Angel In My Bed (2 page)

“I
t is freezing out here.”

Setting a crate of jelly jars into the cart, Victoria Munro turned at the sound of her stepdaughter's voice. Seventeen-year-old Bethany stood in a shaft of moonlight, her arms folded tightly over her torso. With only an eleven-year age difference between them, they had always been more like sisters than stepmother and stepdaughter.

A lone lantern sitting in the barn's doorway cast light over Bethany's white wrapper. “Whatever are you doing at this hour? And on a night like this?” the girl scolded.

“We are helping your grandfather deliver these to his patients tomorrow.” Glass rattled as Victoria set a second crate in the cart. “Since his illness, he can no longer—”

“Cousin Nellis was here again tonight. I saw you arguing with him in the garden,” Bethany said, running to Victoria and wrapping her arms around her. “That awful man will see us driven from our land won't he? And Peepaw can do nothing.”

As Sir Henry's closest male relative, Nellis wanted Bethany's grandfather declared incompetent, a fact that was bound to occur if Sir Henry's illness weakened him further. Victoria would fight Sir Henry's sneak thief of a nephew every inch of the way before she sat back and watched Nellis become the family's benefactor and take over their holdings.

Victoria covered the cart with a canvas tarp and bent to secure the fastenings. She was confident they would make it through winter and still have a roof over their heads come spring, despite Nellis's illegal machinations, but she was not so sure of next year.

“'Tis a dangerous duel you play with Nellis, Victoria. He's getting more persistent with you about his desires. How can you not be afraid?”

“Bethany…” At seventeen, her stepdaughter was too naïve to understand real evil. But Victoria was neither young nor naïve—and she understood evil too well. She could handle Nellis, she told herself. “Would you rather we concede?”

Bethany tucked a wisp of her hair behind her ear and looked away. A velvet canopy of stars lay over the countryside. Behind her, the tree swing creaked in the steady autumn breeze. “It's just…you make me afraid when you fight Nellis the way you do. He won't care now if you marry him or not. He wants this estate.”

“Your cousin isn't a nice man, Bethany. Both your grandfather and I will fight him before either of us surrenders anything to him, and that includes this estate. Besides, even if I wanted to do such a thing as wed, I could not.”

“Because you don't love him?”

Victoria absently fastened the iron rings that rimmed the cart, her cloak doing little to shield her from the chill.

Moving to this cottage down the hill from Rose Briar
should have proven to Nellis that she would not relent in her decision. Could not relent. But he had become even more obnoxiously persistent in the last few months, and she did not understand why. She had managed to save the plot of land on which this cottage sat with the income she and Sir Henry earned from their medical practice, but they were not going to be able to save the ancestral home on the bluff or the three thousand acres of nearby farmland. Nellis had already put everything on the block for unpaid taxes. No one would dare purchase the estate for fear of reprisal, and Nellis would get it for nothing. In a few weeks, everything but this cottage would be in Nellis's hands. After that, he would be going after guardianship of her son.

“Come,” Victoria beckoned. “You can help me finish tying down the tarp. With Nathanial still with your cousins in Salehurst, you and I will be too busy to worry about anything else for the next few weeks.”

“Oh, look.” The younger girl pointed a slim finger at the sky. “A shooting star. Did you see? Make a wish. Hurry.”

Victoria's gaze moved across the trees and over the land that had been her home for the last nine years. Closing her eyes, she made a wish before the tail of the star fizzled in the sky. The people most important to her lived here. She wished for a miracle that would help her fight Nellis, and discovered she would bargain with the devil himself.

A black cat leaped on the cart, and Victoria lifted the purring feline into her arms. “Where have you been, Zeus?” She nuzzled the cat. “Don't you know it's dangerous for you out here at night? An owl lives in our barn. Nathanial would never forgive me if I allowed you to get eaten.”

She missed her son. He'd been gone since the hops harvest began in September. This was the first year she'd allowed
him to go, and had done so because one of his best friends had moved to Salehurst last year. Nathanial was almost ten years old, after all—the age at which many of his friends were already being sent to boarding schools.

“Victoria?” Bethany's small voice came from behind her. “Riders are approaching.”

“Get inside,” she said as a group of darkly clad riders crowned the hill above the cottage fifty yards away.

“But why would they be coming here?” Bethany whispered. “We have a full moon tonight. Smugglers don't—”

“I said go inside, Bethany.” She continued to hold the cat. Sheriff Stillings should not be calling tonight, and she wondered what foul luck brought him her way. “See that Sir Henry doesn't awaken.”

Her stepdaughter turned away and, in a billowy cloud of white, ran across the yard and into the cottage. Oaks pillared the drive, and Victoria's gaze touched the canopies made more eerie by the silver light filtering through their limbs. She would not have expected this particular crowd to be out roaming the woods on a cold night when they could easily have found warmth and entertainment in town.

A rider separated from the group. Sheriff Stillings rode directly toward her and pulled up his beast of a horse just before he ran her down. Gravel sprayed her and sent the cat in her arms into a frenzy.

“If it isn't the lady doctor come to welcome me.” Stillings chuckled. “You aren't going to padlock your stables again, are ye?”

Infuriated that he bullied her so, she let go of the frightened cat, and he shot off between the legs of the horse. Startled, the gelding sidestepped and reared, as the rider
attempted to subdue it. The cat streaked like a trail of smoke up the nearest tree, leaving the maddened horse nervously prancing and the rider nearly unseated.

“Bloody, bloomin' hell.”

Shoving the hat off his eyes, he looked into the derringer Victoria pointed at his heart. “Be careful, Tommy Stillings.” She was taller than most men, and her aim was crack. “I would not wish to think you an intruder and accidentally shoot you.” She lowered the gun to the much prized point between his legs.

She had known Stillings for all the nine years she'd lived in England. She knew the men who rode with him, knew what they were capable of doing. Six months ago, they had started using her horses to haul their illegal caches from the river to heaven only knew where. Bethany's spotted mare had been injured on the trail; it might have to be put down. “As for you ever using the horses out of my stable again, I assure you, you will not.”

“Bloody hell, my lady.” Slapping his hat against his thigh, he glanced around the drive as if to find an army hidden among the bushes, then glared at the men behind him as someone snickered.

“I am alone,” Victoria mocked. “Unlike some, I don't need others to fight my battles.”

Stillings's teeth showed white in the darkness. “That's what I like about you, Lady Munro. You're no sniveling coward. Must be because you spent so much of your life among the natives in Calcutta. Being an innocent orphan and all.” He tossed something to the ground at her feet. “Pick it up,” he demanded. “You can put the gun away, too. If I wanted to attack you, I would have run ye down already.”

Her gaze reluctantly dropped to the object at her feet. And the world froze around her.

“Do you recognize that little trinket?”

Pulse racing, she knelt. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders and touched the ground at her feet, shielding her face as she lifted the earring. Her gaze chased her panic to the hill where the sheriff and his cronies had appeared.

“I'm told there is a necklace that goes with that bauble,” Stillings said, dragging her eyes back to his face. “Is there such a necklace?”

“Who brought this to you?”

The sheriff leaned forward on his saddle, his muddy boots creaking with the movement. “We had a visitor tonight at the Wild Boar. My guess is he's interested in getting his hands on more than some costly necklace.”

“Go.” She threw the earring at him. “And take that with you. Don't you think if I had such a necklace, I would have used it to pay the taxes on Sir Henry's estate?”

Stillings's cynical smile did little to bolster the hope that he might believe her. He looked at the cottage, his expression growing thoughtful. “Seeing as how you saved my life once, I could take care of the outsider for you. I'm a man who likes to see his debts paid.”

“You have a strange sense of honor for a cutthroat smuggler, Tommy Stillings.”

“I take insult to your words.” He laughed softly. “Especially since I've decided to offer ye my services.”

“No doubt this enterprising partnership would include murder.”

“Maybe. But think on this, Doc. Tonight's visitor left me this trinket on purpose. If I were the owner of this earring, I'd be askin' who in these parts can protect me from
him
.”

Stillings spurred his mount and galloped back to the other riders. Together they thundered up the long drive, leaving a layer of dust hanging in their wake. Victoria remained braced against the cold and the terror that turned her blood to ice. She closed her fist over the derringer.

Zeus mewed, jolting her from her paralysis. Kneeling, she called for the feline, relieved when he loped across the drive into her arms. An owl launched from the high branches of an oak and, wings widespread, drifted into the barn. “Shh,” she murmured into the cat's neck, backing out of the drive into the shadows. “It's all right.”

But watching the owl's flight across the yard, she held the cat against her, knowing the words of reassurance were a lie. What she'd dreaded for too long had finally come to pass.

Someone had found her.

L
eading the steeldust mare up the hill, Victoria took a deep breath and looked back at the cottage. She'd managed to sneak out of the house and saddle the horse in relative silence. She swung into the saddle, worried that the creak of leather would bring one of the servants. Fighting back her fear, she reined the mare around and rode out into the night. Five minutes up the road, she switched to a back trail and changed directions as she found the narrow, wooded shortcut that led to the main house on the bluff.

She'd tucked her long, dark hair beneath a battered hat and pulled the rim lower to protect her eyes from the frigid temperature. Branches clipped her sleeves. Bending over the mount's neck, she maneuvered through the woods. Woolen trousers and heavy stockings beneath her boots protected her legs and feet, but nothing shielded her face from the stinging autumn chill. She pulled her coat collar tighter around her neck.

Panic had driven her into the house to change her clothing. Panic spurred her forward now. Fifteen minutes later, she glimpsed the silhouette of the sixteenth-century stone tower that belonged to what remained of the timber-framed church. It overlooked the cemetery where Sir Henry had buried his only son, Bethany's father, nine years ago after his body had been shipped home from India. The aged burial ground had once served the families who lived and worked Munro land. A fire had ravaged the church five years ago. Now, with the exception of nay doers and one lone groundskeeper, few ventured here.

Reining in beneath the iron arch that opened into the graveyard, she let the silence fill her and attempted to quell her panic. After Stillings had left, she'd waited in the cottage, looking at the yard and the road from her bedroom window, watching the shadows in the night, watching to make sure no one was outside. She'd waited for everyone inside the cottage to go to sleep before she came here.

She wanted to believe that the earring turning up had been an awful fluke, but someone knew about the stolen necklace. Someone knew to come to this town in search of her. Upon seeing the bauble tonight, her first terror-filled instinct had been to go after her son and flee England.

But she could leave neither Sir Henry nor Bethany alone, or the life she had built for herself and her son over the years—the only life and family Nathanial had ever known.

A fog clung to the ground, hovering like a ghostly breath over the aged and mossy stones, hiding their eternal secrets. She nudged the horse around the graveyard's perimeter, but could not see the soil to know if anyone had been here recently.

She rose on her legs to swing out of the saddle, when her mare's ears pricked forward and she froze. She whipped her
head around to look down the road she'd just traveled and scanned the darkness. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, but no other sound fell around her. Still, she eased Sir Henry's old revolver from her bag.

How long had it been since she'd gone out into the night with the intent to kill a man? Shaking with cold and apprehension, she backed her mount away from the iron fence into the trees. Tension vibrated the night air and moved over the yard like a slow-growing mist, engulfing her.

Held frozen, Victoria was consumed by something she could not explain. Someone had followed her. Someone she could not see, but felt with every instinct in her being.

“Who are you?” she called.

Looking to her right at the path that led away from the grounds, she started to edge the horse deeper into the copse when a rider separated from the darkness—a silhouette forged by the light of a full moon hanging in the sky behind him.

“I should be asking you that question, Meg.” The haunting voice came back to her from across the graveyard. From across ten years of her past and a world she had escaped four thousand miles away. Recognition seized her lungs along with a fear even greater than the one she held when Stillings had left her tonight.

“Or should I call you Lady Munro now?” he asked, the tenor of his words seizing her completely. “But then what is adulterer when added to con artist, thief, and murderer?”

“Go away, David!” Her heart beating double-time, she edged the horse deeper into the woods. “I mean it. Go away.”

A gust of wind whipped his hooded cloak around him like a hawk's wings and the black horse he rode pranced sideways, giving her a view of mount and rider. For a terrifying
moment, she expected his apparition to take flight. “I cannot do that, Meg,” he answered from the heavy shadows. “You know it as well as I.”

Victoria whipped the reins and kicked her horse with her heels. The horse came out of the wooded copse and leaped the smaller picket fence that bordered the overgrown churchyard. She ducked beneath a low-hanging branch as David shot out of the woods at the bottom of the rise and blocked the path.

Without hesitation, Victoria swung the mare around and headed for another path. She didn't want to ride toward the bluff, but she would go anyplace to evade capture.

The horse hit the field separating the churchyard from the bluff's steep embankment and lunged into a run. She leaned low over the mare's neck and urged the horse flat out across the field, pulling on the reins to slow the mare as she flew over the steep embankment. The pace was too fast. Caught off-stride, the horse stumbled down the loamy hill, but like the Irish stock the horse was, it recovered its balance. Filtered moonlight laid a path through the treetops. She followed the old drover's trail serpentining down the hill. Branches tore her hat and coat off her body. Over her own thundering heart, she heard David's horse gaining. Then like the owl that would devour Zeus, he was riding beside her on the path, a huge winged shadow in the night.

Both horses collided. A scream died in her chest as David plucked her off the saddle. Pressed on one side by brush and open to the slow-moving river on the other, the path narrowed next to a hill that plunged fifty feet down to the water's edge.

David had misjudged her strength. Or her desperation.

He reined in his black and it skidded in the leaves. An elbow dug into his ribs as she kicked and screamed. Her head banged him in the mouth. He caught her wrist.

Before he realized what was in her fist, a gun discharged near his cheek, deafening him. Both horses reared in terror, throwing him backward off the saddle, his arms still locked around her.

With an oath, he hit the slope and they tumbled downward, rolling and scattering dead leaves, until they finally landed in a heap of tangled limbs and dusty clothes.

Somehow, she ended on top, straddling his hips. “Bastard! Why couldn't you just let me stay dead?”

Her sable hair spilled around him in a fragrant mesh of vanilla. For a moment, he was too stunned by his emotions to repel her attack and did not see her swing her fist. Barely evading contact, he rolled her, fighting and squirming, the evocative fullness of her body soft beneath him as they slid another few feet together. The scuffle shoved up her shirt and caught her hair beneath her bottom.

She coughed and choked. “Get off me!”

David found himself lying between her legs. He captured her wrists and braced them on either side of her thrashing head. His chest crushed her breasts, and he could feel her heart thundering against him. The shock of her wriggling jolted him. His gaze fell first on the curve of her lips, then rose to her flushed face, and he suddenly welcomed the doubt growing in her eyes. “Now, Meg.” He tasted blood from a cut on the inside of his lip and spat to the side. “Why would I be wanting to do that?”

He burned to touch her, to wrap his hands around her throat and choke the life from her. A beautiful enemy was the dead
liest of enemies, as she had proven long ago. For nine years, he'd thought her dead. Nine bloody years she'd disappeared.

She had managed to elude the most powerful country in the world, and he found his interest in her little tempered by his grip on his will. He'd been hunting the owner of that earring—and now reeled from finding her alive.

“How fitting that we met again across a graveyard.” He let his hands slide over her waist and her legs as he checked for more weapons. “Indeed, what does one say on an occasion such as this? ‘Hello, Meg. How are you after all of these years? I'm so glad to see that you did not drown.' Hmm, or, perhaps, ‘Goodness gracious, David. I thought I left you for dead in Calcutta.'”

She glared back, eyes glistening with fury—and confusion. She was beautiful bathed in moonlight, the brilliance surrounding them emphasizing the hint of wet violet in her eyes.

“What?” he rasped with barely restrained fury. “Nothing to say before I take you to jail where you so aptly deserve to hang?”

“You are a madman, David Donally. Get off me!” she screamed.

“Quite the contrary.” He covered her mouth with one gloved hand and forced her to look at him. “I am saner than I've ever been when around you. But you
will
understand, with the current residents of these woods, I suggest you quit making so much bloody noise.”

Her eyes flashed hot. “You are the only one in danger here.”

He smiled, appreciating the threat. “From you? Or that band of ruffians with whom you are so familiar? Are they the company you've been keeping for nine fooking years, Meg? Why am I not shocked?”

The Irishness in his voice seemed to alert her to the deadliness of its tone. “Therefore you throw me off a cliff?” She renewed her struggle, bucking futilely. “Get off me, you bastard.”

“What were you doing in that cemetery?”

“I wasn't in the cemetery.” Her words came out in gasps. “I was on my way to the bluff house when I heard you…and took shelter.”

“Then you were out for a predawn ride? Before the roads became busy. Is that it?”

“I don't need to explain my actions to you. If I'm not mistaken, this is private land. My husband's family lives here.”

“If I'm not mistaken,” he said against the curve of her mouth, “Faraday is not the family that owns this land on which we are currently lying so lovingly entwined. And the only husband you still legally have is square on top of you. Unless you are trying to count that death certificate I have as a divorce.”

She stopped her struggling. Her shirt sleeve had torn and spilled off her pale shoulder. She didn't weep, not that she ever would have in his presence. Not his proud, temptress of a traitorous wife, torn and disheveled but magnificent still.

“Will you let me up?” she said through clenched teeth. “You are…squashing me.”

David hesitated, then rolled off her. His ears still ringing from the pistol shot, he set his elbow on one raised knee, looking at once for the revolver. Meg rolled to her feet as if that made her situation less precarious. Or made her any safer.

Testing the cut on his bottom lip with his knuckle, he let his eyes move over the length of her. She was still breathing hard and the mounds of her breasts were visible behind her
shirt laces. Following his gaze to her gaping garment, she snatched her shirt together and presented him her back.

“I wouldn't want to think you unduly bruised.” Having never remembered her modesty, he found himself amused to see it now. “Are you?”

She whirled and eyed his swollen lip. “For the sake of argument, I'd contend that you've thus far received more out of this tryst than I. Would you not agree, Donally?”

“Is this your idea of a tryst?” He came to his feet, his cloak swirling around his boots and dislodging a cloud of leaves. “I can certainly make our reunion more interesting.”

She jumped backward, poised to run. Looking at her, David remembered her as he had first seen her long ago, tall, proud, regal Meg Faraday. She wore no finery, but she had not changed. At the same time, she assessed his dark hair and cropped beard. He wore no gentleman's riding jacket beneath his cloak, but black shirt, breeches, and boots. He knew he looked like a highwayman—a man who lived in the shadows—as he had always lived when he'd known her.

“How did you find me?” she asked, not so proud in bearing as she had been seconds before.

He considered not telling her. He considered slapping her in irons and handing her over to his superior. He considered all these things, yet did none of them.

Staring down at her, fists clenching and unclenching, he forced the emotions to subside. “After the earring turned up at a pawnshop in London, the Calcutta files were reopened.” He didn't recount the weeks it had taken to get to this point. “We located the passenger manifest list from the steamer that went down off Bombay. There were seventeen survivors. Six were women, two of whom had already passed away. Two other women were in their fifties, and one was a forty-
year-old companion. That left one Lady Scott Munro, wife to Sir Scott. Do you know how many Munros live from Brighton to Rye?”

“Please, can't you just go away? Pretend you never saw me? I'm not doing anything illegal, I swear.”

“With your history for respecting the law, it hadn't crossed my mind, Meg.”

Shoving a hand through her tangled hair, she shook her head as if dazed. “I think you gave me a concussion,” she murmured, her gaze hesitating on the revolver lying in the leaves at her feet.

David saw the gun at the same time and read her intent. “Don't think about it, Meg. I will break your wrist if you try.”

“What are you going to do?”

He bent and picked up the revolver. “Exactly what I came here to do. Smugglers, murderers, and my wife not withstanding.”

“Listen to me, David.” She caught the soft fabric of his shirt, just above his heart. The shock of her contact against his chest seemed to jolt them both. “I mean…” She dropped her hand as she fumbled for composure. “Isn't there anything I can do—”

“It won't work, Meg.” He smiled at her uncertainty. “But if you want to spread your legs for me, for old time's sake, I'll certainly accommodate your desire.”