PROLOGUE
She ran toward him, her arms outstretched, her beautiful face contorted with fear, mouth opened in a scream. The terror was plain in her eyes, and though he did not know what caused it, the force of it hit him like a blow. He stood rooted to the floor, unable to move or even to reach for her, and though she ran as if pursued by demons, she never reached him.
She screamed his name. “Reed!” It echoed through the dark, wide hallways.
Still struggling to reach him, effort and strain in every line of her body, she was now receding from him, pulled back by some unseen force. He knew he would never reach her, never see her again, and his whole body shook in a paroxysm of grief and pain and fear.
* * *
“Anna!” Reed jerked upright, his eyes flying open, staring sightlessly into the darkness of his room. “Anna!”
This time her name was said more softly, a desperate, desolate moan of despair. He let out a great sigh, sagging back against the mattress. It had been a dream, that was all.
Reed lay for a moment, gazing up at the tester high above his bed, trying to pull the befogged shreds of his thoughts back together. It was not the first dream he had had of her, nor, he suspected, would it be the last. Indeed, in his sleep she had come to him times without number.
There had been hot, lustful dreams that left him wide awake, sweating and panting, and dark, angry dreams, full of pain. But his dreams of Anna had come less and less as the years had passed; it had been months since he had had one. And never had any of them filled him with a heart-pounding terror such as this one had.
She was in danger. Reed was not sure how he was so certain of that fact, but he was. Something was frightening her, threatening her, and the thought left him with a sick, powerless feeling.
He sat up, pushing aside his tangled bedsheets, and walked over to the window. The curtains were open and the window ajar, letting in a soft summer breeze that cooled his skin. He stood for a moment, looking out at the expansive gardens of Broughton House. From the rose garden below drifted up the heady scents of hundreds of flowers.
Looking out at the moonlit gardens, he saw not their neat and well-tended order but the tangled, overgrown yard at Winterset. It had been three years since he had been there, but it was almost as clear in his mind as Anna’s face.
He closed his eyes, the old bitter sorrow creeping over him. He thought of her dark blue eyes, the delicately heart-shaped face framed by a glorious tumble of light brown curls, accented by sunny streaks of gold. She had a firm mouth, with ends that seemed to turn up, giving her always a look of faint, suppressed amusement at the world. The first time he had seen her, standing in the garden at Winterset, one hand up to shade her eyes as she watched him approach, he had felt as if he had been struck a blow to the chest, and he had known that he had found the woman he would love for the rest of his life.
It was to his lasting regret that he had been right that day. The woman, unfortunately, had not felt the same way.
With a sigh, Reed turned and sank down into a chair. Leaning forward, he put his elbows on his knees and rested his head on his hands, thrusting his fingers back into his thick dark hair. He clenched his fingers, the tiny pain of his hair tangling in his fingers a kind of relief from the pain within him.
After three years, he thought, it should cease to hurt. Yet it had not. There was no longer the constant dull ache that had accompanied him the first few months when he had returned to London after Anna declined his proposal, but neither had his world ever completely righted itself. No woman since had caught his eye enough to warrant more than a dance or a polite conversation. He still thought of her now and then, and every time he did, there was a slice of pain. Reed supposed he should be glad that it was no more than an echo of the hurt that had once enveloped him.
He tried to pull his mind from the old wound and think about the dream instead. He remembered the fear in Anna’s eyes, the scream that seemed to be issuing from her lips as she ran. What was she running from? What did it mean? And, most of all, why was he so certain that the dream meant that Anna was in danger?
Reed Moreland was not the sort of man who believed in visions and portents. He had had a grandmother who had claimed to converse with her dead relations—his mother had said that it was typical of her mother-in-law that she had pursued her hapless relatives even beyond the grave—but Grandmother was generally agreed to be a trifle dotty. Rational adults did not see things that were not there, nor receive information in dreams, nor hear heavenly voices. Reasonable, well-educated men such as himself lived their lives according to logic, not superstition.
Yet neither could he dismiss the things that had happened to his sisters two years ago. They were not hysterical females given to frights and vapors, yet both Olivia and Kyria had encountered strange mystical forces that could not be explained away rationally. Indeed, all of them had given up trying to explain things. If there were unseen forces at work in the world, a possibility that he could no longer dismiss out of hand, then it seemed that the Moreland clan had some sort of special connection to them.
More than that, irrational as it might be, he could not dismiss the force of the feeling that had shot through him during the dream. It had been too strong to ignore. Anna was in trouble. The only real question was: What was he going to do about it?