Chapter Eighteen
January 21, 3:11 a.m.
Sebastian woke with his side throbbing like the devil. He’d slept away too many weeks of his life not to find himself perversely glad of his wakefulness. Awake he did not dream of his dying brother or tearful redheads nor hear the inconsolable cry of an orphaned child. Nor did he dream of Olivia Willow compliant in his embrace, of coming into her again and again. Jesus. The woman obsessed him.
The damned building made eerie noises. Groaning squeaks from floorboards settling. Creaks and thunks of centuries-old timbers swelling with the humidity of an unusually cold and wet winter. Through some acoustical whimsy the wind rushing over the battlements and past the windows howled with a sorrowful basso undertone before rising to a shriek. A man in agony. Sebastian had heard enough of that sound to last him a lifetime. To make matters worse, every so often there arose from the kennels such a keening and furor you’d think Satan himself rattled the bars. And perhaps he did.
The house was haunted all right, Sebastian thought as the wind rose to another chilling screech. But not by an earl murdered and dead these four hundred and seventy-five years. No. A far more recent soul haunted Pennhyll. Even the walls breathed Andrew’s essence. His brother, who was not at all what he ought to have been. And now, here he lay in Andrew’s bed thinking there must be some way to reach into the emptiness and retrieve the brother who should never have died, to make him explain what in God’s name he’d done to Olivia, and why.
With a sigh, he threw back the covers and swung his legs off the bed. His side blazed, retribution for his recent over-exertions. Slowly he moved and avoided prostrating pain. A month ago, the effort would have left him sweating on the sheets, afraid to stir without someone there to catch him if he fell. He grabbed his robe and, keeping his left arm below the level of his heart, pulled it onto his shoulders and fastened the belt about his waist. Lamp in hand, he left his room and the bed that had been his brother’s and his father’s and so on back through the ages even, one supposed, to the bloody dead Black Earl.
His bedroom lay at the end of a series of connecting rooms, each opening into another. Bedchamber, antechamber, withdrawing room, parlor and saloon, after which the pattern repeated itself in more or less a mirror image. From the second parlor, however, rather than proceed straight, he left by another door to the right. There, he found what fifty years ago would have been called a closet and been used for the receiving of visitors. Another door led out of the closet to a corridor. Wood just short of inky black surrounded him, ceiling to floor carved with rosettes and vines so real he expected them to wave in the unseen breeze.
Thick walls muffled the keening wind. The hush struck him as unnatural. Once, just off Curaçao, in the moments before battle, he’d felt that sort of silence. A ghastly quiet that lifted the hair on your arms and shrunk your belly and balls to nothing. By habit, his right hand dropped, ready to defend himself. He swore he heard the sound of steel slipping from a scabbard, but of course he hadn’t, for he had no weapon, and the carved-wood hall was empty. Feeling foolish, he tightened the sash of his dressing gown.
He went left just to prove he wasn’t unnerved. A maze could not have been more confusing than the right and left turnings, stairways appearing from nowhere to lead up or down and sometimes sideways into the depths of the house. Every architect ever to put his stamp on Pennhyll ought to be sentenced to a lifetime traversing these Byzantine halls. He missed the orderly arrangement of shipboard where everything had its predictable place. He opened the occasional door but found empty salons or chambers filled with sheet-covered furniture. Nothing alive, nothing lived in. Nothing but room after empty room. A man could house an armada here and have space to spare.
The floor sloped down half a step. The architectural indicator, he decided, of where the Tudor wing met the medieval. He seemed to have circled back to the original castle. In at least one case, he remembered hearing, they’d built right over the ramparts. He stepped into a damp, misty cold and was painfully reminded he wore only felt slippers on his feet.
Overhead, stone ribs arched to a central point, the interstices filled with cavorting stone animals. He ascended a narrow, twisting staircase and came out in an even more ancient hall. The walls, white-limed after long-gone practice, felt solid and watchful. But not lonely. And not deserted. Five yards ahead, a thin line of light illuminated a slice of the adjacent wall. A weak yellow glow, but steady as from a lamp.
Not a sound did he hear as he approached, just a graveyard’s silence. Using the tip of his finger, he pushed the door until he could see in. Thick beams in the arched ceiling betrayed the medieval origin of the room while shelves of books filled a recess in the opposite wall as high as a tall man might reach. To the left, royal blue curtains draped walls tinted a once popular shade of orange. Columns of grey-veined white rose from floor to ceiling and flanked the marble fireplace. An oil painting hung above the mantel: pink and red peonies in an ivory vase.
The scent of tobacco hung in the air, stale and musty. More a recollection of tobacco than anything else. He moved inside, and his feet sank into silk carpet. Such heaven to his freezing soles he walked farther in. The wind howled again, rattling the window glass behind the curtains. Though fainter than from his bedroom, he heard the answering din from the kennels. The very hounds of Hell could not sound more fearsome. The perfect setting for a ghost. This thought came at the exact moment he looked to his right.
At the far end of the room a figure in white bent over a mahogany desk, writing by the light of a single lamp. Blood covered its head and dripped onto the desktop. Though he did not believe in ghosts and knew to his marrow that in the next moment he would make sense of what he was seeing, fear rippled up his spine. For a moment, a mere instant, he regretted his disbelief in God and in the next remembered the war and why he’d lost his faith. He blinked. And blinked again when the vision remained unchanged. Red from crown of head to table top, a thick and sinuous trail of blood flowed to the desk. The dogs howled louder still, and the wind wailing past the dawn-lightened window could have been a man’s dying breath. Behind him, and through no action of his, the door slammed shut.
The apparition gave a very un-ghostlike shriek and jumped from the chair, sending it to the floor with a muffled thud. A quite real-and-in-the-flesh woman. His grasp for religion irritated him, and he focused that irritation on her, as if she’d intended to frighten him back to the Anglican Church.
“Miss Olivia Willow. What the devil are you doing here?” Jesus, this was just what he needed. Miss Willow in the flesh when he was feeling so disinclined to the sort of self-discipline that would keep her safe from him. She bent to right the chair. Whatever it was she wore, nightdress, chemise, the fabric pulled tight along her back and lower to display pleasant curves.
“Good heavens, you frightened me nearly to death.” Straightening, she put a hand to her upper chest. Behind her, the lamp hissed and flared. Sebastian had the absurd image of Venus stepping from flame. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
He walked in far enough to place his own lamp on a table. A draft swept the room, and he moved away from the whisper of cold air, ending up closer to her than he intended, though still a fair distance away. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” She smiled freely, cheerfully, one of those smiles that made him want to smile in return. He stood his ground and refused to return her smile. A man who made war for his living had little use for smiles and less for spinster redheads hopelessly tangled with his family history. “I often come here to write. It’s warmer here than in my room.”
Sebastian started toward the desk. When he stood but two feet distant, he said softly, “My brother used this room.”
“It still feels like him.”
That was true. Everything about the room felt like Andrew. He half expected to see his brother on a chair before the fire, ready to light his pipe and waiting for his mistress to attend him. “Why are you here? Besides making me think you’re a ghost.”
She laughed, softly, and touched a bound volume of paper open to a place nearer the end than the middle. Ink glistened on one side of the pages. Her long, bare fingers matched the script on the page. He couldn’t make out individual words, more’s the pity. He wanted intensely to know what she’d written. He felt quite certain this was her diary. Her most secret thoughts laid out on the pages. “Passing strange you’d be writing at this hour.”
“I’m an early riser, my lord, and off to Far Caister, soon. To see Mama. You didn’t think I was a ghost, did you?” Her skin gleamed as if lit by the dawn yet to come. Shadows rendered her face in fey beauty, a fairy trapped in the world of men. Another smile, very small, appeared. A smile to enchant a man’s soul. “For, you know, I thought for a moment that you were a ghost. I heard a noise earlier, but when I looked, no one was there. Until just now when you came in.”
“Your hair looked like blood.” He reached for a lock, turning a ringlet around his finger. She had the sort of curls that would never lie flat, small coils from top to bottom and surprisingly soft considering the determination to twist.
“Oh, dear.” She laughed, sunlight and silk wrapped in one soft sound. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you take me for the Black Earl?” He hoped that would make her laugh again.
“Oh.” Her smile drained away. “No. No,” she said. “I took you for Andrew.” She spoke with wistful innocence. “I saw you, and—”
He raised one eyebrow.
Her smile drained away. “For a moment, the resemblance was remarkable. Uncanny, really.”
Silence gathered while he waited for her to master herself. Not an uncomfortable quiet, but pregnant.
“Now,” he said, “it’s I who am sorry.” He reached around her, leaning close enough to smell earthy verbena and beneath that something secret and wholly feminine, and to feel her flinch when his arm brushed hers. Strange how the desk had looked like mahogany before. Now he would swear the thing was the dark honey of oak. Pretending he hadn’t noticed the contact or her reaction to it, he picked up her diary.
With a cry of outrage, she tried to snatch it from him, but he lifted it out of her reach, which wasn’t hard because he was bigger, at least a foot taller, and despite his injury, quite a bit stronger.
“Give it back. You’ve no right.”
He scanned the page. Once again, he was set on his heels. “And what, pray tell, is this monster of which you’ve written? The wolf that will take your life?”
She shrugged, backing away to put a lamentable distance between them. A fine display of unconcern in no way convincing. He wondered if she knew how much her eyes gave away. The callowest lieutenant could hide more from him. She stretched for the diary, but he raised it nearer his head. If she wanted the book, she’d have to lean against him to reach it. She didn’t. Instead, she eyed his hand like a gunner’s mate peering along a cannon sight. “My private thoughts are not your affair. Most certainly not.”
He laughed. Really, he knew her too well and read her too easily for her to think she could fool him. “It’s about me, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Liar.” Her shoulders stiffened, and he knew his guess had hit home.
“I’m not.”
“I’m your wolf.”
“No.”
“Yes, I am, and you know it.” He brought her journal to his eye level—which remained out of her reach if she meant not to touch him. He fanned a few pages then stopped and pretended to examine the page but, really, he watched her. Panic filled her remarkable eyes. “True enough, I am nothing like Andrew.”
“You’re not.”
“Neither am I a monster.”
“I wrote that before I knew you.”
He grinned. Both lamps flared and wavered with the draft that plagued the room. The air here was no warmer than in the hall. She looked him square in the eye, judging, he suspected, the likelihood she could retrieve the book without touching him. He leaned in to place the journal on the plain oaken desktop. “I’m flattered you spend your private hours thinking of me.”
She snatched up the journal and faced him. Carefully, she thumbed the side of the pages. Her middle finger, he saw, was stained black where her pen had rested against it. The corner of her mouth lifted, trembled a little. Her chest lifted with a breath that caught when he moved so close there was but an inch between his chest and her bosom.
He felt awash in her, full of a rutting lust for the deep scent of verbena and for red hair twined around his fingers. The light continued to flicker so that the shadows danced with shapes unnervingly like a man peering at them from the darkened corner of the room. But whenever he stared at the shapes, the darkness broke apart and became again formless shadow. Briefly, he wondered if he could be dreaming. But dreams were not as real as this. He was awake. Alone with Olivia Willow. Consumed by her. He wasn’t to be trusted.
She backed up, and he walked forward until he stood smack against her, pinning her against the desk. Satan’s own smile appeared on his mouth, had he but seen it. More than worthy of the Black Earl at his most horrific. He put his hands on the desk, one on either side of her, thinking how her hair was flame bright against that sea-blue background. He felt her thighs, her hips, along his body, the side of her slipper against his foot. She pretended nothing untoward was happening but with such poor success he threw back his head and laughed. The laughter felt good. Joy and triumph came together in him, gathering her in and joining them as tenon joined the mortise. The moment felt right. God, it felt good to feel again.
“I won’t take anything you don’t offer me, Olivia,” he said, imagining her body against him, moving, shifting, yielding to his every pleasure. The image filled his mind, a thousand times more intense than any dream. “I swear it. In return, you will have passion. And love. I swear that, too.”
She fumbled behind her for something and produced the book in which she’d been writing. She held it tightly. Hard use bent the corners of the uneven green cover. “What do you want from me?”
“You,” he said in a low voice. “I want you.” He heard the faint ring of metal moving against metal, a sword sliding in its scabbard. Next, that damn wind would have him hearing an army at the gates. “I promise you,” he said in a voice so thick with lust he didn’t recognize it for his own, “I have more than enough passion for us both. I’ll love you right out of your mind.”
The shadows in the corner formed into definite shape. A man. Not just shape, but color, too. A flash of blue and red. “I am not mad. Therefore, this is a dream, and a hellish real one at that. And so, lovely Olivia, what’s the harm if we indulge in each other now? We’ll be married soon.”
She stirred, and for a moment, he would have sworn she wasn’t in his arms. He shook his head, and she came back into focus, warm and supple and soft in his embrace. He stroked her back near her shoulder blades. He would not let her go. Not when she was at last where she belonged. Damn that lamp for flaring so. The shadows behind her moved and swirled into impossibly human shape. His skin prickled despite knowing the impression for a trick of uncertain light.
“Sebastian,” she whispered. She touched his arm. The effect of his whispered name shocked him. His gaze settled on her fingers resting atop his sleeve. A shiver of heat and arousal shot through him. Would she touch his naked skin as daintily as this? He’d been months without a woman, and at the moment he felt the abstinence like the edge of a blade to his throat. He felt pressure built in his head, behind his eyes and between his ears. Cold chilled the room. The lamp flared, then settled into a steady flame that stopped the shadows from moving.
She was gone. Vanished. He didn’t know what the hell had just happened, except that he had not held her in his arms. She had not let him kiss her six ways from Sunday nor melted in his arms nor whispered his name. A sense of loss ripped through him, ruthlessly deep. “Olivia.” He shouted. “Olivia!”
He awoke with a gasp and a heart pounding like hurricane winds on a hapless ship. First light through the window bathed the room in pearl light. Bloody, sodding St. Agnes’ Eve.