Angel In My Bed (25 page)

She laughed, striking at her tears. “Judge not lest ye be judged? You think because they are all mostly smugglers and thieves they will be more forgiving of me? Even when Nellis makes known certain facts about us? None of us will be able
to show our faces again. No one within a hundred miles will trust me or you again.”

“After last night, they trust I will find the caves with or without their help. They also trust me to see the caves permanently sealed when I do. And you can trust me to deal with any man who sets foot on Rose Briar without an invitation to visit. What is there not to trust? I'm an open book.”

Tears clung to her eyelashes. “Do you really love me?”

Realizing he saw the mirror of his heart in her wet eyes, he held her hands in his palms and brought her fingers to his lips. He had fallen in love with her long ago from afar, he realized, knowing his heart had been in jeopardy from the first time their gazes connected from across a polo field in Calcutta. “I should have found a way to help you years ago. But I could not.”

“You were honor bound to do your job, David. You still are.”

Understanding honor meant that he also understood dishonor, and recognized the fine line he walked. He only knew he loved Meg, and would not allow her to die in prison.

When she spoke, her voice was nearly inaudible. “I believe I've never known anyone like you from the first time I looked at you walking off the polo field,” she said. “I can even describe the attire you were wearing and the color of horse you rode. You were the only man I'd ever met who didn't lay his heart at my feet on the second encounter of our acquaintance.” She withdrew her hand from his. “I have yet to meet your equal in that regard. You did your job very well.”

David sat against the wall and, drawing one knee to his chest, leaned his head back. They sat shoulder to shoulder, the years between them narrowing to a thin line.

“Whatever Nellis told you is no doubt all factual on the surface. I was what I was.” He braced one wrist on his knee,
and pondered his life as one who studied a self-portrait that no longer resembled him. “But that is as far as it goes. I know I did things in my life…”

“Why did you become a priest?”

David considered the leather creases in his gloves, slowly removing them as he spoke. “I had a need to do something good in the world. To give back something I felt I had taken. Does that sound romantic or overly philosophic?”

“Did you?” she asked. “Do something good then?”

He thought about the past years and what he had accomplished. “I'd like to think I did.” His mouth tilted into a grin. “I married off two of my brothers.”

Meg leaned her head into his shoulder. “You did?”

“One willingly and the other not so willingly.” He rubbed his jaw in memory of that latter experience with his youngest brother. It had been months since he'd thought of his family. He did so now with a need to see them, until he turned his nose into Meg's hair and inhaled the faint scent of myrrh and quince. She'd washed with his soap today.

“What are they going to say when they learn you are no longer a priest?” he heard her ask as she insinuated herself between his legs and sat back on her ankles. Her wrapper gaped open, revealing the fleshly curve of her bosom swelling against her stays.

“I wonder that any of my family ever believed it of me in the first place,” he said, lifting his gaze to encompass hers, wondering how he'd managed so many years of celibacy when his mind so easily drowned in the carnal libation he drank from her eyes. “They don't even know where I am.” He pulled her to her knees in front of him. “Or at least they didn't until I sent a post to my brother-in-law a few days ago.”

“A post?”

“My sister is married to the undersecretary in the Foreign Office,” he said as he rose on his knees to the softer leather mat beneath Meg's legs.

“I don't understand,” she said in a breathy voice, dropping her head back against her shoulders as he found succor in the cleft between her breasts.

The sun had yet to rise, no one in the house stirred or was due to awaken, and he rose above her, kissing her deeply, neither gentle nor patient in his want to have her. “Where is the blessing in having a brother-in-law in high places, if I cannot call upon at least one favor in this lifetime?” he said, lowering her to her back and falling above her as he caught his hands on the floor.

“This brother-in law? He works for Lord Ware?” she asked.

David tore off his coat. “Is this a conversation we want to be having right now?” he asked, pulling his shirt over his head. He fumbled less at the buttons on his trousers.

“Wait!” she breathed between their frantic kisses.

But he'd had enough of waiting and talking. He pushed aside her robe then sat back on his heels and let his gaze traverse the hills and the valleys leading to the apex between her thighs. “Truly, David—” she struggled to sit, only to catch herself on her hair. “Maybe we shouldn't be doing this just now—”

Intimately aware of his presence between her legs, he cocked a brow. “Do you love me, Meg?”

Her hair flowered around her, framing her face and shoulders in a cloud of dark silk, and he could not pretend he was unaffected by the desire to hear her answer. Nor would he feel guilty that he asked the question. He knew on some level that she had always loved him, so the question was moot for
him. But she had to hear herself say the words, as if saying the sentiment aloud made it real.

“Do we want to make another child between us, David?”

He looked at her kiss-swollen lips, then at all of her, the symbolism of that gesture not lost on her. He claimed her for his own. Her past, her present, and her future belonged to him. “Isn't that concern a little late, considering we are already well into our sybaritic inclinations? Many times over.” His mouth found the pulse at her throat.

“Then consider this. What if no matter what you do, you can't prevent the inevitable? Will you be able to live with that?”

It was then David realized she was more worried about him than she was about herself. “We'll make it work, Meg.” He caught her nipple between his lips and suckled, leaving her shift hot and damp above her stays. She gave a start at his encroaching intimacy, but did nothing to dissuade him from continuing. No other part of his body touched hers. He moved lower past her stomach. “Tell me, Meg,” he said, awaiting an answer to his initial question.

“I love you, David.”

He pushed on his palms. Her lashes framed deep pools of violet the pale light pulled from her eyes, and she could not have awakened a fiercer hunger. “You wouldn't be exaggerating, would you? Or saying that just to make me happy.”

She shook her head and laughed. “I love you.”

She held his gaze as he went down on her and found his way beneath her shift. He covered her thighs with his palms and pushed them farther apart. “Tell me again, love.”

The hot breath of his whisper touched her intimately. “Oh, Lord,” she rasped, tortured. “I love you.”

And he loved her, too, with his mouth and his fingers, but
especially his mouth, claiming her possessively, claiming her as his own, making her body do things he wanted her to do. He stoked her fire, found her rhythm burning in the flames, felt her hips arch. She was where he wanted her to be, and when she cried out and clawed her hands into his hair, he felt her climax in his mouth.

He rose up on his knees and, looking into her passion-drugged eyes, fought the violent need to push inside her before he spent himself on the floor between her legs. Her gaze slid down his body, touching him like the fire burning inside her. “Do you want me to stop?”

In answer, her hands cupped his face, and she pulled him into a kiss, a moan vibrating from deep in her throat as she wrapped her legs around his hips with a predictable effect. His kissed her back. Controlled at first, then no longer controlled. He pushed inside her where she was wet and warm and welcoming.

“You make me feel helpless, David.”

It was a feeling that he, too, had worked hard through the years to overcome. But as he pinioned her hands to the soft leather mat at her back, and his heartbeat quickened, some of that helplessness engulfed him.

His breath a harsh rasp against her ear, he held her with slow deep thrusts, entwining his fingers with hers, soon lost within the melody and harmony that hummed between them, until her name became the tempo of his breath. Her orgasmic cry broke in a breathless gasp. Rising on his palms, he kissed her openmouthed, taking her cries into his throat where they joined his.

And in the warming glow that filled him, the heightened tremors of her pleasure shuddering through him, he lifted his head to draw in a draught of air and thrust one last time,
spilling himself deep within her. As he collapsed against her, their bodies damp and indulged, he knew the world could end around him and he would not notice.

 

Victoria snuggled deeper against the warm shoulder jostling her cheek. The first rosy blush of dawn had begun to stir the eastern horizon when she opened her eyes and saw that David was carrying her down the corridor to her room. She wore nothing beneath her wrapper. Her legs dangling over his arms, she smiled against his shoulder. His clothes beneath his coat remained in disrepair. “Where are you taking me?” she murmured.

“Your room or mine?”

She straightened, but he bounced her and she fell against the hard wall of his chest. “Your room or mine?”

David had done things to her body that still made her blush, but strangely, she wasn't ready to end this morning. “I don't expect we can keep this a secret any longer.”

She felt the curve of his mouth against her hair. “I don't expect we ever did, love.”

“My room. The bed is softer,” she said.

And only when he'd set her in bed, did she remember that she'd thrown the telegram from Lord Ravenspur on her nightstand. She opened her eyes to see David standing over the lamp, reading the telegram Nellis had given her. Silently, she groaned, but it must not have been so quiet because David looked at her over the top of the paper, the dark blue in his eyes sharpening to pinpoints of black.

“Nellis gave you this?”

She released a long sigh as she took measure of his tone and nodded slowly, knowing it would be unproductive to forestall the truth. “I didn't tell you because I didn't want you
flying over to his residence and give him cause to arrest you.”

“That would be most unlikely.”

Victoria pulled the blanket around her, not persuaded to share his confidence.

“He told you Lord Ravenspur worked for the foreign secretary.” David folded the telegram in half. “He neglected to tell you that Lord Ravenspur was my brother-in-law.”

“Maybe he didn't know,” Victoria said. “Or he would have assumed I would have known and found no pleasure in taunting me.”

“If he didn't know then that may tell me something.”

“Am I supposed to understand what that means?” she asked, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ears.

“Only that Kinley would know that information,” he said, his eyes focusing on something in his thoughts. David pulled out a slip of paper from the same coat pocket where he'd shoved the telegram. “Is this Nellis's address?”

“Yes. He lives on Grand.” Victoria noted the writing as also belonging to Nellis. “Where did you get that?”

“From Pamela's bedroom.”

She could not help the vise that squeezed her chest. “Should I be worried you found purpose to be in Pamela's bedroom?”

David sat on the edge of the bed. “Come here,” his voice was less an order and more of a promise. He leaned over and dragged her across the mattress, covering her with his chest as he pressed her into the pillows. His feet remained on the ground.

“I'm very particular where I put certain parts of my anatomy. I always have been.”

“I'm glad to know that.”

“Nellis told you that Ravenspur worked for Lord Ware.
You thought despite everything we've talked about, I was still planning to spring some trap on you.”

“My trepidation was born of my own guilt as it was our past.”

He brushed a length of hair from her cheek. “Nellis neglected to tell you that Ravenspur is my sister's husband. What he didn't know is that I've petitioned the crown to see the charges against you dropped. That was my intent in contacting Lord Ravenspur. That was why I didn't tell you. I didn't know if—”

She placed a finger against his lips. “You wanted to talk to your brother-in-law first.”

“No doubt when I didn't show at the depot in New Haven, Ravenspur set his sights on locating Kinley. If my brother-in-law doesn't know about us, he will soon enough.”

“How will you explain to your family how you met me?”

“I met you in India,” he said neutrally, unsure how to answer her question as it seemed to be one he'd been mulling over himself.

“You must have an extremely tolerant family if you think they will still want to know me once they learn the truth,” she mused, and he looked at her tentative smile. “I am not innocent of that which I've been accused.”

He enclosed her hand with his and gently kissed her palm, understanding her well enough to know that she was afraid to hope. “Considering your youth at the time of the crimes, and the circumstances surrounding your life with Colonel Faraday, and everything you've accomplished since, we'll get a pardon. I'm sure of it.”

And as he spoke the words, so sure in the belief that he stood on the side of right and justice and that his family surely loved him as much as she did, Victoria began to be
lieve as well. The first ray of hope was like a touch of sunlight to her heart. He framed her cheek in his palm, and his touch stole a little more of her breath. “It worries me that I have brought you to tears.”