AFTER SHE’D UNDRESSED for bed, Emma had gone to the window of her room and watched twilight deepen to dusk and then to deepest night. Still she stood there, remembering what had happened in that country inn. And everything that had happened in the intervening years.
Then she had carefully examined each word she’d exchanged with the Earl of Greystone since her arrival at Leighton. Trying to understand why he had not acknowledged that he was the man in the story she’d told him. Wondering what she would have done if he had.
After hours, during which she had found no satisfactory solution to either of those questions, she had decided her only course of action was to do what she had done once before. She had gone to find the one person who could answer them.
WHEN SHE HAD ASCENDED the flight of stairs, she discovered that tonight there was no light at all on the second floor of the keep, not even the thread along the bottom of the door. The single candle she carried cast little illumination in the cavernous space, barely dispelling the shadows in front of her as she crossed the stone floor.
For some reason she felt the same disquiet she had experienced while staring up at the tower window the evening of their arrival. Although the sensation was vague and undefined, she knew that it portended that something was very wrong.
If she had been of a less stalwart nature or less determined to get to the bottom of Greystone’s behavior, she might have fled, assigning the unease she felt to Jamie’s imaginary ghosts. Instead, being who she was, as soon as she reached the door to the earl’s rooms, she raised her hand and knocked.
The noise, echoing off stone walls, seemed unnaturally loud in the predawn stillness. She waited, holding her breath in anticipation. Although she strained to hear above the pounding of her heart, there was no response. Perhaps he was a sound sleeper, or perhaps…
She glanced across the tower to the corner where the spiral staircase led to the roof. Clutching her shawl more closely around her, she walked over to them.
Despite their configuration, standing at the bottom, she could see the sky, far lighter than it had been on her previous visits. She set the candle down on one of the lower steps and began to climb, still uncertain after all those hours what she would say to him.
It was obvious as soon as she stepped off the top step, however, that he wasn’t here. The battlements, revealed in the half light of impending dawn, were empty, each merlon and crenel outlined like dragon’s teeth against the sky.
What do you suggest, Lady Barrington? A plunge off the parapet?
She fought the strongest inclination to climb the steps to the wall walk and look down. A patently ridiculous notion, born of anxiety, not logic.
There was no earthly reason to be frightened because she couldn’t find him. He was asleep. He hadn’t heard her knock. Or, more likely, he had chosen to ignore it. No matter what she told herself, that unsettling feeling that something was wrong, which she’d felt since she had entered the keep, persisted.
The sky was beginning to lighten perceptibly now. The servants would be rising in a few minutes to begin the numerous tasks involved in seeing to the well-being of the earl’s guests. If she didn’t get back to her room soon, she would be caught wandering the house in her nightgown.
Taking one last look around the roof, she hurriedly descended into the darkness of the lower level. She stooped to pick up the still-burning candle, intending to light her way to the other set of stairs.
Halfway across, however, the temptation proved too great. She stopped before the oaken door, raising her fist to knock again. She changed the motion in midair, her hand closing around the latch instead, seemingly without her conscious volition.
She slowly pushed the massive door inward and stepped inside. Even with the faint illumination provided by the single candle, it was immediately clear that she had entered a totally masculine domain.
Leather-bound volumes neatly arrayed on shelves lined two of the walls. The gold lettering on their spines glowed dully in the dim candlelight. On the third wall, arranged above the fireplace, was a display of weapons, including both firearms and swords, most of them antique.
Two chairs had been placed invitingly before the hearth, but the ashes inside it were cold and gray. Beside one of the chairs was a small table, which held an empty glass and a half-full decanter.
The other side of the room was dominated by a massive rosewood desk. It had been positioned in front of the oriel window, now touched with a first pale ray of the rising sun.
It was not until she had walked to the center of the room and nearly stumbled over them that she discovered the objects in front of the desk. Books and papers were scattered haphazardly over the stones. A broken inkwell lay there as well, the pool of black liquid around it reflecting the flame of her candle.
Unthinkingly, she bent to pick up the book nearest the well before its pages could be ruined. Only when she had the volume in her hands did she realize that what she held was an account book. She closed it, feeling like a voyeur, and laid it carefully on the desk.
This destruction could not have been the result of an accident. It was obvious someone had deliberately pushed everything from the surface of the desk onto the floor.
What emotion had precipitated that action? she wondered. And where was the man who had performed it?
The door to the remaining rooms of the apartment stood open. Emboldened by the continuing silence and the growing sense that she was quite alone here, she walked across the cold floor to peer inside.
In the growing light, she could see it was as deserted as the sitting room and the roof had been. The bed had not even been slept in.
The feeling of dread that had haunted her since her arrival swelled to a sickening flood of anxiety. It was nearly dawn, and it was obvious the earl had spent the night elsewhere. With someone else?
Was that why he had kept silent after her maudlin confession? Had he been embarrassed, or even worse, disgusted, by her too obvious infatuation with a man she had met for a few minutes more than a dozen years ago?
That didn’t explain why he had made a mystery of his existence since their arrival. And he had. Since the moment she had looked up and discovered that he was watching them—
Remembering, her eyes lifted to the bedroom windows, searching the terrain beyond the drive and formal gardens. There, just as on that first dawn, was the black horse and its rider. Although it hardly seemed possible, the speed at which they were racing along the crest of the hill was even more reckless than it had been then.
That day she had tried desperately to catch a glimpse of his face. She had failed because she had continued to watch from her vantage point as he had directed his mount toward the stables.
Eventually, he would arrive at that same destination today, she realized, turning quickly away from the window. This time she would be waiting for him.
SHORTLY AFTER Jamie’s departure, the Earl of Greystone, still dressed in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, had thrown his cloak around his shoulders and left the tower. On each step he descended, he had expected to find Emma making her way up. Thank God, it hadn’t happened.
He understood that by fleeing his rooms, he was only postponing the inevitable confrontation between them. He had decided, however, it would be on his time and in a manner of his choosing. After all, he had little choice about anything else.
He had spent the remainder of the night amid the comforting scents of hay, horses and well-oiled leather. Wrapped in his cloak, he hadn’t attempted to sleep. Instead he had allowed the emotions he’d fought so long full expression.
Rage and despair. Dread. Even self-pity, which he despised. Tonight he had denied none of them.
At the first streak of light below the horizon, he had arisen, found one of the grooms asleep by the tack room fire and nudged him awake with the toe of his boot. Sleepy and disoriented, the boy had staggered up willingly enough from his pallet.
Sensing the earl’s mood, perhaps, he had asked no questions. He h
ad simply brought Sultan around, saddled and bridled, in less than five minutes.
Deprived of his dawn gallop for almost a week, the gelding was far too fresh to ride out into the near-darkness, but neither of them hesitated. Alex had dug in his heels, sending Sultan out of the paddock at a dead run.
That had been almost an hour ago. Now they were back, both drenched in sweat. The horse, ill-used in an attempt to exorcize his master’s demons, trembled with exhaustion.
Greystone had never before in his life abused an animal, and the mindless race he had set this one on had been not only dangerous, but fruitless. He had escaped nothing from which he’d been fleeing.
There had been a point in that wild ride at which he had pulled his mount up, controlling the eager gelding through force of will while he contemplated a fork in the lane. If he had nursed Sultan along, taking frequent breaks and walking part of the distance, he could have been at Wyckstead in a few hours.
The temptation had been great enough to cause him to actually spur the horse in that direction before he’d pulled him up again, admitting what his heart had known all along. It was too late. He owed Emma an explanation. One that was overdue by more than ten years.
After he’d handed the gelding over to the stable boy, who was clearly shocked by the state the two of them were in, he discarded the cloak, throwing it over his arm as he made his way toward the back of the house. As he walked, his fingers worked at the knot of his cravat until it was loose enough to allow him to rip it off.
He turned his head slowly from side to side, trying to ease the tension that had tightened the muscles of his neck and shoulders. As he neared the entrance to the kitchens, almost oblivious to his surroundings, someone stepped out of the shadows beside the doorway.
In less time than it took his heart to stop and then resume beating again, he had recognized the figure. Emma was dressed in a thin cotton nightgown, over which she had thrown a wool shawl. Except for its color, white like her rail, it looked identical to the one she had worn that night.
Her hair was confined in a long braid, which lay over her shoulder. It was the only touch of color about the slender figure. That and the blue eyes, which had widened as he approached.
If the lighting had been more subdued, he might have convinced himself she was a fantasy. A figment of his disordered thinking, which had envisioned her exactly like this.
Dressed for bed and waiting for him to come to her.
As soon as he’d recognized her, his forward progress slowed. There was nothing to be gained, however, by delay. What must be done should be accomplished quickly and cleanly, like a surgery intended to excise a festering wound.
He took a breath, forcing his feet to move. One step at a time, taking him closer and closer to the woman who had not seen him in a dozen years.
He had thought her pale before, but as he neared, the blood literally drained from her face, leaving it the same parchment-white as the nightgown she wore. Her eyes were no longer blue. The pupils had dilated, eating up the surrounding rim of color.
When fewer than five feet separated them, he stopped. Neither of them said a word as her eyes continued to search his face, examining each feature as if she had never seen them before. And she hadn’t, of course. Not like this.
He had no idea what he expected her to do or to say. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps, like the maid, she would simply cross herself and flee. Or perhaps she would scream.
That had been the worst of the variations that had played out in his imagination last night. It seemed that in the morning stillness he could hear the sound, echoing again and again within the stone walls of his self-appointed prison.
She did none of the things he had dreaded. And nothing he could have anticipated. As he forced his gaze to hold on her face, her eyes filled with moisture. Watching them, his own burned.
She blinked, trying to contain the tears, but one escaped, sliding down the curve of her cheek to catch at the corner of parted, trembling lips. Her shoulders lifted with the depth of the breath she took. It shuddered inward, just as his had the day he had first seen her being helped down from the coach.
After a soundless eternity, she closed her mouth, again blinking against the tears. She took one step forward. And then another. Moving closer and closer in the unforgiving sunlight. When she stopped, she was so near that the faint, sweet aroma of rosewater engulfed him.
She was tall for a woman, but his height forced her to tilt her head. And again her eyes searched his face.
Although there were, by design, no mirrors in his rooms, he was intimately familiar with every centimeter of the damage, the image seared in his memory from the first time he had made the mistake of looking into a glass. The saber had slashed down his face, laying it open from forehead to chin. Battlefield dressed, the scar pulled at the skin, distorting the line of his lip and the lid that should have covered the now-blind eye.
As her examination continued, Alex forced himself not to flinch from it. Not to indicate in any way how painful it was to be exposed like this.
Again she surprised him. She raised her hand, reaching toward his face as if to touch the evidence of the deformity. With the lightning reflexes that had served him in combat, his fingers closed ’round her wrist before she could.
“No,” he said softly.
It was as if the word broke a spell. Her eyes re-focused on his, avoiding the ravaged countenance. She shook her head, the motion tight and small, and her lips parted as if she were about to speak.
He waited a long time, some part of him hoping she would find the right words to say. Since he was unsure what those might possibly be, he wasn’t surprised when she was unable to form them.
He released her wrist and stepped around her, striding quickly toward the back entrance to the hall, driven again by the same need that had caused him to spur Sultan past the gelding’s endurance. And although he listened, foolishly hoping, Emma never called to him.
CHAPTER SIX
“LADY BARRINGTON, I have no intention of discussing my brother with you,” Jamie Leighton said. “It simply isn’t possible. Not only would it be an invasion of his privacy, but his friendship and support are far too valuable to me to risk—”
“Do you remember the first time you saw Georgina?” Emma interrupted calmly.
The only outward sign of her nervousness was that the fingers of her left hand worried the lace edging of the handkerchief she held in her right. As soon as she became aware of it, the movement stopped.
She had taken almost the entire morning to decide what she should do to rectify the unforgivable error in judgment she had made. The first part of the campaign she’d settled on had been to request a meeting with the earl’s younger brother, which Jamie had readily granted. If he had known the subject she planned to broach, he would probably have refused.
“Of course I remember,” he said.
The color in his cheeks had been high since her first mention of the earl. It increased suddenly.
She realized that Jamie was dealing with his own anxieties. If this hadn’t been so important, Emma might have felt sorry for him, caught between her determination and his brother’s equally strong intention to isolate himself from the world.
“I, too, had such an encounter,” she said. “Long before I married Georgina’s father.”
“Indeed,” Jamie said faintly. He was probably wondering why she imagined he might care about her romantic adventures.
“Although I never knew his name, that brief meeting made such an impression on me that I never forgot it. Or him.” Then she added, her voice deliberately softened for the greatest impact, “That man was your brother, Mr. Leighton. That encounter took place more than a dozen years ago.”
She watched as the significance of the time span dawned on her audience.
“Before he went to Spain,” Jamie said.
Spain, she thought. Along with the evidence provided by the portrait, that explained a great deal.
“And th
en I met him here,” she said.
The silence this time was more prolonged. The obvious result of his having no idea of what to say to her.
“I must confess I was not totally unprepared to see him again,” she went on, since she seemed to have rendered him speechless. “Actually, I was the instigator of that meeting. I had noticed his portrait in the gallery—”
There was an unexpected reaction to that. Jamie straightened away from the mantel against which he’d been leaning, his mouth opening and then closing. Whatever he’d been about to say, he had apparently thought better of it.
“However, since that must have been painted prior to the earl’s departure for Spain…”
She hesitated, her throat closing with the emotion she had fought all morning. An emotion she had known instinctively Greystone would hate above any other she might harbor for him.
“I was not prepared,” she forced herself to continue, “for the changes that had occurred in the interim. I reacted badly.”
She refused to let her eyes fall before the flare of anger in Jamie’s.
“How badly?” he asked, his voice hard.
“I cried,” she admitted. “I am quite ashamed of that, I assure you. I had cherished an image of him for so long, you see, and I was…caught unawares.”
The stern line of Jamie’s lip softened. “How did Alex respond?”
Alex. Alexander.
He would never have used his brother’s given name if not for the stress of the moment. Although Emma had whispered it like a schoolgirl since she’d learned it, she could not bring herself to repeat it now.
“Not well,” she said, remembering what had been in his eyes as he’d caught her wrist and held it, obviously waiting for her to say something to him. It was only after he’d disappeared, however, that she had realized that. She had told herself it might be better she had not tried to express herself at that moment. She had needed time to sort through her feelings, and she couldn’t do that with him so near.
The Wedding Chase: In His Lordship's BedPrisoner of the TowerWord of a Gentleman Page 15
