[Samuel Barbara] The Black Angel(Book4You) (38 page)

The surgeon had to be roused from his bed, and he muttered furiously about modern morals when he saw the dueling victim was a woman. But he gave her brandy and stitched her up neatly.

Outside, Gabriel took their horses, and Tynan put Adriana in a carriage and climbed in behind her, bringing with him his grim, bristling anger. It stung more than she wished to acknowledge, even through the cocoon of exhaustion that was spinning ever more thickly about her.

She leaned back, putting her head on the wall, and resolved not to beg him for his forgiveness. He knew the facts as well as she.

It was he who broke the silence as they rocked along the streets, now coming alive with full morning. "You might have let me know where you were." The lilt in his words was doubled. "So I didn't have to wonder all night if you were dead."

For that she truly was sorry. With an effort, she raised her head. A lock of hair fell in her face and she brushed it away. "I do apologize for that, Tynan. I feared what you would do if I told you what had happened."

"
Ah
." Bitterness edged the words. "It was all right if I worried myself half sick. It was all right if you made a bloody fool of me in the eyes of all the men in this town." He lifted a brow. "It was all right as long as you did what you felt needed doing."

During the long hours waiting for dawn, she had expected him to be angry with her. She had certainly anticipated that his pride would be wounded. But there was more here, something she could not in her depleted state quite decipher. "I did not mean to hurt you, I swear it."

"You don't ever mean to hurt anyone, do you, Riana? But you do what you like and never think."

"I cannot fight with you now." She sighed, shaking her head. "You can't have had much sleep, either. We should sleep, and then things will be clearer."

"You are not listening, Adriana. I do not intend to wait around while you get your beauty sleep so you can restore yourself to cause more damage in the lives of the people around you. I've never met such a selfish creature."

That one sailed home, an arrow piercing her straight through the heart. And out of fear of revealing how much power he had to hurt her, she reacted with anger. "If standing up for myself when a blackguard like him had the nerve to put his hands on my body without my leave is selfish, then so be it. But I'll wager here and now that no man in London will dare try it again."

"Perhaps you can tease them into it, Riana, and you'll duel weekly to the accolades that will no doubt pour down upon your pretty head."

"What a plague! Do you hear yourself? Men think nothing matters but their own blessed pride and their tender little hearts and their desires." She clenched her jaw. "You're all so focused on every tiny little thing that you don't have time or room in all that preening manhood for a spare thought for the wishes of your wives and daughters." She slammed her hand down on the bench seat, the full swell of it coming into her chest now. "What is it that you want, Tynan? Some sweet little creature to flutter around, pampering you and hanging on your every word? Someone you dress up, like those French dolls you took to my sisters?"

His jaw was set so hard it drew the cords in his neck, and his hand lay in a tight fist in his lap. "Are you quite finished?"

"No!" she cried. "I have hidden my face for five years out of shame. I've ducked and tried to avoid facing all of it. I regret hurting my father. I regret that my hotheaded brother saw fit to kill the fool, and that they felt they had to leave. But would any of that have transpired if my name were James instead of Adriana? If I were a lord instead of a lady?"

And still his face was unmoved. Adriana felt a cracking inside, for she saw that she was fighting now for the man she had truly fallen in love with. Earnestly, she leaned forward. "You know it would not have, Tynan. You know it. And you know in your heart that you do not wish one of those proper little dolls to love. That you would never be happy with one of them." She reached for his hand, and touched, on his wrist, a string of beads. He jerked away abruptly.

She stiffened. "I see." She leaned back, feeling the ache in her arm, the weight of no sleep on her spine.

He tucked the beads in his pocket and bowed his head for a long moment. In spite of everything, she wanted to put her hands in that thick hair, wanted to press a kiss to that crown. He let go of a breath and raised his head. The anger was muted, replaced with pain. "Adriana, perhaps this is as good a moment as any for me to tell you what I have hidden."

"No," she protested. "Not like this. Not when I am so weary and you are so angry."

"Blast and damn!" He caught sight of something beyond the coach, and bolted toward the door, his hand on the catch. Before the vehicle was even fully stopped, he'd hurtled out, crying out a name.

Adriana stayed where she was, peering out the window to see what could have caused such a reaction. A tall, sturdy, black-haired man, travel-stained but prosperous enough in a striped broadcloth traveling costume, stood on the stoop, and Tynan rushed up to him, putting his hands on his arms urgently.

Without taking her eyes from the pair, she moved to the door and let the coachman help her down. "Come in and my butler will pay you," she said, worry rising at the cry that came from Tynan at whatever news was delivered. She was not quite equal to a run, but moved as quickly as she could. "What is it?"

He turned, and an expression of utter defeat was on his face. "The glassworks were burned to the ground. A dozen men were within." He bowed his head. "I must go."

"Oh, Tynan," she whispered, and put her hand on his arm. "I am so sorry. Of course you must. I'll come with you."

"No." That cord on his jaw showed once again, but he put his hand over hers gently enough, and his eyes had lost their bitterness. "I want you to go to bed. Now." He swallowed. "And you must stay with your brother, else all this will be for nothing."

Julian. She closed her eyes, torn exactly down the middle. But she nodded. "It will only be another few days, then I will come."

"I'll write to you as soon as I arrive, giving instruction."

Dread filled her, but mindful of the scene they were causing by standing out in the open this way, she only squeezed his arm and ducked her head. "Do not leave without bidding me farewell," she said, suddenly urgent.

He nodded.

"Your word, Tynan."

"You have my word." He nodded to Fiona, waiting to bustle her within, into a steaming tub of water.

Inside, the girl clucked over her bruises and the wound, and rubbed healing salve onto all of them. Then, wrapped in a flannel gown that seemed insufficient to warm her, Adriana crawled into her bed, ordered the fire stoked and chocolate brought to her. But before she could even properly adjust the pillows into the nest she so enjoyed, she was flat out, dead asleep.

Tynan, too, needed a bath and a rest and a hot meal. He settled for a shave and a wash while Seamus readied his bags. He'd left Thomas Flynn, a manager at the glassworks, in the dining room with a plate of eggs and rashers and a pile of snowy white bread from the ovens of the cook, one Mrs. Josephine Moody, whose talents in the kitchen could go a long way to healing almost any ill a man could face.

But before he joined Thomas, Tynan sat at his writing desk and took out a quill and pot of ink. He sent Seamus down to eat his fill, too, before they left.

In the silence left behind, he wrote:
Adriana
—
I could not bear to wake you
. He paused, his chest hollow, and tried to think what else to say. That he was angry, but with himself? That her actions had shown him the falseness of his own?

That he could not ask a woman he loved with such depth to take on a life that would be so much more difficult than the one she'd won for herself here?

Some part of him knew it was only despair putting such dark thoughts in his mind. That warning of doom had not been over Adriana at all. He had known it when the duel ended and his nerves only screamed the louder that the doom still lay ahead, and here it was. The glassworks burned, the Catholics within turned to corpses. All of his own work, all the hopes of the men he'd employed, dozens of them, gone in the flames of hatred.

In that moment when Thomas had given him the news, Tynan realized how vain his journey here had been. Vain in every sense of the word, vain because it had been pride that led him on a fool's errand, vain because it was his arrogance that made him believe he could overturn hundreds of years of ill-feeling simply because he decided it was time.

He belonged to Ireland, and there he would go. There he would spend his fortune. He'd put his hands and heart to work there, spend his fortune doing what he could, spend his political intelligence helping to build a true freedom from the straw Irish parliament.

The times and his obligations required that he maintain his lie, and it grieved him a little. But too many others would be hurt if he declared himself Catholic—he would lose his own lands, and all the lands he held in his name for the Catholics in his county. For Aiden's memory, he wished he could declare himself boldly, but he'd been given a task, and serve it he would. God knew his heart.

Grieved and lost, he picked up the quill and wrote quickly. Then he sealed it with his ring and carried it to Fiona. "Do not wake her," he said. "Give it to her later."

Fiona took the note with a troubled expression. "Begging your pardon, milord, but she'll be most sorely grieved if you do not tell her yourself. It was the last thing she said before she slept."

He closed his eyes. "I cannot wake her and still do my duty," he said with more frankness than was proper. As if to shake it away, he pressed a false smile on his face. "You made her a beautiful Caer."

She fingered the note. "Thank you." She bobbed mechanically.

"Where is your home, girl? May I take your people some news of you?"

Her eyes flew open. "Oh, yes, milord!" She paused. "If you wouldn't mind, I've some stockings to send my sister. In County Meath?"

"Aye. Fetch them. I'll wait."

She scurried down the hallway and up the stairs at the end. Tynan stood outside Adriana's door with his hands linked behind his back, staring at the handle as if it would turn itself. Like a cat, he thought, and scowled.

He opened the door and entered silently. The smell of her hung in the air, lavender and toilet water and a hint of musk that was the alluring natural essence of her skin. At her bedside he stopped. She lay on her side, her head buried in the pillows, and her breath was so deep as to be nearly invisible. A scrape marred her cheekbone, and a purple and yellow bruise radiated from it, creeping over her eyelid, joining with the blue circle of exhaustion below. The sight gave him a physical pain, and abrupt violence rose in him again.

As it must have in her. He only imagined what had transpired. She had experienced it.

He smiled. And triumphed.

Here was the unadorned, unhidden face of Lady Adriana St. Ives. A woman whose passion showed in the fullness of her red lips and that bruised eye; whose laughter would mar the smoothness of that flesh with lines. Here was the lady, in her prim nightrail with tiny ribbons at the collar, and the hoyden, in the bandage around her arm. A thousand faces, Phoebe had said of her sister. But all were one woman, and the changing light only brought out unseen facets.

He thought of his wish that she should bear him children, and it pained him most of all that he was leaving that vision here on these shores. For he would have liked the way she bore them, in her belly and in her arms, and with that bossy voice. He would have liked planting them, and watching them grow. He would have liked holding his wife's hand at weddings.

But now she had regained her courage, and by morning she would be as celebrated as she'd once been scorned. She would be free to choose a more suitable husband from dozens of proposals, and host her sisters' presentations to Court, and take up the life of a proper English lady.

He half smiled. Not proper, perhaps. But English certainly.

As if she sensed his presence, she stirred, making a soft sound of pain. Very gently, the Black Angel, whose heart had remain untouched until now, bent and pressed a kiss to the head of the woman who'd stolen it entire.

And then he left her.