by India Grey
Lord, she’d better still be here.
His footsteps sounded as loud as gunshots as he walked through the silent rooms. Passing the foot of the stairs, he glanced at the grandfather clock and felt a sudden beat of hope. It was half past three in the morning—of course—she’d be in bed, wouldn’t she?
He took the stairs two at a time, aware that his heart was beating hard and unevenly. Outside the door to her room he tipped his head back and inhaled deeply, clenching his hand into a fist and holding it there for a second before knocking very softly. There was no answer, so, hardly breathing, he opened the door.
It was immediately obvious the room was empty. The curtains were undrawn, the moonlight falling on a neatly made bed, an uncluttered chest of drawers.
She might be in bed, he thought savagely. The question was, whose?
Adrenaline was circulating like neat alcohol through his bloodstream as he went back down the stairs. How the hell was he going to break the news to Jasper that she’d gone?
And that it was all his fault?
He headed for the drawing room, suddenly in desperate need of a drink. Pushing open the door, he was surprised to see that the fire was hissing softly in the grate, spilling out a halo of rosy light into the empty room. He strode over to the table where the drinks tray was and was just about to turn on the light beside it when he stopped dead.
Sophie was lying on the rug in front of the fire, hidden from view by the sofa when he’d first come into the room. Her head was resting on one outstretched arm, and she’d pulled the pins from her hair so that it fell, gleaming, over the white skin of her wrist like a pool of warm, spilled syrup. She was lying on her side, wearing a man’s dinner jacket, but even though it was miles too big for her it couldn’t quite disguise the swooping contours of her hip and waist.
He let out a long, slow breath, unaware until that moment that he’d been holding it in. Tearing his gaze away from her with physical effort, he reached for a glass and splashed a couple of inches of brandy into it, then walked slowly around the sofa to stand over her.
If the impact of seeing her from behind had made him forget to breathe, the front view was even more disturbing. Her face was flushed from the warmth, and the firelight made exaggerated shadows beneath the dark lashes fanning over her cheeks and the hollow above the cupid’s bow of her top lip. Tilting his head, he let his eyes move over her, inch by inch, adjusting his jaded perception of her to fit the firelit vision before him.
She looked …
He took a swallow of brandy, hoping it might wash away some of the less noble adjectives that arrived in his head, courtesy of six months spent in the company of a regiment of sex-starved men. Vulnerable, that was it, he thought with a pang. He remembered watching her sleep on the train and being struck by her self-containment. He frowned. Looking at her now, it appeared to him more like self-protection, as if she had retreated into some private space where she was safe and untouchable.
He felt a sudden jolt pass through him, like a tiny electric shock, and realised that her eyes had opened and she was looking up at him. Like a cat she raised herself into a sitting position, flexing the arm she’d been sleeping on, arching her spine.
‘You’re back,’ she said in a voice that was breathy with sleep.
He took another mouthful of brandy, registering for the first time the sheer relief he’d felt when he saw her, which had got rather subsumed by other, more urgent sensations.
‘I thought you’d gone.’
It was as if he’d dropped an ice cube down her back. Getting to her feet, she turned away from him, smoothing the wrinkled dress down over her hips. He could see now that jacket she was wearing was his, and a fresh pulse of desire went through him.
‘Sorry. Obviously I would have, but I didn’t think there would be any trains in the middle of the night.’ There was a slight hint of sarcasm in her voice, but it was a pale echo of her earlier bravado. ‘And I didn’t want to leave until I knew how Ralph was. Is he—?’
‘He’s the same. Stable.’
‘Oh.’ She turned to him then, her face full of tentative hope in the firelight. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
Kit exhaled heavily, remembering the quiet determination with which she’d kept fighting to keep Ralph alive, reluctant to take the hope away. ‘I don’t know. It might be.’
‘Oh.’ She nodded once, quickly, and he knew she understood. ‘How’s Tatiana? And Jasper?’
‘Both asleep when I left. They gave Tatiana a sleeping pill.’ He couldn’t keep the cynicism from his tone. ‘Unsurprisingly Jasper didn’t need one.’
Sophie’s laugh had a break in it. ‘Oh, God. He’ll be unconscious until mid-morning. I hope the nurses have a megaphone and a bucket of iced water.’
Kit didn’t smile. He came towards the sofa and leaned against the arm, swilling the last mouthful of brandy around his glass so that it glinted like molten sunlight. Warily, Sophie watched him, hardly able to breathe. The fire held both of them in an intimate circle, sealed together against the darkness of the room, the castle, the frozen world beyond.
‘He was very emotional. I know he’s had a lot to drink, but even so …’
Sophie sat down on the edge of a velvet armchair. ‘That’s Jasper. He can’t help it. He wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s one of the things I love most about him.’
‘It’s one of the things that irritate me most about him,’ Kit said tersely. ‘He was in bits all the way to the hospital—sobbing like a baby and saying over and over again that there was so much he still needed to say.’
Bloody hell, Jasper, Sophie thought desperately. Coming out to his family was one thing. Getting drunk and dropping heavy hints so they guessed enough to ask her was quite another. ‘He was upset, that’s all,’ she said quickly, unable to keep the defensiveness from her tone. ‘There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion—some people might regard it as being normal, in fact. He’d just seen his father collapse in front of him and stop breathing—’
‘Even so. This is just the beginning. If he can’t cope now—’
‘What do you mean, this is just the beginning?’
Kit got up and went to stand in front of the fire, looking into the flames. ‘Who knows how long this will go on for? The doctors are saying he’s stable, which Tatiana and Jasper seem to think is just a stage on the way back to complete recovery.’
‘And you think differently,’ Sophie croaked. Oh, dear. Something about the sight of his wide shoulders silhouetted against the firelight had made it hard to speak. She tucked her legs up beneath her, her whole body tightening around the fizz of arousal at its core.
‘He was without oxygen for a long time,’ Kit said flatly.
‘Oh.’ Sophie felt the air rush from her lungs and felt powerless to take in any more to replace it. She had tried. She had tried so hard, but it hadn’t been enough.
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying it’s highly likely he won’t come out of this. That at some point in the next few days Jasper’s going to have to deal with Ralph’s death.’
‘Oh. I see,’ she said faintly. ‘That soon?’ Something about the way he was talking set alarm bells off in some distant part of her brain. He’s going to tell me he wants me to leave now, she thought in panic. Tonight, before Jasper gets back …
‘I think so.’ His voice was low and emotionless. ‘And if I’m right, I think it would be better if he didn’t also have to deal with the girl he’s crazy about running out on him.’
Steeling herself as if against a blow, Sophie blinked in confusion. ‘But … I don’t understand. You asked me to go …’
Kit turned around to look at her. The firelight gilded his cheekbones and brought an artificial warmth to his cold silver eyes. ‘Things have changed,’ he drawled softly, giving her an ironic smile. ‘And now I’m asking you to stay. You’ve played the part of Jasper’s doting girlfriend for two days. I’m afraid you’ll just have to play it a bit longe
r.’
CHAPTER NINE
KIT was used to action. He was used to giving an order and having it obeyed, working out what needed to be done and doing it, and in the days that followed trying to penetrate the dense forest of bureaucracy that choked the Alnburgh estate tested his patience to the limit.
He spent most of his time in the library, which was one of the few staterooms at Alnburgh to have escaped the attention of Tatiana’s interior designer. A huge oriel window overlooked the beach, and on a day like today, when sea, sky and sand were a Rothko study of greys, the bleakness of the view made the inside seem warm by comparison.
Putting the phone down after yet another frustrating conversation with the Inland Revenue, Kit glanced along the beach, subconsciously looking for the slender figure, bright hair whipped by the wind, who had made it so bloody difficult to concentrate yesterday. But apart from a couple of dog walkers the long crescent of sand was deserted.
He turned away, irritation mixing with relief.
It had been three days since Ralph’s heart attack, three days since he’d asked Sophie to stay on at Alnburgh, and things had settled into a routine of sorts. Every morning he drove a pale, shaken Jasper and a tight-lipped Tatiana to the hospital in Newcastle to sit at Ralph’s bedside, though Ralph remained unconscious and unaware of their vigil. He stayed long enough to have a brief consultation with one of the team of medical staff and then returned to Alnburgh to avoid Sophie and begin to work his way through the landslide of overdue bills, complaints from estate tenants and un-followed-up quotes from builders and surveyors about the urgent work the castle required.
It was a futile task, of that he was certain. Often, as he came across yet another invoice from Ralph’s wine merchant or Tatiana’s interior designer, he remembered Ralph saying, I have every intention of lasting a lot more than seven years.
Now it looked as if he wouldn’t make it to seven days, and his inexplicable refusal to acknowledge the existence of British inheritance tax probably meant that the Alnburgh estate was doomed. It would be sold off in lots and the castle would be turned into a hotel, or one of those awful conference centres where businessmen came for team-building weekends and bonding exercises.
Ironically, because in thirty-four years there Kit hadn’t formed any kind of bond with the rest of his family.
He walked back to the desk, leaning on it for a moment with his arms braced and his head lowered, refusing to yield to the avalanche of anger and bitterness and sheer bloody frustration that threatened to bury him.
There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion—some people might regard it as being normal.
Sophie’s voice drifted through his head, and he straightened up, letting out a long, ragged breath. It was something that had happened with ridiculous regularity these last few days, when time and time again he’d found himself replaying conversations he’d had with her, thinking about things she’d said, and wondering what she’d say about other stuff.
It made him uncomfortable to suspect that a lot of the time she’d talked a lot of sense. He’d wanted to write her off as a lightweight. An airhead actress who was easy on the eye, and in other respects too, but who wasn’t big on insight.
But if that was the case, why did he find himself wanting to talk to her so badly now?
Because Jasper was either drunk or hungover and Tatiana was—well, Tatiana, he thought wearily. Sophie was the only other person who hadn’t lost the plot.
An outsider, just like him.
Sophie dreamed that she was being pulled apart by rough hands. She curled up tightly into a ball, hugging her knees to her chest, trying to stop shivering, trying to stop the hurting deep inside and calling out to Kit because he was the only one who could help her. She needed his strong, big hands to press down and stop the blood from coming.
She awoke to see a thin light breaking through the gap in the curtains. Her body was stiff with cold, and from the cramped position that she’d slept in, but as she unfurled her legs she felt a familiar spasm of pain in her stomach and let out a groan of dismay.
Her mind spooled backwards. Had it really been a month since that December night in Paris? Jean-Claude had called at the apartment in the early hours, reeking of wine and sweat and cigarettes, almost combusting with lust after an evening working on ‘Nude with Lilies’. Bent double with period pain, Sophie had only gone down to let him in because she’d known he’d wake the whole street if she didn’t. That might have been preferable to the unpleasant little scene that had followed. Jean-Claude had been unwilling to take no for an answer, and it was only thanks to the amount of booze he’d sunk that Sophie had been able to fend him off. He’d fallen asleep, snoring at ear-splitting volume, sprawled across the bed, and Sophie had spent the rest of the night sitting on a hard kitchen chair, curled around a hot-water bottle, deliberately not thinking of anything but the pain blossoming inside her.
Tntatively she sat up now, wincing as the fist in her belly tightened and twisted. Since she was thirteen she’d suffered seven kinds of hell every month with her period. The cramps always came first, but it wouldn’t be long before the bleeding started. Which meant she’d better get herself to a chemist pretty quickly, since she hadn’t come prepared and neither Tatiana nor Mrs Daniels were the kind of cosy, down-to-earth women she could ask for help. Just the thought of saying the words ‘sanitary protection’ to either of them brought her out in a cold sweat.
She got out of bed, stooping slightly with the pain, and reached for her clothes.
It was the coldest winter in forty years. The temperature in the castle hardly seemed to struggle above freezing, and Sophie was forced to abandon all ambitions of style in favour of the more immediate need to ward off death by hypothermia. This had meant plundering Jasper’s wardrobe to supplement her own, and she’d taken to sleeping in his old school rugby shirt, which was made to keep out the chill of a games field in the depths of winter and was therefore just about suitable for the bedrooms at Alnburgh. She couldn’t bear the thought of exposing any flesh to the icy air so pulled her jeans on with it, zipping them up with difficulty over her tender, swollen stomach, and grabbed her purse.
Going down the stairs, clutching the banister for support, she glanced at the grandfather clock in the hall below. Knickers, she’d slept late—Jasper would have gone to the hospital ages ago.
She felt a twist of anguish as she wondered if he’d been hungover again this morning. Sergio had been putting pressure on Jasper to let him come up and be with him through all this, and Jasper was finding it increasingly hard to deal with his divided loyalties. Sophie didn’t blame him for trying, though. Kit had given her a hard enough time—what would he do to flamboyant, eccentric drama-queen Sergio?
Not kiss him, presumably …
‘Morning. Just about.’
Talk of the devil. His sardonic, mocking voice startled her. That was why her mouth was suddenly dry and her heart had sped up ridiculously.
‘Morning.’
She attempted to sound aloof and distracted, but as she hadn’t spoken a word since she’d woken up she just sounded bad-tempered. He was wearing a dark blue cashmere sweater and in the defeated grey light of the bitter morning he looked tanned and incongruously handsome, like some modern-day heart-throb superimposed on a black and white background. Maybe that accounted for the bad-tempered tone slightly as well.
His deadpan gaze swept over her, one arched brow rising. ‘Off to rugby training?’
She was confused for a second, until she remembered she was wearing Jasper’s rugby shirt.
She faked an airy smile. ‘I thought I’d give it a miss today and have a cigarette behind the bike sheds instead. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s really my game.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he drawled quietly with the faintest smile. ‘I think you’d make a pretty good hooker.’
‘Very funny.’ She kept going, forcing herself to hold herself more upright in spite of the feeling of having been kicked in t
he stomach by a horse. ‘I’m going to the village shop. I need to pick up a few things.’
‘Things?’
Bloody hell, why did she always feel the need to explain herself to him? If she hadn’t said anything she wouldn’t have put herself in the position of having to lie. Again.
‘I’m coming down with a cold. Tissues, aspirin—that sort of thing.’
‘I’m sure Mrs Daniels would be able to help you out with all that,’ he said blandly. ‘Would you like me to ask her?’
‘No, thank you,’ she snapped. The kicked-by-a-horse feeling was getting harder to ignore. She paused on the bottom step, clinging to the newel post as nausea rose inside her. The pain used to make her sick when she was younger and, though it hadn’t happened for a few years, her body seemed to have developed a keen sense of comedy timing whenever Kit Fitzroy was around. ‘I’ll go myself, if that’s OK? I wasn’t aware I was under house arrest?’
From where she was standing his hooded eyes were on a level with hers. ‘You’re not.’
Sophie gave a brittle little laugh. ‘Then why are you treating me like a criminal?’
He waited a moment before replying, looking at her steadily with those cold, opaque eyes. A muscle was flickering slightly in his taut, tanned cheek. ‘I suppose,’ he said with sinister softness, ‘because I find it hard to believe that you’ve suddenly been struck with an urgent desire to go shopping when it’s minus five outside and you’re only half dressed.’
‘I don’t have time for this,’ she muttered, going to move past him, desperate to escape the scrutiny of his gaze. Desperate for fresh air, even if it was of the Siberian variety. ‘I’m dressed perfectly adequately.’
‘I suppose it depends what for,’ he said gravely as she passed him. ‘Since you’re clearly not wearing a bra.’
With a little gasp of outrage, Sophie looked down and saw that the neck of the rugby shirt was open wide enough to reveal a deep ravine of cleavage. Jasper’s fourteen-year-old chest was obviously considerably smaller than hers. She snatched the collar and wrenched it together.
