Chapter Seventeen
January 21, 12:00 a.m. – St. Agnes’ Eve
The clock in Olivia’s room tolled midnight. Uneasiness carved a hollow in the pit of her stomach as she readied herself for bed, and not just because the closed curtains of her window covered a space large enough to hide a man. She hadn’t gone downstairs for supper, instead, pleading headache, she cowered in her room. Knowing her cousin was back unnerved her for reasons she didn’t understand, since for years his attitude toward her was one of neglect. But Hew wasn’t why she hadn’t gone downstairs. Hew’s appearance and her uneasiness faded to inconsequence compared to Tiern-Cope. He’d kissed her. He had. She hadn’t imagined his mouth on hers or his arms around her waist, or her leaning against him. She hadn’t done a thing to stop him until nearly too late.
She shivered. With the covers up to her chin, she watched the shifting light from the fireplace. One thick wall sloped outward and another boasted a window ledge six feet deep and high enough to sit in. The ledge narrowed in a squared-off V shape and ended in a slender window facing an adjacent tower. The opposite wall had another window with three large steps cut into the ledge. That window overlooked the back of the castle where the moat had been before some Tiern-Cope ancestor decided to enlarge the rear of the castle. Carved stone outlined the fireplace in the third wall, and in the fourth was the door to the hallway. In that same wall, another door near the corner—so short even she had to dip her head to get through—led to a small room for the necessary. As for furniture, there wasn’t much; the wardrobe, a desk, a chair, a dressing table and a four-poster bed with blue hangings. Quite the grand bed. Her favorite thing about the room. In the Black Earl’s day, no doubt, tapestries had covered the now bare walls. She suspected if the hour were right and she were to lie just so in the larger window, she might see the moon. Right now, however, the walls chilled to the very bone. Another draft rippled through the room.
The terror that had overwhelmed her when Tiern-Cope kissed her wasn’t really gone. She probed the edges of that moment. The panic hadn’t come because of anything he did. She’d felt safe in his arms. She remembered the longing, an ache of wanting, the feeling that at long last her life had come right. And then suddenly, a wave of unreasoning fear swept everything away, and left her cowering, trembling and empty. He hadn’t made fun or been angry or insistent. He just stopped.
The fireplace flared, coals hissed and popped. Olivia listened to the sound die down, shivering despite the fire. Where on earth was that infernal draft coming from? She distinctly recalled fastening the window locks, but one must have worked loose because night air stirred the curtains. A slow, deliberate motion that for one heart-stopping, breath-stealing moment convinced her someone crouched behind the fabric. The air swirled, chilling straight through the covers.
She slipped out of bed. Arms clutched around her for warmth, she went to the draped window ledge. Dread crept up her back like frost on glass, but she forced herself to reach for the curtain. Perhaps a barbarian Scotsman from one of her less tormented dreams lurked behind the fabric, deadly claymore drawn for attack. Her heart slammed in her chest. She held her breath, let it out and told herself she was being silly. She drew aside the curtain.
Cold air surged past, but no sword streaked down to chop off her head, no Highland warrior attacked from inside. Indeed, the latch was loose. She hiked up her nightdress and climbed into the ledge. The stone beneath her feet felt like ice. Outside, a pale crescent of moon shone on the snow-covered ground below, a layer of white covered the sill. She secured the lock in the fitting and, backing out, drew the curtain closed.
In bed once more, she curled into a ball with the covers tight around her for whatever warmth she could find. The opposite curtains moved, a ripple of motion, and it did seem as if there was someone behind them. It did. She pulled the covers to her nose, ignoring the curtains and the shadows, thinking she’d rather dream about the Black Earl separating her head from her neck than finding herself awake in the night, shaking with fear and unable to see the face that so terrified her. She remembered Tiern-Cope’s arms around her, the protection and comfort of his presence. He’d held her, just that, until her panic passed. He never complained or insisted on an explanation. He just held her until she felt safe. How strange, her drowsy mind thought, that the only place she felt safe was in the arms of a man who didn’t like her. Came of his being a hero, she supposed.
She was halfway to deep sleep when the door creaked, a noise loud enough to rouse her, yet soft enough to doubt her having heard anything. She lay motionless, listening but hearing only the wind outside, the clock, the sounds of an ancient building. Normal sounds, but still her skin prickled. Pressure built in her head. Her pulse beat in her ears. The feeling of pressure thickened, stealing over her, a sense of envelopment, a shift in perception. Not her pulse, but footsteps. Someone pacing. Ten steps toward the fireplace. Ten back to the foot of her bed. The susseration of fabric against fabric. Metal sliding along metal, a low ringing sound, and mixed with that a murmuring. She peered into the darkness but saw nothing. No moving shadows, no figure approaching her bed, just the inert shapes of furniture and the resulting shadows. Footsteps. Regular breaths. The resonance in her head grew. The murmuring began again, a breath, then a whisper.
My love.
Steps paced near, and she swore she could feel the air thicken. Pain lanced along her temple.
My heart.
Unendurable pressure. She tried to move, but couldn’t. Her limbs were frozen, trapped in her nightmare. More footsteps. A breath on her cheek. Cold air wafted through the room.
My own.
A face flashed before her eyes. She tried to breathe and couldn’t get air into her lungs. She screwed her eyes shut, but the face didn’t go away. The features blurred, looming, threatening, laughing. She knew that face but the recollection refused to come. Terror like she’d known only once before in her life consumed her. Her lungs refused to expand. Or couldn’t. She was going to die. She knew it. A scream bubbled in her throat.
The fullness in her head vanished, leaving deafening silence in its wake. In one motion, she shot to her knees, throwing back the covers, gasping as if she’d run from Far Caister to Pennhyll. No matter how hard she stared, there was no one. Her door remained shut tight. Not even a difference in light around the frame. The only sound was the wind rattling the glass in the windows. There wasn’t anyone in the room. She trembled, heart tripping like a sparrow tangled in a net. There was nothing. There was nothing and no one here. She sat with her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees, taking slow breaths. This time the dream had changed. The footsteps and voices were new. The endearments, those were new, too. She didn’t remember that from any previous nightmare.
Why couldn’t she remember?
She stared at the dark folds of the hangings as if they were to be her last sight in the world of the living. Another coal popped. No barefoot, tartan-covered Scotsman hid in the widow ledge. No foully murdered earl walked the halls of Pennhyll. The curtains stirred again, languidly, as if an elbow or perhaps the blade of a sword disturbed the fabric.
This time she refused to acknowledge the prickles of fear running up her spine. She got out of bed. Even though her belly felt empty and her knees shook so she barely trusted them to hold her up, she checked the windows. Both of them. Again. Both were open. She secured the last and climbed down. As she closed the curtain, the wind outside rose. A draft came down the flue and made the fire flare. Startled, she whirled and this time there was someone there. She couldn’t help it. She let out a yelp.
A young woman stood at the side of her bed, very young, practically a girl. She wore plain clothes in thick woolen given shape only by the apron around her waist. A white cap on her head gleamed like bone in the dimness. “Good evening, milady,” she said, dipping into a curtsey.
“Good heavens, you frightened me nearly to death. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I knocked, miss. Several times, so I was sure you were asleep. I’ve come to look after the fire.” She held up a bucket of coal before crossing to the hearth. “There’s a chill on tonight.”
What a relief to discover such a mundane explanation for her dream; she’d translated the sound of the servant tapping on the door into footsteps, and the sounds of her tending the fire into the Black Earl himself pacing her room. “It’s always chilly in here.”
“I reckon,” she said, “it’s always cold on St. Agnes’ Eve.”
“Why, so it is. I hadn’t realized. St. Agnes’ Eve, I mean. You’re new here. At least, I’ve not see you before. What shall I call you?”
“Edith, Miss.” She finished with the fire and rose.
“Have you been here long, Edith, or were you hired for the party tomorrow?” She laughed, a thin, nervous sound. “Well, I suppose I ought to have said today.”
“A while.” She went to the bed and plumped the pillows. “I’m sorry I frightened you. I was certain you heard me knock.”
“I didn’t. I was thinking of the Black Earl and…and St. Agnes’ Eve.”
Edith untangled the covers and then faced her. “You’ll dream of your future husband tomorrow night, that’s sure.”
“What if I forget to fast?”
“Who knows? Perhaps you’ll dream of him tonight.”
“It’s more likely I’ll dream of the Black Earl wandering the halls of Pennhyll angry with Miss Royce for summoning him.”
“The Black Earl can’t be summoned,” Edith said, smiling.
“Why not?”
She put a finger to the side of her nose. “If he wants you to see him, you will. Otherwise….” She shrugged. “Come to bed, milady. You’ll catch your death if you don’t.”
“Have you seen him?”
Edith adjusted the covers when Olivia was back in bed. “That I have.”
“Well?”
“I could feel in my bones he repents his wicked ways and wishes he could put things right.”
“Really, Edith.” Before the present earl’s father had decamped, leaving the castle empty and Far Caister without the considerable monies derived from the family’s employment and custom, the last six or seven earls of Tiern-Cope enjoyed good relations with the locals, and perhaps a more benign Black Earl. It was a fact of faith and legend that the fourth earl preferred a bloody melee with the Scots over attending to his wife and children or to his duties as lord over his people. No one ever spoke of the Black Earl with anything but fearsome awe.
“What time will you be needing me in the morning?”
“I’m to Far Caister early to see Mama. I’ll be up before you, I expect.”
Edith curtseyed. “I’m happy to come whenever you call.” At the door, she hesitated. “The Black Earl won’t hurt you. He’d never do that. My word on it.”
“Thank you, Edith.” Olivia hid her smile. She wouldn’t offend Edith’s dignity for all the world. Besides, the assurance felt strangely comforting. She was not, herself, even half as superstitious as most people who grew up in the shadow of Pennhyll Castle. But, considering the history of the earls Tiern-Cope, and the fact that she was in a room of the original castle—for all she knew perhaps the very room where the Black Earl had met his death—she could not shake off the dread of something not of this world.
“Good night, milady.”
“I’m not my lady.”
“You are to me.”
“Good night, Edith.” She blinked, and Edith was gone as quickly and as quietly as she’d appeared.
Five minutes later, she did fall asleep and leave behind the unfamiliar shadows of the present.
Olivia stood in a room easily fifty paces across. In her sleep, she smiled because she felt as if she’d been lost for years and had only now come home. Tourmaline silk shot with narrow lines of cream covered the walls. On the floor an exquisite rug of Chinese design. Bronze curtains hung floor-to-ceiling, tied back with tasseled ropes of silk. Twin pier mirrors hung on opposite walls, framed with gilt so bright it must be newly laid on. On the mantel candlesticks in the shape of dragons poised to breath fire and smoke. The furniture shone with the gold of walnut and ash and fittings glittered whenever the shifting afternoon light hit them. The Tiern-Cope crest was carved in the marble above the mantel. A maid polishing the table looked up from her work. “My lady.”
“Edith.” But Olivia saw her mistake in the next instant. Not Edith, though the resemblance was haunting.
The servant curtseyed and swept up her rags. From a connected room, a man called to someone. Olivia turned her head in that direction, and when she looked back, the girl was gone. Memories whirled in the back of her head. Not frightening this time. The owner of that voice made her smile. He protected her, and he loved her. When she was with him, the world felt right. As long as she was with him, she was safe.
He entered the room, crossing at an angle to her so that she saw just his shoulders and a glimpse of flat stomach. Not a stitch of clothing covered him. Not one. She could see the backs of his thighs and his bare behind. Round and strong and firm. Dark hair cut short gave his profile greater sternness. She knew beyond certainty she had every right to be here, with him perfectly naked. Her heart swelled with joy, a feeling so intense she wanted to cry out to the world.
He stopped at the window and stood there, one arm resting atop the sash, staring at the hills rising toward Scotland. His arm came forward on the sash, and he shifted so that he faced her. “Well,” he said in a soft voice that made her breath catch. His voice was velvet, liquid velvet, and she was drowning in it, filled all the way to her soul. That voice, a woman could love. “Good afternoon.”
Bluer eyes she’d never seen. Nor more piercing ones. She drowned in eyes of an incredible, piercing blue. The light shimmered as a cloud crossed the sun. But this man, this man with eyes like frost on a window, whose eyes made battle-hardened men quail and who seemed so foreign to tenderness, made her complete. Memories bubbled beneath the surface of her thoughts. Any moment she would remember something important, and the world would come right. But, the harder she tried, the more stubbornly recollection eluded her. She did not want to remember unpleasant things, things that frightened her. She much preferred remembering she loved the man in front of her. No one could long forget that kind of emotion.
“Come here into the warmth,” he said easily. He reached for her, taking her hand and pulling her toward him. “I’ve been waiting for you.” He stroked her hair, shifting a bit to let the light fall on her. “For a very long time.”
She, too, reached for him, following a line in the air along the length of the forming scar that marred his chest. A corona flared around him until she moved past the point where the sunlight hit her eyes. She stared at his chest, at the gashed and ill-healed flesh, and he, seeing her attention, took her hand and brought her fingers to his mouth. She felt the warmth of his breath, the pressure of his lips, soft and warm. “I wish you had never been wounded,” she said. “Even though it brought you home to me.”
He took one of her curls between two fingers and lifted it to his lips. “Dearest.” He breathed in, a long, slow intake of air. At the moment of exhalation, he released her hair. He was very large, Olivia thought. But he never made her feel insubstantial or weak. His mouth curved without haste. She wasn’t even certain at first that he meant to smile but, slight as it was, her stomach dropped straight to the floor. She would do anything, anything at all, to continue being the recipient of a smile like that. He glanced over his shoulder. “McNaught. There you are.”
A short, round man came in carrying a silk dressing gown over the crook of an arm. “My lord,” he said, holding out the silver robe.
He drew on the dressing gown with an uneven shrug of his broad shoulders that protected his wounded side. “Were you looking for me, my own dear heart?” He spoke easily, but something lurked beneath the surface, a dark sort of purr, like a cat, inscrutably satisfied. “That will be all, McNaught.”
The valet nodded and withdrew.
Her head ached a little, a sense of fullness, and she felt memory tugging at her, clamoring to be known. But she didn’t want to know. She belonged here. Nowhere else. She pushed away every thought except him.
His mouth curved ever so slightly. She could have touched his chest if she’d not been paralyzed by his fiendish beauty and that slow, rare smile. He’d not fastened his dressing gown. Part of his wound showed, violent pink, an angry weal where something had pierced his skin. She lifted a hand in a warding, as if she could heal him with the gesture. A man might die from a wound like that. Her open palm touched his chest just below his heart. With no fabric between her hand and his chest she felt the smoothness of his torso, the hardness of muscle, the beat of his heart beneath warm skin. “You were wrong,” she said. “You do so have a heart.”
“It belongs to you.”
With deliberate care he covered her hand with one of his and glanced at the bed. His smile sent a shiver from her head to her toes. Sebastian. The name flashed into her head, touching the world in which Lord Tiern-Cope was going to marry someone else. Something pulled at her, but she couldn’t leave him. His hand over hers flattened her palm on his chest. He put his mouth near her ear. “You’re a beautiful woman. Must I tell you that constantly? Ah, well, I don’t mind if I must.”
“I’m dreaming,” she said.
“Let me make your dream more pleasant still.”
“Oh, do, please,” she said.
“Happy to oblige you, madam.” He bent close. Her hand was on his naked chest, and it felt wonderful. She felt more than a little dizzy. He touched the outside of her thigh. “Are your legs bare?”
She laughed in reply. He threw his arms around her, sweeping her up to carry her to a chair. When he sat, she ended up straddling him, her palms on the back of the chair. “Oh, my.”
His hands slid beneath her skirts, finding her garters and moving past while he kissed her throat. She felt him pressing her down, but she resisted. “Must you torment me?” He growled deep in his throat. One hand left her waist to delve again beneath her skirts. “My little witch. Are you going to refuse me again?”
“Refuse you? Perish the thought. I can never tell you no.”
She felt his fingers brush her inner thigh. His hips shifted, and then in one swift movement, he was inside her. Both his hands held her waist, guiding her, filling her. He reached up and unfastened the front of her gown. Her breath caught when one of his hands slid around to her there. He moved with her, his mouth finding her breast and then, without warning, she felt as if every nerve in her body concentrated just there, around him. “Yes,” he said, right before his mouth closed on the skin of her neck.
She threw back her head and felt his lips slid down. She let the convulsion of pleasure take her, concentrated infinity in her body. When she could think again, she raised her head from his chest and looked into eyes of chilling blue. He remained inside her, and she felt suddenly uncertain of herself and of him. Memories rose up, crowding out the satisfaction, fear lurked at the edges. She did not want to know. “Hold me.”
His smile spread. “My heart,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her.
“Sweetheart. My own. My life.” The endearment made her shiver inside, pulling her inexorably nearer him. “My love.” He cradled her in his arms.
“I love you,” she said.
“I know.” He slid his hands under her skirts again, and before long the world shattered like glass.
She awoke with a start, sitting upright in the bed with both hands clutched over her galloping heart. The curtain swelled and billowed with a draft that chilled, and darkness leapt from moonlit corners whenever the fabric lifted with the waft of air. She had closed the window. And locked it.