She studied a wood chip. “We get a storm like this every three or four years. Once, we had a hurricane come through. Brighton received most of the damage.”
“I remember. The Dublin rags carried news of that.”
She looked up and found his eyes on her. He had read about something that had happened to her, she realized, wondering if that was the same as looking into a sky filled with stars knowing those same celestial entities filled David’s sky as well. Glancing away, she moved out of the lantern light nearer to the horse.
“You were very capable with Mr. Doyle tonight,” she said.
He put aside the axe, saying something inane to the chicken that brought a smile to her mouth. “You don’t talk about yourself much, do you?” she asked as he moved beside her, stirring straw with his steps.
Don’t panic, she told herself, holding her hand out to the stallion behind the door. David’s coat brushed her cloak. He set down the cup and turned to the horse as it leaned its neck over the stall in greeting. “I’ve worked in many a hospital. Not as a physician, but close enough to people sometimes to be one.”
“A far road from the one you traveled in Calcutta.”
“Roads have many forks,” he said.
“That’s the beauty of roads,” she agreed. “They fork.”
One corner of his mouth tilted. “The more forks the better.”
He was skilled at keeping a conversation moving when he wanted to as he talked about everything except the topic at hand. She imagined that making love to him again would be about as breathtaking as burning up on a beach of hot sand. India had been like that. Sultry and tempestuous. Jasmine and sunlight.
Death.
“I don’t want to bed you,” she said without looking at him.
His hands stroked the horse’s ears and neck. “It’s cold in here, isn’t it, Old Boy?”
His presence achingly intimate, she felt pinned by the gentle movement of his hands, captured by the mockery of their circumstances and conflicting desire. “I mean it, David. Don’t ask me. Especially when we both know why you are here.”
“Why did you venture out here?” he asked, rubbing his hand down the horse’s neck.
She glanced up at his shadowed profile, knowing she couldn’t answer that question, without admitting how easily he seduced her. The sensation left her dizzy.
“What’s his name?” She nodded to the horse, and this time David grinned, the kind of smile that could light up a dark night, or in this case the inside of a frosty stable.
He looked directly into her eyes. “Old Boy.”
Her mouth crooked into a smile before she caught herself and frowned. Stepping around him, she walked toward the barn door, the cloak flowing around her like wings. “I wish I hated you.” She opened the door and turned. “But I don’t.”
David remained where she left him standing, stroking the horse, aware that the blood rushed faster in his veins. He could still smell his soap on her. The scent of her hair. He’d come out to the barn tonight to get away from her, and now found that he did not want to escape at all.
“Not good, Old Boy,” he murmured, distracted, the words as much a warning to himself as they were an admonition that the line he walked was thin indeed. “Not good at all.”
“She said ye like peppermint, my lord.”
David threw off the covers someone had laid over him in the night. He sat on a chair in front of the hearth. Mr. Doyle stood beside him, a cup of hot tea extended. The weathered, blue-veined hands shook with age. A glance around told him Meg was gone.
Furious, he slid his feet into his boots. “Did she also tell you to remain quiet until she’d left?” He walked to the kitchen window and looked outside at the stable.
Tracks led from the stable in the snow. She’d taken the horse. He dragged up his coat from the sofa and, walking outside, looked toward the church.
It was there he stopped. One set of fresh tracks left the churchyard from the old rectory. Yet there were no tracks leading inside, which meant they did not belong to Meg.
Someone had been inside that church since the snow had begun to fall after midnight. Shoving his arms into his coat sleeves, he looked across the field into a network of distant ravines and hillocks that eventually turned into woods. Old Boy’s tracks joined the footprints a hundred yards out and disappeared over a hill.
“You were sleepin’ like a babe when she left this morning,” Doyle said, standing inside the doorway wrapped in a blue-checkered blanket. “I told her last night I seen the spirits in the church. Sometimes they glow in the rectory. Sometimes in the belfry. I told her. She believes me now.”
Muttering an oath beneath his breath, David stepped off the porch.
“Y-you won’t be leaving me, will you?”
He pulled his gloves out of the pocket and turned to see the old man following him. “Pack what you will be taking to Widow Gibson’s. I won’t be gone long.”
“Bless you, m’lord.”
David decided it was a good idea Meg was taking Doyle to another place for winter—if he didn’t wring her neck first, he thought as he trudged through snow toward the churchyard.
“Who are you today?” He paused to study the tracks. “Lady Victoria, good Samaritan? Or Colonel Faraday’s protégée?”
Meg, Maggie, Victoria, Lady Munro. He’d never known a more talented chameleon than Margaret Faraday, beautiful daughter of a Bengali garrison whore and a convicted murderer. Except maybe her father.
Squatting, David splayed his hands over the footprints, studying the depth of the snow. A big man wearing large boots and a cloak had made the tracks. He could see the fabric striations atop the icy surface. A man’s cloak usually touched his calves, which made this particular ghost of Doyle’s at least six feet tall. Colonel Faraday was six feet tall.
David looked north and continued following the tracks, plowing through the snow, a lone figure in black wool and clothing too nice, certainly inappropriate for a winter stroll. Yet the farther he walked, the more time seemed to stand still all around him, the air breathtakingly silent, the landscape strangely beautiful encased in snow and ice.
Like Meg, he thought, an ice queen atop the lifeblood and heartbeat of her soul. Fate and deception had made her his wife. The force of his own passion had brought her back to him. He had forgotten the true depth of that passion. The danger she posed.
This was the second time in as many days he’d allowed himself to worry about Meg. David laughed—a knife-blade edge of anger—a dead giveaway that he would bloody throttle her this time. It wasn’t a reassuring sound.
Not when he wanted her as he wanted the warmth of sunlight at this moment.
“Too long in Ireland,” he murmured in disgust a half hour later, his breath clinging like a cloud to the air. He had difficulty catching his breath in the cold. He stopped to assess the tracks and to breathe. Bracing his hands on his thighs, he glanced over his shoulder, back at the cottage, surprised that he’d traveled so far. In front of him, in a wooded copse, long clump grass peeked through places bared of snow by the wind. Pushing off, he moved on, but slowed when he glimpsed another pair of smaller tracks.
A woman had met the man here. He found where a horse had been corralled behind a windbreak. Moving on, he followed the horse’s tracks another hundred yards to the top of a hill that looked down over a sweeping valley.
In the taut silence of his thoughts, David saw the band of riders crest the knoll in front of him. They had seen him at the same time he stopped on the rise.
Bloody hell.
Out in the open as he was, he had no place to go. If he ran, the horses would be upon him in less than a minute. As the riders neared, he identified Stillings in the lead. Even in a heavy cloak, hat, and beard growth, the man was unmistakable. Only eight to one, he mused aloud. Two men broke away, and the riders widened into an arch. David recognized a flank attack when he saw one, backed a step, and prepared to fight.
One horse bore down on him, the rider wielding a cu
dgel.
David ducked, rolled, then came up on his feet. Two men dropped from their horses and tackled him from behind. His body slammed against the ground. He felt a kick to the ribs, but evaded the second boot to his chest. David rolled to his feet, his coat swirling around his ankles as he turned and met the third rider holding the club.
“Bloody grab him, Franks,” Stillings shouted.
A man’s bulky arms wrapped around his torso, his heavy breathing measuring a physical exhaustion that won David precious few seconds. He raised both feet off the ground and kicked the man holding the club, sending him sprawling on his backside. Lowering his chin against his chest, he touched both feet to the ground, gripped Franks’s forearm, and flipped him flat onto his back into the snow. In one swift movement, David dropped to one knee, his arm a vise around the man’s neck.
Breathing hard, he lifted his eyes to Sheriff Stillings. “Pull your men off me.” The words came out in a puff of steam. “Fooking now!”
The four men surrounding him stopped in their tracks, all of them looking to Stillings for direction. No one moved.
“Two of my men were killed last night,” the sheriff said. “Not a mile from here. Their necks were broken.”
David let loose of the man whose throat he gripped in the crook of his elbow. Gasping, Franks crawled away. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re a stranger in these parts.”
“He is with me,” a decidedly furious feminine voice said from behind him.
David’s head jerked toward the voice. Meg sat atop his high-stepping stallion. “I lost my derringer,” she said, “and this shotgun will hurt, Tommy Stillings.”
The barrel in her hands did little to persuade David that he was any safer from her than he was from Stillings. As if reading his mind, she said, “Mr. Doyle keeps a shotgun in the barn.”
David wiped his mouth and spit blood into the snow. Not that he’d ever trust her anymore than he appreciated being in her direct line of fire. “I’ll try to remember that next time you and I are sleeping beneath the same roof for a night. I will be the first to know if you decide to shoot that thing, won’t I?”
“I told you it was dangerous for you alone out here.”
“But not for you,” he said deadpan, coming to his feet and managing not to flinch from the pain in his ribs. “Have I interrupted a secret assignation?” David looked between his wife and the sheriff, who seemed bemused by the exchange. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Do you two know each other?” Stillings asked.
Meg pulled her gaze from his and raised her chin. “You have just tried to kill Lord Chadwick, my cousin and the new owner of the land where you and your men are trespassing. He purchased Rose Briar two days ago.”
“Did he now?” Leather creaked as Stillings propped his elbow across the saddle and gave David the full import of his gaze. “The new owner. Dressed all nice-like for church. Inspecting your land?”
The men around him chuckled. Stillings nudged his horse forward, eyeing David’s clothes. “No gentleman I know fights the way you do.”
“He didn’t kill your men,” Meg said, the shotgun leveled at Stillings’s chest.
Stillings frowned. “You shouldn’t be aiming that at me, Doc. I might get the impression you’re trying to shoot me.”
“Oh, please, Tommy. I would think that after the other night, that fact would be abundantly clear.” Her gaze touched David’s. “The sheriff thinks I’m a thief. He’s under the impression that I’m in possession of a necklace that will make him a wealthy man.”
“Interesting.” David cocked a brow. “Are you?”
“Naturally.” She glared at him. “That’s why I live like a pauper in a hunter’s cottage.”
“Does our magistrate know you own Rose Briar?” Stillings asked David.
“I had the pleasure of informing the honorable Nellis Munro yesterday.”
Stillings’s horse stamped in a circle. The barrel of Meg’s shotgun followed his chest. “Why are you on this property, Tommy? Aren’t you a little off the main roads?”
The sheriff’s smile was white against the black stubble on his face, but his eyes had grown hard. “What have I told you about talking that way to me in front of my—”
“How is your wife, Tommy?”
Something flickered in Stillings’s gaze.
“I saw her three weeks ago in town,” Meg said. “I’ll need to check on her progress next month. Unless, of course, you prefer that she birth that babe alone. I want you off this land. Even I have my limits when you threaten my loved ones.”
Stillings straightened in the saddle. “You know what I think, Doc? You’d not let Annie birth that babe alone no matter what I did.” He laughed as he waved his men away.
His men mounted in a rattle of bridle chains and creaking leather made stiff by the cold. The horses galloped down the ravine toward the wooded copse, and finally reappeared on the opposite knoll before vanishing into the woods.
“Your loved ones?” David spit out blood over a laugh. “Wasn’t that overdoing it?”
“When did you talk to Nellis?”
He tested his bottom lip with the back of one gloved hand. She was wearing his cloak. The one she’d worn last night in the stable. “Ask your bloody family.”
“Did you kill Stillings’s men?”
David squinted against the bright glare of the sun, tempted to yank the shotgun out of her hands and pull her off the saddle, if his head didn’t feel like he’d dropped it out off a second-floor balcony. Clearly, she wanted a reason to distrust him as much as he distrusted her. He began to relax, as much as he could around her.
“I was in town yesterday. Where were you before Rockwell found you?”
“Oh, please. I’m not strong enough to snap a man’s neck. Isn’t that your forte?”
“Whoever was in that church last night, I can assume didn’t belong to Stillings’s group?” he asked.
Unless she already knew. But she wasn’t looking at him, and he couldn’t see her eyes. “I followed the tracks into the woods about a half mile down the hill.” She pointed to the ravine. “I saw signs that a horse had been left in a lean-to on the other side of where an old hay barn sits. I was there when I saw Stillings’s men.”
David wanted to look away but found he could not. She’d been nowhere near that lean-to or surely he’d have seen her. “Why did you go alone this morning, Meg?”
“Shouldn’t you be thanking me for saving your life?”
He fixed his eyes on the shotgun. “Is my life safe in your hands?”
More than a warning, his voice held a question. Her gaze dropped to his stance, to his hands before lifting to touch his eyes. Awareness of her—of danger—coursed like a current through his veins. Even at her mercy, he would have time to kill her before she swung around the shotgun and pulled the trigger.
Maybe.
If he didn’t hesitate.
As he had years before. Jeopardizing the mission and the lives of the men who depended on him. Nearly costing him his life. Certainly his soul.
“Shooting you is underrated,” she said quietly.
“Or maybe you’ll be hunted until you die. This time without benefit of a fake death to cover your trail. These people aren’t your family, Meg. They aren’t your people. Why are you even here standing up to a man like Stillings?”
“I don’t expect you to understand.” She shoved the shotgun in the sling hanging from the saddle and, leaning into the stirrup, lowered herself to the ground. Snow crunched beneath her boots as she approached him. “You’re hurt.” She pulled aside his coat.
He stopped her from touching him. “Why would you save me from Stillings’s men?”
“Maybe I like your personality. I don’t know. You tell me.”
He couldn’t.
And thrice his heart thumped in response to her standing before him. A breeze whipped at her voluminous cloak. The curves of her body looked supple and inviting. He low
ered her hands to her sides. In no way did he want her to touch him.
“I should look at your ribs.”
“No.” He walked past her. “You should not. If I wasn’t chasing you, this wouldn’t have happened.”
She followed him to the horse. “Don’t be such an infant—”
He bent and snapped up the reins, trailing in the snow. “I don’t want your help, Meg. I don’t need your help.”
“No, you only want me as bait to catch my father.”
“Bait?” he scoffed.
“Wasn’t that all I ever was to you, anyway? Bait?”
Victoria watched as he stepped into the stirrup and swung his leg over the saddle with a grimace of pain. The sun was behind his shoulders. “You obviously know how to shoot that shotgun,” he said, “so keep it and go back to Doyle. I want him packed to move.” He swung the horse around. “Today.”
“I’ve already followed those tracks.” Victoria glared at his rigid back. He was going to leave her to walk, the bastard. “Obviously you’ve kept your fighting skills as well-honed as they always were,” she called, resenting the tears that welled, the sense of abandonment, the way he had always made her feel. “But still not well enough to keep you from running away. I would have left India with you had you just asked, David! Why couldn’t you have asked?”
The horse stopped on the incline, but Victoria was too deep into the throes of her temper to take heed of her tongue. “I know you must have felt something!”
The beast reared and pranced irritably in a circle as David turned back up the hill. A shadow passed over her at his approach. Her gaze traversed the length of a shiny boot, past a thigh snugly attired in dark trousers. His gloved hand gripped the reins. “What the hell did you expect to happen between us, Meg? You and me?
“Didn’t you think I knew you danced only when your father pulled the strings? Why do you think he let me marry you?” Her horrified gaze held his probing colder one. “You never knew. Did you? He learned who I was before you did. There was never anything but the game and the chase. Bait? Your father dangled you in shark-infested waters ready to feed you to the treasure gods, Meg. You never once asked for my help. Not one bloody time in the three months we were married did you ask.”
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