The Runaway McBride (32 page)

“I don’t want Florence Nightingale,” he murmured. “I want you and no one else.”

When he tugged on her hand, she sat down on the bed. There were raw scrapes on his knuckles and welts on his face. He looked like a fallen gladiator.

An odd little ache started in the vicinity of her heart and spread out to encompass her whole body. Her knees felt weak, her fingers trembled, and her throat tightened unbearably. This gladiator had fallen in service to her, and his only reward was the sharp edge of her tongue. She should be ashamed of herself.

She sniffed and stretched out beside him. Eyes heavy with sleep, she nestled closer.

 

 

She wakened from her dream to discover that she had taken
hold of his hands and was pressing kisses to the ragged abrasions on his knuckles. Beneath her fingertips, she could feel his pulse beating erratically. Catching her breath, she tilted her head to look at him and found herself trapped in his wary stare.

“Tell me I’m not dreaming,” he said.

It was then that she became aware that at some point during the night she had slipped beneath the quilt, and his rock-hard body was pressed close to hers. “Yes, I mean, no,” she answered brilliantly.

The wariness left his eyes. “What are you doing, Faith?”

“Kissing the pain away.” This explanation seemed inadequate, so she elaborated. “It’s what my father used to do when I scraped my knees as a child.”

“No, don’t stop. There are scrapes on my face, too. I can feel them. Aren’t you going to kiss the pain away?”

“It was a dream.”

“We’re not dreaming now.”

“Obviously not.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear.”

There was no hesitation on his part as he lowered his head and took her lips in a ravishingly sweet kiss, no hesitation as he separated the edges of her robe and took possession of her breasts. He heard the sudden catch in her breathing, felt the quick kick of her heart, but she didn’t push him away. Instead, she skimmed her hands over his shoulders and twined her arms around his neck. He kissed her again and again, and the passion he tasted on her lips made him hungry for more.

He was so hard, he wanted to take her there and then. He knew he wouldn’t, he shouldn’t. It was more than lust that was driving him. He wanted to take her to bed again and again to convince her, in the age-old way of the human race, that she belonged to him.

He tore his lips from hers. She didn’t stop him when he stripped her of her nightclothes and tossed them away. He did the same with his own clothes. They came together, bare skin against bare skin, but he wasn’t finished yet. He wanted to stroke and pleasure her soft woman’s body until she was as ready for him as he was for her.

He rubbed his thumb over the peak of one breast, and her little cry of pleasure made his blood pound. He replaced his thumb with his tongue and lips and sucked strongly. Her back came off the bed, and she gave a little keening cry. When he did it again, she pushed herself free of him.

He was so short of breath that he could hardly get the words out. “Don’t tell me you don’t want this, because I won’t believe you.”

“Idiot!” She was as short of breath as he. “I’m here with you because I want to be. You don’t have to seduce me or rush me into anything. I won’t change my mind.” She rested her forehead against his. “I make my own decisions. So shall we start over? But this time, I want to be one of the players.”

She was right. He hadn’t wanted to give her time to think in case she changed her mind. All this twaddle about taking a woman to bed to convince her that she belonged to him was just that—so much twaddle. She was her own person. She went where she wanted to go.

And that’s what tied his stomach in knots.

He had rivals, but they weren’t made of flesh and blood. Her head was filled with the glamour and pathos of the mother she had never known, her intrepid mother and her like-minded friends. He didn’t know how he could fight it, but he knew he was going to try.

“Fine. Start playing,” he said.

She was no longer a novice, and she knew how and where to touch him to make him writhe. But this was more than pleasuring the senses. This was a woman asserting her right to be a full and equal partner in a ritual that was as old as time. She took his breath away.

Slowly, she began a trail of wet kisses from his lips to his groin. He had to grit his teeth against pleasure so intense it was almost a pain. Sweat broke out on his brow when she blew a warm stream of air across his tightly muscled stomach. Her caresses grew bolder, till he could not think beyond a haze of desire that seemed to permeate every pore. Then her fingers found his rigid arousal, and his control shattered. When he tumbled her on the bed and reared over her, she let out a squeal that turned into a laugh. He laughed, too, but their laughter turned to hoarse moans when his fingers slid into the slickness of her sex. Her gasping cries of pleasure made him frantic to take her.

With one swift thrust, he locked his body to hers. She wrapped her arms and legs around him. The crisis came upon them like a lightning storm. Incoherent lovers’ words spilled from their lips. At the end, there was no need for words. There was only the driving need to become one.

Later, much later, with his hands linked behind his neck, James smiled up at the ceiling. “That was special,” he said. “I mean, it was good for me. Was it good for you? ”

She was snuggled against him, eyes closed, and her breath tickled his armpit. “It was wondrous,” she said.

He wanted more from her than that. After all, she had invaded his every waking and sleeping moment. He’d long since come to know that she was the only woman for him. Though he was too faint-hearted, too afraid of rejection to say the words first, he wanted a declaration from her.

“How was it wondrous?” he prompted.

“Mmm? Well, it was like standing at the top of the Great Pyramid and looking out on all sides. It’s a humbling experience.”

She drifted off to sleep, leaving James to mull over her answer. The Great Pyramid. He wasn’t sure that he liked the sound of that.

He turned into her and winced at the sudden pain that shot through his right shoulder. There were other aches and pains that were making themselves felt, all from his encounter with the thugs who had been sent to get the diary from Dora.

He’d made mad, passionate love to Faith and hadn’t felt a twinge. That’s what came of being totally focused on only one thing. Her power to make him forget pain was awe inspiring.

Another pain shot through him, and he sucked in a breath. Even in sleep, Faith heard him. She patted him as a mother would pat a crying baby and made comforting cooing sounds.

He fell asleep with a smile on his face.

On the third day after Danvers’s funeral, when James came
down for breakfast, he found Roderick in the breakfast room. The salvers had been removed from the sideboard, but there was a pot of coffee on the table and the usual complement of crockery and cutlery to go with it. James told the waiting footman that all he wanted that morning was coffee and a small bowl of porridge with cream.

He kept his expression pleasant, because the footman was watching, but he was ready to explode. Roderick was supposed to have returned to London two days ago, but the young jackanapes had taken his own sweet time about it.

As soon as the footman left, Roderick spoke. “You look as though you’ve been through a mangle. Have you considered putting a beefsteak on that black eye? ”

“Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind next time we’re involved in a free-for-all.”

James pulled out a straight-backed chair and gingerly lowered himself onto it. Every muscle in his body felt as though it had petrified. It wouldn’t last. As soon as he got moving, the stiffness would go. Roderick, on the other hand, looked as lithe and nimble as an acrobat. There wasn’t a scratch on him, though he had been in the thick of the scrimmage, too. It was deflating to discover that he could hardly keep up with this youngster.

“I assume,” James said, “that you got Dora and Lily safely away on the Cambridge train?”

Roderick’s brows rose at James’s harsh tone. “As I wrote to you in my express.”

“As you wrote to me!” James refrained from grinding his teeth together with great difficulty. “I expected you to return on the next train out of Cambridge and report to me in person.”

“Why? Everything went as planned. I delivered Faith’s friends to my cousins. I only stayed on because I met some of my own friends. And I sent the diary home with my express.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I would be worried about you? ”

Roderick’s jaw dropped. “Frankly, no. You’ve never worried about me before.”

“Well, times change!” James roared.

A silence fell. Finally, Roderick reached for the coffeepot and held it up. “Coffee?” he asked politely.

“Thank you.” James watched as Roderick poured coffee into his cup.

Another silence went by. “So, where do we go from here?” Roderick asked. He topped up his own coffee.

“I don’t know. It would be helpful if we could decode the diary.”

“What do you hope it will tell you? ”

“Why Danvers was killed, of course, and who is behind his murder.”

James had taken Roderick into his confidence, up to a point. His brother now knew that the diary belonged to Faith’s mother and that, since the diary had surfaced, a killer was out to suppress it. What he hadn’t told his brother was that he possessed the gift of foresight. He wanted to be taken seriously, not have his sanity called into question.

Roderick said, “I dipped into the diary on the train to pass the time, and it seemed pretty tame stuff to me. The Maynard woman possessed an acid humor, highly satirical really, but there is nothing there worth killing for, not as far as I can see.”

James was about to say that people had been killed for less when Roderick’s words finally penetrated. “You decoded the diary? ” He was astonished. Codes to him were as incomprehensible as the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. “I’d no idea you were so talented.”

Roderick blushed. “It’s not that hard a code to crack, except for the last few pages. I could not make head nor tail of those.”

“I don’t suppose you could. If anyone can decode them, it will be Alex, but he’s off on one of his diplomatic missions, and no one knows when he will return.”

Roderick shook his head. “Alex won’t crack the code, not unless he has the proper tools.”

There was a silence, then James said, “Well, don’t stop there. Don’t keep me in suspense. What tools will Alex need?”

Roderick was obviously relishing this reversal of roles, thought James. He’d lived in the shadow of his elder brother, but now that his elder brother needed his help, old quarrels were forgotten. They were collaborators and, James decided, he liked the feeling.

Elbows on the table, Roderick edged toward James. “The tools are two copies of the exact same edition of a book, one copy for the person who sends the message and the other for the person who receives it. In fact, it’s called ‘the two book system’ and was invented by an Englishman called Scovell during the Spanish Campaign. This is how it works.”

He went on to talk of page numbers and columns, all of which was well above James’s head. Finally Roderick said, “Questions? ”

James tried to look intelligent. “Would you mind repeating the part about how the code works?”

Roderick obliged, and this time the system began to take shape in James’s mind. “Two people sending messages to one another,” he mused. “Does this mean Madeline was sending a coded message to someone who had the means to decode it? ”

“It would seem so.”

“It sounds simple, too simple.”

“Ah, but that’s the beauty of it.” Roderick plucked a grape from a bowl of fruit in the center of the table and popped it into his mouth. “Scovell’s code was never broken, you know, and that gave the British a tremendous advantage.”

“What sort of book are we talking about? ”

“It could be anything: a novel, a dictionary, or even a poem. But both parties to the message must use the exact same text.”

James was impressed. “How do you know so much about codes?”

Roderick shrugged. “Mathematics: that’s what I’m good at. Codes are pure mathematics. I like to play with numbers.”

James sat back in his chair. He was thinking that the more he learned about his brother, the more he realized how little he knew him.

Roderick watched him for a moment before interrupting his thoughts. “I’m good at cards, too, though I know you’ll find that hard to believe. I know I misled you, but that was because you always seemed to expect the worst of me, and I couldn’t help playing up to you.”

James’s thoughts chased each other at lightning speed. “What about your gaming debts? ”

“There weren’t any.” Roderick cleared his throat. “Any money I made—and it wasn’t much—went to Mother and Harriet. Occasionally, I paid off Father’s debts. He isn’t good with numbers, unfortunately.”