Angel In My Bed Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œWho are you?” she called.
    Looking to her right at the path that led away from the 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œOr should I call you Lady Munro now?” he asked, the tenor of his words seizing her completely. “But then what is adulterer when added to con artist, thief, and murderer?”
    â€œGo 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 terrifyingmoment, 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 leaped 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 anyplace 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 like the owl that would devour Zeus, 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 her 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