To Seduce an Angel (13 page)

He stared down at her, and Emma felt herself yield her true self, a girl with nothing in the world but nightmares and plans of escape.

He seemed to lose himself in watching her. “Acorns are tithable, but not if the hogs eat them.”

Emma pressed closer. His hand stroked to the small of her back, waiting for him to go on.

“Apples are tithable if they fall from the tree, but not if they are stolen.” His voice had grown low and almost harsh.

“Wild cherries growing in the hedgerows are tithable.” A laugh shook his chest under her ear. “You're safe now, Miss Portland. I should leave.”

No
. Emma could feel the dream crouching, ready to spring.

“If the nightmare comes again . . .” He was pulling back as he spoke. “Think of a good memory like your ponies.”

Emma shook her head. He didn't know how the good and the bad were woven together. As soon as he spoke of the ponies, the cherries in her head vanished from the hedgerows. The bare branches turned brown and full of crows. She clutched his shirt, bunching the fabric in her fists. The dream sprang.

Two crows sat on the fence as a younger Emma and Tatty returned from the village with flour and oil for the farmer's wife. At their approach more crows flapped up in a raucous black whirl of wings and cries from something on the ground. A French soldier laughed from the open farmhouse door. When Emma turned back, she saw the thing on the ground. Her pony's head.

She closed her eyes. Her body began to shake in rough shudders. Daventry gathered her closer, his arms tightening, containing the shudders until they subsided into hiccups, and even those stilled. He lifted her chin.

“Tell me what happened to those ponies you used to ride.”

Emma shook her head. She could not speak.

“Look at me.” His thumbs brushed tears from her cheeks. “I'm real. I won't let the dream have you. I won't let Budge and Hiccup be hurt.”

Dav felt the danger in the moment. Her eyes confessed some horror she could not name. She clung to him as she had to the pony. He had comforted her. He should leave now, offer some polite assurance that he was nearby, and not take anything from the shaken woman in his arms. But in the glow of the candle she was all pink-and-cream flesh. What he saw was a vision conjured out of his own sleepless desire, a warm tousled girl with a crown of golden curls and a filmy garment of ivory silk twisted about her waist, so that the pattern of the lace exposed the rosy peak of one sweet breast. She smelled of lavender and roses, and the heady scent of her filled his head.

She was like him somehow. Whatever lies she told, the dream was true. He did not press her to tell him more. He knew it was a dream of unbearable loss. There was just one comfort left to give. He leaned down then and took her mouth, claimed it with his own, just a touch at first.

Emma took Daventry's kiss. She opened to him, expecting the thrust of his tongue, but it didn't come. He meant the kiss as comfort, but she needed him to want her, so he would stay and keep the dream away. She arched her body up to his, and his hands swept down her back to gather her closer.

Dav slid the silk off her shoulder, freeing her breast. He let himself cup the softness of it in his rough palm and close his thumb over the peak as he had wanted to do the first day. His touch drew little whimpers from her and more arching of her pliant body. It made him dizzy with wanting to put all of his aching self into her warmth. He reached down and cupped her bottom to pull her against his straining cock. Her startled gasp stopped him. He opened his eyes to meet her wide gaze, realization plain in her eyes of where such caresses might lead.

“I think I've put the nightmare out of your mind,” he said. He pulled the silk gown back over her pale breast.

She nodded, and he took a deep breath and made himself step back.

 

 

EMMA watched him. He stood in the doorway almost beyond the candle's reach, the white of his shirt and the dark depths of his eyes distinct in the shadows. “If the dream comes again, call me.”

She nodded. She wouldn't though.

When the door closed behind him, she made herself get out of the bed and put her feet on the ground. The chill of the room cooled her at once, puckered her flesh and set her teeth chattering. On shaking legs she went to her dressing room for a shawl. She wrapped herself in soft wool and sat in the big bed to think.

She had come into her womanhood in prison. Tatty had shown her what to do, but Tatty had not prepared her for this.

She must not like him. She must not find him warm or good or funny or kind. Above all not kind. She must think of him as a wall, an obstacle, a problem to solve.

He would remain after her escape with his house, his boys, and his wealth.

She would walk across England. It was not a big place, not so vast as the continent she and Tatty had already crossed. England was a mere island. An island could not be so very big.

She laughed at herself. She couldn't help it, but she knew that it was not good to laugh in an escape. The time to laugh would be after her escape when she had reached Bristol and found a ship bound for America. She could go as a servant. Servants did not have guards or fish soup.

Daventry was not the man that the duke and Aubrey had led her to expect. They thought the greatest danger to their plan would be to have her exposed as a spy. True, Daventry saw too much, understood too much. He must see now what he'd suspected earlier—that her careful papers were a lie. She knew nothing of tithes. She woke from dreams no vicar's daughter with her nose in her books could ever have.

But that was a danger Emma could handle. The real danger was that Emma liked Daventry's kisses. The real danger was that she, like his boys, would want to stay with him, that she would cling and delay her escape until the law caught her.

She had to find a way to resist him. She lay back and pulled the covers up over her. The linen slid over her breasts, made sensitive now by Daventry's embrace, and sparked an instant recollection of his kiss.

He was the second man to kiss her, as different from her first as honey from gall. Fausto had been the first. He had been the youngest of their guards, but not the kindest. Kissing him had been part of the escape plan, the distraction part. Each time Fausto shoved his fishy tongue in Emma's mouth, Tatty had stood by, testing the keys at Fausto's waist in the lock of their cell.

Emma shuddered. She was here to buy her life and Tatty's with information. The sweet, sweet comfort of Daventry's embrace would not keep her from the crows. Only the duke's paper could do that. She could only get the paper by spying.

Then she realized that she had discovered one thing about him, after all, without spying. He was a man who understood nightmares. Things had happened to him that gave him an intimate knowledge of pain and fear. If she let Daventry want her, she would betray him more than she ever intended. He was a man who would not take betrayal well.

 

 

DAV leaned against the wall that separated her from him, his body hot and hard and throbbing with frustrated desire. He didn't like walls, but he was grateful for this one, the only thing keeping him from giving in to his most inconvenient discovery of the effects of lust.

He held himself perfectly still. He understood himself too well. He had given her the room next to his and sent Adam away not to investigate her lies but to lie with her. Only the girl's eyes, so wide with terror they'd gone black, had held him in check. His mind had recognized her fragile waking state, still so deep in the dream that only the thinnest rim of blue remained around the pupils of her eyes.

He knew himself to be a most fortunate man. Kidnapped at thirteen, held in captivity by a stranger for two years, he had escaped and made a life for himself on the streets. He was even more fortunate in his family, who had not given up the search for him in spite of the danger to themselves from his great enemy and his enemy's hirelings. When his family had found him, they'd shown him how to come back to them and to the life he had thought he'd lost forever.

His brothers had gone a step further, understanding that the man who'd taken him at such a young age might have damaged his sensual appetite. Xander and Will had found a way to have what seemed an impossible conversation and had helped him understand that Harris's actions did not change who Dav was. There were ugly names for men like Harris and even for men for whom love of their fellows was as natural as breathing. But Harris had been largely impotent. There, Dav had been lucky, too. Impotence had made Harris more likely to use his fists, but it had saved Dav's person from irreparable damage.

In time his brothers had arranged for him to meet a matter-of-fact young tart from a thriving establishment run by a group of women who could afford to be selective in their clients. One memorable night with her had done a great deal to complete his release from Harris.

She had pressed him with surprising frankness for the details of his sexual experience with his captor and showed him how his body was meant to work, all the while instructing him in the mysteries of the female body—its workings and its pleasures. He had not minded the lessons.

“Ever cast up your accounts?” she'd asked him.

He had had to admit that he had.

“Well, did you eat again?”

He laughed. “I did.”

“Well,” she said. “Ye've got to cast up 'arris, like 'e was somethin' bad that you ate. Your mind can get it all twisted, but the body is honest. It shivers and sneezes and sleeps. The belly grumbles and aches and gets rid of bad food. Listen to your body.”

And he had. He wasn't fool enough to think he'd impressed her, but he didn't disappoint. She frankly admired his body and told him ladies would like it. For weeks afterward, he'd suffered a plague of cockstands, reassuring if inconvenient proof that he would mend.

Now that he had no doubt of the direction of his desires, he must not give in to them. He had been aroused. Emma Portland had been frightened. Her inexperience had thrown him off. She clearly knew enough of kisses to take his with a greedy hunger for it, but she had no knowledge of how to kiss back. He had tried to slow them down.

Neither truly knew who the other was. She was no vicar's daughter, but she was strangely innocent. She didn't know how to kiss him back, but she had received his kisses with an insistent need that told him she had been as powerfully affected as he had. Still he had the power in the situation. That alone should keep him from touching her.

He took up his book again,
A Practical Treatise on the Law of Tithes.
It should make a fitting penance for his advances on Emma Portland. The language of tithing laws had a biblical ring, and every page of the large volume in front of him rang with the voices of stern rectors and bishops claiming their rights.

The trouble was that tithes now made him think of Emma Portland. She tasted of honey and salt. The kisses he stole from her were like the sweetest apples. If he thought about cherries, he would make himself crazy with desire. If he were the gentleman his family tried to make him, he would apologize for his advances. But he didn't regret them. Given a chance he was more likely to repeat the offense than apologize for it. If Adam didn't return soon, the girl had no chance.

IN the morning Emma was no match for her charges
.
Their thoughts were on the afternoon's promised boxing lesson. Hers were on Daventry's kiss. Her math lesson went nowhere, and when Lark began throwing a beanbag about the room, she admitted defeat. To save the room from utter destruction, she stepped in the middle between Lark and Rook, and when she had order restored, she dismissed them.

Adam Digweed still had not returned from his investigation. She had an hour to spy before it was time to walk to the village and face Wallop. He would press her about the package Daventry had received. She had to take a chance while Daventry visited tenants with his estate manager. Emma decided to try his library, the likeliest place for any sort of document.

One oddity of her employer that she hardly knew what to make of was his habit of leaving doors open. From the corridor she could see that the library was empty as she'd expected.

His cozy library was nothing like the duke's grand library at Wenlocke. His library was a working place. While his wards resisted learning one new thing, he seemed to want to learn everything there was to know. She wondered what he searched for in all those open books.

Recalling her first visit to the library with the boys, she looked for what might have altered in the room. It was easy to dismiss the books on the floor or on the chairs. They lay flat, untouched recently. Some had scraps of paper tucked in the fold covered with writing in a bold flowing hand. On the desk itself was a small clear working space and a tray of the usual writing implements, pens, mending knife, sand, and an inkwell. A stack of three closed volumes filled the upper right corner. An open book lay facedown next to the stack. The rest of the desk was covered in closely written sheets, lying as if a wind had rustled them into a drift of paper.