Dark Angel (2 page)

Chapter Two

Murmuring voices flowed toward me through the darkness, drifting like strands from a symphony heard through an open window. One of the voices belonged to my savior, of that I was certain, but the other was unknown to me.

I did not open my eyes, as the important task of bearing the pain that covered me like a mantle occupied the whole of my attention. I shoved at it with my mind, but it persisted; I may have moaned in response. Something cool pressed against my cheek, smoothed my forehead—it was a woman’s touch. A cloth swept across my brow.

“Poor wee thing. It looks as though she was nigh unto being drowned,” a female voice whispered.

A male voice rumbled in response.

I perceived that I lay indoors upon a hard, raised surface covered with soft blankets. The acrid smell of burning tallow hung in the air, and a soft light flickered beyond my eyelids. The mass of stiff material and steel hoops supporting my dress shifted and loosened. I cried out and arched my back as a blade of pain ripped through my side.

Were they trying to kill me? To finish what the storm had started?

“Take care,” my savior’s voice snapped.

“Master, we must get these wet things off her before she catches her death,” the woman protested. Her voice sounded worn with age. “I’ll need to clean the blood from her wounds.” The woman’s voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper. “Then we will see what ye can do for her. Turn round and I’ll prepare her for ye.”

“She’s practically half-dead. What bloody difference could my seeing make to
her?
”

There was a long pause. When he spoke again, his voice, to my distracted ears, sounded reluctant.

“Oh, very well,” he grumbled.

From the sound of his footsteps, he moved away.

The woman shifted me and bright pain bloomed again, the blackness threatening to engulf me once more. I hovered on the edge of consciousness, praying for the void to come while my wounds were cleaned. The pain in my side made my breathing shallow, and I panted softly. Something warm and scratchy—another blanket—was draped over me.

“Master?” the woman called to him.

The footsteps returned.

“Feel there. Her ribs, perhaps?” she asked.

A large hand spread itself against my wounded side beneath the blanket.

“Yes,” he said, his voice tight.

The warmth from his hand penetrated the fog of throbbing pain. I should have been shocked, or at the very least embarrassed by this stranger’s touch on my bare skin. The pain eased. An odd coincidence, but my addled mind made the connection.

I opened my eyes barely a slit. He gazed down on me, his expression troubled, a deep frown of concentration furrowing his brow.

The gray mist of his gaze enveloped mine and blocked all else from the periphery of my vision. The untamed beauty of his face struck me even in my half-conscious state.

Another woman might have found his high cheekbones and exotic eyes excessively proud or the swarthy hue of his skin too foreign or the black slash of his eyebrows too authoritarian. Nevertheless, to me, he was beautiful like a wild thing was beautiful, some creature of the forest and the fields.

“Do not—” I barely croaked the words.

His frown deepened, and he leaned closer. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his hand against my side seemed to grow hotter by several degrees.

“I won’t hurt you,” he vowed, the fierceness of his expression belying the comfort in his words.

I tried again. “Do not let go,” I managed, and saw him blink in surprise.

His head moved in a slow nod of understanding.

“Sleep,” he commanded, and I closed my eyes in obedience to his one-word decree.

…

Consciousness returned by slow degrees, revealing itself in streaks of flickering light behind my closed eyelids. There was a familiar sound: windows rattling as the driving rain pelted against them. And a less familiar sound beneath that—an almost indiscernible breathing— indicated I was not alone. A scent lingered in the air, of wood smoke and heather and pine.

I cracked open my eyes only to be assailed by the view of emerald-green silk stretched out in long swaths above my head. A soaring canopy clung to four wooden bedposts carved in intricate details of cavorting fauns, swirling flora, and nubile nymphs. I averted my gaze from their naked limbs, instead following the pattern of the scrolled woodwork down to the massive bed in which I lay. Sumptuous linens embraced me, enclosing me fully in their downy depths. Turning my head, I saw a fire lit in a nearby hearth, the fireplace large enough to hold a man standing upright. The warmth blazed forth in crackling arcs of flame, and yet the light thrown off was not enough to illuminate the far corner of the enormous room, where someone stood shrouded in shadow.

My savior watched over me. I felt his presence as I would perceive the sun at noontime even if my eyes were shut tight against its brilliance.

“Will you come forward, sir?” I whispered.

He heard me. The stillness about him heightened into a wary tension, although he did not move.

“Please?”

He hesitated, then took a step forward, but the shadows clung to him still.

I struggled to sit upright, holding the sheets to my chest. A glance downward revealed I wore a nightgown of fine lace fastened at the neck with a tiny satin bow. The gown was demure in that it obscured every inch of skin below my throat to the triangle points of lace covering my wrists, and yet provocative in that the garment was obviously intended to highlight the femininity of its wearer. I flushed and pulled the sheet higher, hugging it to my shoulders.

A bump beneath the lace revealed that I still wore my cameo pendant, the links of the silver chain cool around my neck.

Perhaps the nightgown belonged to his wife. My spirits flagged at the thought, but I immediately shrugged it off. It was nothing to me, I assured myself, trying to ignore the sense of possession—or more accurately, connection—that must come from having one’s life saved by another.

Still, I would not be dissuaded for the mere sake of my modesty from thanking my savior for my life. I beckoned him forward. “I wish to see your face.”

He moved toward me and warmth bloomed across my cheeks at the sight of him. The radiance from the fire reached him; his gray eyes, reflecting the dancing flames, glittered like diamonds, his haughty cheekbones more pronounced in the play of light on his skin. The unrelieved black he wore explained why he’d so effectively blended into the dark. He was a man who did not wish to be seen.

“Thank you, sir.” I drew a deep breath, trying to loosen the vise of apprehension twisting my stomach. “I am in your debt.”

“There is no debt,” he said quietly. “You should sleep. Heal. I cannot—” He stopped and seemed to choose his next words carefully. “It is easier if you sleep.”

His voice was as mesmerizing and as beautiful as his face. The deep rumble of it flowed over me. He spoke the Queen’s English as well as I, yet it was obvious he was of some foreign clime. I could not place his faint accent.

I shifted, and some little ache caused me to wince. He flinched an instant later, as though he, too, were in pain, and my nurse’s instinct rose to the fore. I noted the sheen on his forehead, the slight tremble in the hands he moved to clasp behind his back.

“Are you well, sir? May I assist you?” I asked anxiously, my own pain forgotten.

He regained control.

“It is you who are in need of assistance, which we have provided to the best of our ability. If you will not sleep, then tell me, how do you feel?”

I considered this, remembering the faces of my shipmates as they sank below the surface of the water.

“I feel as though I have been drowned and brought back to life,” I whispered, and a shudder racked through me. I tamped it down. I would mourn them later, in private. “You are the cursing man who rescued me. May God bless you, sir.”

“If He did, it would be an astonishing first.”

I did not understand him, and my expression must have said so. He made a vaguely Gallic gesture with his broad shoulders as if to say it did not signify. He stood with his feet apart, his carriage erect, looking down at me intently for long moments, his towering height making me feel even tinier by comparison. My thoughts, unmoored by that gaze, drifted away until I could no longer recall what I had meant to say. I merely stared up at him in admiring awe while the fire in the hearth crackled and sang.

“Tell me your name,” he finally said, his words no less a command for the fact that they were softly spoken.

I licked my lips, suddenly thirsty. “I am Mrs. Jonathan Briton. Where am I?”

His lips thinned. “Mrs.?” he demanded, ignoring my question.

“I-I am a widow.” I was taken aback by his tone.

“Ah.”

There was a note of satisfaction in that word, though why he would take comfort in my sorrow, I could not imagine.

“Then you were not traveling with your husband. You lost him at some other time.”

The way he said it made me feel as though I had been careless, perhaps misplacing my husband in the pocket of my winter overcoat. Still, it explained his tone—it must have been relief in his voice that I had not lost my husband in this recent tragedy, only a distant one.

“I traveled alone.” By necessity. The nature of my mission had required it. I was unwilling to involve anyone else in the consequences I was prepared to bear for the children.

The children.

My gaze darted to the nearby nightstand and, not finding what it sought there, ricocheted around the room.

“I have lost something, sir.” I swallowed my anxiety, forcing my voice into a normal pattern despite the screaming panic in my mind. “Did you find a reticule on my person, or near about, when you brought me from the water? It was black with jet beads.”

“I did not. It is likely sunk to the bottom of the ocean by now.”

Despair sheared through me. No, it cannot
be
. After everything…I bit my lip to stifle my cry of anguish, pressed down hard to stop it from escaping.

He noted my reaction, his body shifting as if to protect me from a danger he could not possibly comprehend. “This thing was of importance to you?”

What could I say? Only that it meant everything, and I could not possibly replace it? That I had lost all hope with the loss of the money in that bag, money I had been told I had no right to possess? What good would it do to bemoan my fate, to rail at the sea that had stolen my future and that of the children?

I traced the oval shape of the cameo beneath my nightgown and neatened my face into a bland semblance of normality for the sake of appearances. It was a long-ingrained habit appropriate to my strict Victorian upbringing. A well-bred gentlewoman never revealed her inner turmoil to another, even when she wanted to scream and beat her bosom.

Especially
not then.

“It is nothing. A trifle. Do not think of it again,” I managed, my throat squeezing shut.

“A trifle.” He regarded me, speculation in his gaze.

I did not realize my hand on the sheet clenched and unclenched, twisting the fabric into knots, until he tapped his fingertip gently against it. I stilled instantly, and his hand moved away.

“What is your name?” he asked again.

I blinked in confusion. “I told you, Mrs.—”

He knelt down before me, so close I could see the ring of coal black surrounding the gray of his irises. The movement had been swift and soundless, startling me back against the plump pillows.

“Your
Christian
name.”

“C-Catherine,” I stammered, surprised into answering by his proximity. He radiated energy, a subtle magnetism that suggested he was accustomed to obedience.

“I will look after you now, Catherine. Whatever troubles you becomes my trouble, too. Whatever you need, I will provide.” He smiled, a flash of white teeth, and my heart nearly stopped. “‘Ask, and it shall be given you.’”

“‘The devil quotes scripture for his own ends,’” I rejoined without thinking, then gasped at the sheer audacity of my remark.

His smile only widened further.

“Yes,” he murmured. “That he does.”

He stood in the same lithe motion in which he’d knelt and turned away. He was nearly to the door before I realized he intended to leave.

“Wait
,
” I called out. “What is
your
name?”

He stopped, his back to me, but he did not turn. He seemed to be contemplating his response. “You may call me Gerard, if it pleases you.”

Regardless of the intimate nature of our conversation, or perhaps because of it, I became determined to establish some sense of propriety between us. “May I inquire as to your family name?”

He turned his head slowly, so slowly I feared the expression I might see on his face. Jaw clenched, he directed a look over his shoulder at me that could have singed eyebrows. I felt as though I had trod on an ancient grave and made its inhabitant furious.

“I have no family.” He nearly spit out the last word. “Your choices are
Master
, as my servants call me, or Gerard.” He turned toward me and I noted with that same sense of awe the hard width of his chest, the coiled strength in the hands at his sides, the subdued power in his stance. “
Choose
.”

The word whipped at me, compelling me to submission.

Servant or equal?

I called no man master. “Gerard it will be, then.”