Must Have Been The Moonlight (25 page)

She retrieved her hair from his fingers. “Which implies that the leak came from the consulate.”

“The implications thrown at me are whitewash to cover that disgrace. Lord Ware isn’t an idiot. He’ll see that.” He leaned his palms on the rail, bracketing her between his arms.

“What is your theory?” The words sounded breathy.

“That someone got very rich on the sale of stolen goods and artifacts and retired on the payroll shipment.”

“And framed you for murder.” He felt her gaze touch his lips. “I’m glad that you are no longer in Cairo,” she said.

“You are so fierce in your protection,
amîri
,” he whispered against her hair. “For someone who wants to throw me out of her bed.”

She untangled herself from his arms. “I have been worried about you this day, and you walk into that dining room two hours late, God’s curse to stubborn Irishmen. Were you really nearly washed overboard? What did the captain say about the door latch?”

Michael tipped her chin and gazed at her soft, full mouth. “That it had a tendency to freeze during storms. Like my good sense. Since I was out there that night because of your damn horse. But alas, you are not a widow yet. You have cursed me, I think.”

She stepped around him. “I am the one cursed to listen to your boorish humor.”

He caught her arm. “Why are you so angry?”

“Because I won’t be the cause of your demise.”

Pulling his mint tin from his pocket, he watched her swing open the door. “Are you engaged for the next week?” he asked.

“Are you asking if I’m available, your Grace?”

He slid a mint between his lips, his gaze going over her before he found himself looking in her eyes, wondering what the hell he was doing acting like some green sixteen-year-old in the throes of his first crush. “I’m asking.” His voice held a dark edge.

“In that case”—she leaned against the door—“yes, I’m available.”

That evening, Michael and Brianna stayed in Winchester. They visited the only operating theater in winter, an old hurdy-gurdy show that no gentleman would take his wife to see. They were the only souls foolish enough to walk outside on an icy January eve, but Brianna didn’t care. On the carriage ride to London, they played cards as he displayed
another side of himself she’d never seen. Lifting his gaze, he caught her watching him over the rim of her cards. His gray eyes changed with the light and his moods. He looked at her now, his dark hair longer, his teeth when he smiled as white as the shirt he wore tucked into black trousers.

“Your bid,” he prompted.

She suspected that she would lose this game just as she had the last three. “When did you say I’d be meeting your family?” she asked offhandedly.

She’d discovered their first day on the road that he didn’t like talking about his family. “I didn’t.”

“Do you intend to let anyone know that you’re in London?”

“Not for as long as I can help it.”

Brianna narrowed her eyes over the tops of her cards. He’d been very good at manipulating the conversation around that topic. With a casual deliberate movement, she shifted seats and sat in his lap. “What did you say beats four queens?”

When she turned to look over her shoulder, there was laughter in his eyes, and something much hotter. “Four kings?” He fanned out his cards on the seat, thus shaving off another day of their courtship.

She knew that he was cheating at cards. Two could play that game, she thought, and wriggled her bottom against his crotch. “You can’t hide your life from me forever, Michael.”

Impassively, he let her wriggle, but his eyes were sizzling on hers and sent a sensual thrill through her veins. The thought of him inside her made her heartbeat quicken and, just as fast, she decided to return to her seat.

Two days later Michael and Brianna checked into the grandest hotel in London. Guests could travel to the upper floors in an ascending room, a hydraulically operated lift that thrilled Brianna as she clutched the cage and looked six floors below her. She rode the contraption twice before Michael finally pulled her off and led her, laughing, all the way down the corridor to her room. He unlocked her door.

“I will see you tonight.” His voice all silky and hot, he edged her into the room.

Before Brianna could feel disappointed that he’d not come in, he shut the door, leaving her to stare at the oaken panels.

It was the scent of roses that finally made her turn around. The fragrance pervaded the chamber and filled her senses. Her jaw dropped open. The room was like something out of Arabian tales. Sheer hangings the color of a desert sunset draped the windows and the huge four-poster bed. Rose petals littered the floor.

She untied the laces on her cloak, dropped it on the bed and walked into an adjoining chamber, where she heard Gracie talking. Nile-green tiles covered the walls and floor, depicting a mosaic landscape filled with palm trees. A porcelain tub on four clawed feet dominated the room. Red petals seemed to float on the steam still rising from the water.

“Mum.” A young girl dressed in a black dress and white mobcap curtsied. “Your bath is ready. Your towels are heated.” She pointed to a low cabinet against the wall, a pull rope on the wall, and scented oils.

Candles danced and shimmered in the cooling draft as Brianna skimmed a finger through the water. “Thank you,” she whispered, and the girl left.

It was the first real bath she would have since leaving Cairo. That Michael would do this for her warmed her heart. He’d sent a rider on ahead from their last rest stop outside London, and now she knew why. He’d been ever so polite since leaving Southampton, playing his side of the bargain as he played everything else. Succinctly and with sleight of hand.

“Oh, Gracie.” Brianna lifted her hair. “Undo me, please.”

Brianna climbed into the bath and sank into the luxurious froth of scented bubbles. She splashed them on her face, shoulders, and breasts. She lathered and soaped. When she came up for air, she lifted her feet out of the water and wig
gled her toes. This was contentment, she thought, feeling like a warm cat. Movement to the side caught her attention and she turned her head.

Michael was leaning with his arms crossed in the doorway. He wore a black robe belted at the waist, his chest visible through the open V at his neck. His gray eyes held hers pinned until her cheeks flushed hot. He’d been watching her for a long time.

“I take it you approve?” he asked.

She leaned against the tub’s rim. “Pray tell, your Grace, are you trying to win extra favors?”

“To the very best of my ability, Brianna.”

Michael continued leaning against the door, and Brianna was conscious of more than her racing heart, for what was in his eyes must surely be reflected in hers. She felt wanton and flushed, surrounded in bubbles—a woman well-loved.

Or she feared a woman falling in love.

She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms against her legs. Her hair shiny black in the candlelight fell over her shoulders and framed her face.

“This is cheating,” she said when he approached.

Michael knelt beside the tub. “I know.”

His intentions always started out honorable with Brianna, yet when it came to his actions, he found himself doing things he never intended to do. He’d never intended to have an affair with her, or to go back to her after their time on the
dahabeeyah
. He had never intended to betray her trust, but after she had come to him that night in the apartment, he knew he could not let her go.

He’d taken away her choices, her independence, probably even her dreams. Now he set out to conquer her heart, body, and soul, and intended to use whatever means at his disposal.

If the fires were not already running rampant through her, they were burning him enough for them both.

“How did you arrange this so quickly?” she asked.

“I sent someone ahead,” he said without taking his eyes from hers. “The rest of the details were left to me.”

“What details?” Ink-dark lashes framed her eyes.

“This.” He buried his fingers in the damp thickness of her hair and looked so deeply into her eyes that he believed she could surely read his soul. “And this.” His mouth covered hers. And it seemed hours before he finally dragged his lips from hers.

Hours where her hands had crept up to the collar of his robe and gripped it tightly.

She was so incredibly beautiful, he thought, that one conviction was immediately brought into certainty as he felt his eyes slide closed. His complete surrender had come so subtly that the moment of reckoning was over before he’d so much as realized that it had even arrived.

Brianna lifted her gaze to his in an unconscious request for another kiss. The moment she did, his mouth seized hers again and the kiss turned explosive. He stood, bringing her up with him. Seemingly suctioned to him from head to toe, she surrendered to a groan. Then she surrendered to him.

Hot and fervent, her body fanned the flames. Her arms slipped around his neck. He stepped into the tub, following her down into the frothy bubbles. Against the silky heat of her flesh, he could feel the hard arousal of his sex. “You are going to smell like the sweetest of flowers for days, your Grace.”

“I’ve smelled worse.”

“What about our courtship?” she asked.

“I was going to play out the courtship,” he said, both tender and determined. “We still can.” He shifted, settling her thighs over his, the taut curve of her stomach cradling his erection. “You wanted more. But in the end, I can give you no more than I am, Brianna. Tell me now if you want me to stop.”

Michael felt her silence for what it represented. But if he thought that she could not commit to him, he was wrong.

She moved over him, onto him. His name a breathless whisper on her lips. Her name an answering rasp.

Hunger seared him. He filled her. She leaned her head against his and shut her eyes.

Water sloshed over the rim of the tub.

Her hands slipped across his chest. He felt the heavy thumping of his heart, the warmth of her flesh against her fingers. She pulled back to look into his face, his other hand bracing her bottom, they moved in slow harmony, giving then taking, back and forth, a long slow glide that sharpened his hunger, made it agony—and ecstasy. She licked his tongue with a flickering caress, deeper still, her mouth covering his, capturing his lips, if only to draw breath from him. “Jesu…” he rasped against her lips. She escalated his senses to higher levels. To the moment when all barriers fell away. To the moment when it was only him. Only her. And the words whispered in passion between them. There was power in her presence, the force of her movement against her, driving him to lose control, but he took her with him when he did, and when she climaxed, she kissed his mouth as thoroughly and intimately as she’d taken his body, stamping an impression of her forever on his lips.

“The ring is of the first quality, your Grace.”

Brianna held the crafted piece to the light, reading the inscription inside the band.

“Your diagram was specific,” the jeweler added, clearly nervous since she had yet to respond. “Onyx inlaid in a serpentine gold band. Not too pretentious and not too dull. As you said.”

“It’s perfect.” Laying the ring on the black velvet cloth atop the display case, she shifted her gaze to the balding jeweler and smiled. “Mr. Smith, you’ve done a superb job in such a short time.”

Brianna had found the jeweler three days ago during Michael’s fitting at the tailor. The band was to be a surprise. She’d had the date of their wedding engraved next to the

Latin word
aeternus
: eternal. She had been in a romantic mood that day, and optimistically inclined to hope that eternal meant blissfully happy.

As Mr. Smith wrapped the small box, she opened her reticule and removed the draft she’d drawn from her funds in the Bank of England.

She felt a prickle on the back of her neck. Not the first that day.

A large plate-glass window covered the front of the shop. The viewing salon was open to the busy street.

Brianna walked to the window. Glancing up and down the crowded thoroughfare, she saw that the Aldbury carriage, the rising swan crest visible on the door, had arrived. She’d sent Gracie that morning with the luggage to Kensington and had taken a cab to the jeweler on Bond Street with instructions that the carriage come there.

That morning, Michael had put on his uniform for the last time. His meeting with Lord Ware would be over at noon, and she wanted to greet him with her surprise. She did not intend him to walk this path alone.

A breeze stirred the tendrils of her hair and diverted her attention from the window. Mr. Smith stood beside her, holding out the box. “It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Lady Ravenspur. I hope your husband is pleased with his gift, and that you will return.”

Brianna ran her gaze over the quaint shop. Her first day here, he’d proudly shown her his finely crafted pieces. Whenever she’d sat across the street at the tailor, she had never seen anyone enter the store.

“Have you any timepieces, Mr. Smith?” she asked offhandedly. “My husband could use just such an accessory for his new wardrobe.”