Now and Forever (91 page)

"The hell it isn't."

There was just enough light for her to see the surprise in his deep blue eyes. "Your language offends me, madam."

"Your treatment of Abigail offends
me.
"

"She wants for nothing."

"Except for your attention."

"She is a child."

"She is your
daughter
, your own flesh and blood."

He turned and strode away, but she wasn't about to let him get off that easily.

"You don't want to hear it, do you?" she demanded as the passageway opened into a small room dominated by a large wooden table and a narrow bed. "Why do you treat Abby that way? What on earth could she have done to deserve—"

"Be warned, madam."

"You owe it to her." She pressed on, the memory of the child's tears still fresh in her mind. "You're her father."

"Bloody hell, concern yourself with your own predicament, because it is considerable."

"My predicament?" She poked him in the chest with her forefinger. It was like poking Mount Rushmore. "You're the one with a predicament."

He pushed her down onto the bed. The mattress felt like a soggy matzo, but she didn't think this was a good time to lodge a complaint with the management.

"Mark my words well, madam, for they have great meaning for you. Today we lost two of our best men because I sheltered a traitor in my midst."

"Lost?" she asked. "What do you mean,
lost
?"

"Captured and condemned to death. Lost to all who care for them."

"Not to worry." She waved his words away like flies at a picnic. "I know all about that. They're in jail near Jockey Hollow."

"And how is it you know that, madam?"

"You just told me."

"I did not mention Jockey Hollow."

"I, um, I must've heard it somewhere else."

"Where?"

"I don't know . . . somewhere."

"That answer will not serve. Tell me the name of your spymaster or I will end your worthless life in this very room."

"Wait a minute!" she said, her face growing pale. "I can take a joke with the best of them, but this isn't funny anymore. I don't have a spymaster, Devane. I don't even know what a spymaster is."

"Two good men are sentenced to die, Dakota Wylie, and you are to blame. Why should you be spared?"

"Look," she said. "I know all about Rutledge and Blakelee. You don't have anything to worry about. Everything's going to be okay."

He grabbed her by the upper arms and lifted her off the bed. "Where are they?"

She neither blinked nor looked away, not discomfited in the slightest by the indignity of her position. Her courage was greater than the courage of a dozen men of his acquaintance. He would give all he had and more to have such a woman by his side.

"Put me down!" she ordered.

"Answer me first."

Her knee banged against his hip and he thanked the Almighty that her aim was left of center.

"Where are they?" he asked again as he lowered her to the ground.

"I don't know," she said honestly, "but I can make a guess."

"That is not good enough."

"Jockey Hollow," she said. "They're supposed to be in a jail near Jockey Hollow."

"A fine statement, madam, but I fear 'tis inaccurate. There is no jail near Jockey Hollow."

"There has to be."

"A law has not been passed to that effect," he said dryly. "I grow tired of this charade. Mayhap a night in the Franklin Ridge jail will bring out the truth."

She met his eyes.
Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go and while you're at it, forget about your two hundred dollars.
She'd read enough about those jails to know she'd never last twenty-four hours under such terrible conditions.
So what are you going to do, Wylie? Offer him your lily white body?

Maybe she'd do something even more dangerous, like telling the truth. "You were right about Andrew McVie," she said. "He
is
a friend of mine."

The joy in his eyes was unmistakable and her heart soared. The man might be a spy, but at least he was on the right side.

Of course, he quickly masked his joy with a veneer of mild curiosity. "It is said he floated over the treetops in a basket suspended from a bright red ball."

"It's called a hot-air balloon."

"You floated over the treetops with him?" He tried, but he couldn't conceal his disbelief.

"Yes, I did."

"How came you to be separated from your friends?"

"The balloon was in trouble. We were falling from the sky and I guess you could say I bailed out."

"You abandoned your friends."

"We were going to crash."

"And you chose to save your own life."

"No," she retorted angrily. "I chose to save your daughter's life instead."

"I fail to see how Abigail enters into this story."

"I heard her crying. I thought she was in danger."

"You leaped from the basket to save Abigail?"

"I didn't seem to have much choice in the matter."

"You would have me believe you risked your life for one you did not know."

She sighed. "I wouldn't have you believe anything, Devane. I'm just telling you what happened."

He considered her for a moment. "You say you are a friend of Andrew McVie. If that is so, where has he been these three years past?"

"I can't answer that."

"Cannot or will not?"

It was a little of each but she didn't dare tell him that. "I met Andrew only a few weeks ago. I have no idea what he was doing before then, but I can tell you that he's going to rescue Rutledge and Blakelee."

"That is naught but conjecture."

'No," she said carefully. "It's a fact."

"You would have me throw in my lot with a woman who claims to foretell the future?" If the look on his face was any indication, she'd better never tell him she could see auras, read tarot cards, and chat with her mother long-distance.

"At least you know on which side my loyalties rest. Why don't you show me something to prove you're not a Tory? A letter of protection from George Washington, for starters." The man had written to everyone else in the thirteen colonies; he must have written at least a billet-doux to Devane.

"A letter of protection would render me useless," Devane said coolly. "The suspicion under which I am held is my most valuable tool."

"That leaves us in the same position we were before. I still don't know exactly where you stand."

"I am a patriot," he said after a moment. "I have no love for the officers of the Continental army, but a great deal of love for what this country can be."

"You can hate the army that fights for your independence and still call yourself a patriot?"

"The Colony of New Jersey has been cruelly used. Farms have been destroyed, houses confiscated by generals who ought to spend more time in battle. Women have been raped and murdered, all in the name of the Continental army. It is possible, madam, to support the cause but hate the way in which that cause is pursued."

"Would you feel that way if your wife hadn't run away with an officer from the army?"

A muscle in his left cheek twitched but he ignored the question. "I am perceived as sympathetic to the British and that allows me access to places and people closed tight to my brothers in the spy ring."

He was a smart man. He had to know he was handing her a sure way to betray him, but that still didn't mean he was telling her the truth. "Maybe you shouldn't be telling me this after all."

He met her eyes. "I have already done so."

She waited, but there was no flash of psychic energy, no buzzing vibrations along her nerve endings to tell her what to believe. In the end there was only her heart, and her heart could no longer be denied.

"I know," she whispered. "And I'm glad."

#

Reason told Patrick that only a madman who had taken leave of his senses would have done such a thing, but unfortunately his sense of reason had abandoned him the first moment she came into his life.

He had lost hope that she would find him. He had waited years for her, thought Susannah was the woman who would unlock his secrets, but it had been Dakota Wylie all the time. This uncommon woman with the strange name and unusual manner had performed a miracle he would have deemed impossible: she had made him feel alive.

He hated her for the way she looked at him, as if she could see inside his soul, for the way she stood her ground, forcing him to see her as a person and not just a woman. He hated her for making him want things he knew could never be.

It was more than the soft dark curls that framed her face, more than the sweet scent of her skin, more even than the fact that her nearness roused in him a silken web of emotions that wrapped themselves about his heart and drew him closer to her. Not even Susannah with her great beauty had called to him in the same way.

His entire world had been turned upside down since Dakota Wylie's arrival. His life seemed different with her in it, as if he had come to the end of a long journey to find that home lay at the end of the road. In truth, he feared for his sanity. Such changes in his heart and soul were not possible. He would not allow them to be thus.

Still, how else could he explain that even time itself no longer moved at the accustomed pace? Such intensity of feeling came with the passage of weeks and months. It was not possible in mere days. There was the sense that forces he knew nothing about controlled his destiny.

"I should not believe you," he said at last, "but I do. I should not trust you, yet I do. 'Tis a considerable problem, madam, one for which I see no solution."

"That's not surprising," she said. "We barely know each other."

"'Tis true, and yet I feel as if I have known you for a very long time indeed."

"Oh, God," she whispered. "You feel it, too."

"It is as if the nature of time has somehow changed."

"As if we're living an entire lifetime in the blink of an eye."

"I do not believe in magic, Dakota Wylie, but what I feel for you is unlike anything in my experience."

"I know." Her voice was low, almost inaudible. "It is the same for me."

"Why am I bedeviled as never before? Is it love, then, that we feel?"

Her eyes swam with tears. To hear those words from such a man. To be able to spend a lifetime as his partner, his lover.
His wife.
"I don't know. I'm not even certain that I like you very much."

"We are connected in some way that I do not understand."

Now's your chance, Dakota. Tell him the truth! Tell him how you really got here.
"We share a friend in common."

"It is more than that, madam."

"We are both on the side of the patriots." How could she tell him she'd traveled two hundred years to be there? There was nothing in his frame of reference to help him believe something so bizarre. There were times when she wasn't sure that
she
believed it.

"This goes deeper, Dakota Wylie, to a place that I have never been."

His words resonated deep inside her soul. Suddenly she wasn't longing for something she'd once had or dreaming of what she hoped to find somewhere else. The easy jokes, the layers of protective armor she'd built up around her heart had all been created to protect her against this moment, from the first wild stirrings of impossible love.

The room faded away and all she saw was the man standing before her.

"There was no husband," she said.

"No husband?" He cupped her chin in his hand. "No man to whom you have given your heart?"