Angel Rogue

Chapter 22

Robin was right about the number of humorous stories he knew. By the time they were ready to retire, Maxie had laughed so much that she could scarcely remember the black anxiety she had felt when trying to look toward the future. Arm in arm, they climbed the stairs, Robin carrying a candle and Maxie holding up her red velvet skirts so she wouldn't trip and break her neck.

He accompanied her into her room and lit the bedside candle, then turned to go to the adjoining chamber. The candlelight cast strong shadows across his face, illuminating the chiseled planes. In his flowing blue velvet robe, he looked like a medieval lord who had stepped out of the past. He was the most desirable man she had ever seen, and she wanted to untie his sash and bare his beautiful body and pull him onto the bed.

Without conscious thought, she placed her open hand on the triangle of skin exposed by the loose folds of his robe. His heartbeat accelerated beneath her palm as raw sexual tension" pulsed between them.

Mouth dry, she asked, "Whose turn is it to be sensibler?"

"Mine, I think." He touched her hair, letting the shining strands spill over his wrists. Then he lifted her hand and kissed her fingers before releasing them. "Remember, I'm just next door. If you have a nightmare, call and I'll be right here."

"I know." Forcibly repressing the impulse to risk a goodnight kiss, she stepped back and began braiding her hair for bed. "Pleasant dreams."

After he closed the connecting door, she removed her robe and slid between the fresh sheets. Yet despite the comfort of the bed, sleep eluded her. The reason had nothing to do with her disturbing sense of a dark future. It was simply that the fourposter was too wide, too cold, too empty.

She rolled onto her stomach and pummeled the pillow irritably, using the excuse of making it more comfortable. Though it might be wise to avoid greater intimacy with Robin, wisdom made a poor companion for the night. The very difficulty of being without him reinforced the knowledge that she was following the right course. Damn, damn, damn.

An hour of tossing and turning brought her no closer to sleep. Scowling, she sat up and pondered. Perhaps if she opened the connecting door between the bedchambers, she would feel closer to Robin. Less alone.

She slipped off the high bed and padded over to the door, shivering a little in her light muslin shift. It was raining again, and the air had a raw chill that reminded her of a New England November. Quietly she opened the door and listened, hoping to hear the comforting sound of Robin's breathing over the steady drum of rain on the windowpanes.

She heard him, but the sound was not comforting. His breathing was choked and shallow, like that first night when they had slept on bracken pallets on a north country moor. He had claimed a nightmare then, but he had had none since.

The bed creaked as his weight shifted. Then he began to talk in a language that was not English, his flexible tenor laced with anguish. She frowned and entered his room. He was speaking a German dialect. Though she did not speak the language, she recognized the words das Blut and der Mord. Blood and murder.

With a harshness that would have woken her even through a closed door, he suddenly cried, "Nein!

Nein!" and lashed out frantically at some unseen threat.

Alarmed, she scrambled onto the wide bed and laid a hand on his shoulder to wake him from the nightmare.

He exploded under her touch, rolling over with blinding speed. Before she could even speak his name, he seized her shoulders and forced her down into the mattress. His torso was bare and damp with perspiration and his breath came in wrenching gasps as he sprawled full length on top of her, his forearm pressed across her throat so hard that she could scarcely breathe.

She was terrifyingly aware of the trained strength in his taut body. If she struggled, he might throttle her or break her neck. Trying to lie absolutely still, she drew as much air as she could through her constricted throat, then said sharply, "Robin, wake up! You're dreaming."

For a dreadful moment the pressure on her throat increased, cutting off further speech. Then her words penetrated through his nightmare. Blindly he whispered, "Maxie"

She managed to say, "Yes, Robin, it's me."

He flung violently away from her to lie on his back, his fair skin ghostpale in the darkness. "Christ, I'm sorry," he said hoarsely. "Are you all right?"

Gratefully she drew a deep breath into her lungs. "No damage done." She sat up and leaned toward the night table to light a candle, then turned back to Robin.

To her horror, she saw that he was shaking so hard that the mattress vibrated. She wrapped her arms around him in an instinctive gesture of comfort.

He responded with a desperation that threatened to bruise her ribs. She drew his head against her breasts as if he were a child. Thinking he might have fallen victim to malaria on his travels, she asked, "Are you having an attack of fever?"

"No." His voice trembled with the effort of trying to sound composed. "It was only a nightmare."

She stroked his head. "There is no such thing as 'only a nightmare.' The Iroquois understand that and say that dreams and nightmares come from the soul. What was disturbing your rest?"

After a silence so long that she began to wonder if he would answer, he replied in a voice so thin it was nearly inaudible, "The usual-violence, betrayal, killing men who might have been my friends in other times."

His bleak tone was chilling. She thought of the farmer who had discovered them in his barn. Robin had conversed knowledgeably about the war in the Peninsula without ever actually saying that he was a soldier. Yet she now realized that he hadn't denied it, either. "You really were in the army?"

"I was never a soldier," he said with bitter humor. "Nothing so clean as that."

"If you weren't a soldier, what were you?"

"I was a spy." He lay back on the pillow and wiped his face with a shaking hand. "For a dozen years, from the time I was barely twenty. I lied, I stole, sometimes acted the assassin. I was very, very good at it."

She felt the shock of surprise that comes when a fact is utterly unexpected, yet so clearly right that it cannot be doubted. "That explains a great deal. I thought you were a common, garden variety thief or swindler."

"It would have been better if I had been a common criminal. I would have caused less harm." Distorted faces began to crowd around him, images of those he knew, plus a blurred legion of unknown others who had died because of information he had passed on. His shaking worsened, and he wondered with despair if it was possible for a body to shatter into pieces.

It was the worst panic spell yet. He wished Maxie were not here to see his weakness, yet he could not stop himself from clinging to her as a lifeline in a sea of shattering emotional turbulence.

Before the images could overwhelm him, she spoke again, her low voice pulling him from the drowning pool of pain. "A thief works only for gain. I can't believe that you became a spy for simple greed."

"It's true that spying is no business for someone who wants to get rich. I took it up because I thought that defeating Napoleon was a good cause, and spying was a way to make myself useful. Yet as time passed, I became more and more aware of the blood on my hands…"

When she tilted her head, her silky hair brushed his cheek with the bittersweet tang of lavender. 'Tell me how you began. Surely you didn't study spying at Oxford."

"Cambridge, actually." He found a shadow of amusement in how aptly she had gauged him. "After my second year, there was a truce on the Continent for the first time in a decade. I decided to take a holiday in France. I soon realized that it was only a matter of time until the war resumed again.

"By chance, I learned something that would interest the Foreign Office, so I sent the information to a semidistant cousin of mine who had a position there. Lucien immediately came to Paris to talk to me. He was impressed with what I had discovered, and suggested I stay in France when the truce ended. Besides my natural deviousness, my mother was a Scot, which gave me an entree to the Scottish community that had settled in Paris after the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Since they despised Napoleon, they made excellent allies."

He had always admired his slightly older cousin; it had been gratifying to win Lucien's approval. Growing up, Robin had received damned little approval in other quarters. It had been seductively easy to convince himself that he would be doing something brave and valuable.

"At the beginning it was almost a game. I was too young and heedless to realize that… that I was selling my soul, a piece at a time." The suffocating panic began to rise again. "By the time I understood what I was doing to myself, there was nothing left of it."

"An interesting metaphor," she said softly, "but false. You may have forgotten how to find your soul, but you can't lose, sell, or give it away."

He gave a humorless smile. "Are you sure about that?"

"Quite." She took his hand in hers, and the panic retreated a little. "If you had no soul, you could not suffer the kind of guilt you feel now. In my experience, dedicated villains sleep peacefully at night."

"By that standard, I must be a saint," he said wearily.

"You said once that your friend Maggie was your partner in crime. I wondered then what you meant. She was also a spy?"

"Yes. Her father was killed by a French mob. I helped her escape. She had no reason to return to England, so we became partners. I spent much of my time traveling about the Continent, but home was wherever Maggie was. Most often, Paris."

"Comrades and lovers," Maxie murmured. "She was the linchpin. When she left you, things fell apart."

He nodded. "When We were together, I was able to keep the worst of the demons under control. I didn't start to unravel until later. How did you know?"

"Feminine intuition," Maxie said rather dryly. "I suppose that your stints as a servant were in pursuit of information."

"Exactly. People tend not to notice servants. A footman or groom can learn everything that goes on in a house."

She pulled the blanket over them. Its weight was welcome; he hadn't realized how cold he was. But the vital warmth came from Maxie. She was sweetness and sanity, her breasts soft beneath her thin shift, her gentle hands soothing.

"It has just occurred to me that many of your absurd tales might be true," she said. "Did you really share a jail cell in Constantinople with a Chinese sailor?"

He smiled faintly. "God's own truth. Li Kwan taught me some amazing fighting techniques that have saved my life several times over. Our combined talents got us out of that hellhole."

"What about Napoleon's retreat from Moscow?"

Robin made a choking sound and began shaking again, as if the chill of a Siberian wind were still in his bones.

She tightened her embrace. "It's obvious why such memories are horribly painful. But surely your work helped your country, perhaps contributed to saving lives by ending the war earlier."

"Perhaps, yet often what I did was downright trivial." His mouth twisted. "One of the triumphs of my dubious career was the not very difficult deduction that Bonaparte was planning to invade Russia because of the number of books on Russian geography he had on his library shelves."

She gave a soundless whistle. "The deduction might have been simple, but how the devil did you manage to get into the emperor's private library?"

"You don't want to know."

She smoothed his sweat damped hair back from his brow. Shadowed lines showed at the corners of his eyes. For the first time, he looked every minute of his age, and then some. "It was war," she said with compassion. "Though killing someone to gain entrance must have been dreadful, it wasn't really different from shooting a soldier on a battlefield."

"It wasn't murder that time, but seduction," be said in a voice of self loathing. "A chambermaid, plain and rather shy, but sweet. Jeanne was so grateful for the attention. I pretended to be a loyal French soldier who was recovering from wounds, and who wanted to see where his beloved emperor worked. It wasn't hard to persuade her to take me there." His fingers curled into her arm with bruising force. "I hated using women like that-taking what should be best and truest between men and women and perverting it. But I did it anyhow. God help me, I did it."

"There are men who ruin women for sport. At least you had a reason," she said quietly. "Did Jeanne ever learn that you had been using her?"

"No. I told her that my regiment was being sent to Austria, and bid her a fond adieu. She… she wept and prayed for my safety. I still see her face…" His voice broke.

Maxie grieved for plain, sweet Jeanne, and for Robin, who had betrayed his own code of honor. Yet surely there had been a positive aspect to their affair. "Jeanne may have wept for losing you, but I guarantee that it did wonders for her confidence to know that a man like you had wanted her."

When Robin started to reply, she put a finger to his lips. "Don't tell me that it was a betrayal on your part-I concede the point. But you brought her some happiness, and you let her keep her pride and dignity, which you didn't have to do."

"The fact that I was never unnecessarily cruel doesn't make my actions right," he said flatly.

Her brow furrowed as she tried to put herself in his place. "Being amoral would be a great advantage for a spy. For someone like you, who is innately decent, it was obviously ghastly. How did you manage to keep going for so many years?"

He exhaled roughly. "By walling off my worst deeds, as if they had been done by someone else. That worked for a long time. But after the war ended and there were no more crises, the walls began crumbling."

"Hence, nightmares."

"Exactly."

Gently she stroked his taut spine, thinking of when she had tried to teach him to listen to the wind. Once again, she sensed the tangled threads of his character, and this time she understood why so many strands were, spun from raw, black pain. His spirit seemed terrifyingly fragile. Though he may not have lost his soul, he was drawing ever closer to emotional breakdown. Strange to think that this darkness had always been beneath his laughter.

Empathy had left her drained. It would be easy to let matters rest here. By morning, Robin would have rebuilt the walls that saved him from madness and would be as jaunty as ever. But the fragmentation that had enabled him to survive was now in danger of destroying him.

Her mother had taught her that dreams must be renewed, and nightmares must be released. For Robin to become whole, healing light must be brought into the knotted blackness at the center of his spirit.

She shivered, feeling helpless. He needed someone stronger and wiser, but for now, she was all he had. Delving deeper into his pain would hurt them both. Yet for the sake of Robin's sanity, she must try, even if he ended by despising her.

She let her spirit float freely with the wind and rain that were cleansing the night sky. Then, after some of their strength had entered her, she opened her eyes and began to speak.