The Road to Ruin Page 15

  “Did he tell you stories about his pirating ways before you were born? Where he was born, whether he has family?”

  “More leverage against him?”

  “Not at all. You keep trying to convince me he is a good man at heart. I merely wanted to understand what drives him.”

  He made a good point. “He is a good man at heart but I won’t try to convince you. When you have your belongings back safe and sound, you will see he has morals and knows what is right.”

  “And robbing ships and killing men is right?”

  “It depends what end of poverty and desperation you come from, my lord. What you would do if everything you held dear was at peril.”

  As soon as she’d said the words, she longed to take them back. She didn’t want to know what lengths he would go to to have his mother and sister back. She didn’t want him to think too much on it either.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When James heard a strange sound during the night, he opened his eyes, his senses on full alert in the darkness. A sliver of light fell across his boots from the end of the bed but didn’t provide enough illumination to see what or who made the sound. In the back of his mind he knew something wasn’t right.

  In the distance a loud pop was followed by a whistling sound and then a bang that shook the walls around him. He was on his feet and at the window in less than a heartbeat. The acrid stench of smoke filled the air as yet another booming explosion shook the floor. James ducked, thinking the next cannon ball would be aimed at his head.

  He tried to peer out of the window but the smoke was too thick, the night too dark. At his back, a muffled thump was followed by a curse and he couldn’t believe his stupidity. He had let his defences down and someone had found them.

  His hand went to where his dagger was always strapped against his leg but he found only the fabric of his trousers.

  “Who’s there?” he called.

  “Did you think we would never find you, Monsieur Boucher?”

  The woman’s Parisian lilt sounded at once both familiar yet not. “Who are you?”

  “You do not remember killing me, monsieur?”

  His eyes stung and his mind reeled. Was this his day of reckoning? “I won’t apologize, milady, we were at war.”

  “Does that give you the excuse to kill women and children?”

  Memory once again stirred as she stepped into the puddle of moonlight. Long dark hair billowed down her back and around her face. “Marie?”

  “Ah, so La Boucher does remember one of his victims? What about the others? Do you remember all of their names?”

  “I did not know all of their names.” His chest hurt and his throat filled with lead at that admission. A single tear rolled down his cheek when he closed his eyes. He blamed the smoke. It was thicker now.

  Marie withdrew her hand from behind her back to reveal a long sword, its sharp-edged blade glinting as she advanced.

  He did not retreat. Not this time. “You are a ghost: you cannot hurt me.”

  She laughed, the sound still in the air as her form disappeared before his eyes as though it came from the very smoke around him. When next he heard her voice, it was from the direction of the bed. “It isn’t you I was thinking of hurting tonight.”

  He followed her. “You must stay out of my dreams, Marie.”

  “You wanted me in your bed, James. Do you no longer want me?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them, Marie lay there on the covers, nude but for the blood covering her chest up to her neck, the gash deep, wide, fatal.

  “Get out of my head!”

  “Do you recall the night you took my life, James?”

  “I remember the night you tried to kill me, yes.”

  She pulled the blanket up to her chin and stared at him, her big brown eyes now wide and scared. Exactly how she had looked minus the shock as he’d driven his blade deep into her chest.

  “Do you remember Henri?” Her face changed to that of a small child’s. “Or Jean?” The face changed again and again. It was an accounting of his victims. One he’d dreamed too many times before.

  “What about the Englishmen who died, Marie? Do you know the names of the boys killed in Bonaparte’s name?”

  “We are not talking about the casualties of war, mon cher. You were an assassin, not a soldier.”

  When he just about couldn’t stand it anymore, he closed his eyes tight again.

  “Is that how you survived, James? Did you close your eyes as you murdered them in their beds? Did you turn your back as their houses turned to ash? Did you tell yourself it was all right to kill me because I was your enemy? I think you felt nothing as my life drained away.”

  “You made yourself my enemy when you tried to kill me. A French woman in the middle of an Egyptian war zone cannot be trusted. I was a fool.”

  Marie shook her head. “I truly underestimated you, didn’t I? I didn’t think you had it in you to murder a woman.”

  “Self-defence is not murder. You were a spy. You were sent to discover my secrets and then kill me. Did you see yourself as a whore for sleeping with me for my intelligence? Did you think I didn’t know you were more than you seemed?”

  She shook her head again, her face coming back into focus, her dark hair spread across the pillow, her nudity and blood now covered in the virginal white of a cotton nightgown. “I wanted to sleep with you, James. You were the notorious Boucher and I wanted your head on a pike in the town square. I wanted to tell the men of the army that a woman had bested the best.”

  “But I didn’t fall for anything and you were killed. What did the men of your army think about you then?”

  This time it was her eyes that squeezed shut against the truth but when she opened them, it wasn’t Marie who lay in the bed, it was another woman. Another woman with a lithe and supple body, her flame-red hair almost alive, her wide green eyes betraying a malicious tint. Another woman set on discovering his secrets and then turning them against him.

  “What about me, James?” she purred. “Will you kill me if the time comes and then call it self-defence?”

  “Leave Daniella out of it.”

  She smiled then. The blanket dropped as she sat up, revealing the ripped and ruined gown from earlier, her full breasts on display, the dusky nipples peaked and begging. “I want you, James.”

  He stepped towards her to pull the blanket up but she reached out and pulled him down into a kiss, the honeyed warmth of her mouth like heaven after the acrid stench of smoke.

  When she groaned and tightened her grip in his hair to an almost painful pull, he rolled onto his back and pushed her away.

  The laugh that followed was not Daniella’s. Another change in the shifting moonlight and Marie was back. “You do not like the redhead? You prefer your victims brunette?”

  “Daniella would never stab me in the back the way you tried to.” His voice was stark in the empty room, his breath harsh between the forced words.

  His lie troubled him. Would Daniella stab him in the back? Could she?

  The only certainty was that this dream would end the way the dream always did. With Marie lying lifeless alongside him in the bed they had shared for three weeks, blood bubbling from the edge of her red lips and pumping from the hole in her chest.

  “How do you know the pirate speaks the truth and isn’t using you? How do you know she isn’t proving herself to her father by delivering the man who crippled him?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Marie. Daniella isn’t like that.”

  “Isn’t like what?”

  He turned on the bed and faced Daniella once again. Marie could not keep doing this to him. It had gone on for far too long. “You have to leave now, Marie.”

  “Oh?” The taunting laugh came again. “What if I don’t want to leave?”

  The sharpened tip of a dagger pressed to his Adam’s apple and he swallowed despite knowing the movement would nick his skin. “You should have killed me ba
ck then, Marie.”

  “Yes, I should have.”

  He gripped her wrist hard enough to bruise.

  She cried out and dropped the dagger but then came at him again, this time with a sword.

  James knew the sword couldn’t hurt him in the confined space with no force behind it…and wielded by a ghost. He threw his body on hers, straddled her perfect hips, heard her cries of denial, of love, that he was mad. He’d heard it before. He’d believed it before. He’d nearly died for it once.

  “You need to leave me alone, Marie,” he shouted, his hands around her neck, her face turning red against the crisp white pillow as she struggled to breathe. Her face changed again then, from Henri, to the unnamed soldiers and civilians, then back to Daniella. He shook her, and her nails raked his arms, his cheeks, his hands where they squeezed.

  “You’re dead, you need to stay dead!” he roared.

  And then she did something she had never done in the dream. She clasped her hands together above her head and brought them down hard to connect with his nose.

  Blinding pain, threatening blackness and the sudden buck of her hips saw him on the floor beside the bed. As he lay there on the hard timbers and looked up at Marie wearing Daniella’s face, in her hand the small dagger, he wondered if this dream would end differently. He wondered if the woman he had killed had finally found a way to take his life in return.

  *

  “What the hell?” Daniella didn’t know whether to slice him to ribbons with the dagger or hit him again. Her hands throbbed and she rubbed them against her thighs.

  When James had begun to talk in his sleep, she’d listened. He argued with someone called Marie. It hadn’t taken long for him to start thrashing in the bed so she had got out of it and stood staring at him. When finally he calmed, she hopped back beneath the blankets to try to get some sleep. Then he’d rolled over on top of her and tried to strangle her.

  Had he still been sleeping when he attempted to wring the life from her? She rather doubted he just woke up and decided he didn’t need her after all. She rubbed the front of her neck, her throat feeling as though she had swallowed rusted steel.

  “I’ll kill you for that, Marie.” He held two fingers to the bridge of his nose as blood dripped over his lips and onto his shirt.

  Daniella’s grip around the handle of the dagger tightened. She inched backwards to the door but he came at her again.

  “James, it’s me, Daniella. Wake up!”

  One hand slammed into the timber next to her ear, the other wrapped around her throat again. “That’s what you want me to believe, but you’re a vindictive bitch, Marie. You need to move on.”

  Daniella shoved with all the force she could muster but he was immovable. If she had been slightly worried when he’d had her in his arms earlier, intent on seduction, she was terrified now. His eyes were glazed and he seemed to look right through her.

  She hated to do it but had no other choice. She threw her balance to one side and brought her knee up high and hard and fast.

  With a cry of pain, James let go of her and fell to the floor. Daniella jumped over him and crouched beneath the window ledge. If he came at her again, she would push him through it. If it came down to her life or his, she chose hers.

  He moaned and writhed but didn’t get up again. He was firmly wedged in front of the door and unless she wanted to scale the night-dampened wall in her nightgown then she was trapped in the room with him.

  As she looked around for something heavy enough to knock him out with if she had to, he groaned again and rolled to face her, his cheek against the flooring timbers, his hands on the part of him she had hurt the most. Not his nose.

  “What the devil did you do to me?”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What did I do? I was defending myself against you!”

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head in disbelief. He really had been sleeping? She’d heard of men who had committed violence while asleep but had never really believed the tales.

  “First you called me Marie and then you tried to kill me!” Her throat and neck hurt so much it was a wonder she could breathe at all.

  “Daniella…I… God, I’m sorry. Are you hurt?”

  “Of course I’m hurt, you ass! You almost strangled me in my bloody sleep.”

  He rose gingerly, unable to take more than a step before bending and swearing softly. As he approached her again, she held the dagger at the ready. If she shoved it in the side of his neck, he would die. She’d done it before and it required more aim than strength or finesse.

  “I’m not going to harm you, Daniella.”

  “Excuse me if I don’t believe you,” she retorted, lifting the dagger higher and acquiring a better grip on the weapon.

  He changed direction and went to sit on the end of the bed, his head in his hands as he stared at the floor. She relaxed, but only slightly.

  “This has happened to me before.”

  She had to really listen hard to hear what he said—and swallow her horror when she understood.

  “The first time was when I was recovering from a bullet wound in my leg. I met your father not long after that.”

  “What happened?” she asked, not sure whether to believe she was out of danger or not.

  “I was in a tent with the other sick and wounded and the doctor gave me laudanum to dull the pain after they dug the ball out. I told them I didn’t need the drug but apparently a man doesn’t get a choice when faced with an English surgeon bent on saving his life.”

  He sighed. “I remember sleeping so heavily, I knew I had to be dreaming when Marie showed up that first time to haunt me. She was dead. I saw her die. But when I came to, I found I was strapped to the cot. All around me was carnage. They told me I had risen from my bed and started to chase an imagined foe around the tent. They told me I had stabbed one man and injured five more. I was called home before the army could figure out just what to do with me, their broken assassin.”

  “Why weren’t you imprisoned?”

  “It was confirmed by the doctor that having sufficient laudanum in my body to keep three men down was reason enough not to completely hold me accountable for my actions. I did spend my last two weeks as a military man in a prison cell.”

  “You said that was the first time?”

  He nodded.

  “How many times have you done it since?”

  When he met her eyes, Daniella recognized desolation in them. “A few. I sleep with the door barricaded from the outside some nights, and others I simply don’t sleep at all.”

  “But you have slept these past two nights just fine. Is there something that triggers it?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t sleep. I haven’t slept in nearly a week. Sometimes it happens when I am under a great deal of pressure or am anxious. I did come up with a handy trick to ensure I do not fall too deeply asleep and that is what I have used these nights past.”

  “What is it?”

  “Usually I sleep on rocks.”

  “Rocks? I don’t understand.”

  “My bedroll has little sharp rocks sewn into special pockets so that I never get a good night’s sleep.”

  She digested that. “This worked for you in the war?”

  He shook his head. “I was still in the prison cell awaiting a decision when the letters came to bring me home. I don’t think they would have let me go back into the field as the Butcher after that. Also, I had attacked my fellow soldiers for no reason at all. Most men were scared of me; others wanted to lock me up forever. Hobson was the only loyal man who vowed to fight on with me. My career was over no matter what happened after that day.”

  “And you were called home before any court-martial?”

  “Yes. There was a letter. I’m sure my elevation helped my superiors put my crimes out of their minds.” She could almost taste his sarcasm. “Dear Major James Frank Trelissick,” he continued as though he read straight from the missive. “You are being recalled to your family
under the most desperate of circumstance. It is with great sadness that I inform you of your brother’s and your father’s deaths.”

  The anguish he must have felt. All at once his military career over and his family half gone, the title in his hands but smattered with blood.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, Daniella.” There he went deciphering her thoughts again.

  “How could I not?”

  He chuckled then but it lacked any trace of humour. “Now you admire me? After I try to take your life?”

  “You said it yourself. You had no idea what you were doing.”

  “I never do. That’s the damnedest thing about it all.”

  She did know how difficult it was to lose control over a situation. “Who is Marie?”

  He sighed. “Marie was my lover and a spy and a traitor. I killed her.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Admitting it aloud didn’t help the way he thought it would have. He’d hoped to hear a whisper as Marie’s haunting ghost slipped away for good. Sadly, there was only that same cloying numbness shrouding him as always.

  But when he stared into Daniella’s large green eyes, he felt the familiar weight of guilt—and a surge of anger at himself. He felt like a dog. Her smooth skin bruised already in the perfect shape of his fingers and thumbs, any other marks hidden beneath that innocent nightgown.

  “Please let me check your injuries?”

  “I should be checking yours,” she muttered but came closer.

  He lifted a brow and remembered the exact moment he’d woken from his nightmare. The throbbing pain between his thighs was a sure reminder that things had got very much out of hand tonight.

  “I meant your nose,” she clarified with a brow lift of her own. “Can I put the dagger down or should I keep it close?”

  “You can put it down,” he assured her. Nothing could make him hurt her while he was in charge of all of his faculties. He’d told his mother not to worry about his nightmares. Told her they sounded worse than they were but what if he hurt her? Hurt Amelia? At least at home his bedroom door had a sound lock.

  Daniella threw the dagger on the bed and he watched closely for any signs of fright or shock on her face, but then she came to kneel before him in a move so submissive he wondered what type of emotion he’d instilled in her with his confessions. “And still you feel no fear?”