Page 11 of Secrets of the Highwayman (Immortal Warriors #2)

H er mind was still off with Nathaniel, lying cold and dead on the road, Pengorren standing over him with the smoking gun. Fumbling the cell phone out of her pocket, Melanie took the call without checking the number—it was probably the office in London. She should have contacted them hours ago.

“Mr. Foyle, I’m so sorry, I—”

“Mr. who?” Suzie’s chirpy voice brought her wide-awake. “It’s me. Suzie. Your sister,” she added, when Melanie still didn’t reply. “Just wondering how you are down there in the depths of Cornwall.”

Nathaniel was staring at the phone in her hand as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Melanie turned away, hunching her shoulder and not allowing him distract to her.

“I’m fine, Suzie. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Aren’t I allowed to ask?” Suzie sounded oddly defensive for a woman who had once declared she never felt the urge to apologize for her actions. “I just wondered, that’s all. Had a feeling, if you must know.”

One of Suzie’s feelings. They always made Melanie feel uneasy, just as anything paranormal did. Though, scarily, they were often spot on.

“What sort of feeling?” she forced herself to ask. At least it gave her time to pull herself together. She stood up, stretched, and walked toward Miss Pengorren’s desk. Something pinged in her memory. Running her finger along the leather-bound spines, she found the diary she’d been reading earlier that morning and slid it out.

“Just a feeling. You’re not in some sort of trouble, are you? I was shivering when I woke up. Cold, damp, dark. Been in any places like that recently?”

She had, but she wasn’t going to tell her sister about it. “No. I’m fine, Suzie. There’s plenty to do down here. I’ve barely started yet. How are you?”

“Fine. Kids are with their father, so I’m all alone at the moment.” There was another pause, and Melanie realized to her horror that she was meant to fill that pause with an invitation. Come on down here, Suzie, and stay with me.

“You know I’m working,” she said sharply. “This isn’t my house.”

“All right. You don’t have to sound quite so gleeful about it. It was just a thought.”

Now Melanie felt guilty, but not enough to change her mind. “Look, maybe we can meet up when I get home? Have lunch?”

“Oooh, lunch, lovely.” Suzie sighed and brushed off her sarcasm. “Whatever. Just look after yourself, all right? See ya.”

The call ended, and Melanie looked at her phone. It was unusual for Suzie to call her like this, and she felt unsettled. There were just too many strange things happening today . . .

Nathaniel was staring out of the window again, so she made her check-in call to the firm. Mr. Foyle was out of the office, but she left a message to say everything was fine, then ended the call and slipped her phone back into her pocket. She brought the diary over to the window and held it out. Nathaniel glanced down at it and then back at her, doing that single eyebrow lifting thing again.

“This is the final diary of Miss Pengorren, the last owner of Ravenswood, the last of the Pengorren family. She died without heirs in a nursing home in London—that’s why I’m here, to sell the place.”

If that information hurt him, he didn’t let it show.

Melanie wiggled the book in front of him. “Read the last entry.”

He took the book and opened it, flicking to the back.

A monstrous injustice. I wish I could restore Ravenswood to its rightful owner.

After a moment he looked up at her, an expression in his eyes that might have been hope.

“What does she mean, ‘a monstrous injustice’?”

Melanie shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. She was going a bit gaga, judging by some of the other things I read in there.” Then, at his blank stare, “Senile, losing her mind.”

She held out her hand for the diary, but he didn’t give it back. Instead, he smiled, managing to appear devastatingly attractive despite having been dead since 1814. He’d said that Pengorren was good at manipulating people, but Nathaniel was pretty damn good at it himself.

“Do you mind if I hold on to this? I would like to read the rest of it.”

“If you like. There are more of her diaries over there, on the shelf above the desk.”

He didn’t glance in the direction she pointed; his gaze was fixed on her. He was measuring her, deciding what to tell her, how much more she could take.

“I need to find out what happened here after I died. I need to know if I was the only one who saw something unwholesome in Pengorren. I need to know if it was my failure to act decisively,” he added bleakly, “that led to the destruction of my family and my own death, or whether it would have happened anyway.”

“How will that—”

“I tried to send Sophie away, after I saw her and Pengorren together, but it was too late. She refused to go. She wouldn’t listen to me. She looked at me as if she hated me for even suggesting it.”

“Nathaniel—”

“I was never the perfect son or brother, Melanie, but now it’s time to rise to the occasion. I’m twenty-seven years old and I have to grow up and be a man.”

Melanie would have said he was already a man, but her heart was thudding, she felt light-headed, and her hands were sweaty. He had that effect on her. Not that she liked what he made her feel, the way she seemed to spiral out of control when she was around him. She had her own life, and now it was being hijacked by a man who wasn’t even alive, someone who had literally attached himself to her and followed her home. It seemed incredible. Beyond belief. One moment she was here doing her job, and the next . . . Her job.

“I’m in line for a partnership with my firm,” she heard herself say. “I’m twenty-nine, and it’s something I’ve been working steadily toward ever since I joined the firm. You might not think it’s much compared to what you’ve been through; but it’s my goal, my future, and it’s important to me.”

“I’m not asking you to give up your future, Melanie.”

“No? I thought that was exactly what you were doing. You want me to dash off with you instead of acting responsibly. I’m here to do a job. Call me shallow, but I dream about an office with my name on the door, clients who respect and trust me, a smart apartment on Canary Wharf with the Thames flowing past my front door.”

Nathaniel’s stomach rumbled, loudly. She glared at him, and he shrugged, the corner of his mouth quirking up, and his eyes gleaming with wicked amusement.

“My apologies,” he said, “but even dead highwaymen get hungry.”

“You’re hungry?” She couldn’t help but be surprised.

“Yes.”

“But . . . do you eat?”

“Do you?”

“It’s not the same, I’m not a-a . . .” Melanie eyed him suspiciously. “What are you, anyway?”

“I’m a man. I’m not sure for how long, but for now I am a mortal with a mortal’s needs and wants and desires.”

There was something almost suggestive in the way he said it, dropping his tone like that. Melanie ignored the innuendo, concentrating on him as a man who needed feeding.

“Come on then,” she said, and led him down the stairs and into the kitchen.

N athaniel followed her , enjoying the sway of her hips in the strange trousers she wore. He’d thought for a moment there that he’d lost her, that maybe he’d laid it on too thick. I have to grow up and be a man. Nathaniel grimaced. A bit emotive for him. Not that he didn’t mean what he’d said, but he usually preferred to keep those sorts of inner feelings private.

What was it about Melanie that made him blurt it out? Open himself up to a woman who was very much a stranger? The need to gain her help so that he could save his family and himself might have something to do with it, he thought wryly. Simply put, he was desperate.

But in his heart he knew he was undervaluing himself. And her. This wasn’t just about desperation; there was more going on between the two of them than either of them would admit.

After his awakening by the queen, she had led him to the door that crossed from the between-worlds to the mortal world. But he had been little more than a shadow. A ghost. He’d tried to make himself known to people, appearing before them, but he’d only ended up scaring them. They didn’t understand, and what they didn’t understand frightened the wits out of them.

That was when the queen had told him what he must do. He must wait until Melanie Jones came to him in the past, and then ask her to help, and she must agree. Most importantly, he must gain her trust.

Except that Nathaniel couldn’t wait that long—the old recklessness coming out in him again. So he’d come to her in his ghostly form and raced her along the lane. He grinned now, remembering it. He hadn’t felt so good for a long time, and whatever she might believe to the contrary, he knew Melanie had enjoyed it, too.

Now, thanks to Melanie, he was once again a living, breathing, warm-blooded man. And at the moment Melanie’s curves were warming his blood more than usual.

“I don’t suppose you spent much time in the kitchen when you were here the last time,” Melanie said, with a glance over her shoulder.

Was she trying to annoy him, make him bite? Nathaniel knew his easygoing manner irritated her, but she was like a permanently overwound watch.

“You’d have servants to see to mundane things like cooking and cleaning,” she went on, casting him another little glance to see how he was reacting.

“Of course,” Nathaniel said in a bored voice, “doesn’t everyone?”

Would she be like that in bed? Overcautious, precise, warily watching every move he made? Or would she lose all her inhibitions completely? He’d seen a glimpse of what she could be when she raced his ghost. Nathaniel let himself fantasize. Melanie Jones, skin flushed, slanting eyes shining, her mouth swollen from his kisses. She’d probably never allowed herself to unwind long enough to really enjoy a man.

Nathaniel knew he’d like to be that man.

They reached the kitchen, and he stopped, looking about him at the big echoing room with its myriad shelves, long, solid table, and enormous wood-burning stove. Things hadn’t changed since he was a boy, well, not much. There were a few modern additions, but not many. If he closed his eyes he could see the servants hurrying about preparing food, or giggling over some silly joke. Dorrie and Tamlyn and the rest, and Mrs. Vercoe, the cook, like Wellington, ordering her troops into battle.

“Well?”

He blinked, focused. Melanie was standing by the table holding a jar in each hand.

She seemed to understand his dislocation. “I said do you want peanut butter or marmite?”

“Peanut butter? Marmite?”

“Marmite’s a popular English spread, dark and yeasty. Salty. You either like it or you don’t. Peanut butter is peanuts and . . . butter. It’s your choice. Eddie doesn’t run to haute cuisine, so we’re left with just the two basic food groups.”

“Eddie?”

“The caretaker. Remember? You saw me talking to him in the garden. He lives in a cottage in the grounds.” She set down the jars and began to open the lids. “I’ll have to think up some story for him if you’re going to be around here for a while. Or maybe you could hide whenever you see him? No, that wouldn’t work. He’d probably think you were a burglar. Or a ghost.” She smiled wryly.

“I can claim to be a distant relative of the Raven family.”

“Wrong side of the blanket.” She said it like it was a private joke. Melanie finished spreading the contents from the jars onto buttered slices of bread and held one out to him. When he took it, cautiously, she licked her fingers.

The sight of her delicate pink tongue made him hot. Like the burst of heated air after a cannon was fired, it took him by surprise, momentarily stopping all thought. He felt disoriented, confused, adrift.

“What?” Melanie said. She frowned and tucked her hands into the pockets of her trousers, suddenly self-conscious.

He realized then that he was staring at her as if she were one of those strange sea creatures that were washed up after a storm on the little half-moon beach below Ravenswood. He used to examine them when he was a boy, spending hours dreaming about where they’d come from and what wonders they had seen before they came to his isolated Cornish shore.

Melanie was a bit like that. She was strange and exotic, and he wanted to examine her, find out what made her the woman she was.

Nathaniel bit into the bread. The dark marmite spread was very salty, catching him by surprise, and he pulled a face.

She laughed at his expression. “Marmite not to your liking then? Here, try the peanut butter.” She handed him another slice, and he sampled this one more cautiously. Still salty, only this time crunchy as well.

He swallowed with difficulty. “Mrs. Vercoe, our cook, always had food put away in the pantry. Saffron cake or some pasties, even star-gazy pie, if she felt so inclined.” He gave her a hopeful look, but he could see she was unmoved.

“I’m sorry, but cook doesn’t live here anymore. You could ask Eddie, if you don’t frighten the wits out of him first. And that reminds me—he’s seen your portrait, so he’ll notice the resemblance.”

She folded over one of the slices of bread and began to work her way through it.

“Who’s Suzie?” he asked, laying his own slice down.

Her eyes assessed him. “My sister,” she said, when her mouth was empty. “My older sister. She lives in a flat in Shepherd’s Bush—the better part. Divorced, two kids.”

“Divorced? You say it as if it means nothing. In 1814 the only way for a couple to be granted a divorce was by Parliament.”

She thought about that, starting on another slice of bread. “Bummer.”

He choked. “Are you divorced?”

“Uh-uh. Never married. I’m a career girl.” Then, seeing his blank look, “I live for my job.”

She knew the concept, where a woman was concerned, was alien to him. The women of his day were supported by their families until they married, and then they were supported by their husbands. What a terrifying thought, women doing as they pleased!

“Have you any family? Other than Suzie?”

“My parents, but I don’t see them all that often. They divorced when I was young, after we lost everything. My father played the stock market,” she added, and there was tension in her shoulders, in the line of her mouth. “We went from being relatively well-off middle class to poverty-stricken and on-the-streets . . . or near enough. Everything I am now, everything I have, I’ve worked bloody hard for.”

Melanie sounded proud of her achievements, and why shouldn’t she be? It was true, all her hard work had paid off, or it would soon, when she became a partner. She might be driven, she might even be a control freak, but Melanie would never allow herself to be placed in such a vulnerable situation again.

“No man at the moment then?”

“Man?”

“Lover.”

The question threw her. She stared at him, trying to think of a flip answer when she was tempted to tell him to mind his own business. Maybe she just wouldn’t answer. But he wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

“I’ll keep your secret, I promise. Word of a Raven.”

She laughed.

Nathaniel folded his arms and leaned back against the counter, watching her. There was the hint of a smile on his mouth, and a lock of hair had fallen over his brow. He’d crossed his legs at the ankles, and his tight-fitting trousers showed up every muscle in his long legs. Her gaze slid up, over the waistcoat and the blue jacket, clinging to his chest and shoulders. The neckcloth was looking grubbier than it had, and not quite as neatly fastened, and there was golden stubble on his jaw, but that only made him look more sexy.

She met his eyes. They were gleaming through the fringe of his lashes. He was returning her perusal with interest and a double dose of smoldering sexual desire.

“I told you, there’s no one. I’m not interested in men at the moment. I’m a career girl.”

Abruptly Melanie looked away and took a quick bite of her peanut butter sandwich. She tried very hard to swallow. Nathaniel Raven wasn’t a man you could easily ignore, but for her own sake she had to try. She was almost certain that if she gave him the slightest reason to do so, he’d reach out now and pull her into a hot and heavy embrace. He’d probably have her up on the counter in no time. I am a connoisseur of women’s undergarments. Yeah, right.

Her fingers twitched as if she could feel him already, and she curled them into tight fists. No, she thought. No, no, no! But deny it all she might, the sparks were still flying between them. Making her feel wildly, vibrantly, wonderfully . . .

. . . alive!