Kathryn Smith (22 page)

He rolled toward her, pulling the quilt from the bottom of the bed over them both as he did so. His arm settled over her waist as his chest pressed against her arm. She could feel the rhythm of his heart against her shoulder. She shifted her bent legs so that they rested against his thighs to avoid the dampness on the sheet below her hips.

She met his gaze, trying to decipher what that unreadable emotion she saw there was when he spoke. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She could lie, but to what end? To protect herself? She had already made herself as vulnerable to him as she could, and if she didn’t trust him completely, what was the point in trusting him at all?

“I was afraid,” she confessed. How liberating it was to tell him the truth. How utterly frightening.

He raised a brow. “Of me?”

She nodded. “Of what you might do if you learned the truth about my marriage.”

He frowned. “It was never consummated.”

“And therefore not legal.”

He stared at her. “You said it was a marriage of convenience, but I assumed that it was still a marriage.”

“Tony had his reasons for marrying me and I married him to escape my family. For years I have been terrified of someone learning the truth. If word got out that my marriage wasn’t valid I could lose everything and end up at the mercy of my parents. I would rather dance naked in Covent Garden than do that.”

“And you would look very fetching as you did so. But I still do not understand why it was never consummated. The two of you appeared to have a good relationship. Surely you could have been able to share a bed at least once.”

This was the sticky part. Telling him her own secrets was one thing, but she had no right to reveal Tony’s.

“My husband was not able to perform his husbandly duties.” It wasn’t a lie. Tony had been no more able to make love to her than he would a stick of wood. In fact, the stick might have fared better than she. It wasn’t because he hadn’t loved her, he just hadn’t found her attractive. He used to lament how much simpler his life would be if he could only be a husband to her.

Her explanation seemed to satisfy Wynthrope—at least on the subject of her marriage. “Why did you never take a lover?”

“The same reason I was fearful of being with you. I was afraid of people learning the truth. I didn’t know if I could trust anyone.”

He stilled as the full implications of that sank in. “But you trusted me.”

She nodded, her throat tight under the weight of his gaze. “Yes.”

He kissed her again, fiercely and without finesse, but the raw emotion of it filled Moira’s heart with joy. Slowly he
released her and she became aware of something hard pressing against her hip. Surprise filled her as she realized what it was.

“Again?” Dear heavens, she didn’t know if she was ready to do it again. The tenderness from the first time had yet to fade.

“Ignore it and it will eventually go away,” he advised, wrapping his arms around her again. “As eager as it is, I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll indulge it when you’ve recovered.”

The knowledge that there would be a next time filled her with a rush of happy anticipation as she snuggled against him. It was so hard to believe that this was real, that she had found someone who gave her so much happiness, who made her feel so complete. She wanted it to last forever.

As she closed her eyes and drifted toward sleep, Moira realized that she was very much in danger of falling in love with him. Not just that, but she wanted to fall in love. Even more surprising was that she believed in her heart that he just might be able to love her in return.

A virgin. Good God, what kind of joke was this? Was fate out to destroy him?

Lying on his side, Wynthrope watched Moira as she slept. He would have smiled at her soft snores if his heart wasn’t slowly being shredded in his chest.

She was the most amazing woman he had ever met. Being inside her was the closest thing he’d ever experienced to heaven, but hearing her tell him she trusted him made him feel like hell.

What had she been doing there? He should have had plenty of time to steal the tiara before she returned home from the party. She never returned home before one o’clock, not when she was enjoying herself.

Not when he had been with her.

Damnation. She had left the party because he wasn’t there. It had never occurred to him that his attendance would affect her one way or the other. He should have known. If the situation had been reversed, he wouldn’t have stayed either, especially if he got the idea that she wasn’t coming back.

The horrible thing was that he had intended to return. How differently this night might have turned out if things had gone as planned. They would probably still be at the viscount’s house—Moira’s former house—dancing until the wee hours. He would have seen her and Minerva home, perhaps he might have stolen a kiss or two, but whether he would have ended up in her bed was a mystery.

Regardless of what might or might not have happened between them, the fact still remained that he had come there for one reason only—to steal the tiara. That fact hadn’t changed, it had only been delayed for a bit.

The image of her in that tub, her pale skin gold and glistening in the firelight, was something he would carry with him forever. Never in his life had he seen something more breathtaking or perfect. She was all slender perfection, her form rounder than he remembered. She had taken his suggestion to heart and gained a few pounds—just enough to make her a little softer.

He thought his heart was going to stop when she stood up and asked for that blasted towel. Did she truly believe he would allow her to cover herself again after giving him a glimpse of all she had to offer? He had wanted to wrap himself around her, touch and taste her, and he had succeeded.

The scent of her clung to him, vanilla sweetness mixed with warm, aroused woman. All he wanted was to spoon against her, bury his face in her hair, and sleep forever, but there was a job to do.

Slowly, so as not to wake her, he slipped out from beneath the quilt and gathered his clothes from the floor. The fire in
the hearth had burned away to little more than embers, and he had to feel around for all his belongings. Finally dressed, he took a stub of a candle from the mantel and lit the wick with the glowing remains in the grate. Glancing toward the bed to make certain his activity and the extra light hadn’t wakened Moira, he moved silently toward the painting on the wall directly opposite the bed. It was a good place to start looking for the safe. Thankfully there were only a few paintings in the room.

He felt around the side of the gilt frame, closing his eyes in regret as his fingers encountered the cool metal of a hinge. Of course he would find the correct painting immediately, it was just his rotten luck.

A bit of pressure and the painting swung forward, the hinges protesting with a soft whine. Again Wynthrope glanced toward the sleeping woman on the bed. Her soft snore assured him that she was still asleep.

She looked so lovely, so peaceful. His heart hurt at the sight of her. He turned away.

Lifting the candle to the face of the safe, he illuminated the locking mechanism. He would have been apprehensive about cracking it if he hadn’t staged those other robberies first.

Narrowing his concentration on the safe, trying to block out the fact that Moira slept trustingly behind him, Wynthrope’s fingers expertly began their task. He felt, rather than listened for the safe to tell him the correct combination of numbers. If he knew Moira as well as he believed he did, he already had the correct sequence figured out. He tried the combination.

The lock clicked and he smiled grimly. His luck was with him this evening, even though he wished it wasn’t. The key to the safe was Moira’s wedding date. Most would believe that it was because of her love for Tony, but even if he hadn’t discovered the truth of her marriage, he would still know
that she had chosen that date because it symbolized her freedom from her parents.

He despised these people and he had never met them, though he despised himself more at this moment.

He lifted the candle to peer inside the confines of the safe. There were flat wooden boxes for jewelry, velvet bags, and soft velvet pillows. There were also papers and other personal items, but he ignored those. He was after one thing, and that’s what he needed to concentrate on.

The tiara sat on a velvet pillow, its stones throwing off a blinding array of glittering sparks as the light of the candle touched it. Reaching in, he carefully picked it up, his movements slow and fluid so as to not disturb anything or make a noise.

Outside the safe, the tiara didn’t look like much of anything. Atop Moira’s glistening hair, it had looked like an adornment fit for a queen—his black queen. Now it was nothing more than an intricate integration of stones and metal—a heavy, insignificant thing.

It was the key to his freedom. All he had to do was take it, wrap it up in the bag he had brought with him, and take it with him when he left. Then he could give it to Daniels and all this would be at an end. He wouldn’t have to worry about North or Devlin, or even Brahm being touched by the mistakes of his past. He wouldn’t have to worry about Moira and her safety.

He wouldn’t have to worry about Moira at all. Not anymore. The moment he turned this trinket over to Daniels, it would signify the inevitable end of his relationship with Moira, unless he could lower himself enough to face a future built on deceit.

At one time he probably could have lowered himself to just such a degree, but he didn’t have the heart for it anymore. Somewhere along the line that shriveled fig in his chest had come alive, slowly blossoming under Moira’s nur
turing attention. It was far from whole, still cracked and dusty, but there was hope within it again, and the knowledge that he wasn’t as lost as he had once feared.

If only it had stayed a dried-up, dead thing, this would be so much easier.

He had the prize he had come for. All he had to do was close the safe, so why didn’t he? He stood there, frozen to the spot, unable to will his legs to move, staring at the bit of glitter in his hand.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take this prize because he had been given a far more precious one by the woman sleeping trustfully just a few feet away. He didn’t mean her maidenhead—it was much overrated as far as prizes were concerned. Every woman had a maidenhead once in her life, it was hardly a rarity among mankind.

No, the prize Moira had given him was her trust. She had a secret that she had guarded for years, a secret that made her close herself off from life, that made her cautious and careful. He knew all about those kinds of secrets, he had plenty of his own. Had he trusted her with his? Not really—not the deep ones. He kept the secret of his past concealed from her even as she revealed her own.

She had given herself to him. He hadn’t seduced her or coerced her. When she stood up in that tub, revealing her nakedness to him, it had been because she wanted to do it. She wanted him to be the first man to know what it was like to be inside her, and, God help him, the idea of her ever allowing another to touch her that way filled him with a cold, dangerous possessiveness.

In the beginning she had been so afraid that he was out to use her in some way—that he was going to make some kind of trophy of her. Christ, if she only knew the truth. She was a trophy—but not as she thought. She was something worthy of winning, a woman worthy of fighting for, of risking
everything just to hold. The fact that he embodied everything she feared and mistrusted was sickening because he had convinced her otherwise.

Hell, he had almost convinced himself otherwise.

She was so much stronger than he was. She had faced her fear of what might happen if she revealed the truth to him. If he were the sort of man to spread tales, he could easily ruin her by bragging about his conquest. He knew many men who would do just that, without any thought of what the indiscretion might do to the lady involved. One word from him and Moira could end up with nothing, dependent on her parents once more. She rarely spoke of them, but he knew how much she would hate going back to them. She would starve before she asked them for a penny.

No, he was definitely the weaker of the two of them. He was too afraid to trust her. He could sugarcoat it and justify it by saying it was because there was more than just himself at stake, that he kept his silence to protect his brothers, but that was horse shite. He kept his silence because he couldn’t bear for her to look at him with distaste in her gaze. He would rather have her think him a heartless scoundrel than know he had been duped into being a thief.

He didn’t want her to think he had used her just to get the tiara. He had wanted her from the first moment he saw her, the tiara had nothing to do with that, but she would never believe that now. If only he had told her from the beginning, perhaps they could have worked something out. Perhaps she would have sold him the tiara. If he had been truly careful he might have been able to get a forgery made—one that even Daniels couldn’t see through.

But it was too late for second thoughts now. Now was the time for decisions. He had the tiara in his hand. Did he take it and walk away from Moira? Or did he take it and conceal the truth from her forever?

Or did he put it back and tell her everything and pray to God she forgave him? Which meant more, keeping his secrets and protecting his family, or having Moira in his life?

A bigger man would choose his family. A better man would know that putting others ahead of himself was the greatest sacrifice.

A better man would realize she could never love a liar and a thief. A bigger man would let her go.

He was not such a man. He wanted her, wanted to give her everything he had to offer and more. He wanted to be a better man, but not for his family or himself, but for
her
. And the better man for Moira would not steal from her. A better man would tell her the truth and risk losing her rather than deceive her altogether.

Daniels would have to find another way to get this tiara. North would have to deal with the actions of his past, just as Wynthrope himself would. This ended tonight.