Angel In My Bed

Melody Thomas
ISBN: 006074233X

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Angel….or the devil in disguise

On one final mission for the crown, David Donally is hunting for a missing treasure. His only clue is a dazzling, gem-encrusted earring, and it is leading him to the most desirable woman he has ever known. An enchanting thief he once seduced and betrayed in the name of duty. An exquisite lover he’d believed was dead. His wife!

Meg Faraday thought her former life was behind her—until the night the treacherous husband she’d eluded for nine years suddenly appeared. By rights, she should despise the handsome spy who had once captured her heart, then shattered it. But the fire between them still burns, and what was once an irresistible passion has now become a dangerous game of betrayal.

Who are the honorable men who serve the League of the Condor a secretive organization that exists on the fringes of society? Angel in My Bed introduces one irresistible hero you will not want to miss.

REVIEWS

EXCERPT

Leading the steeldust mare up the hill, Victoria took a deep breath and looked back at the cottage. She’d managed to sneak out of the house and saddle the mare in relative silence. She swung into the saddle, worried that the creak of leather would bring one of the servants. Fighting back her fear, she reined the mare around and rode out into the night. Five minutes up the road, she switched to a back trail and changed directions as she found the narrow, wooded shortcut that led to the main house on the bluff.

She’d tucked her long dark hair beneath a battered hat and pulled the rim lower to protect her eyes from the frigid temperature. Branches clipped her sleeves. Bending over the mount’s neck, she maneuvered through the woods. Woolen trousers and heavy stockings beneath her boots protected her legs and feet, but nothing shielded her face from the stinging autumn chill. She pulled her coat collar tighter around her neck.

Panic had driven her into the house to change her clothing. Panic spurred her forward now. Fifteen minutes later, she glimpsed the silhouette of the sixteenth century stone tower that belonged to what remained of the timber-framed church. It overlooked the cemetery where Sir Henry had buried his only son, Bethany’s father, nine years ago after his body had been shipped home from India. The aged burial ground once served the families who lived and worked Munro land. A fire ravaged the church five years ago. Now, with the exception of nay doers and one lone groundskeeper, few ventured here.

Reining in beneath the iron arch that opened into the graveyard, she let the silence fill her and attempted to quell her panic. After Stillings had left, she’d waited in the cottage looking at the yard and the road from her bedroom window, watching the shadows in the night, watching to make sure no one was outside. She’d waited for everyone inside the cottage to go to sleep before she came here.

She wanted to believe that the earring turning up had been an awful fluke, but someone knew about the stolen necklace. Someone knew to come to this town in search of her. Upon seeing the bauble tonight, her first terror-filled instinct had been to go after her son and flee England.

But she could leave neither Sir Henry nor Bethany alone, or the life she had built for herself and her son over the years--the only life and family Nathanial had ever known.

A fog clung to the ground, hovering like a ghostly breath over the aged and mossy stones, hiding their eternal secrets. She nudged the horse around the graveyard’s perimeter, but could not see the soil to know if anyone had been here recently.

She rose on her legs to swing out of the saddle, when her mare’s ears pricked forward and she froze. She whipped her head around to look down the road she’d just traveled and scanned the darkness. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, but no other sound fell around her. Still, she eased Sir Henry’s old revolver from her bag.

How long had it been since she’d gone out into the night with the intent to kill a man? Shaking with cold and apprehension, she backed her mount away from the iron fence into the trees. Tension vibrated the night air and moved over the yard like a slow-growing mist, engulfing her.

Held frozen, Victoria was consumed by something she could not explain. Someone had followed her. Someone she could not see, but felt with every instinct in her being.

“Who are you?” she called.

Looking to her right at the path that led away from grounds, she started to edge the horse deeper into the copse when a rider separated from the darkness--a silhouette forged by the light of a full moon hanging in the sky behind him.

“I should be asking you that question, Meg.” The haunting voice came back to her from across the graveyard. From across ten years of her past and a world she had escaped four thousand miles away. Recognition seized her lungs along with a fear even greater than the one she held when Stillings had left her tonight.

“Or should I call you Lady Munro now?” he asked, the tenor of his words seizing her completely. “But then what is adultery when added to con artist, thief and murderer?”

“Go away, David!” Her heart beating double-time, she edged the horse deeper into the woods. “I mean it. Go away.”

A gust of wind whipped his hooded cloak around him like a hawk’s wings and the black horse he rode pranced sideways giving her a view of mount and rider. For a terrifying moment, she expected his apparition to take flight. “I cannot do that, Meg,” he answered from the heavy shadows. “You know it as well as I.”

Victoria whipped the reins and kicked her horse with her heels. The horse came out of the wooded copse and leapt the smaller picket fence that bordered the overgrown churchyard. She ducked beneath a low-hanging branch as David shot out of the woods at the bottom of the rise and blocked the path.

Without hesitation, Victoria swung the mare around and headed for another path. She didn’t want to ride toward the bluff, but she would go any place to evade capture.

The horse hit the field separating the churchyard from the bluff’s steep embankment and lunged into a run. She leaned low over the mare’s neck and urged the horse flat out across the field, pulling on the reins to slow the mare as she flew over the steep embankment. The pace was too fast. Caught off stride, the horse stumbled down the loamy hill, but like the Irish stock the horse was, it recovered its balance. Filtered moonlight laid a path through the treetops. She followed the old drover’s trail serpentining down the hill. Branches tore her hat and coat off her body. Over her own thundering heart, she heard David’s horse gaining. Then he was riding beside her on the path, a huge winged shadow in the night.

Both horses collided. A scream died in her chest as David plucked her off the saddle. Pressed on one side by brush and open to the slow moving river on the other, the path narrowed next to a hill that plunged fifty feet down to the water’s edge.

David had misjudged her strength. Or desperation.

He reined in his black and it skidded in the leaves. An elbow dug into his ribs as she kicked and screamed. Her head banged him in the mouth. He caught her wrist.

Before he realized what was in her fist, a gun discharged near his cheek, deafening him. Both horses reared in terror, throwing him backward off the saddle, his arms still locked around her.

With an oath, he hit the slope and they tumbled downward, rolling and scattering dead leaves, until they finally landed in a heap of tangled limbs and dusty clothes.

Somehow, she ended on top, straddling his hips. “Bastard! Why couldn’t you just let me stay dead?”

Her sable hair spilled around him in a fragrant mesh of vanilla. For a moment, he was too stunned by his emotions to repel her attack and did not see her swing her fist. Barely evading contact, he rolled her, fighting and squirming, the evocative fullness of her body soft beneath him as they slid another few feet together. The scuffle shoved up her shirt and caught her hair beneath her bottom.

She coughed and choked. “Get off me!”

David found himself lying between her legs. He captured her wrists and braced them on either side of her thrashing head. His chest crushed her breasts and he could feel her heart thundering against him. The shock of her wriggling jolted him. His gaze fell first on the curve of her lips then rose to her flushed face, and he suddenly welcomed the doubt growing in her eyes. “Now, Meg.” He tasted blood from a cut on the inside of his lip and spit to the side. “Why would I be wanting to do that?”

He burned to touch her, to wrap his hands around her throat and choke the life from her. A beautiful enemy was the deadliest of enemies as she had proven long ago. For nine years, he’d thought her dead. Nine bloody years she’d disappeared.

She had managed to elude the most powerful country in the world and he found his interest in her little tempered by his grip on his will. He’d been hunting the owner of that earring--and now reeled from finding her alive.

“How fitting that we met again across a graveyard.” He let his hands slide over her waist and her legs as he checked for more weapons. “Indeed, what does one say on an occasion such as this? ‘Hello, Meg. How are you after all of these years? I’m so glad to see that you did not drown. Hmm, or, perhaps, goodness gracious, David. I thought I left you for dead in Calcutta.”

She glared back, eyes glistening with fury--and confusion. She was beautiful bathed in moonlight, the brilliance surrounding them emphasizing the hint of wet violet in her eyes.

“What?” he rasped with barely restrained fury. “Nothing to say before I take you to jail where you so aptly deserve to hang?”

“You are a madman, David Donally. Get off me!” she screamed.

“Quite the contrary.” He covered her mouth with one gloved hand and forced her to look at him. “I am saner than I’ve ever been when around you. But you will understand with the current residents of these woods, I suggest you quit making so much bloody noise.”

Her eyes flashed hot. “You are the only one in danger here.”

He smiled appreciating the threat. “From you? Or that band of ruffians with whom you are so familiar? Are they the company you’ve been keeping for nine fooking years, Meg? Why am I not shocked?”

The Irishness in his voice seemed to alert her to the deadliness of its tone. “Therefore you throw me off a cliff?” She renewed her struggle, bucking futilely. “Get off me, you bastard.”

“What were you doing in that cemetery?”

“I wasn’t in the cemetery.” Her words came out in gasps. “I was on my way to the bluff house when I heard you...and took shelter.”

“Then you were out for a pre-dawn ride? Before the roads became busy. Is that it?”

“I don’t need to explain my actions to you. If I’m not mistaken, this is private land. My husband’s family lives here.”

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said against the curve of her mouth, “Faraday is not the family that owns this land on which we are currently lying so lovingly entwined. And the only husband you still legally have is square on top of you. Unless you are trying to count that death certificate I have as a divorce.”

She stopped her struggling. Her shirt sleeve had torn and spilled off her pale shoulder. She didn’t weep, not that she ever would have in his presence. Not his proud, temptress of a traitorous wife, torn and disheveled but magnificent still.

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