A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(17)

* * *



? ? ?

I am an excellent sleeper but that night I tossed and turned as if on a bed of nails.

“Blast the man,” I muttered as I thrust my bedclothes away. I meant Stoker, of course. I had traveled to a fascinating place in the company of an intriguing aristocrat who was wildly skilled in the flirtatious arts. There were diverting undercurrents of tension and mysterious things afoot. Best of all, the prospect of my own colony of glasswings danced in my head. I ought to have been held fast in the arms of Morpheus, slumbering sweetly as I dreamt of butterflies and blue seas. Instead, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw only him.

With a few elegant curses, I wrapped my dressing gown about me and made my way up the staircase that wound, tight as a snail’s shell, to Stoker’s room. I did not bother to knock and he did not look surprised to see me. He was sitting in the embrasure, looking into the black night. I sat beside him, noticing the spangle of stars and the bright pearl gleam of the moon as it hung, full and low.

“I suppose you think I owe you an explanation,” I began ungraciously.

He did not turn to face me. “You owe me nothing,” he said, his voice a little weary. “It is the nature of whatever is between us that we make no demands upon each other.”

“Don’t,” I ordered, my hands curling into fists in my lap. “Don’t be understanding and accommodating. It is upsetting.”

He turned his head, a small smile playing about his lips. “I haven’t been, if it consoles you. I sulked for the better part of the time you were in Madeira. No, I lie. I raged for the first few months, then I moved on to sulking.”

“Is that why you did not write? To punish me?”

“I did not write because you told me not to,” he reminded me gently.

“Since when do you do as you’re told?” I demanded.

He gave me a long look. “You are angry with me. What a novel experience. I’ve been on the receiving end of your annoyance, your impatience, your frustration. But never your anger. It’s colder than I would have expected.”

“It can be colder still,” I warned him. “But I am come to make amends.”

“For what?” he asked, arching a brow in a perfect imitation of Tiberius. “For dashing off to Madeira? For running away with my brother? You seem to have made a habit of fleeing, Veronica.”

“For a woman bent upon taking to her heels, I seem not to have got very far. I am right here,” I said.

By way of reply, he canted his head and deepened the arch of the brow. It was an inquiry and it was a measure of our understanding that I knew what he was asking.

“I have no wish to discuss particulars with you,” I told him firmly. “But neither do I wish to be at odds. So let us have it clearly understood. At the end of our last adventure, I may have permitted myself to indulge in rather warmer feelings than I am comfortable owning, feelings to which I very nearly gave voice. Were it not for Tiberius’ timely arrival in the glasshouse that day, I might have said things I would now regret.”

He opened his mouth, but I held up a hand. “I am glad Tiberius came, and I am glad I never said what I might have that day. And I am glad I went to Madeira. We needed time, the both of us, and I think we still do.”

“Time?”

“Time,” I repeated firmly. “For the duration of our acquaintance, I have understood that Caroline de Morgan was some sort of evil influence upon your life, a malign presence that very nearly destroyed you. It is a credit to the resilience of your character that you survived her the first time, and it is a further credit to you that you survived a second. But I think neither encounter came without scars.” I flicked a glance to the long, silver line that marked his face. It might have been dealt at the claws of a jaguar, but Caroline de Morgan was every bit as responsible for the damage as the jungle creature that had flayed him.

His expression was inscrutable, and I went on, calmly. “We have, both of us, acknowledged that our bond is unlike any we have shared with another on this earth. This friendship, this strange alchemy that knits us together, it is too fine a thing to let it be tarnished with whatever corrosion she has left behind. I think there can be nothing more between us until and unless all ghosts from the past have been exorcised.”

He looked as if he wanted to protest, but instead he turned his face to the moon, watching the silver-white light play upon the black waves. “What do you propose?”

“Nothing,” I told him simply. “I propose we do nothing at all. We simply carry on as we have in the past, friends and colleagues, nothing more. Not until you have fully recovered from the damage she has inflicted.”

His hands tightened on the sill of the window. “I have recovered,” he told me flatly. “Caroline is nothing to me.”

“Your knuckles have gone white at the mention of her name,” I pointed out.

With visible effort, he loosened his grip, turning to me, his voice low and dangerous. “Veronica, it is entirely natural that I should harbor some ill will towards a woman who has done everything in her power to destroy me. She married me under false pretenses. She committed adultery with my best friend and abandoned me to die in a foreign country. She dragged my name through the mud and the muck not out of necessity but with real delight. She is everything that is vile and tainted in the world, and if you don’t think I deserve to want to take her apart bone by bone with my bare hands—”