and Con kept up a steady stream of chatter as they went down the stairs, eliminating any necessity for Megan or Theo to speak.
She turned to the others to say a quick goodbye at the front door. Theo extended his hand to her, and it was impossible not to take it. Megan’s breath quickened as his hand engulfed hers. His palm was warm and a little rough, surprising her. She would not have expected an aristocrat to have worked enough to form calluses. Moreland must have been involved somehow in the menial tasks of his explorations. She had always pictured him riding along on some conveyance or other, with plenty of native servants to do all the work.
Theo held her hand a fraction of an instant too long, releasing it just as her eyes flew to his in question. There was a certain heat in his gaze that sent an answering flame licking through her, but there was something else, a kind of watchfulness that reawakened the uneasy feeling she had experienced when she first met him.
The smile she gave him and the boys was a trifle unsteady. Quickly she turned and walked out the door and down the street, firmly refraining from breaking into a run. She could not shake the notion that somehow, impossible though it seemed, Theo Moreland knew who she was.
4
Theo barely heard the chatter of the twins as he stood in the doorway, looking after the retreating figure of Megan Henderson. Who the devil was she?
Con and Alex took off at their usual pace back up the stairs, and Theo turned and strolled through the hallway and out onto the terrace. He took the wide, shallow steps down onto the flagstone path that led to the arbor.
He stopped at the place where he had caught his first glimpse of Miss Henderson and stood, remembering the moment.
Recognition had jolted through him when he saw her, stopping him dead in his tracks. He could not believe it, and yet the fact of it was looking straight at him. Miss Henderson, the twins’ new teacher, was the woman who had come to him in his dream years ago. The woman who at the time had seemed so real to him, but whom he had come to realize must have been a figment of his imagination, a product of his fevered, delirious dreams.
However, now he knew that his assumptions were not true. The woman was very real indeed…and about to be living in his own house.
Theo shook his head in confusion and walked over to the arbor where his mother and the tutor had been sitting. He sat down in the chair Miss Henderson had occupied. The odor of the first blooming roses mingled with the subtler, faintly lavender scent of Megan’s perfume.
He had forgotten how beautiful the woman had been—no, not beautiful, exactly, in that sort of perfect, stunning way that his sister Kyria was beautiful. No, this woman was intriguing, enticing, with a soft, curvaceous body hidden and restrained by the plain dark clothes she wore, her hair warmly cinnamon in color and curling, seeming about to escape from its pins at any moment. And her smile…
Theo let out a groan, sinking his head onto his hands. He remembered that smile perfectly—the soft, wide mouth with its plump lower lip, slightly indented in the center, quirking a little to one side in an enchanting, eminently kissable way, her mahogany-colored eyes warm and inviting.
But she wasn’t real. She was a dream! So how had she turned up here in the Broughton House garden?
It had been ten years, and he had been terribly ill at the time, Theo reminded himself. The odds were he simply did not remember exactly what the woman in his dream looked like, and when he saw Miss Henderson, she had resembled the woman enough that his mind attached the teacher’s face to the image he had seen.
Even as he came up with the logical explanation for the odd occurrence, Theo knew that it was not so. That dream was as real, as vivid to him, as it had been ten years ago. He had only to close his eyes and he could remember the slab of stone hard beneath his body, and the sweat slicking his flesh and dampening his hair. He had been burning up with fever, his mouth constantly dry and parched no matter how much they poured that drink down his throat. The air had been stifling, heavy with the smoke from the incense burners on either end of the slab on which he lay. He remembered the low, rocky ceiling that arched over him, the rough walls, damp with the moisture of the cave.
He remembered, too, the dark, silent girl who had tended to him, wiping the sweat from his face and urging the drink on him, the metal of the goblet cool against his fevered lips. Her low voice had chanted in some foreign tongue. Dennis had been there, too, most of the time, talking to him, urging him to return from the netherworld in which he floated.
But neither Dennis nor the black-haired maiden had been there when the woman had come to him. His fever had been burning more hotly than ever, and he had been assaulted by hallucinations—visions of animals and birds and strange, monstrous people had danced around him. And he had sweated and shivered, aware deep inside that life was slipping from him.
Then she had appeared at the end of the slab, a wondrously normal, heartening sight in his confused world. A plain white gown had fallen straight from her shoulders, and her hair had tumbled down around her shoulders, soft and riotously curling, a warm reddish-brown, slightly darker in the flare of the torchlight than it had looked today in the sun of the rose garden. She had been young, her cheeks pink with the blush of youth.
He had gazed at her then, having never seen her before, yet somehow viscerally knowing her, with an awareness that went much deeper than mental understanding. They were connected in a deep, intense way that he could not have explained yet he understood with every fiber of his being.
“You must not die,” she had said to him, and walked around to stand beside his head.
He had looked at her, unable to speak, too weak even to raise his head. She had smiled down at him then, a wonderful, inviting smile that brought out the hint of mischief in her sparkling brown eyes.
“I won’t let you,” she went on. “Do you understand? You cannot die yet. I am waiting for you.”
Then she had bent and softly kissed his lips. He could still recall the butterfly-soft flutter of her mouth.
Theo had spoken of his vision to no one, not even Dennis. It had been too real and at the same time too bizarre to share with anyone. He could not explain his certainty that he knew the woman even though he had never seen her before. Nor did he want to share the intense flash of hunger that had darted through him at the sight of her.
It was the same stirring of desire that had arisen in him today when he first saw Megan Henderson. There was something about her, something that went beyond all notions of beauty or desirability, to an attraction so deep and elemental that it seemed a part of him. He had not felt anything like it with any other woman.
He remembered what his brother Reed had told him about the first time Reed saw Anna, the woman who would eventually become his wife. It had been like a blow to the chest, Reed had said, and Theo had thought the description overly dramatic. Yet today what he had felt had been as strong as that, as intense, though it had been more of a jolt all through him rather than a blow to his heart.
He had to wonder what that meant about the twins’ new teacher. Not, he felt sure, that he was going to marry the woman. He had realized some time ago that he was apparently missing the romantic streak that seemed to run through the rest of his family. His parents, his brother, his sisters—even his twin—all had married for love. Theo, however, was sure that he had never felt the emotion. He had been attracted to many women over the years, had even indulged in affairs with those who were free and willing to engage in such relationships, both here in London and in some of the other places he had traveled.
There had been one woman—the clever, ambitious owner of a millinery store—with whom he had kept company happily every time he returned to London. That relationship had lasted almost three years, off and on, and had ended amicably when he’d returned from his trip to China to find that she had entered into a more permanent relationship with a man who stayed home. He had enjoyed her company, had found pleasure in her bed, yet he had never felt the sort of heart-thudding joy upon seeing her that he had witnessed on Kyria’s or Olivia’s faces when they saw their husbands.
He