Promise Me Heaven (29 page)

Wrapping her arms around the hard warmth, she refused to relinquish this dream to consciousness. Strong arms tightened around her. She turned, and her mouth pressed against smooth, warm skin where a phantom heart beat beneath her lips. She smiled.

In her dream Thomas cursed. Or was it a prayer? It was impossible to say. She snuggled closer, pressing her length more fully to his. He shuddered and her body answered.

Even in dreams where she was chased by terror and danger, he had the power to ignite her senses, to call from her body the shivering response that only he could. Her hands slowly measured the breadth of his shoulders, palmed the slope of his chest, tested the hardness of the ghostly arms that held her. She sighed.

His heart was a thick, mesmerizing rhythm beneath her ear, his unyielding embrace at odds with the shivering gossamer brush of unseen fingertips. Something velvety and warm trailed across her forehead, over her cheeks, and down her throat. A languid, yet somehow fervent movement. He was kissing her! Cat purred in delight.

“Cat, wake up. We have to leave soon.”

Leave
? How could one leave a dream? Cat opened her eyes and blinked, foggy headed as she tried to accustom her vision to the murky light. The bed shifted beneath her. She bolted upright, banging her head painfully on some overhead projection.

“Ow!” two voices erupted.

She struggled in the bedclothes and, becoming more entangled, pitched forward. Strong hands caught her, hauling her back upright. He was real.
Thomas
. She stretched out her hands to touch him, to reassure herself he was no exhaustion-induced fantasy. “Thomas?”

“Your hardheadedness is no longer open to debate, m’dear,” he said, sitting down on the single chair and rubbing his chin.

His voice dispelled the lingering enchantment of her dream. But even his sardonic tone could not erase her joy.

“How did you find me?”

“First things first.”

She heard the scrape of a flint and the sudden flash of light caused her to squint. She could not see his face beyond the flame. He had gone very still. “Thomas? What is it?”

“Ahm. You have, I take it, been masquerading as your aunt?” He was laughing! The drat great beast was laughing at her after all she’d been through!

“Yes. Why are you laughing?” She sniffed with offended dignity. “I assure you it was not an easy—”

“Cat. Take a look.”

He nodded at the large, broken triangle of mirror propped against the wall next to the bed. Ringing the end of a blanket over her shoulder, Cat leaned over from the waist to see what was causing him so much amusement.

A hideous, filthy hag stared back at her. The greasepaint she had applied that morning had frozen then thawed. Oily dark streaks bracketed her nose and encircled her eyes. Straw and hayseeds had become fixed in the thicker layers of paint, pebbling one cheek in a bizarre approximation of a beard. Her hair hung in long, snarled ropes. In horror, Cat covered her mouth with her hands. They gleamed bishop’s blue.

She turned to Thomas, her eyes wide. “There wasn’t a water basin or a cloth, and I was too tired to do more than rid myself of those sodden dresses, and I never so much as realized there was even a mirror to look into, and I…”

He regarded her with amused smugness.

“And I will be
damned
if I explain why I do not look as though I were about to attend some cursed musicale when I have spent the entire day banging along in an open wagon while the skies poured ice on me!” She reached out, braced her hand against Thomas’s chest, and shoved him, hoping to topple him literally and figuratively from the chair.

She might as well have tried to push an oak tree over. He looked at her hand pressed open on his now-stained shirt and captured it in his own. Turning her hand over, he bent his head and placed his lips on her palm.

“You are intelligent, brave, courageous, and resourceful, and I am filled with admiration for you.”

Sudden tears spilled from her eyes, leaving glistening tracks in her ruined makeup.

“I am not! I am none of those things!” The words tumbled out. The words she had to say. Ridiculous now to even think them, but they were impossible to contain. They had haunted her throughout the entire terrifying, horrendous day. “I am a liar. I lied to you, Thomas. I haven’t had any lovers.”

He didn’t seem to know how to respond. He stared at her.

“Not a one.”

“I know,” he finally said, smiling oddly.

Her perceived sins loomed in front of her, making confession a necessity. “And I ran, Thomas. I fled like the most base coward. I could not think where to go to find you… I left without… Oh, Thomas! I didn’t know where to look for you!”

Thomas was stunned. Even as he gathered Cat to him, rocking her gently, the impact of what she had just said overwhelmed him. No other woman he knew would have had the ingenuity to escape past the blockades. But more astounding still, no woman he had ever known would have then tortured herself for having left behind an unrelated man of twice her size and experience.

Foolish heart, he chided himself, to read something in that. It was just Cat, who, having assumed responsibility for the welfare of so many, had unthinkingly added him to her long list.

“It’s all right, Cat.” He withdrew a square of linen from his pocket and carefully daubed at her messy face.

“… and Hecuba!” She gulped, trying to gather her composure. “I haven’t the least idea where she is!”

“Ah, yes, Hecuba. I admit, I expected to find her beneath that pile of blankets and be back to chasing you to ground by now. Where is Lady Montaigne White?”

“Eloped.”

“Pardon me?”

“She eloped, and I swear, Thomas, if you start laughing again…”

“Forgive me. It is merely the result of extravagant relief.”

She eyed him suspiciously.

“Really. Now tell me the details. Some pretty young French cicisbeo, I expect. Well, she’s a canny old thing. She’ll protect her assets well enough.”

“Not at all. She eloped with the Marquis de Grenville.”

“Grenville?” He eyed her with open disbelief. “You’re gulling me. He died of the French pox a decade ago!”

Cat disengaged herself from her comfortable position tucked under Thomas’s chin and threw her hands up in mock surrender. “You’re right. I am teasing you. Sitting here, freezing to death in this drafty hole, without a guinea to pay the landlord, not knowing if you were alive or dead, or if I should ever see you again, I got bored. So I thought to myself, ‘If perchance Thomas should reappear, however shall I entertain him? I know! I’ll tell him some Banbury tale about Hecuba eloping with an ancient marquis!’ ”

Thomas grinned at her sarcasm, relieved to have the despair gone from her eyes.
This
was his Cat. “Point taken.”

She fidgeted a second before settling herself once more against him. He pushed her upright.

“Sorry, Cat. We haven’t time for you to take a nap. We have to be off before the other guests awaken and bribe, buy, or steal their way out of here.”

“Do you have a carriage?”

“No. Just a farmer’s plow horse which, at this point, is worth more than any blooded steed at Tattersall’s. I rode astride. We will have to find something to hitch her to.”

“I have a wagon.”

Thomas stood up, carefully lowering Cat to her feet. “Why doesn’t this surprise me? Well, then, we’d best be off. We need to get you back to England. In the best of worlds, with your reputation intact.”

Her brow furrowed with perplexity.

“Did you think that your mother’s marriage to my half brother would sanction our unchaperoned trip across France? No matter what the circumstances, my notoriety would negate far more than such a dubious a family connection.”

“What will we do?”

“Hecuba’s elopement suggests a plan. You shall remain in guise as a rich, elderly woman and I shall masquerade as your French ‘companion.’ Not only will we protect your identity, but we also stand a better chance of making it quickly across the country. The French are a nationalistic but practical people. They won’t be averse to helping an unthreatening old woman, even if she is English, and her opportunistic French lover. For a fee.”

“And you think you can give a creditable performance as a French ‘companion’?” Cat asked, openly doubtful.

“I have some experience at this sort of playacting.”

“Ah yes, your foreign service, no doubt.”

Thomas looked at her, startled. “What do you know of my foreign service?”

“Only that you were involved in some information gathering capacity here in France.”

“And who told you this? Daphne Bernard?”

“What difference does that make?”

Thomas took a deep breath. “Pray listen, Cat. My past is not a particularly savory one. I have done things unfit for your ears—”

“Your past found you in Brighton, Thomas,” Cat broke in, failing to meet his eye. “Daphne Bernard is part of that past. Whatever your relationship with her, no matter how unsavory, I know it was necessary. But please, I don’t want to discuss it any further. Ever.”

Thomas watched her closely, reading the telltale stain rising beneath the greasy smears on her cheeks. If only Daphne were the most sordid piece of the history he could have related to her. If she caused Cat’s cheeks to flame and her eyes to dart away from his in embarrassment, how would she react if she were to hear about Mariette Leons and her son? He refused to think of it.

Her form beneath the thin muslin was silhouetted by the candle. The sway of her full breasts as she bent over was a sensuous motion revealed in tantalizing clarity by the backlighting. All thoughts of Daphne and Mariette and every other woman he’d ever known slowly dissolved as he stared at Cat. He felt his blood pound to his loins in instant appreciation.

Damnation. He might as well be a sixteen-year-old virgin himself instead of a man on the brink of his middle years as she’d once pointed out. She wasn’t even aware of it. Her actions were without calculation, utterly unselfconscious. And why should she fret over his avuncular presence? How could she know he fought his body’s urgency as he stood beside her?

“I have to get dressed,” Cat said patiently, obviously misreading the absorption in his gaze as woolgathering.

“Yes.”

“Thomas, you were the one who was exhorting me to speed a few minutes ago.”

“Yes. Of course. I’ll meet you down in the public room in quarter of an hour?”

Cat sighed as she picked up one after the other of the still damp bust improvers.

“Better half of an hour.”

Chapter 24

T
homas had already hitched one of the horses to the wagon and was waiting outside the inn beneath the ebony sky by the time Cat appeared, slipping from the shadows at the back of the inn by way of the maid’s exit from the attic and a stout pole ladder. She fretted a moment over leaving Sally Leades and her brother, but Thomas reassured her in a hushed voice, telling her they were safe with their countrymen.

He waited until she nodded, his greatcoat billowing in the wind about his broad shoulders, his dark head bare to the elements. Wordlessly, he handed Cat into the cart, his black eyes scanning the horizon as he tucked her under the blankets and lap rugs he had somehow procured.