purity of her face, and their lie would be discovered.

  He threw himself on the old man’s mercy. “Yes, English. Please, you must help me. I will pay.”

  The old man slammed the door shut. Thomas could hear muttered voices behind the barrier. He leaned
his forehead against the wood, praying the old man would not make him use force, knowing he would if necessary, if Cat needed him to.

  The door swung open. The old man stood grinning up at him. Sighing in relief, Thomas breathed a word of thanks before turning to get Cat.

  He did not see the old man’s two sons appear like thick, black shadows from the corner of the house. He did not hear their footfalls over the howling wind. But he felt the blow that caught him viciously behind the ear and he felt the ground rise up to meet his collapsing form. His last despairing thought was that he had failed Cat, after all.

  Cat. Thomas shook his head. His head swam in pain-filled waves. He squinted, blinding lights streaking fireworks across his field of vision. She wasn’t in the room. Only two beefy farm lads and the wizened old man kept him company. He shifted and realized he’d been trussed up, his hands tied behind him.

  “Up, are you?” the old Frenchman said. He limped forward to stand in front of Thomas. “Thought to do us, did you? Bah! Nothing in that rackety thing but a pile of blankets. What’s your game, m’lad? You’re no more English than my boys here!”

  Experience had taught Thomas never to offer information, so he sat silent, waiting, every nerve straining to detect some sign of Cat.

  The old man suddenly snarled, and his hand swung out, catching Thomas’s cheek in a savage backhanded blow. “Out with it! You ain’t English quality. Why, you’re as dark as a gypsy!”

  The old man bent low, his face inches from Thomas’s. He lifted his hand again. This time it held a short leather strap. His sons watched impassively. Thomas struggled against the ropes binding him and the old man laughed. From outside a dog started barking. The old man’s head snapped up.