The
Heart
Denied
Copyright © 2010 by Linda Anne Wulf
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2010
ISBN 978-0615432427
Hydra Publications
337 Clifty Dr
Madison, IN 47250
www.hydrapublications.com
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Also by Linda Anne Wulf
Heart of the Hunter
Samples of Other Hydra Titles
Andraste by Marisa Mills
Bridgeworld by Travis McBee
Gnosis by Tom Wallace
Secret by Morinda Montgomery
The Universal Mirror by Gwen Perkins
PROLOGUE
London
June 28, 1728
Bed curtains?
Thorne Neville rolled over with a groan, only to see the deep cleft in a plump bosom. Six inches closer, he might have smothered.
There were worse ways to die.
“Sleep, Mister Adams,” said a drowsy voice at his ear. “‘Tis barely dawn.”
Mister Adams. His alias. That explained the bed curtains. “You sleep,” he mumbled. “I’ll be off.”
“So early?”
“Aye.” He sat up and feigned a yawn to make his next words sound casual. “I’m going home.”
He tensed as the mattress shifted and flint struck behind him. Candlelight bathed the bed, revealing his stray clothing—which he gathered with unusual haste while Katy Devlin’s stare seared his back.
“Home? You’re leaving Oxford?”
Dread slowed Thorne’s heart. Must she make this more difficult than it already was? He tugged on his stockings and tied the garters, jammed his arms into his shirtsleeves. “Do you not think four years at university enough?” Turning, he pinned Katy with the unnatural brilliance of his blue eyes, an intimidating maneuver he’d often used to his advantage, though never on a woman.
She didn’t flinch. “Then you’ll be leaving London, too, Mister Adams. And me.”
It was Thorne who flinched, dropping his gaze. “I…I’m not ‘leaving London,’ nor anyone in particular.” He freed his black mane from inside the shirt and smoothed the wrinkled linen into his breeches. “I merely return to my ancestral home to take up the reins where my father left off.”
“And would that be, sir, the very place you’ve avoided like the plague, since he died? Where you’ve not ventured in four years, neither at Yuletide nor harvest?”
The barb pierced its target. In return, Thorne pierced Katy with a silent glare.
“Well then, be off, Mister Adams!” She rolled out of bed and flung on a wrapper, swiping a sleeve across her eyes in the same motion. “I’ve other gentleman callers to see today.”
“Aye,” Thorne muttered. “We’ve each our obligations, however less than noble.” He fastened his waistcoat, yanking at the mother-of-pearl buttons.
“But you know mine. I know naught of yours.”
So the fight wasn’t over. “Nor would you care to,” he said shortly, hoping to put an end to it.
“You think not?” Katy sashayed toward him, fists planted firmly on her ample hips. “Then all you know of me is that I sleep with men for my keep.”
“And that it was not by your choosing,” he said quickly—too quickly.
“Och, defending me against myself now, are you? And what does it matter how I got here? I am who I am, Mister Adams, and I’ll be begging no pardons, even from you. Who the deuce are you this morn, by the by? Where’s the man who’s bedded me every se’nnight for four years? He’s never judged me.”
“Nor shall he.” A snap of his wrist shook the folds from his neckcloth. He looped it around his throat, briefly considering hanging himself with it.
“Then look at me,” Katy pleaded, tears constricting her words, “and tell me what summons you home with such haste you cannot linger another hour.”
Thorne swallowed a sudden tightness in his own throat. “You ask too much of me,” he said, fumbling with the long ends of his neckcloth.
“Och, sir, I’ve never so much as asked your true name, or whence you come. Here, let me.” She brushed his hands aside and tied the linen with deft fingers. “All I know is that someone holds stewardship of your lands in your absence…has he died, that person? Is that why you must go?”
Thorne looked into her eyes—those emerald wells of compassion from which he’d drunk for four years now, believing that as long as he paid for the privilege, there would be no demand for his heart—long ago stolen and buried.
He’d been wrong. Wrong to think Katy’s profession made her invulnerable. Wrong to keep calling here after he saw the signs. And wrong to confess to her that she was his first and only lover.
But he hadn’t been wrong about his heart. Years ago gone with a young woman to her grave, its resurrection was out of the question.
The sun’s first pale rays rippled over Katy’s hair. Unable to help himself, Thorne touched an auburn lock before going on to trace the rose-petal softness of her lips. His pulse quickened as she caught his fingertip between gentle teeth.
Silently cursing fate, he hauled Katy to him, slipping her wrapper and shift off one shoulder to caress its smooth roundness. Rebelling suddenly at the passing time, as well as at other growing constraints, he slid his hand down to cup a full, firm breast. He encountered Katy’s open palm instead.
He smiled into her eyes; he knew this game. “You would bargain your favors with me, Miss Devlin?”
“They are my stock in trade,” she said, irony lacing her words.
Thorne’s smile froze. “So they are—as you seem bloody bent upon reminding me this morning.” He snagged his tricorne from the hat stand and strode toward the door. “I should have gone before sunup, at any rate.”
“Mister Adams.”
So grim was the note in her voice that he halted in his tracks and turned to meet her unblinking regard. Her tears were wiped dry.
“If you pass through that door, sir, without telling me who or what summons you away-” Katy took a deep, tremulous breath and squared her shoulders. “Then I shan’t receive you again.”
I won’t be calling here again, Katy. He knew he should say it, but the words stuck in his throat.
Awash in the rosy light of dawn, she stood with her gaze unwavering, hands loosely clasped, mussed hair tumbling to her waist over the nightclothes still
drooping from one shoulder. That she made no move to rearrange herself only added to her dignity.
But Thorne feared that the anguished pride in those dry, green eyes would forever haunt his dreams.
In three strides he had her by the shoulders. He pressed his lips to her pale brow, then took a deep breath and drew back to look her in the eye. He owed her at least that much.
You owe her the truth. Every rotting word of it.
“I’ve a promise to keep,” he heard himself say in a low, taut voice. “An obligation to fulfill.” He firmed his hold on her shoulders and shook his head, scarcely able to believe it himself.
“I must go home, Katy…to meet my bride.”
ONE
Wycliffe Hall
June 29, 1728
Behind a desk that nearly dwarfed her, Dame Priscilla Carswell shot to her feet. “How dare you barge in here unannounced.”
“I dare,” Tobias Hobbs fired back, “the way the Combs wench dared barge into my stables this morn.” He slapped his cap against his thigh. “Keep your fool maids in the Hall where they belong, Carswell. I’m stable master, not a bloody nursemaid. I’ve no time for their bawling.”
“Yet you’ve ample time for their deflowering,” the housekeeper retorted, blushing to the roots of her perfect white coif.
Hobbs smirked. “They come to me, and I’m not one to refuse. But I’ve my hands full just now-”
“And you think I don’t?” Dame Carswell folded scrawny arms over her pleated stomacher. “With his lordship to arrive from University in two days, his guests even sooner, and my best maid sick as a pup over the way you’ve used her? Twice this morn I’ve sent her topstairs to collect herself!” The housekeeper’s beady eyes flashed as she rapped a finger on the desk blotter. “Elaine Combs is not your common trollop, and ‘twas you hounding her a month ago. So you’ve brass, Toby Hobbs, marching into my office with your dung stench and acting my superior! I shall speak to Pennington straightaway-”
“You do that, you old crow. He doesn’t want her in the stables any more than I do.” Hobbs turned on a mud-caked heel and, stealing a backward glance at the housekeeper’s livid expression, sauntered across the great hall and out through the kitchen, tipping his hat to blushing maids all the way.
*
Thorne stared out the coach window, his gut tightening as Wycliffe Hall slid into view. A jewel, some called the huge Tudor hall with the flagged terraces and sloping gardens, faceted as it was by numerous oriels and gables and set in such lush Northamptonshire countryside. But the jewel had a flaw. Meant to save lives, the towering stone keep at its northeast corner had so far only taken one.
The coach ascended the winding flagstone drive. Reaching the terrace, Thorne watched paneled-oak doors with leaded lights swing wide on the portico.
A tall, white-haired man in gray livery stood framed in the doorway, looking so confounded that Thorne had to chuckle. “Steady, Jennings,” he said, alighting from the coach. “I’m two days early, not back from the dead.”
A snap of the old butler’s bony fingers brought two footmen scurrying out for Thorne’s trunk. “Welcome home, M’lord,” Jennings croaked, bowing as Thorne doffed his tricorne and ascended the portico. “Though ‘tis rather topsy-turvy just now.”
Thorne crossed the threshold and peered between the carved-oak panels of the draft screen. “I quite see what you mean.”
Gray-frocked women swarmed the great hall, some polishing glass chimneys, others waxing the parquet flooring, still others remounting the tapestry over the massive mantelpiece. Several footmen hauled a settee and some rolled carpets from the east wing into the west.
All this, for me and two guests? Perhaps word had leaked that one of his guests would soon be mistress of Wycliffe Hall?
Behind him, Jennings cleared his throat. “We’d have gathered to greet you properly, had we known-”
“Then I’ve spared the lot of us, haven’t I.” Dodging the commotion, Thorne walked the great hall of his ancestors, reacquainting his gaze with the carved-oak wainscoting, the arched braces and blackened collar-beams high overhead. The old oak trestle table stood, newly sanded and waxed to a shine, on the dais with twenty chairs at either side, all under the same three-tiered chandelier from which he’d once managed a swing and gotten baptized with hot wax for his trouble.
He smiled inwardly to see the servants going about their work as if he wasn’t there; Carswell had always run a tight ship. “Where is the old dame?” he muttered over his shoulder.
“She’s been fetched, M’lord,” Jennings said, predictably at Thorne’s heels.
“His lordship’s chambers are not readied.” Dame Carswell’s steel-velvet voice accompanied a staccato step that double-timed Thorne’s easy stride. “Leave his trunk outside my office.”
The footmen hauling the trunk nearly fell down the stairs in their haste to obey. The housekeeper turned to Thorne and curtseyed. “M’lord, what a pleasant surprise.” Swathed in black bombazine, her white cuffs and cap as starched as her backbone, Dame Carswell spared him a tight-lipped smile. “We might have been prepared for your early arrival if not for Tobias Hobbs’ meddling.”
Thorne arched one eyebrow. “A matter for Pennington, surely.”
“I have informed him, M’lord.”
“And my guests, have they arrived early as well?”
“No, M’lord.”
“Thank Providence for small favors, eh Carswell?”
Her mouth only grew more pinched.
“Never mind, you’ll soon have everything to rights.” Teasing her had amused him when he was a pup and his father had left the discipline to her; now it seemed tiresome. He gazed easily over her head. “Where is Pennington?”
“In the south pasture, M’lord. Some ewes are down, I believe.”
Thorne’s pulse tripped. “There’s a welcome home.” With a cursory nod for Carswell, he strode toward the kitchen and the nearest rear exit.
Suddenly he slowed his pace, his eye catching a movement on the musicians’ gallery. No one had been up there in the eighteen years since his mother died. His father had forbidden it, along with music in general. As Thorne gazed up intently, a figure stepped back into the shadows, its slender gray sleeve and pale hand disappearing as the narrow gap in the curtains closed.
He thought about slipping up the service stairs to catch the servant red-handed, but he had reached the kitchen door by then. He opened it to a blast of steam, smelling of onions, thyme, and roasted meat. Chatter died, replaced by gasps from the scullery maids. A kettle lid clattered on the stone floor.
“Have a care, Hillary. Bless ye, Master Thorne…M’lord…ye’re home!” A frowsy-haired woman materialized from the haze, her flour-covered hands clasped to her bosom, her old eyes misting. “Och, and look what a man ye’ve growed into!”
“A man indeed,” someone exclaimed, prompting a whispered “whusht” and a giggle. Thorne paused to give the cook a courtly bow and a droll wink, and then turned and strode backward as he headed for the rear entry. “‘Tis grand to see you, Mistress MacBride,” he called out over the sounds of hissing steam, sizzling meat and popping coals. “Of all I missed at University, ‘twas you I missed most.”
“Ha! More likely ye missed my scones,” she crowed back at him, her ruddy cheeks turning redder.
Thorne halted in the doorway, grinning. “Any fresh?”
“Maids or scones, M’lord?” Mistress MacBride countered, with a wry glance at her scullery crew. “Aye, we’ll have them in a trice.” She shook a finger at Thorne. “But only if ye call me ‘Bridey,’ like ye’ve always done.”
He chuckled. “Very well, Bridey. Send the scones ‘round to the library with a pot of tea in an hour. With two cups.”
He saw her sudden consternation, and heard it when she must have thought he was out of earshot.
“Eating in the old baron’s reading room,” she fussed; but then she cautioned her giggling maids. “Mind ye’ve no fool notions, he’s not Youn
g Master anymore. He’s our lord and liege now, and I’d best remember it quick as any of ye.”
Out in the foyer, Thorne smiled to himself. If only Carswell were so adaptable.
*
“Aye. Two of Graham’s ewes were found dead this morn,” Arthur Pennington, longtime steward of Wycliffe Hall, replied with a grim nod.
“Anthrax?” Thorne held his breath.
“God willing, no. Kendall’s having a look. He’ll send word.”
Thorne nodded, treading carefully over the herders’ rutted path in the buckled shoes he had not bothered to change. Arthur was his mentor, but he tended to put more stock in God than Thorne was willing to invest. He only hoped his arrival home didn’t mark the loss of their entire flock—a sorry way to carry on his father’s decades of hard work.
Thorne stared off at the manor church, nestled in a hollow near a copse of trees. Arthur must have noticed the direction of that stare.
“He’s missed by all,” the steward said quietly. “Parson finds a fresh posy on the gravestone every Sunday. Hasn’t a notion who’s leaving it there.”
Shame, and something close to rebellion, twisted Thorne’s belly, with the thought that, while he was hiding away at Oxford, someone who wasn’t even kin had paid regular tribute at his father’s grave.
“And the salmon?” He gazed at the stone bridge over the deep, silent currents of the beck. An approaching cloudband shadowed its gray waters.
“A good haul. Thirty stone or better,” Arthur replied. They had reached the rear gardens, where the steward leaned against the gatepost and lit his brier pipe. “When will your guests arrive?” he asked after a few puffs.
“Any hour now. Best not tell Carswell, though.”
Unsmiling, Arthur drew on his pipe again and said casually, “No doubt you’re looking forward to meeting Radleigh’s daughter.”
“Aye, considering she’s to be my wife.” Thorne frowned. “What’s on your mind, Arthur?”
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