by Jagger, Kait
‘You’ll be late for your call with Gus,’ she said eventually, kissing his jaw and lifting her fingers to his nape, savouring the scent of him.
‘Ever the efficient PA,’ he said lightly.
‘Well,’ she smiled wanly, ‘you knew what I was when you fell in love with me.’ To which Stefan laughed and lifted her against him.
‘Walk back with me?’ he asked.
Luna shook her head. ‘I think I’ll stay out here a while longer.’
She watched him walk back towards the house, his feet making prints in the virgin snow. Then she lifted her scarf over her head again and walked back herself, skirting the exterior of the west wing and making her way to the portico, where the estate driver was parked in the Jaguar.
‘Thanks for waiting for me,’ she said as she got into the back seat.
‘Not a problem, miss. It’s going to be a nasty night. I wouldn’t want you trying to get to the station on your own.’
He began to drive and Luna turned to look out the rear window as they drew away from Arborage, where her letter of resignation lay on her desk and her personal belongings sat boxed on the floor of her sitting room, awaiting collection by a storage company in the morning. The house looked beautiful in the floodlights, the falling snow making it look hazy, almost dreamlike as it receded into the distance.
She couldn’t stay. Of course she couldn’t. The Marchioness would understand that, but Stefan…
Luna turned away from the rear window. Tears were streaming down her cheeks now. The driver glanced with concern in his rear-view mirror and she shook her head at him. It’s okay. Just keep driving.
And then Luna buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Epilogue
‘I want one of you to tell me what the hell is going on here,’ Sören was shouting at Augusta and Stefan in the sitting room of the family’s private quarters. It was Sunday morning, the morning after their call with the board. Augusta was sat tight-lipped on one of the sofas and Stefan was standing next to the window, unshaven and exhausted, looking out on the snowy lawn below.
He had spent a sleepless night searching for Luna. Halfway through the conference call with Gus, he’d started to get a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. Excusing himself, he’d run all the way up to her sitting room, opening the door to find three neat boxes, carefully labelled, her bedroom denuded of all her personal effects except the pink silk cord that had come with her roses.
The estate driver had been unable to tell him anything more than that he’d left her at the train station in Newbury, at her request. Though when pressed he gave Stefan a hard look and added, ‘She was crying her eyes out in the back of that car, sir.’
He had known desperation then. Wild, helpless desperation.
‘You led me to believe that Florian was stepping down of his own volition,’ his father was saying to Augusta, pacing agitatedly in front of the fireplace. ‘That he had “skeletons in his closet” that made it impossible for him to become Marquess. And now I find instead that you have blackmailed him. And drawn my son into your dirty little game. When what you should have done is taken the evidence your investigator uncovered straight to the police, and damn the scandal.’
‘I did what I did to protect Arborage,’ Augusta said obdurately, clasping her hands on her lap.
‘How is it protecting Arborage to leave Florian in play, free to continue dripping poison in your daughters’ ears? Do you honestly think he will crawl quietly into a corner and stay there, after what you have done? You have absolutely no idea what you’re playing at,’ Sören said, shaking his head contemptuously.
‘And then there’s that poor girl,’ he continued, pointing in the direction of the office downstairs. ‘That girl who would do anything for the two of you. And you let her. You took advantage of her loyalty.’
‘Oh, come now, Sören,’ Augusta said peevishly. ‘Luna is an adult—’
‘He almost raped her, Augusta!’ Sören thundered, slamming his fist onto the coffee table in front of her. Stefan released a fraught, inarticulate noise at this and his father turned on him. ‘Too late for that now.’ He looked between the two of them with disgust. ‘It’s a bad business, this,’ he concluded. ‘I wish you no happiness from it.’
Stefan had found Luna’s work phone, laptop and tablet all neatly piled on her desk, along with a brief letter of resignation saying she had to leave for personal reasons. And so she slipped through his fingers. He had no idea where she was, or how to find her. His only connection to her had been through Arborage, he realised with some shame – he didn’t even know if she had a personal email account. He could call Jem or Kayla, he supposed, beg them for news of her. But he didn’t, knowing that she would hate him for involving them.
His father seemed to regret his harshness later, when the two of them sat together in the Dower House, Stefan riddled with guilt and regret.
‘I blame myself for this,’ Sören said. ‘I should have suspected something when Augusta first came to me to talk about Florian. I, who knew her better than anyone. I should have asked more questions…’
He gave his son no comfort on the matter of Luna, however.
‘When you told me you were seeing her, I was of two minds. First, I was glad, but then…Luna is a serious girl, Stefan, the kind who doesn’t love lightly. And you have never been serious about women.’
But his father was wrong. Stefan couldn’t even find the words to tell him how wrong he was. He thought back to the moment when he had first recognised Luna, standing dripping wet in the garden. How he had laughed, not out of a lack of seriousness, but out of sheer joy, that there was a reason he’d felt a connection with her from the moment he had seen her in the farm shop. She was the arg flicka, and she belonged to him.
He had pursued her single-mindedly after that, so certain was he that they were destined to be together. Even Augusta’s dire warnings of Luna’s mental fragility in the wake of her parents’ deaths hadn’t put him off – indeed, this very fragility, combined with her quiet reserve, had drawn him towards her. That and her honesty, her complete inability to play games. You look beautiful too. He’d known even before the first time they made love that it would be special, and she hadn’t disappointed him – he’d literally never experienced anything like it, the way she made him feel. She unmanned him without even trying, without even realising her power over him.
Power. That was what it came down to. Her unwitting power over him, his desire for power over her. The power Augusta had over them both, power she had used to set them at cross purposes, drive them apart. And the power of love, to which he had been so completely unwilling to yield that he had shut Luna out of every part of his life he deemed off limits.
He thought about their final conversation in the garden. He had come into it determined that it was an argument he must win. Goaded by her initial coldness, he’d kept at her and kept at her until he broke her. God forgive him, he’d even silently exulted when he saw her shoulders sag, heard her say, You’re right. I’m being unfair.
Now, too late, he saw the conversation through Luna’s eyes. Not as an argument, but as the final step in a decision-making process. She had already concluded that she had to leave the Marchioness; she’d come to the garden to decide if she was leaving him as well. She had given him every chance to make a concession, and gotten nothing in return. Could he admit that he had been wrong to conceal his agreement with Augusta from her? No, he could not. That his obsession with work and his own selfish concerns had put her off seeking his help with Florian? No. No, in fact, he’d as much as blamed her for remaining silent.
And worst of all, could he convince her that of course she came first in his life, that if she doubted it he was prepared to do anything it took to make her believe? No. You knew what I was like when you got involved with me, he’d chided her, watching her break in front of him, and taking satisfaction from breaking her.
And now she was out there somewhere, alone, crying for him.
But you. You told me you loved me. The possibility that she believed he didn’t, that she thought loving her had been a game he’d played in his spare time, tore a hole in his chest.
He would prove to her that she was wrong. She couldn’t hide forever, not even his elusive Luna. Her severance payments from Arborage had to go somewhere, and her bike still sat in the barn. She would reveal herself to him eventually, and if she didn’t, he would track her until he found her.
He would get her back. That was all that mattered.
Her Master’s Servant
Book Two in the Lord and Master Trilogy
By Kait Jagger
Published by Kait Jagger
Copyright © Kait Jagger 2016
Cover: Lauren Nagoda (www.laurennagoda.com)
Formatting: Troubador Publishing (www.troubador.co.uk/matador)
For address information, please contact the author at [email protected]
All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the prior written consent of the author, excepting for brief quotes used in reviews.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
ISBN 9780993458408
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB
Contents
Cover
Praise for Lord and Master
PART 1 – SHETLAND
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
PART 2 – BERKSHIRE
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Praise for Lord and Master
Book One in the Lord and Master Trilogy
‘This book is filled with good story, passion, good writing and real characters. Nothing feels forced, the story flows flawlessly…Stefan is my newest book boyfriend, and I want one of my own!!’
—Carol Sales, Beauty and the Beastly Books
*
‘Enjoyable, erotic romance, infused with a healthy dose of reality.’
—Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
*
‘I loved that author Kait Jagger creates the character of Luna as a friend and colleague with a full life of her own, rather than a flat character simply waiting for a man. Lord and Master is indulgent and magnetic. I stayed up way past my bedtime on more than one night simply because I needed to know what happened next.’
—Jenna Czaplewski, The Girl with Book Lungs
*
‘Author Kait Jagger has penned a gripping, scintillating page turner, loaded with riveting characters. Best book I’ve read in ages!’
—Stephanie Lasley, The Kindle Book Review
*
‘Every once and awhile a book comes along that completely knocks you on your ass…There’s an overwhelmingly gothic feel to Lord and Master that we rarely see these days. Modern romances are just that, modern. Lord and Master, however, brings the reader back to such as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights complete with its secrets and intrigue, but with a contemporary British style that reminds one of popular movies like Love, Actually or About a Boy.’
—Sandra Lombardo, Reads and Reviews
PART 1 – SHETLAND
Chapter One
The tide was coming in, in that sudden, treacherous way it did on this stretch of the west coast. Dark, volcanic rocks that had been visible just minutes earlier were now completely submerged under the punishing Atlantic waves.
As another massive wave crashed against the cliffs, a lone motorcyclist slowly negotiated a dirt track rising steeply from the rocks. It was tricky going, this. Not only was the track wet from sea spray and recent rains, it was punctuated regularly with fissures and stones. The trick was to identify the most level route and stick to it.
Reaching the crest of the hill, the biker relaxed slightly, preparing to pull out onto the asphalt road that adjoined the track. It would have been easy to miss the sheep stuck in the wire fencing by the side of the road, but luckily the rider saw it and pulled to a stop, hopping off the bike and popping the side stand.
Luna Gregory removed her helmet and walked toward the fence, where a ewe had managed to get her head wedged underneath the woven wire netting. Possibly due to the recent rains, the ledge of soil next to the fence had eroded, leaving a gap the sheep had apparently found impossible to resist.
Bleset, Luna thought to herself absently – the markings on the ewe’s face meant she was a bleset, to use the Shetland term. Luna also knew from the smudge of blue paint on the ewe’s hindquarters that she was expecting triplets in a few weeks’ time, when lambing season was due to begin.
‘Did the grass look greener on this side?’ Luna asked rhetorically, squatting next to the fence. The ewe bleated in response and Luna carefully tugged the wire upward, placing her hand on the sheep’s black and white face and gently pushing it backward. After a moment, the ewe took the hint and struggled free, rising on her hooves and running off across the field.
‘You’re welcome!’ Luna called after her, then frowned to herself. It had come to this: she was shouting at sheep now.
She stood and wiped her gloved hands against her Gore-Tex biking trousers, tucking an errant strand of long, dark hair behind her ear. Casting her milky blue eyes down toward the rocky shore from whence she had just come, she saw another wave come crashing in, and a plume of spray leap into the air. The noise of the surf had been overwhelming from the rock where she’d been sitting a few moments ago, but up here in the dunes it was muted. She could hear the wind blowing through a stand of tall grass nearby, their blades whipping together like thousands of sheets of paper.
Luna was completely alone, save for the ewe and a few hundred of her brethren on the adjoining fields. Seven hundred miles lay between her and… what? She couldn’t call it her home because, really, she had no home now, or if she did it was here on Shetland.
Five hundred miles by land, plus a further two hundred by sea between her and all she’d left behind.
*
For three days she had cried, sitting in a darkened hotel room outside of London. She who could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d shed tears in the preceding decade, who prided herself on keeping an iron grip on her emotions. True, her losses had been great – in a single stroke, she had parted ways with both her long-time mentor and the love of her life. That the choice to leave them had been hers did nothing to mitigate her pain.
They had betrayed her, between the two of them. Faced with the seemingly inevitable loss of the empire she had built at the 500-year-old Arborage Estate in Berkshire, Luna’s boss – Lady Wellstone, Marchioness of Lionsbridge – had hatched a secret plan to depose her brother-in-law, Florian Wellstone, and install the third in line to the estate, Stefan Lundgren, in his stead. A plan that entailed blackmail, and treachery, and lies. No matter that the odious Florian deserved it. He hadn’t been the only victim of the Marchioness’s scheming; Luna had paid as well.
‘So, is it everything you’d hoped for? Becoming the future “lord and master”, I mean.’
Repl
aying her final, fateful conversation with Stefan in the formal garden at Arborage, snow falling around them, Luna could almost taste the bitterness in her words, and her subsequent despair when Stefan effectively confirmed her accusation that by colluding with the Marchioness he had put his personal ambitions before her.
‘The man you fell in love with was a driven, successful businessman whose family birthright was Arborage. You didn’t fall in love with me despite those facts – they were part and parcel of the man I was, and part and parcel of why you loved me. You can’t expect me to stop being who I am.’
No, no she couldn’t. But she couldn’t live with it either. So she had left, forsaking not only the Marchioness and Stefan, but Arborage, the only place she had ever dared to call home in her adult life.
Of course, of the three, Stefan was the greatest loss. It was thoughts of him that wracked her with sobs in the airless hush of her hotel room. Had it shocked him, to find her room at Arborage empty the morning after their confrontation? Luna was sure it had, though it gave her no pleasure to contemplate it.
