Dangerous Games. Charlotte MedeЧитать онлайн книгу.
Bellamy was not well known to her during the course of her marriage, other than in a social sense. But he had made himself readily available to her after the tragedy with kind words and a patient benevolence that she had never encountered before. Not that she had ever been a good judge of character, Lord only knew. After Charles, self-doubt was a troublesome attendant. The last thing she needed to do at the moment was to question why Bellamy would find interest in a widow, with an unimpressive family background, who had been absurdly and unfashionably in love with her late husband.
Her mouth thinned and she adjusted her shawl. Bellamy, for whatever reasons, demonstrated only the best of intentions toward her. He was a powerful man, and if she required further evidence, she needed only to remember how neatly he’d dispatched the inspector at Covent Gardens a fortnight earlier. Insistent, disrespectful, and very public with his inquiries, the inspector had made it clear that he was a terrier with a bone, ferocious and implacable. Until he had met with the wolfhound that was Bellamy who, with a low snarl, had sent the man packing. She had not been harassed since, not a coincidence, surely. Bellamy’s influence reached to the highest corridors of government, and a single word could definitively halt an entire army on the other side of the world, not to mention an inconsequential investigation.
Marriage to him would mean she could continue her work discreetly. As with most men, he was vaguely supportive of her pursuits, and that was enough, more than enough. He spent most of his time with his vast business concerns in India, a situation that would translate into a measure of freedom for her. And security. No one would dare cast aspersions…the rumors would stop. She took a breath against the tightness around her heart. Then she—and the world—could forget the death of Charles Hampton.
The lights flickered strangely. A breeze perhaps snaking its way through one of the barred windows. The Tower was not yet outfitted with gas fixtures, the tall candles dripping wax on the cold stone floor. The outlines of her profile etched eerily against the glass case, she deliberately returned her attention to the diamond, shutting out memories, too painful and too dangerous. When she looked up again, she saw the face hovering over hers.
Haggard and masculine, stopping the breath in her lungs.
This was no ghost. A heavy arm roped around her neck and shoulders, pulling her back toward a hard chest.
“Obscene.” The low whisper was hot menace in her ear. No time for thought, she clawed instinctively and ineffectually at the solid muscles of an arm. Reflected in the glass, his eyes glittered strangely, dark as onyx. Her head felt light, and her reticule, clamped in her hand, slid to the floor.
Her body frozen, her mind skittered with hundreds of possibilities. Obscene. Her eyes returned to the Koh-I-Noor. He was referring to the diamond. “What do you want?” The barely managed words were hoarse, strangulated.
He dragged her away from the glass case and toward the small antechamber behind them. Plunged into medieval gloom, she could make out three missing bars from the lone window in the room, weak moonlight the only source of illumination. Realization dawned, inconceivable as it was indisputable. The man had scaled two hundred feet in the dark.
She didn’t know whether she’d cursed under her breath or aloud. “Let go of me—I can scarcely breathe.” As if that should matter to him.
Trapped at such an awkward angle, her stays were gnawing into her abdomen, her breath coming in halting pants. But he refused to relinquish his hold. Anger was beginning to replace the numbing fear in the pit of her stomach.
“See reason.” Words were the only weapon she had, and she knew how to use them. “There’s a guard standing outside the door and he’s expecting me to emerge at some point.” Her mind did summersaults. “And then there are the soldiers at the entrance of the Tower, and in all probability an even greater number inside.”
“I know.” The simple statement, filled with supreme unconcern, chilled her more than any knife or pistol could.
Her elbow jammed his ribcage, barely registering. There wasn’t an ounce of padding on the man, save ridged sinew and bone separated by a few layers of leather and fabric. She took a ragged breath, his scent strangely neutral, soap and skin. Her careening thoughts slid to a halt.
It was the diamond he wanted. The diamond he believed obscene.
“Take it and see how far you get.” She could not even sway her body against his, her arms pinned helplessly at her sides. Her anger burned brighter. “You must be a madman to think you could break into the Tower of London and make off with the Koh-I-Noor.” She’d just sputtered utter nonsense. He’d already penetrated the Tower, beyond the phalanx of soldiers and guards who protected the Crown Jewels with their lives.
What kind of man was this? She commanded herself to be still, to tamp down her fury, marshaling her thoughts. Once long ago, she’d attended a naturalist’s lecture, a scientist who had blithely categorized the human species as simply another animal. And at this moment, in the damp and in the dark, she knew his theory to be true. Because every particle of her being, from her cold skin to her rigid body, told her that she was a hairbreadth away from a death as meaningless as that of stalked prey on an open plain.
“You believe I want the diamond.” The hot whisper in her ear again. The heavy walls of the small antechamber were suffocating, closing in around her, the stranger holding her so closely that she thought any moment their two bodies would merge. She shut her eyes against the renewed shock, and inexplicably, the image of Charles floated into her awareness. A harbinger of death. Her Charles with his soft brown hair and benign gaze. She had been so young when they’d married and he so poetic, so artistic, and so handsome. Dry tears burned behind her eyelids. The room around her faded away, the pain of the past smothering.
“Perhaps I want something else.”
Charles vanished. Her eyes snapped open and the earth beneath her feet lifted as the band of steel around her neck and shoulder gave way. She struggled to recover her balance, legs unsteady, combs falling from her hair, one by one to the floor.
Her vision steadied, the chalky moonlight illuminating the small chamber. A few inches separated them. He stood almost a foot taller than she with broad shoulders and a hardened musculature that had only moments ago been pressed against her body. Clean shaven, sporting neither beard nor muttonchops, he pilloried her with his eyes, so dark and penetrating, Lilly took a step back.
“What is it that you want?” Panic crowded out the possibilities, one more horrendous than the next. Black breeches and shirt matched his expression. He was a fallen Lucifer, the hardened set of his jaw and the lines bracketing the sides of his wide mouth telling a story she didn’t want to hear. A savaged, ravaged face, telling her he had nothing to lose.
He was no longer touching her but it didn’t seem to matter. “What I require is you. Willing or not, is immaterial to me.”
Without looking behind her, she sensed the door to the small antechamber would be closed tightly. “Me? Why me?” She repeated the words blindly, heedless now of the fall of hair around her face. She grasped at options, one more impossible than the next. “If you believe that I will help you with your foolish plan to steal the diamond, you’re mad. And as though I even could.”
He shrugged. “You can and you will.”
She wiped a strand of hair back from her face. “Whoever you are—this high-handedness is positively risible, as though you could do, say, or threaten me with anything that would in any way assist you. I will not help you steal the Koh-INoor.”
“If I wanted to steal it, it would be already gone,” he said implacably. “Right out from under your superior nose.” He advanced toward her in the already enclosed space. “I said it’s you I’m interested in at the moment. The diamond may come later.”
“You must have the wrong individual,” she tried. “I am not the person you are looking for.”
“I believe that you’re deliberately misunderstanding me. For your own purposes. As though you may have something to hide. Am I right, Mrs. Hampton?”
She