She realized, though she was still very much afraid of her father, she was more afraid that she could never rectify her past. “A part of me always knew my father couldn’t love me. I was too much like my mother. I looked like her. I was impulsive and had to be forever reined in. But I never allowed myself to see how much of a monster he truly was until you came into my life, and I saw beauty. When your partner told me who you really were, I wanted to die. Maybe if you hadn’t come home at the moment you did, I might have. Instead, I aimed the gun at you. If you had just walked away…if you hadn’t moved when you did…”
“You were never supposed to be in the house when that raid went down. But you changed your routine that day. You were not at the consulate…”
Victoria shook her head, remembering the nightmare that had set her running for nine years, making no more excuses for her actions or condemnation for his. She had not been at the consulate because she had been visiting the physician about her condition. “After I left you”—she couldn’t voice the word shot—“I realized all that I had become was all that I despised in my father. I had someone growing inside me who depended on me to survive. I didn’t want my baby to suffer my own legacy. But even as I made the decision to turn in my father, a childish part of me wanted to believe he had not always been so evil.”
Or that she was nothing like him. For nine years, she strove to be everything for Nathanial that her father had never been for her.
“Your father couldn’t love you because he didn’t know how.”
She cocked her head. “You say that as if from experience.”
“Does either of us really know what love is? You were eighteen when I married you. For all of your worldly experience, you were naïve about men.”
“Was it all a lie?”
For a long time he said nothing, and she thought he wouldn’t answer.
“None of it was a lie, Meg.”
Her tears blurred his face. Somehow, he had moved nearer, and when she straightened, she was looking into his eyes. “You ask that I take my first step with you,” she said. “I already did ten years ago. And you gave me Nathanial.”
They remained suspended in time, neither speaking. It came upon them slowly, the way the years seemed to fall away and into bittersweet crumbs to her feet. Breathing became hard. Caught by the shifting sunlight warming the room, she was suddenly standing apart from everything she was, everything she’d become these past years.
The dam was suddenly cracking.
What was the point in trying to protect herself when she wanted to kiss him. When she wanted to feel his hands on her body and the whisper of hope against her heart. Then he put his palm on the doorjamb at her back and her uncertain eyes held his.
“Kiss me, Victoria.”
He sealed her name with a tender kiss that turned all too quickly into something more. And the dam that had cracked now shattered in a flood of emotions. Why couldn’t she listen to her head instead of her heart, she chastised herself, dropping the vest at her feet and looping her arms around his neck.
When they broke apart, there was no teasing glint in his eyes, nothing to drain away the building tension. They were both breathing rapidly. She felt her body’s response and, leaning against him, pulled him back into the kiss. She opened his mouth to her thorough exploration, taking his groan deep into her throat. His harsh stubble abrading her flesh, he threaded his fingers into her hair, sifting them through her braid, and tipping her face to deepen the kiss.
Having lost her focus completely, she felt her head fall against her shoulders, frustrated by her own lack of self-preservation. She had not realized the depth of her need and barely registered his action as he turned the key in the lock.
“I am too soft, I think,” she murmured, when he drew back to settle his mouth on the hollow of her throat.
She felt his hardness against her abdomen and the smile in his voice. “I am not soft at all,” he rasped joining his mouth again to hers, his fingers scoring a path from the curvature of her shoulders to her hands.
He wrapped his fingers around her wrists and raised them to the door. His dark blue eyes burned into hers. “And if you don’t stop me, I will take you to my bed and finish what I want to do with you at this moment.”
She sank against the length of him, intensely aware of the hunger they both shared. “People will miss us downstairs, David.”
Their gazes met and held. “God’s truth, do we care? What do you want?”
Victoria felt the door at her back, felt trapped by more than its barrier to freedom. The heat of his hands enfolding her wrists and the turbulent blaze of his eyes all conspired to rebuke her resolve. She didn’t want to examine her needs, for she was no longer sure of anything, least of all herself.
Yet there was too much between them to deny the physical and emotional connection. They still had a thousand miles to travel before they reached the middle, but somehow the distance was not as far as it had been when she’d awakened that morning.
She belonged to him. And as that primitive reality swept through her, a bubble of giddiness threatened to overtake her senses. “I want to see you naked.”
His breath was warm against her lips, and, divining her resolve, he bunched her shirt in his fist and drew it over her head. “Then I endeavor to make it so.”
He swept her into his arms, conveying her to the bed, where he sat her on her feet beside the mattress. This was not the rush and desperation she’d felt before, but a wanton need to touch and feel all of him. She eased her palms across his taut shoulders, opening the robe over his arms where it fell in a caress of black silk to his feet. He wore nothing beneath. David had the kind of body a woman didn’t forget, and ten years had honed his muscles. He was hard and rigid, polished perfection that sprang from the dark juncture between his thighs. As if he didn’t even know he was standing in front of her naked and magnificent, he worked his hands over the ties on her trousers and slid them down her legs with her drawers. But standing beside him in her stays and camisole, she considered the ugly scar forming on her waist, and her hesitation made him raise his eyes.
There was something hot in the force of that look. Something that burned over her and made her buttery inside. Then he was easing her down onto the bed and they lay entwined, her leg over his hip. “Do you trust me not to hurt you?” he rasped, as if struggling to breathe.
She didn’t want to evaluate that sentiment. She knew what he meant. He didn’t want to hurt her wound. But he was also speaking about the wound in her heart that he had put there. He was asking her to believe in him as if he understood there would come a time that they would both be tested.
Rolling with her, he pulled her across his hips, speaking the words again as he opened her mouth to a plundering kiss, his hands expertly disarming her of her will but halting with her stays. Only because she recognized that he’d sensed her vulnerability, and waited for her to let him remove her camisole.
One hand splayed her back. He closed the other over one breast, then suckled the second through the frail fabric. She could feel his need in the way his hand curved down her spine, over her hip and along her thigh to claim the hot, humid center of her. Her lashes lowered. She arched, aware of his tongue on her breast and the moistness he created with his mouth. She reveled in the freedom.
Drawing his hands to her breasts, she kissed him with a torrent of pent-up need, her body ebbing with the tide of her emotions. The rasp of their breathing flowing between them, back and forth as his mouth returned to hers with her same urgency.
Dimly in the back of her mind, she had expected to feel in control. Not this wild hot rush that he let loose inside her. She had never been ashamed of her body and had always been aware of the power her beauty could hold over a man. But she had tucked that part of her away for so many years that her gradual awakening flashed like quicksilver between them.
“I trust you,” she heard herself say.
When she had never breathed those words to anothe
r soul.
She was hot and restless, seeking more as she followed David’s hands to the hem of her camisole and helped him remove the last vestige of clothing between them, less than a whisper of cloth to have proved so capable of a barrier.
Her hair a loosened mass around her face, she watched him look at all of her without touching, yet touching her intimately. Then he met her gaze, her uncertainty rent asunder by the possessiveness in his eyes as he wrapped his hand around her nape and brought her mouth to his.
He eased her to her back and, rising on his elbow, looked into her face. “Everything heals with time,” he said, his words meaning more to her than physical healing of her body.
Victoria or Meg—she did not know herself any longer—found sanctuary within his gaze. He had his own scars, she realized, her finger tracing the ragged line across his left rib cage to the flat disk of his nipple. He spread his hand across the moist juncture between her thighs. His finger delved inside her with intimate thoroughness, touching her in a way only he had ever touched her, opening her to him. His mouth traced her jawline. Her eyes drifting shut, she felt her head sinking into the pillow. Felt her heart rise to the warmth pressed against her. She instinctively moved her hips to meet his movements.
She gave a low whimper. “Love me, David.”
And he realized he had loved her always.
He’d been searching for redemption only to return to the beginning, as if he had the power to change his life and hers.
His fingers twining with hers, he rose above her and spread her thighs wide, possessing her with his eyes before entering her. He retreated, then forged deeper. Poised on his own crest, his eyes drifting shut, he could sense the drape of sunlight across his back, stripping away all restraint. She wanted all of him. She tried to catch his mouth with her lips but her head fell back. With a low astonished cry, she arched against him, her skin hot and tight to his touch.
“Don’t stop.”
He could not if he tried.
She followed him as he twisted with her until she was on top of him. He tested the silken strands of her hair with hands that were no longer steady. She continued to move against him. Her breasts filled his hands. Then her mouth captured his with a strength that took his breath. Taking what he gave, she sucked his tongue between her lips. His breath harsh against the back of his throat, mingled with hers. He welcomed her hunger for it fed his, and the kiss went onward, spiraling upward, propelling him higher. Her orgasm pulled the breath from his lungs, until he gripped her hips, rocking them both hard.
She pulled back, her wild hair wanton and flowing over her shoulders, her gaze capturing his with a knowing intensity. And with a violent thrust that pulled her name from his lips, he spilled himself into her.
Later, when the wild tempo of their heartbeats slowed, and he was breathing normally again, he could feel her eyes on his face and the sunlight bright on the bed.
“Continue to stare and you will find I am not yet finished.” David opened his eyes.
Meg was still sitting astride him, a cat-smile on her beautiful, wet mouth. “As I said earlier,” she purred, scraping tapered nails across his chest. “To the victor go the spoils.”
“Aye, colleen.” He wrapped a hand around her head and pulled her to his mouth, turning her beneath him, where he enjoyed a long, luxurious kiss as he fondled her right breast. “Had I known surrendering would be so sweet, I’d have done so long before now.”
Sometime later, they awakened and made love again, their drowsy state of awareness heightened as he brought them to slow completion. Reason abandoned him, but he was past redemption. For there was something impossibly selfish and futile in wanting her as much as he did. Then he was holding her tightly against him, aware that she was holding him too.
Chapter 18
Victoria awoke slowly, stretching languorously against the downy comfort of David’s mattress. This morning she’d lain in the arms of an angel. For just a moment as she watched dust motes dance in a beam of sunlight stretching across the covers, she smiled, before a noise turned her head, and she found herself staring at Bethany, sitting in the chair beside the bed.
Behind her, Moira was busy cleaning the room. The girl straightened, saw that Victoria was watching her, and startled.
“My apologies, mum.”
“It’s all right, Moira.” Her arm lay across David’s pillow and she struggled to her elbow.
“Lord Chadwick ate lunch an hour ago and went to see Sir Henry,” Bethany said. “Nathanial is with him. He told me that I was to let you sleep.”
“Oh,” Victoria breathed the word, feeling more than awkward. “What time is it?”
“It is past three o’clock in the afternoon.”
Holding the blanket to her chest, Victoria struggled to sit. “Oh!” She groaned, not because she’d slept away the entire day, but because every muscle in her body screamed at the same time.
“I’ll draw up a bath, mum.” Moira dipped. At the door, she stopped. “Would you prefer the bath in your room or here?”
Wrapped in the blanket, Victoria slid her legs over the bed. David’s scent lay all over her like a visible mark of possession. “My room, please.”
Everyone and the cat probably knew she was in these chambers at three o’clock in the afternoon. It would take no scholar to guess what she had been doing in David’s bed, she thought, dragging the blanket with her as she met Bethany’s hostile gaze.
“I’m shocked—” Bethany flung out her arm to encompass the state of the bed. “You’re a grown woman, Victoria. I thought you were above allowing a man to…to ravish you like you are so much chattel in his keeping. How could you even care about him?”
Watching her whirl to leave, Victoria moved away from the bed. “Don’t go.”
Bethany stiffened and turned. “This post arrived an hour ago,” she said, holding up an envelope. “I came up here to tell you I am the only person in the entire world not invited to Tory Birmingham’s Yule soirée. Scandal of your escapades has probably reached London by now. But I have decided that it matters not whether I am invited to another soirée again. Who cares about such trivial matters, anyway? Certainly not I when I am the least important person in anyone’s life. I can’t even get a man to like me.”
“How could you believe that about yourself, Bethany?”
“What I don’t understand is that it doesn’t matter what you do, Victoria. Everyone still loves you and wants to protect you. Aren’t you worried about making another baby? Or do you think another child will keep you out of prison?”
Victoria paled.
“I’m not dumb or deaf.” Bethany dabbed her sleeve against her eye. “I know you’re not my stepmother. And when Peepaw dies, I’ll have no one. Not even Nathanial. He isn’t even my half brother.”
Victoria was still standing in the center of the carpet. “I’m sorry, Bethany.”
“Peepaw won’t tell me anything. Except that you used Father’s name because someone is after you. Maybe that person isn’t the only bad one here. Maybe you are, too.”
The words cut straight across Victoria’s heart. Not because they were a lie, but because they were the truth.
Bethany’s eyes sheened with tears. Her back stiff, she strode to the door, but her hand paused on the latch. She turned, a blush climbing into her face and washing her cheeks pink. “I don’t even know your real name, or what you did.”
“I was a little younger than you are now when I helped my father steal part of a government’s national treasure,” Victoria said quietly. “When my father came under suspicion and a case began to grow against him, Lord Chadwick was the man they sent after us.”
Wiping her forearm across her cheeks, Bethany gathered her composure and appeared mortified. “But they can hang you for something like that.”
“I believe you are correct.” Victoria drew a short, steadying breath as she approached the growingly distraught girl. “What I did was wrong, Bethany. I make no excuses for the crime.
But my affection for you has never been a lie.”
“Then I believe I really shall be alone, Victoria. For I will never live with Nellis. I am afraid of him.”
Victoria could not get Bethany’s comment about Nellis from her head. After she bathed and dressed in a serviceable blue morning gown with half boots laced to her ankles, she asked one of the footmen to take her to the cottage so she could find David and Nathanial. Sir Henry was asleep. Esma was outside in the yard feeding the chickens.
“I don’t know where Lord Chadwick took young Nate, mum,” Esma said. “He did send my William to talk to Mr. Gibson about hiring a stone mason.”
“Then he must be working on dismantling the walls of the church.” Victoria looked out across the yard. The snow had melted, but the gray clouds over the distant English Channel did not bode well for the current warmer temperatures.
Ever since David mentioned her father’s disappearance six months ago, her realization that the event coincided with Nellis’s interest in Rose Briar continued to nag at her. As did Sheriff Stillings’s conversation weeks ago. “Has Bethany returned from the manor house?” Victoria asked.
“She is in the stables. If she had her way, I’ve no doubt she would live with the beasts. You have a knack for healing people. She has a knack for healing animals. It is unfortunate Sir Henry has never noted her talents before.”
Victoria folded her arms beneath her cloak. “Neither have I been as clear-headed in that direction. Bethany has taken the brunt of our distractions of late.”
“She is a good lass, mum.” Esma pumped water into a bucket. “But while you’ve been distracted, you’ve not noticed the tender affection she’s developed for the young man ye hired.”
Angel In My Bed Page 23