“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?”
“No fear? I thought you were actually going to strangle the life from me. I was terrified and ready to cut your throat.”
“I should count myself fortunate that you are a pirate and not a genteel flower.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “Never in a thousand years did I imagine you would make such an admission.”
God, she was amazing. He wanted to tell her how strong he thought her for fighting him off, for not screaming for help or killing him after she’d disabled him. Never had he thought he would ever meet someone like her.
He should never have fallen asleep. He’d only meant to lie next to her until she’d dozed off herself.
“You’d better cast off your hopes of finding a biddable wife,” Daniella told him.
His pulse jumped. “What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do when you marry and still have dreams such as these?”
Hobson had asked him much the same when he brought up the notion of finding a wife. And then once more when they moved into Daniella’s brother’s stable and passed themselves off as servants. Each night when he found the courage to not sleep on a bed of rocks he asked himself whether he was doing the right thing by his family to even reside in the same house as them.
Now he would give anything and everything he had to be in the same house as Amelia and his mother again.
He had to change the direction of their conversation lest he become even more morose. “I will not sleep in the same room as my wife.”
She stopped moving, stopped laughing; he almost believed for a moment that she stopped breathing. “You need to make an heir, do you not?”
Despite the only light in the room being the full moon’s glow, and despite their earlier intimacy, the blush was visible on Daniella’s cheeks.
“This isn’t an appropriate conversation.”
“What is the appropriate conversation after midnight with the man who just tried to kill you?”
He’d never known anyone like her. He had to stop his mind from imagining her his equal. He’d already warned himself not to do that.
“A man does not share a room with his wife.”
“Ever?”
He shook his head. “Perhaps in a love match but no, a man generally visits his wife in her rooms and then returns to his own.”
“You English are a bizarre lot. How does a wife stand it?”
“She is raised to know it as the way things happen.”
“What if your wife does ask you to stay with her all night? What if she falls deeply and madly in love with you? Will you tell her about your dreams then?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is my weakness. It is my demon to battle and no one else’s.” Henri’s cherubic face flashed before his eyes and he had to close them, had to find a way to bring back the numbness and drive away the despair.
Daniella huffed. “Why do men choose to bury their heads in the sand rather than admit what they did was wrong and move on from it?”
“You don’t move on from the lives I took, Daniella. It changes you. Forever.”
“Only if you let it. Did you ever kill for the sake of killing? Did you ever stab someone in the heart or run them through with your sword for the joy of it? You aren’t the monster you seem to believe you are.”
“Not a monster. Not quite. But I followed my orders and not all of those people were dangers to the crown or the war effort.”
“How do you know?”
Little Henri had been an innocent victim of the war. James had just finished killing his parents. The Sheppartons had sold British secrets to the French for a paltry house and vineyard on the outskirts of Calais. Hundreds had died because of them. They had thought they’d got away with it too. Until James had been sent back from the front in Egypt to find them.
Their deaths were quick. Clean. Uncomplicated. Until he’d heard the sobbing of little Henri. He’d
