Angel In My Bed Read Free Page A

the cold and the terror that turned her blood to ice. She closed her fist over the derringer.
    Zeus mewed, jolting her from her paralysis. Kneeling, she called for the feline, relieved when he loped across the drive into her arms. An owl launched from the high branches of an oak and, wings widespread, drifted into the barn. “Shh,” she murmured into the cat’s neck, backing out of the drive into the shadows. “It’s all right.”
    But watching the owl’s flight across the yard, she held the cat against her, knowing the words of reassurance were a lie. What she’d dreaded for too long had finally come to pass.
    Someone had found her.

Chapter 3
    L eading 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 horse 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 had once served the families who lived and worked Munro land. A fire had 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 herhead 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