The Virgin Who Ruined Lord Gray - Anna Bradley Page 0,17

throat, and Jeremy, an innocent man—no, a boy, really—taken up for the crime, and facing a ghastly death at the end of a noose.

Do you suppose you can outrun me?

Sophia tugged the coverlet tighter around her shoulders, but she couldn’t suppress a shudder at the memory of those huge hands gripping the wrought iron spikes, the pale scars on his knuckles, the icy challenge in his gray eyes.

I’d be disappointed indeed if you didn’t lead me on a chase.

She rolled over onto her side and squeezed her eyes closed, but sleep eluded her until at last she threw the coverlet back and crept to the window.

The rain had returned. The street below was damp, but aside from the muted patter of the drops on the pavement, all was silent and still. Sophia stood there for a long time, staring into the darkness before drawing the drapes across the window with a determined tug. She returned to her bed, and this time when she closed her eyes, they remained closed.

She was no swooning virgin, and she wasn’t afraid of ghosts.

Chapter Four

That night, Tristan dreamed of graveyards.

It began quietly, as dreams often do—quietly enough the dreamer is deceived into thinking he’s found a warm, safe cocoon, just before he’s hurled into a nightmare.

In the dream, he was alone in a graveyard, wandering among the headstones under the watchful gaze of a pair of sightless stone angels. Their wings were spread wide, the feathery tips joined over the arched doorway to a white marble crypt gleaming dully in the moonlight.

He’d come to the graveyard to fetch someone, to save her from some terrible but unknown fate, but each time he drew close enough to catch a strand of her long dark hair, she melted into the fog hanging low over the headstones. He might have wandered from one headstone to the next for an eternity, chasing that cool, transparent mist if he hadn’t stumbled and fallen to his knees.

He’d tripped over something—

Someone.

Henry Gerrard, his eyes open, blank, staring at nothing, warm blood still oozing from the gash in his throat. In the next breath Tristan was running toward the church, his hands dripping with Henry’s blood, a plea for forgiveness on his lips, but when he staggered into the confessional his voice was gone, and he was left alone with his sins and no hope of a blessing—

He woke with a jerk, his heart pounding and his nightshirt clinging to his damp skin. He sat up and dragged a hand through his hair, also drenched with sweat.

It wasn’t his first nightmare, nor would it be his last.

At first, there’d been no pattern to them, no logic or reason. When Tristan crawled into his bed and closed his eyes, he never knew which of his demons would choose to haunt him, but over the past few weeks the nightmares all ended the same way.

When he opened his mouth to beg for forgiveness, he’d be struck dumb.

Sometimes he was begging Henry’s wife, Abigail, to forgive him, but more often it was Henry himself. Sometimes Henry would be just as Tristan remembered him, with his trusting brown eyes and laughing mouth, but in Tristan’s worst nightmares he’d be as he was tonight, soaked in blood, with vacant, staring eyes and a jagged slash across his throat.

Then Tristan would wake, shaking and panting, and trade his sleeping nightmare for his waking one—one where Henry was still dead, murdered in St. Clement Dane’s churchyard, and Tristan was still the man who’d failed to save his best friend.

Before tonight, he’d never dreamed of priests and confessionals, or dark-haired ghosts and white marble crypts, but he could hardly fail to trace those particular demons back to their source.

I’m anxious to confess my sins. I’m quite wicked, you see.

Tristan did see. He saw a great deal more than she could ever imagine.

He didn’t know how or when he’d realized she was running to No. 26 Maddox Street tonight. They’d still been a dozen streets away from the Clifford School when he’d changed course to get ahead of her. At that point, she could have been going anywhere.

But she hadn’t been. And somehow, he’d known it.

Perhaps it was nothing more than the way she ran from him. He knew the city as well as he knew the pattern of scars on the backs of his hands, yet he’d lost sight of her more than once.

Tristan didn’t lose people. Ever.

She was too clever not to have realized she couldn’t outrun him, so what