“Nicholas?” It was so preposterous that Calan could only shake his head.
“I have his letter. My mother saved it all these years. Every cold, brutal word is there.”
“Impossible.” Or was it? Calan knew that Nicholas could sometimes be proud and arrogant. If his younger sister had angered him, he might have threatened to cut her off.
But…rape? How could that be part of Elena’s past? “Who threatened her, Kiera? Because this doesn’t make sense. Let me call Nicholas and you two can—”
Kiera cut him off. “Out of the question,” she said in a rush. “Now I’d like to leave, unless you plan to add kidnapping to the list of criminal things that happen in this house. You’re just like the rest of them. You get what you want at any price, no matter who gets hurt.”
CHAPTER NINE
JUST LIKE THE REST OF THEM.
Calan hid a bitter smile. In that, at least, she was absolutely wrong. He was like no one that Kiera had ever met.
Of course he would never share that secret with her. But now at least her pain and anger made sense. Families could be the cruelest of enemies, striking at vulnerable layers of hope and innocence. Calan still carried his own turbulent memories—and the scars—to prove that dirty truth.
“I said I want to leave. Move out of my way.” She gripped his arm and tried to shoulder him aside.
“Not yet. There are things you need to explain.”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said? I’m leaving. I won’t explain anything to you or your arrogant employers.”
“Just tell me one thing. If you hate the Draycott family so much, why did you come back here?”
Anger simmered and snapped in her face. “I don’t have to answer that.”
“No, you don’t. But it’s a fair question. Assuming your story is true—”
“It is,” she snapped. “Every word.”
“If it is true,” Calan went on calmly, “coming to the abbey would have been the last thing you would choose. Except if you were hoping for revenge. Theft for a start.” Calan had to goad her. It was the fastest way to lay the truth bare. He had to know how far her hatred would push her.
As she tried to force her way past him, he turned smoothly, pinning her against the wall. Carefully he took her hand in his and opened the palm. “You’ve cut yourself. If you’d stop fighting me, I’d take care of it for you.”
“If you’re waiting for me to moan and fall apart, you’re flat out of luck. My whining skills have never been very good.”
“Are you always this difficult?” he said calmly.
“I don’t need to be taken care of. I don’t need anything from you.” She tried to pull away, but Calan’s fingers entwined with hers.
He felt her hand tremble. For some reason he couldn’t name, he brought her palm up to his mouth.
And kissed the skin gently.
Her breath caught. “What…are you doing?”
“Something very stupid, I imagine. Odd that I can’t seem to help myself.” Even the sound of her husky voice did strange things to his pulse. The slightest movement of her hand made his skin feel heavy and heated, need rising viciously.
But he had learned something crucial.
She was no professional. Professionals never made the mistake of getting involved in family matters. All in all, Calan was starting to believe that her behavior had nothing to do with criminal elements. “If you leave now, if you run away with so many unanswered questions, it will always haunt you. You’ll never put this behind you.”
“How would you know?”
“As I said, I’ve had my share of bad moments. Running doesn’t work, believe me.” His voice hardened. “It’s a waste of time to carry around more baggage than you need.”
She studied him for a moment, then sidestepped without a word.
Calan moved right along with her, her fingers against his.
“Why are you doing this? The family must pay you very well to be their watchdog.”
“I count the viscount as my friend. I would guard his interests for that reason alone. I would neither expect nor accept payment for that.”
“Very noble.” She sniffed. “But you choose your friends badly in that case.” She glared at him, her eyes suddenly narrowing. “You were there at my hotel. It wasn’t a simple coincidence, was it? Have you been following me?”
Calan couldn’t explain how he’d found her. She would never understand the special skills that had allowed him to track her car from the abbey, down twisting lanes and over quiet country streams.
By scent alone he had found her.
No, she would never believe that.
“If you want answers, you’ll have to sit down and let me take care of your hand first.”
She blew out an angry breath. “Why do you care about my hand?
“I’m not exactly sure myself.”
“Then give me one reason to stay.”
“Because if you choose to stay, you’ll be well treated.”
Calan swore that he would calm and soothe her. But then he would do everything he could to make her talk of her own will. He couldn’t let her walk away. Not because he thought she was a threat. He understood now that she was something far more important.
She was the key to a tragedy that Nicholas Draycott had never been able to understand or forget. Calan was going to see that his friend had that resolution. Somehow he would make Kiera stay, without restraint or coercion.
“What do you say?”
“Up to now your word hasn’t stood for much. You told me you don’t lie, but you do. You also said you’d take me back to my hotel, and you haven’t done it.”
“I said I’d take you back before I realized who you were. You belong here, Kiera, not in that impersonal hotel. Here in the house where your mother was born. Where she was deeply loved.” Calan glanced at the picture over the fireplace. “I knew her. Not very well or for very long, but I remember her clearly. She loved the books in this room. She was always in here or out in the garden, trying some new scheme to grow a new color of rose.”
Kiera’s eyes widened. She took a long breath. “You knew her?”
Calan felt her resistance fade. When he released her hand, she sank down on the leather wing chair near the window.
“I met her at a difficult time in my life. She never asked questions. Being pointed wasn’t her way. She simply gathered you in and made you feel at home. I know that she made me feel safe here. I owe you the same.”
When Kiera looked up, he saw the glint of tears in her eyes. “You must have been just a boy.”
Old enough to understand things a child shouldn’t have to understand, Calan thought grimly. “I was eight. It was summer, and I was visiting my great-aunt in Norfolk. Elena was here, studying French with her tutor. She was leaving for a year abroad and she was desperate not to sound ridiculous in Paris. She always garbled her tenses.”
Kiera seemed to sway slightly. Her hand flattened on the wall, almost as if she needed its support. “She always hated tenses. Usually she ignored them. I remember once when we—” Kiera stopped abruptly. She stared at the walls filled with precious books. “She loved history. You’d never find her without a book nearby. Strange, I’ve always wondered what she was like back then, before…things turned bad. She kept so much hidden from us, right up to the end,” Kiera whispered, almost to herself.
“You have siblings?”
After a moment Kiera nodded.
Calan burned with questions, starting with why Elena had never come back to the abbey. But he saw just how shaken Kiera looked and knew he had to give her time.
He poured her a glass of sherry and waited while she sipped it. When the color began to return to her face, he found the medical kit in Nicholas’s desk.
Then he took her hand and gently began cleaning the ragged welts.
No questions.
No speculation or idle talk.
He calmed her with his touch. And Calan accepted that he would
do that again one day, thigh to thigh.
Soon or not, the time didn’t matter. He could be a very patient man when something important was involved. And Kiera was very important to him, on levels he was only starting to realize.
Emotions shimmered. The old abbey at its magic again, offering secret challenges and stirring up memories.
He could almost see the pale, wistful boy standing at the back of the library. He could almost hear the tall, confident woman who laughed as she pulled down books for him without being asked. She had put him at ease when few people could, and Calan owed her for that measure of comfort.
He’d sent her two letters. She’d sent him two postcards from Bordeaux.
Then, a few years later, he had heard she was dead.
He turned away, frowning. The past felt painfully close as he carefully placed a bandage over Kiera’s torn skin.
Then, because he wanted to touch her full, generous mouth, he stood up and walked to the far bookshelf. “I have something else that you might like to see. I only hope that Nicholas hasn’t moved it.”
She watched him intently, perched on the edge of the chair.
“Here it is.” Calan pulled out a set of photographs in a worn leather album and carried it across the room. “That’s Elena on the right. She was very beautiful, with a dozen young men always coming and going. Nicholas teased her about it unmercifully.”
Kiera took the album cautiously, as if it might burn her. Her face softened as she stared at the figures sitting on the wall beside the moat, sunlight brushing their faces.
“The boy in the back. That’s you?”
Calan nodded.
“But you’re…so thin. You look very unhappy.”
So much for his studied performance. Calan wondered if everyone else had seen through the act as easily as Kiera had.
“Only to be expected. The good old days were never really very good, were they?”
“Now who’s the cynical one?”
“Guilty as charged.” Calan glanced over her shoulder, looking at a picture of Nicholas trying to catch one of the swans. “He loved Elena. He feels guilty still. He tried to find her and his investigators always came up empty-handed.”
But Kiera flinched. “He ignored her when she needed his help.” Her expression hardened. She stood up, the album plunging to the floor. “We’re done here. But first, here’s what I think. I think that you’ve been following me. I don’t know why or how you found me, but that doesn’t really matter. If you or your arrogant employer comes anywhere near me, now or at anytime in the future, I’ll see that you regret it.”
Her hands were shaking.
Calan realized that she was strung as tight as a wire, and he hated the pain in her eyes. “Kiera, you’re wrong about this.”
“No. There’s nothing more I want to hear from you. No more wistful photos, no more sad stories. No more sweet Draycott family lies.” She pulled the borrowed coat from her shoulders and tossed it down onto the chair. “Now will you drive me back to the hotel, or do I have to walk?”
Her eyes snapped. Her hair was a wild tangle around her angry face. And dear Lord, he wanted her, wanted her sighing beneath his hands, wanted her reckless and hot. He knew it was madness, but from that first moment he saw her on Draycott soil, it had seemed as if his every sense was attuned to hers.
He took an angry breath, working to recover the control that never deserted him.
Until now.
“It’s almost six miles.”
“I’ve walked twice that.” She smiled icily. “In a snowstorm.”
The wonder of it was, he believed her. “Finish your sherry. Then pick up the bloody coat and put it on so you don’t catch pneumonia. After that, I’ll take you back,” Calan snapped. “Sorry to destroy your imagined melodrama, but I don’t intend to hold you here. Apparently you’re not as important as you think,” he said coolly.
Her hands opened and closed. Then she picked up the coat and tossed it over her shoulder. Still watching him, she gripped the glass of sherry and gulped it down.
Then she tried to smother a cough.
Calan picked up the fallen photo album and placed it on the desk. “I only wonder that I didn’t see the connection immediately,” he said quietly. “The color of your eyes. The curve of your mouth.”
She flinched, swayed as surely as if he had struck her openhanded. The memories were clear in her face, sadness like a ringing bell, and Calan would have given anything to take back words that could cause her such pain.
“I don’t want to hurt you more. But there’s one other thing. Like it or not, you’re going to hear it. I only knew her a short time. But she meant a great deal to a young boy who didn’t know who he was, or his place in the world. I thought you should know.”
He was already turning toward the door when he heard the sound of cloth on leather. She crossed the room slowly, the coat gripped to her chest. All the angry defiance had slipped away. Now there was curiosity and almost a sense of relief in her face. “You did miss her, didn’t you? I can hear it in your voice. Not that it changes anything…but thank you for that.”
Then Kiera rose slowly on her toes and kissed him.
CHAPTER TEN
HE HAD SURPRISED HER. Irritated her. Intrigued her.
Then he’d charmed her right to the tips of her unadorned toes. Kiera was determined to fight the feeling. She had never been pulled to a man this way, never carried off balance by passion.
But she was off balance now. And this man was so far out of Kiera’s league that her head spun with it. Everything felt wrong.
She had been ready to storm off, burning with fury—and then a simple story about a small, unhappy boy had stopped her short. The respect in his voice had held her.
Then the photograph of her mother in happier days had torn out her heart.
Thanks to Calan’s story, her mother’s past had become far clearer. Now Kiera had concrete images to fill the shadows and haunting gaps in her mother’s life.
When she had responded with a simple gesture of thanks, it was given as recognition of their truce. A simple brush of lips, it was meant to be nothing weighty or complicated.
But in an instant all that had changed. She hadn’t expected to notice the heat of his body or the hard planes of his cheeks beneath her hand. She hadn’t expected to savor every detail of their contact until her blood sang with it.
Calan made no sound as her hand slid into his thick hair. Motionless, distant, he watched her.
No invitation. No smile. No sign that he was touched.
So that was that. Crystal clear, she decided.
Her hands dropped. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For that story about my mother. I had so little.” She looked down, frowning.
He caught her shoulders in one swift movement that had her gasping. She was hauled blindly against his chest. His hands opened, rough against her shoulders. He took a raw breath. And then he held her. Tightly. As if he never meant to let her go.
As if, for now, holding her was enough.
And for some reason Kiera felt completely safe against his chest, with the harsh sound of his breathing in her ears, a counterpoint to the slam of his heart. Her fingers opened, combing through his dark hair. He muttered a low curse.
Intrigued, Kiera moved closer.
His eyes darkened.
His low hiss of pleasure was very loud in the quiet room. Kiera felt desire shiver to life, measured in the pounding of her own heart. In a matter of seconds her gesture of simple gratitude had become anything but simple.
And nothing close to gratitude.
Now she wanted something that felt dark and hungry. Edgy and dangerous.
He moved closer until their thighs met. She felt his hands open, kneading her back and sliding lower to cover her hips. Their lips touched, and she felt the hot brush of his tongue.
Brutal and swift, desire blotted out all her careful plans and determined logic. She cau
ght his shirt and pulled him closer, determined to savor that hard mouth. But there was no time to savor when she felt so urgent, driven to take, and take furiously.
Her head tilted, opening to his mouth. Her nails dug into his tweed jacket. She sighed at the restless heat of his tongue against hers. The room, the house, and England itself tilted and spun. She felt a sharp wave of dizziness. Her only stability was here, against his body. All she needed was the feel of his skin and the rough tweed of his jacket as need swallowed logic.
He braced her against the wall. She felt his arousal as he lifted her, anchored her against his thighs. His hands locked on hers.
Kiera stared at his tense face, caught by the shock of exploring this new terrain of desire. As shock gave way to curiosity, her fingers dug at his jacket. “Please.”
He answered her with fire, his strong hands opening, shifting her hips to pull their bodies into maddening, intimate contact. Thigh to thigh, heat built between them.
It still wasn’t enough. Kiera pressed closer, lifting her body against him. “Let me touch you,” she ordered, breathless. “I need to touch you.” He shifted and his jacket fell. Then she tugged blindly at his shirt.
Two buttons hit the floor.
With a low curse, he gripped her hips, driving their bodies together. Through a haze of need, she felt his tongue brush hers, slipping into a hot entry that carried promises of pleasure as old as time.
She wanted that pleasure now.
She wanted him naked and hungry, driving inside her. She shivered with the force of the image, and instantly, his arms tightened around her. “Kiera?”
She barely heard, tugging furiously at his shirt.
A third button hit the floor.
“Take it off,” she ordered breathlessly. “Now, damn it. I want to see you. I want—”
Everything.
Images overwhelmed her. She wanted his skin on hers.
His lips hungry and hot, everywhere.
And she wanted it right now.
She felt him mutter, the words sounding like Gaelic. Reckless, she pressed closer, then winced at the sudden scrape of his buckle. As her breath caught in a hiss, Calan cursed. His hand slid between them. His belt slid free.
Bound by Dreams Page 9
