“Niall is home,” she whispered. “You must leave at once!”
He gave her a most wolfish smile. “What would happen if I didn’t?”
“If you are quick, you can leave by the window. I am sure that climbing down from a second-story window is child’s play for a man of your talents.”
Stairs creaked below the landing. Athena gestured Morgan toward the window. He started in the right direction obediently enough, but at the last minute he turned and glided to her bedside.
Athena supposed that, somewhere deep inside, she was almost expecting what happened next. Morgan crouched beside her, his hands on the bed, and leaned very close. His heat washed over her like the summer sun. His thick, black, unfashionably long hair brushed the sheets, her pillow, her breasts.
And he kissed her. His mouth came down on hers, hard for only an instant before it gentled and began to caress. His weight pressed her back into the pillows. She might have felt smothered, terrified, but her senses had become so heightened that waves of pleasure pulsed all the way to her toes. One of her arms moved of its own accord to wrap about his shoulders. Firm muscle clenched under her palm.
“Athena,” he murmured.
She caught her breath. Her lips throbbed. Her body throbbed. “Morgan.”
A loose floorboard on the landing just outside her door groaned in warning. Morgan sprang back. He leaped for the window, threw it open and was gone. Cold air spilled through the curtains, making a vain attempt to cool Athena’s heated skin. Hastily she rearranged her nightdress and scooted down under the blanket. There was no use in pretending that she hadn’t been awake, not with the lamp still burning and the window wide open.
The door swung in. Niall entered the room and glanced about. His expression was, thank heaven, no more than slightly perplexed. He lacked the senses to know that someone else had been in the room.
“I saw the light on,” he said. “Why aren’t you asleep?” Before he could answer he noticed the billowing curtains and strode to the window to shut it. “You’ll catch your death, Athena. Why is the window open?”
“I felt rather warm,” she said meekly. “I could not sleep.”
He frowned at her and stood by the bedside. “Are you feverish? Should I send for a doctor?”
“No. I am quite well… merely thinking.”
He sat between the bars on the edge of the bed. “About what?”
Athena tried to remember how long it had been since she and Niall had had a heart-to-heart conversation that did not revolve around common courtesies or, more recently, arguments over her activities. “The circus,” she answered honestly. “The performance for the children. It is only a few days away.”
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. His fingers plucked at a bit of her blanket. “Would you be very disappointed… if the performance had to be cancelled?”
So he did feel obligated to say something, after all. She faced a clear choice: either pretend she knew nothing, using her supposed ignorance to undermine Niall’s resolve, or confront him directly. She knew what she would have chosen yesterday.
Many things had been different yesterday. She would not have believed the time would come when she would be compelled to defy her brother. But then, she would not have believed the time would come when she was kissed in her own bed by a near stranger… least of all one like Morgan Holt.
“You plan to send the circus away,” she said.
He looked at her sharply. “How did you know?”
“Something… something Cecily said today on the lot,” she improvised. Cecily Hockensmith had acted rather strangely while she and Athena waited in the carriage for Mali’s return, but Athena had been more concerned with her brother at the time. “I knew something was wrong by the way you behaved. It was not like you.”
She drew a breath of relief when she saw that she had guessed correctly. “I discussed the matter briefly with Miss Hockensmith,” Niall said, “and asked her to come with me when I went to the lot—”
“To ask the circus to leave Denver,” she finished. “Why, Niall? They were a gift to me, to the children. Cecily said something about a bad influence, but surely—”