“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.”
If she’d held anything in her hand, she would have hurled it against the door. He was worse than a wicked snake, entwining himself in her thoughts and bending her will. Yet, strangely, with his departure, the last tremulous ray of warmth vanished, and the room grew cold. Maybe it was because her life as she knew it had just come to an end.
Chapter 5
Victoria stood in David’s dressing room, grateful for the hearty meal Agatha had brought up after she’d awakened from a nap. After three days in this room, she would maim anyone who tried to stop her from going home. At least her head no longer ached, and the egg-sized lump near her temple had receded to a tender swell.
Unable to wrestle with her thoughts any longer, Victoria drew on her drawers over her stockings and tied them at her waist. Given the debacle that was now her life, she considered wallowing in another good cry. One that she could appreciate without a layer of laudanum in her blood. But what she really needed was to see her family.
She stood in front of the long mirror in David’s dressing room, examining the bruises on her ribs. She looked as if she’d been in a brawl. Maybe she had when she considered her unorthodox departure from her horse at David’s hands.
She had not seen her husband since the morning of her interrogation with Kinley. From Agatha she’d learned that David left every morning after breakfast, only to return late. She didn’t know where he slept. Last night, she thought he’d been standing beside the bed, but when she rose on her elbow and looked around, the room had been empty.
Victoria touched the bruises against her ribs
, and, unbidden, memories returned. She knew, without having realized, why her thoughts kept returning to David. After all, no other man had ever lain with her or touched her in all the ways that he had. The bruises on the outside didn’t nearly match those on the inside. She closed her eyes, for there was pain and anger that even the years could no longer keep buried.
Nine years ago, she almost killed him. She had discovered who he was, whom he worked for the day she had come from the consulate physician, preparing to surprise him with the news that she was carrying their child—only to find her father’s bungalow in chaos. Hurrying to her bedroom, she’d found a man bleeding profusely from a wound in his chest, but still strong enough to hold a gun on her, demanding her silence while her father’s men looked for him. He’d told her who David was and that a raid was about to take place on the house. Orders signed by her husband that included her arrest.
Victoria only remembered confronting David with the gun the agent had held on her before he’d died. She warned him not to touch her, to let her go. She’d pleaded. It was the closest she had ever come to killing another human being: the closest she’d ever come to pressing the barrel of a gun against her own temple. Only the fact that she had carried another life inside her body kept her from ending her life. But instead, she had run from all that she knew and loved, and never looked back…until now.
Her mind spun even further back to the first time she’d met David, and knew the exact moment when her life had truly changed, the catalyst that had set her fate in stone. She first glimpsed him on the polo field, riding a low pony and leading his team to victory. He’d been a new arrival in India, working in the diplomatic corps. No man had ever made her breath catch as hers did when he walked his horse off the field, turned his head, and looked directly at her on the sidelines. He’d tipped his riding hat, and she’d watched as he led the horse back to the stables, aware of the whispers around her.
She remembered feeling young and silly that he singled her out and that she had blushed, her reaction so completely girlish that she evaded him for a week afterward—until a dinner at the governor general’s house brought them face to face.
To her discomfort, she’d watched him through the entire meal, barely aware of her own thoughts. In truth, she had never been like other girls her age. She found the cosseted female gender childish and shallow. She disliked the superficial layers of their society, but she played the social game well because it served her purpose. That night she shone.
After all, she was the infamous Meg Faraday, who had spurned the attentions of a wealthy duke two months before. She was the girl all the other girls whispered about behind her back because her mother had run off with a captain from the Bengali army.
Meg was ten years old at the time, and had neither seen nor heard from her mother from that day forward. One never discussed the topic in the Faraday household. A little girl in need of love, she had become her father’s perfect daughter. She learned the lessons well. There was nothing more terrible than when he withdrew his love for some perceived wrong she committed, nothing more frightening than when he left her standing alone in a room wondering if this would be the moment he’d leave her like her mother did.
At first, Colonel Faraday had encouraged her friendships with the daughters of diplomats. She learned where valuables and important papers were kept. In the beginning, she bought into his lies that these people were somehow a threat to England. He worked for the security of the consulate, after all. What fourteen-year-old would not believe her parent? She became a valuable asset to him. She could climb into third-story windows and unlock doors as deftly as she could scale rooftops.
By the time she was seventeen, she suffered no more illusions about her father or her own crimes against those she had befriended. She never suspected that the governor general had launched an internal investigation into her father’s activities or that she was the key target, the weakest link; she only knew that she wanted out of a life that had descended her into a nightmare.
A week before her eighteenth birthday, she had met David on that polo field and had fallen in love, never once suspecting the truth behind his appearance in her life or the motives behind his whirlwind seduction. For the first time, another man became a bigger presence than her father. Here was a man who could have had any woman at his calling, and he had chosen her. David Donally had been the first man to love her for only herself, not for what she could give him in return; at least that was what she’d believed. She let him into her bed and her heart like the novice virgin she was. Then she’d brought him into her father’s circle, never knowing how cleverly David had manipulated her every move to get there.
What were a young girl’s dreams worth, after all? she remembered wondering as she’d watched her future die beneath her father’s indoctrination of her husband.
Victoria closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath to clear her mind. She wiped the dampness off her face with the back of her hand and turned away from the mirror. Outside the dressing room, someone was removing the tea tray. Victoria slipped into her shift and eased the stays around her ribs. She had been in the changing area for an hour. Agatha brought her the clothes Mr. Rockwell had retrieved from Bethany a few days ago when he went to tell Sir Henry her whereabouts.
Another voice intruded, and Victoria knew David’s countess and partner had entered the bedroom. Her flowery perfume wafted into the dressing room.
“Where is she, Agatha?”
“She be in the dressing room, mum.”
Victoria slipped the dress over her head, and slid her arms into the long sleeves as a knock sounded. “Miss Faraday?”
She hated that everyone insisted on using that wretched name. “I suggest that if you wish to carry off this ruse, you call me by my correct name,” she said, walking out into the main room to retrieve her shoes.
Pamela was wearing a lemon yellow satin gown trimmed in Chantilly lace as bright as sunlight. A glittering pair of emeralds in her upswept blond hair gave her an elegance to match her faux title. Indeed, she looked like a spoiled countess as if born to the role.
Agatha stood in the doorway and spoke to Pamela. “Mum, Mr. Rockwell is here to return her back to her family.”
“David has sent a message with arrangements to see you delivered to your family,” Pamela said. “He told me to tell you that everything is in order.”
Victoria hesitated. “Does that mean he paid the taxes on Rose Briar?”
“I believe that it does.”
She was struck silent as she instantly forgot that she disliked him immensely. Of course, it would be dangerous for her to forget this was only business, his side of a bargain. Nothing more. Nellis would be furious, she thought.
“David is very persistent when it comes to the job,” Pamela reminded her, the woman’s use of his first name not going unnoticed. “If he says he will do something, I guarantee he will. It is one of those qualities a woman can count on.”
Victoria slipped her feet into a pair of old slippers. “Do you know Mr. Donally well?” she asked after a moment, turning to face the other woman.
“Since he rejoined the team three months ago, we have gotten to know one another. One does under such circumstances.” Pamela nodded to Victoria’s bodice where it sagged off her shoulders. “Do you need help?”
Victoria could not fasten the buttons at her back. Hesitantly, she turned and lifted her hair. “Thank you.”
Pamela’s fingers deftly finished the buttons. “He was somewhat of a legend in his day, and most people were as surprised by his departure as they were by his return,” she continued. “It even surprised Kinley that he came back. After all, they had barely corresponded in the nine years he was away.”
“David left London? When?”
“Three months after your ship went down. It took him that long to recover from the wound you gave him.”
“Three months?” Victoria laid her hand atop the back of the chair. “I didn’t know.”
“I suppose you didn’t. From what I understand, despite his injury, David tore up Calcutta looking for you after you disappeared. Kinley had sent every available man to bring you in dead or alive. David was the one who finally found your father. He and Kinley had a falling out shortly after that,” Pamela said. “No one ever knew why.”
Victoria looked at the gold band on her finger. David’s robe lay draped over the chair beneath her hand. “How did they finally catch him? My father, I mean?”
“Someone tipped off the authorities. David captured him boarding a ship to Alexandria.”
“I see.”
“He’s an adept agent.” Pamela drew the robe through Victoria’s fingers and, dropping it on the bed, turned with a lift of her brow. “And he never belonged to you, Miss Faraday.”
David turned up the collar of his woolen greatcoat and came to a stop at the top of the hill. The sleepy stillness surrounding him did not fit the uncertain mood of the pewter sky. His tall boots hugging the barrel of his horse, he withdrew his field glasses and looked down at the cemetery spread around the burned-out shell of an old church. He quartered the thinning forests and distant fields.
One corner of his mouth lifting in a meager smile, he returned the field glasses to their leather casing and tucked them inside the haversack behind his saddle. A stiff chill found its way beneath the lapel of his coat. He kicked his horse into motion and cleared the ditch in a graceful arc as he continued down the back road into the cemetery. After a few days of rest—or as Meg accused him in his absence, her captivity—Ian Rockwell would be returning her to her cottage this evening. David had stayed away from her—as far away as he could while he sifted through the facts of this case. He’d already risked compromising this investigation by demanding that she remain in his custody, but he knew Kinley had been manipulating him from the moment he’d shown up in Ireland and asked David to rejoin the case.
One gloved hand resting near his thigh, David kept his gaze on the ground, alert to his thoughts as he lifted his head and looked out across the rows of stones. Meg had come straight to this place after Sheriff Stillings confronted her with the earring. David suspected the reason was more complicated than anyone thought.
Angel In My Bed Page 5