A silver streak of lightning arced through the diamond-paned windows and flashed several times. The impression of a tall, sprawling bed and a fireplace that would fit a rather large man in it barely registered as she locked eyes with the shadowed figure sitting motionless in the high-backed chair close to her bed.
Dorian Blackwell. He’d been watching her sleep. He’d been close enough to reach out and touch her.
The lightning passed, plunging them both back into darkness, and Farah froze for the few seconds it took for the thunder to shake the stones of the keep. Though she could see nothing, she blinked several times, trying to rein in the beats of her runaway heart.
Any moment, she expected him to leap on her like the predator he’d evoked in her memory, and she knew she didn’t have the strength to fight him, or to run.
“Please,” she whispered, hating the weakness in her voice. “Don’t—”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the darkness said. He was so close, she thought she could feel his breath on her skin.
Farah wasn’t certain she believed him. “Then why? What am I doing here?” She wished for an impression of movement, but the shadows remained still and absolute.
A few silent moments passed before the voice reached for her through the inky black. “There is something very important I need to do. You have the capacity to either help me or be in my way. Regardless, it’s better to have you where I can keep an eye on you.”
“What makes you think I would ever help you?” she asked imperiously, as outrage began to smother her panic. “Especially after you’ve taken me from my home, my life. That was a reckless move. I work for Scotland Yard, and they’ll be looking for me.” Farah hoped her threat struck home. She remembered Blackwell in the strong room. He’d been collected, seemingly fearless, but she’d seen the sweat in his hairline, the tension in his coiled muscles, the pulse throbbing at a vein in his strong neck. “You don’t like enclosed spaces, I think,” she ventured. “If they find me here, you won’t be able to avoid kidnapping charges. They’ll send you back to Newgate for certain.”
“You don’t think I can make it so that you’re never found?” His inflection remained the same—cold, uncaring—but Farah gasped as though he’d slapped her. Silently, she fought a tremor of terror. Had he meant they wouldn’t find her? Or her body? She had to remember that the Blackheart of Ben More left a mountain of devastation in his wake in the form of the dead or missing. Regretting her threats, she groped inside her murky thoughts for something to say.
“Do you love him?”
The question caught her completely by surprise. “Pardon?”
“Morley.” The name could have been blocked in ice. “Were you going to accept his proposal?”
Farah had the oddest sense that the question had astonished them both. “I fail to see how that’s any of your—”
“Answer. The. Question.”
Farah resented being ordered about. However, something about the shroud of night made her uncharacteristically frank. “No,” she confessed. “While I have a great deal of respect and fondness for Carlton, I do not love him.”
“You let him kiss you.” The dispassionate words still managed to convey accusation. “He put his hands on you. Are you in the habit of allowing men you do not love to take such liberties?”
“No! I … Morley’s the first man I’ve kissed since—” Farah blinked rapidly. How could a man such as Dorian Blackwell put her on the defensive over a measly kiss? Didn’t he have a harem of beautiful courtesans? Wasn’t he the most notorious blackguard in the realm? “I don’t have to explain my actions to you! I’m not a thief, a kidnapper, or a murderer. I’m a respectable, employed, self-possessed widow, and may allow whatever liberties I deign appropriate.” Her head still swam, and the more excited she became, the worse she felt. Whatever he’d dosed her with was making her reckless, impulsive, and emotional.
The darkness was silent and still for so long, she wondered if his specter had been a hallucination brought on by the drug in her veins.
“A widow?” Dorian Blackwell murmured as though bemused. “You may play the respectable matron with others, Mrs. Mackenzie, but you are a woman with terrible secrets. And I happen to know what they are.”
The arrogance in his tone provoked her, but Farah’s heart kicked behind her ribs at his words. That was entirely impossible. Wasn’t it? Her secrets had died ten years ago and were buried in a shallow, unmarked grave.
Along with her heart.
“What is it you think you know?” she whispered. “What is it that you want from me?”
Another streak of lightning forked through the storm, illuminating his bulky shadow, turning the ebony of his hair a blue-black and his scarred eye an unnatural silver. Farah only caught his expression for a moment, but it was an unguarded moment, and what she saw stunned her into silence.
He was leaning closer, his head dipped down, but his deep-set eyes burned at her through dark lashes. His hand hovered in the space between them, his expression a mixture of exquisite pain and longing.
The vision was gone as swiftly as it had appeared, and Farah sat in the dark, awaiting the pressure of his fingers.
He left her untouched, his shadow appearing as a wide outline against the window as he stood and moved away from her. “Yours are questions best left for the morning.”