Nicholas studied the portrait more carefully this time. The figure carried a single rose in full bloom, not a modern hybrid but one of the old, wide-petaled varieties. Just the same sort as those growing over the stone face at the front of the house. “Cuisse de nymphe—maiden’s blush. One of the old reprobate’s favorites.” He frowned. “To tell the truth, I never paid much attention to the portrait before. Of course, all of these have been reproduced in some collection or another. We’ll have a look in the library and check on it.”
Kacey was still staring at the portrait, a crease working across her brow, when Nicholas pulled her around to face him. “Tomorrow, that is. Right now, I’ve got other things on my mind than paint and canvas, no matter how old or cleverly executed.”
With a tremulous smile, Kacey turned into his embrace, combing her fingers through his thick hair and then rising to brush a kiss across his lips. Hard-faced, fierce with a need that was hunger and far, far more, Nicholas swept her up and strode down the hall to his bedroom.
A vein throbbed at his forehead as he laid Kacey back against the sapphire coverlet. “How right you look there.”
A muscle flashed at his jaw when he slipped the buttons of her dress free and tossed it away, feasting on her pure ivory nakedness.
In a wild flurry of rustling, he tugged his shirt from his pants and fumbled at his zipper with fingers suddenly unsteady.
Seconds later—seconds that seemed like an aching eternity—his clothes went flying atop hers. Slowly Nicholas laced his fingers through hers and stretched her arms above her, every movement deliberate as he covered her with his hard body. “Marry me, Kacey Mallory,” he ordered huskily. “Spend the rest of your life making me hungry, happy, and very crazy. Ferret through my mail. Sneak files out of my desk. Knock over my plants. Lock me in my own stables.” His eyes darkened, searching her face for her answer. “Make me the happiest man on earth, in short.”
“Yes—a thousand times yes, my love.” As Kacey spoke, a tear worked from the corner of her eye. Her love poured over him in a golden flow, nearly tangible.
At last some of Nicholas’s fear began to ebb. His head dropped, and he tongued one furled pink nipple to exquisite arousal. “Are you sure, Kacey? Are all the ghosts gone now? There’s room for only two in this bed, you know.” His fingers shifted, seeking her sweetness.
Jade eyes dazed with passion, Kacey stared up at him. “I—I told you I don’t believe in ghosts, Nicholas.”
“What do you believe in, green eyes?” he muttered, sliding his fingers deep, shifting his hips against her until she was mindless and gasping with the pleasure he brought her.
“You, Nicholas Draycott. Oh—”
“Prove it,” he muttered, arching his back and filling her with the steel of his own need.
Instantly Kacey’s fingers dug into his back. Her legs wrapped around him. “Please, Nicholas…” she moaned.
The Englishman’s face darkened with the strain of control. “God, Kacey, I wanted to make it last…but—ahhh—I don’t think I can. No, don’t touch me or I’ll—”
Her hands moved. Her soft, breathy gasps rocked through Nicholas like an explosion. He felt her tighten, convulsing around him, her eyes dazed as she pleaded for him to follow.
With a raw groan he did, sliding deep, oh, so deep, until time shimmered and wove its glowing strands around them, long spirals crossing and then meeting again, past, present and future caught together in the beauty the lovers wove with hearts and minds and bodies one.
Somewhere far out over the downs, a church bell rang twelve times—and then once more, one could have sworn, the last peal low and faint but clearly audible. A freak of nature, the experts called it. The product of high humidity and low temperature—or perhaps the opposite. Experts could never agree about such things, of course.
But the locals only shook their heads, knowing it was something very different. They knew the work of a ghost when they heard it—the work of the Draycott ghost, to be exact, signaling his presence with that phantom thirteenth stroke.
Upstairs in the long gallery, a dark portrait began to shimmer in an errant beam of sunlight from a not quite closed curtain. Golden light played over the man’s lips, carved in a proud, bittersweet smile.
In his hands, the blush-pink rose seemed to gleam, its petals slowly unfolding while rich perfume filled the air.
One petal moved, detached from the corona, and fell dreamlike to the floor.
And then, as the sun moved behind a cloud, the beam shifted and the portrait was cast back into shadow, resolving into a flat plane of oil and canvas once more.
From the end of the hall came the creak of wood, followed by soft, breathless laughter.
“Again?” Kacey’s voice was startled. “Nicholas, you wouldn’t—I couldn’t possibly—”
“Wanna bet?” It was a low, primal growl, dark with triumph, rich with promise. “Sweet Jesus, you make me feel like a randy sixteen-year-old, Kacey Mallory. Like a man’s who’s got two hundred years to make up.”
Which, in a way, he did. Perhaps they both did.
So it was no surprise that neither noticed the sleek gray form ghosting past the door and down the corridor. On velvet paws, the cat found the long gallery and came to rest before the portrait of Adrian Draycott.
His long tail arched, the great creature sniffed at the fallen rose petals, then turned to stare up at the painting.
For a moment, the air seemed to hum.
The cat fell back, legs tensed, tail high. He jumped…
Up, and then higher…
Right into the portrait, which shimmered and seemed to open as the gray body sailed inside, then disappeared from view completely, to the sound of low, welcoming laughter.
BRIDGE OF DREAMS
PART I
A Door of Shadows
PROLOGUE
Kent, England
Draycott Abbey
May 6, 1794
GABRIEL MONTSERRAT, THE fifth earl of Ashton, stood in the candlelight, letting the silence wash around him.
He was going to die. There was no escaping it now.
But it didn’t matter. Everything he had loved and valued was already gone, so what greater pain could death hold?
He touched the damp stone walls of Draycott’s wine cellar, feeling everywhere its vast age. A grand old house, it had witnessed so much of his life’s joy—and all its bitter sorrow.
Draycott Abbey alone he might miss. And also its arrogant master. But the rest?
No, not the London glitter. Not the jeweled, laughing women who ever sought his bed. Not the gaming, nor the vice. Certainly not the heady danger he had taken to courting ever more recklessly of late. He was the Rook, after all. Such excesses were expected of the man famous for saving French aristocrats from the guillotine. Yes, Gabriel was a man who would dare all, even if his exploits in revolutionary France left nothing but ashes in his mouth.
Now that she was gone.
Gabriel’s head was pounding and the wound in his side had settled into a vast, icy chill. Something was sticking to the lace of his shirt. Glancing down, he saw that it was his own drying blood. He raised a glass of wine to the darkness. “To you, Devere. You have won, damn you. I shall die in here behind this wall with my wine.”
He should have been terrified or furious, but he wasn’t. He’d lost too much to care. And, as he studied the case of wine, a strange smile twisted Ashton’s lips. Yes, it was over. Devere had seen to that when he’d shot the one woman Gabriel had ever loved.
But maybe there was a different way. Maybe in some other time, everything could be different. Maybe somewhere in the soul everyone carried memories of lovers lost and vows shared in palaces that had long since turned to dust.
For a moment the tall man with the sun-bronzed face and the unfashionably unpowdered hair studied the bottles nestled in a case of wood shavings and cotton batting—bottles which he had escorted all the way from the misty valleys of the Garonne in France, where t
he fires of revolution yet raged.
He had slipped through death, eluding his pursuers again and again, and in the process he had saved the family of the woman he loved. But he had returned to find death leering from his own doorstep.
Still, maybe there was a way.
A wild blaze filled his eyes. As hope lit his face, a fragment of the earl of Ashton’s notorious bravado returned.
The recklessness that Geneva had loved so well.
Before she’d breathed her last. Before she’d died in his arms. Yes, I will manage it somehow, my love, he vowed.
Because some things had power beyond belief or explaining. Perhaps beyond time itself.
Gritting his teeth against the pain tearing through his chest, Ashton pulled quill and ink from the small writing desk that Adrian Draycott kept by the far wall of his wine cellar. Slowly he began to write…
I, Gabriel Ashton, being whole of body and sound in mind and spirit, do hereby warrant this document as the final addition to my legal disposition of worldly goods and lands. Only one change is to be made, and that will be entered below…
His face gaunt with strain, the dying earl wrote on by the light of a guttering candle. Each sharp stroke that slashed at the vellum sent fresh blood oozing onto his white lace.
The contents of the case of superior Sauternes wine from the Garonne Valley of France, lately acquired by myself and now settled at my feet, are to be handled exactly as detailed below. Let it be recorded that ANY DEVIATIONS FROM MY WISHES WILL NEGATE THE TERMS OF THIS WILL. In that event, this wine is to be destroyed, with no benefit accruing to anyone. I hereby charge the heirs of my friend, Adrian Draycott, to see to the terms, and warn that WHOSOEVER SHALL TAMPER WITH THESE WORDS WILL FEEL THE FULL FORCE OF MY FURY.
Ashton coughed painfully. A dark blotch slid onto the sheet that was an addendum to his last will and testament, a document as reckless and outrageous as the fifth earl of Ashton had been in life.
And when he was finally done, when the last word lay like a black gash upon the page, the man who had once been the most dashing scoundrel and the greatest hero in all England gave a de spairing cry and fell forward onto the desk, where his lifeblood mingled with the still-wet ink.
He whispered Geneva’s name with his last breath.
Kent, England
Draycott Abbey
April 16, 1994
SOMEWHERE OVER THE WEALDEN hills of Kent a church bell was chiming.
The brawny mason from London barely noticed, too busy looking for the end of the rusted water pipe. Cursing, he inched along the wall, reaching fruitlessly through the suffocating darkness of Draycott Abbey’s wine cellars. With every cramped movement his oaths grew more colorful.
Suddenly his foot caught on a slab of uneven granite. He toppled forward, his ten-pound wrench slamming against the wall.
Somewhere beyond the granite slab came a low rumble, then the heave of rotting mortar. Moments later a six-foot section of wall gave way, toppling to the stone floor.
A square of darkness gaped from the far side of the cellar, where a narrow room now lay revealed.
“Well, I’ll be blowed,” the big man whispered.
“Bloody likely,” his companion answered. But as he spoke, he surreptitiously made the sign of the cross.
Suddenly, William Jones wasn’t feeling so grand himself. “Go and fetch his lordship. Reckon he’s going to want to see this for himself.”
But the man at his side didn’t move, transfixed by the opening in the wall that led away into darkness.
To a room that had lain sealed and secret for two hundred years.
“Whatta you reckon’s hidden in there, Will?”
“How in bleedin’ hell should I know?” There was nervousness in the big man’s voice now. Suddenly he wanted to be back in London, back in the crowded streets filled with lights and laughter and people.
Anywhere but here, with its odd silence.
With its strange, clinging darkness.
“Will?”
“Just go and get him, blast you!”
With the other man gone, the silence in the wine cellar grew choking. And although the brawny stonemason would forever afterward try to deny his memories and convince himself it had been no more than a freak of his imagination, at that moment he found himself implacably drawn toward that cold square of darkness.
Slowly, he raised his flashlight. Just beyond the jagged edge of the wall, light played over an old wooden crate thick with dust and cobwebs. Inside the rough planks he could just make out the outline of eight bottles of wine, dark streaks of mold straddling their corks.
And draped across the case, quill intact, lay a set of white bones, still cradled in fragments of lace and velvet.
Will Jones’s broad face went pale. His flashlight glinted off a jewel winking amid the network of bones, all that remained of a man who had died here two centuries ago and had been interred in this dusty grave. Then the stonemason saw the diamond ring and the sheet of vellum that lay scrolled between the white, bony fingers.
Not much frightened William Jones. He had fought in the Falklands and done a tour of hard labor in the emerald mines of Brazil, where greed and death lay thick as the stink of human sweat. But he had never known real terror until now as he stood with his flashlight playing through Draycott’s inky darkness.
Because suddenly he had the feeling he was not alone. Something seemed to push him inexorably forward, almost as if a hand had settled on his shoulder, forcing him toward that jagged piece of darkness. His jaw clenched as he fought the urge. Muscles bunched over his brawny shoulders. Against every wish, he felt his hand rise toward the dusty crate of wine. As it did, William Jones felt something move past his fingers, almost like the brush of cold water.
With a cry, he lashed out with his hammer, fighting the insane urge he couldn’t even name. “No, damn it. I won’t. I won’t!”
Stumbling like a drunken man, he lurched around and fought his way back toward the cellar door.
Toward the lights. Toward the noise and the life.
Not all the money in the world could keep him in that cold, restless tomb full of secrets.
OUTSIDE DRAYCOTT ABBEY the wind played through the elms and hawthorns. A bird cried once, high and shrill.
But within the shimmering moat, within the circling walls, all was silent. Deep in the wine cellars, light tore away from darkness, form from nothingness.
A shape emerged. A man, yet not quite a man.
His eyes glinted with the clear azure of a tropical sea and his hair shone the unrelenting black of a northern sky.
Alive, he was, light shimmering about his shoulders, catching in the fine lace that fell across his wrists.
Alive, yet not quite alive.
Back and forth the ghost of Draycott Abbey paced the cold floor, brows knit, hands locked behind his back. His eyes were fixed on a past half-forgotten and a future that refused to be revealed.
For a moment anger filled the darkness. Anger and a wanting that stretched down through the long, sad centuries.
I tried, Gabriel, but God help me I came too late. By then you were both gone. But where? What happened here in my absence?
The words drifted on the soft wind. They sighed through the roses wrapped about the abbey walls.
Of course, there was no answer. Adrian Draycott had long ago given up expecting one.
Only now the past stood open, unsealed with the stroke of a wrench, and Adrian was determined to see the old mystery solved. It was his sworn duty, in fact, as the guardian ghost of Draycott Abbey. On and on he paced, fire in his eyes and cold in his heart, walking this house he loved so well.
He wished he could change the past, but it was not possible. One could only go forward, trying desperately to remember all the old lessons while mastering the new ones. Sometimes the process left him very tired.
He made his way to the gray parapets. There he touched the lace that drifted at his cuff, lost in memories of a bolder time
, when the abbey had rung to his shouted commands and fourscore servants had rushed to do his slightest bidding.
But no more. Now he was just another shadow at the edge of the roof, just another memory among all the others that filled this great, grand house. And he found himself wondering if his long-dead friend Gabriel had been right. Maybe there was a way that the past could finally be set to rights.
It all depended on the wine, of course. And the hearts of two stubborn people. But Adrian swore that if it was even remotely possible to see Gabriel’s mystery solved, he would somehow see it done.
Deep in the night the church bells chimed, twelve times and then once more, a low, ghostly hum. The scent of lilacs seemed to drift upon the still air, while the dreaming house slept on. And Adrian’s tall form shimmered, moving restlessly among the abbey’s shadows.
CHAPTER ONE
“ONE MILLIONS POUNDS?” Dominic Alexander Montserrat, the tenth earl of Ashton, sank down in a chintz wing chair at the sunny corner of Nicholas Draycott’s study. Below the window, Draycott Abbey’s moat shimmered and danced, but Dominic barely noticed. “I don’t believe it.”
Nicholas Draycott smiled broadly. “Then you’d better start. As a matter of fact, the solicitor tells me the figure might be closer to two million.”
Dominic’s strong fingers, callused from months of stripping oak casks and pruning grapevines, dived through his long black hair. “But how, Nicholas? Why? And when—”
His old friend, now the twelfth Viscount Draycott and devoted inheritor of the beautiful Jacobean moat house called Draycott Abbey, interrupted with a laugh. “Hold on, Dominic. I realize this must be a huge shock—it bloody well was to me, too. At least you didn’t have to go down and confront a skeleton that had been immured for two hundred years in your wine cellar.”
“I still can’t believe it!”
“According to the date on the will, that’s when he died. And this man Gabriel, your ancestor, was most precise in how he wanted that wine of his to be treated. With a million pounds at stake, I suggest that it’s worth taking the trouble to comply with his conditions. Not to mention the fact that he threatened anyone who tried to obstruct his plans. ‘Whosoever shall tamper with these words will feel the full force of my fury,’ was how he phrased it.”
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