She realized then how much he needed her—he wasn’t a man who easily shared his nature.
“I care about you,” he said in a husky voice that pierced her heart. “I care so much I would do anything to keep you.”
He gave a deep moan and thrust a final time, the impact forcing the breath from her body. Even then she thrilled at the feel of him pulsing inside her. When he withdrew from her, she felt as if she were slowly falling to earth.
He stretched out beside her, stroking his hand along her shoulder, down her arm to her wrist. She could not summon the will to stir. She was content to absorb the heat of his hard-boned body.
“We are not hiding the truth from my sister,” he said as her heart began to resume its usual rhythm.
“Does she know everything about you?” she asked curiously.
“She did until I met you. Now we will tell her together that I have found happiness.”
Chapter 37
Lily warmed to Samuel’s sister the moment that the duke introduced them in the great hall. Lady Alice was infinitely softer and more understated than her charismatic brother. She had a refined beauty that was more subtle than his. With her aristocratic bearing and easy grace, she made Lily recall the status she had once taken for granted. She felt a poignant stab of longing for her own family. Would she ever see them again? Would Samuel’s rank impress them?
“I understand now,” Alice said very quietly as Lily rose from a curtsy, “why Samuel is so late to return my letters. It is not only his work that claims his time. And do not make a knee to me again. You will be my sister-in-law, and you were not meant for subservience.”
“You can say that again,” Samuel murmured before he left their company with some excuse about proof sheets he had received in the mail.
“Let us walk in the garden, Lily,” Lady Alice suggested, lifting her brow as she spotted the sword Samuel had forgotten on the stairs. “My bones ache from the coach travel here.”
“That I understand,” Lily said, laughing. After all the work she and the staff had undertaken, it would be a delight to relax for a few hours. And it was soon clear that Lady Alice refused to acknowledge her as a housekeeper. She treated Lily not only like an equal but like a friend.
Soon Lily fell under her spell, too, slipping back into the position of gentlewoman before she knew it.
“I am glad that my brother found you,” Lady Alice said when they reached the rose arbor. “I was engaged once to the only man I will ever love. Stephen was wounded defending his troops at Ligny. His last request was that he come home to marry me in the probable event that he would die. Samuel and the staff helped me care for him for three months before his merciful release.” She turned toward a rose trellis. “We never did get married.”
“The war was wretched,” Lily said, shaking her head. “I hated it.”
“But it had to be,” Alice said with a sigh.
“Don’t you get lonely?” Lily asked.
“Honestly? Not really. My friends insist I will find another wonderful gentleman, a widower perhaps. But what for? Samuel pays my bills. The pair of you will give me nieces and nephews to spoil—besides, at twenty-seven, I’ve grown too fond of my independence to play the game of love.”
“I wouldn’t have understood that before I left home,” Lily admitted. “I was convinced I would never love anyone again.”
Alice laughed, biting her lip. “Didn’t you know how persuasive Samuel can be?”
Lily thought fondly of Chloe’s warning on the night of the masquerade. “I suppose I had to find out for myself.”
Later on the night of her arrival, Alice came to Samuel’s office. She had never been afraid of him. They had been conspirators against the elderly aunt who had raised them after the fire.
Samuel made himself put aside his pages and beckoned her from the door. “Come inside—if you can find a spot to sit. Lily despairs of the mess. I’ve no idea why.”
A stack of golden sovereigns spilled across his desk, collapsing against his inkwell. He and Alice held their breath. The inkwell held.
“Lily was never meant to be a housekeeper,” Alice said. She carefully moved the folio pages arranged on the couch to make room for herself. She had a black jeweler’s box with a gold clasp in her hand. “How exactly did it happen?”
“I met her at a masquerade.”
“Romantic.”
He sighed. “From my point of view. I had a marriage contract drawn the same night.”
“Well, why aren’t you married?”
“There was an obstacle I had overlooked. Another man had claimed her first.”
“I’m surprised you let that stop you.”
His eyes glinted. “It didn’t.”
He went on to explain the chain of events that had brought Lily back into his life. He emphasized Grace’s part in her fall and downplayed certain nuances of his own role. Alice would have to fill in these holes by herself. She would. She had grown up with Samuel and knew what a devious scoundrel her younger brother had been. They had fought bitterly as children.
“I have something for you.” She rose to hand him the box. “Or rather, for you to give Lily on your wedding day. It belonged to our mother.”
He unhooked the box’s hinge. “Her diamond-and-pearl necklace?” he said in surprise. “I know how much it means to you.”
“I have never worn it, and pearls are meant to be worn or they lose their luster. It’s as if they come alive when they’re put on. They are believed to take on the wearer’s vibrancy. You’re the artist, Samuel. I don’t have to describe how warm they will look on Lily’s skin.”
“Thank you,” he said, moved by the gift. “You’re right. These pearls are one of the bright memories.”
“You will make others, Samuel.”
He sat back in his chair. “So will you.”
“It took years before I stopped having nightmares about the fire,” she said. “I don’t know how or when it happened, but now at least it has become a bearable ache.”
He nodded. “For years afterward I would think it was coming back to me. I’d hear screaming or I would smell smoke. But I’m not sure it wasn’t my imagination.” He smiled at her. “Don’t fret over me. I feel their presence often, and I take comfort from them.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I understand.”
Lily brought Lady Alice the whiskey toddy she had requested in the drawing room before bed. She smiled up at Lily from her chair, still wearing her plum silk evening dress. She had removed her shoes and crossed her bare ankles on the footstool. “You should have one of these, too,” she said, taking her drink.
“I have to keep my wits about me in this house.”
Alice laughed. “I can imagine you do. Samuel was a veritable demon during our childhood.” She closed her delicate fingers around the mug. “Well, at least until the fire. You know about that, I assume?”
Lily hesitated. She was torn between her instinct to protect Samuel’s privacy and her need to know everything about him. Who better understood him than his sister? “He’s talked of it a little. But when he got that frightening fever, I saw . . .” She shook her head.
“The scars from his burns?” Alice said, putting her whiskey on the table between the two chairs.
“Yes.”
“You have a right to know,” Alice said.
“Then how did it happen?” Lily asked.
“Father was painting a portrait of our mother, and our other aunt was watching my two younger sisters. Nobody knows exactly how it happened. It was a month before Christmas. A fire always burned in the solar, and we had beautiful old tapestries that hung opposite the windows.” She exhaled softly. “Oil paints, turpentine, and a spark, I’ve been told.”
“But you and Samuel weren’t there?”
“We were too restless and sick with coughs to sit for a painting,” Alice said. “He and I had gotten into the guardroom downstairs. We heard Aunt Leona screaming from the top of the private staircase
. We thought she wanted us to come upstairs to sit, and at first we ignored her. And then Samuel said he heard pounding.”
Lily said nothing.
“Samuel doesn’t remember running up the stairs. We only got halfway. The flames had spread through the upper hall and the smoke beat us back. Lawton had to save us.”
Lily’s brow furrowed. “The steward who is usually off on business?”
“Our devoted Lawton.”
“The quiet gentleman in the long gloves?”
“To hide his burns,” Alice said. “He smothered the flames from my dress sleeves and Samuel’s jacket with his bare hands. Then he carried us both outside and instructed the castle cook to dress our wounds and take us to St. Aldwyn House, where our other grandmother lived.”
“I thought Lawton was unfriendly.” When would Lily learn not to judge? “I almost asked him once to remove his gloves.”
“He’s the only servant still living from the old house,” Alice mused. “He stays at Gravenhurst to guard the place, because that has been his duty since time immemorial. He’s even made friends with a band of gypsies who put curses on the occasional journalist or ghost hunter caught sneaking past the gates.”
“I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know,” Lily said. “And grateful that the three of you survived.”
“For a long time I wished I’d been the one who couldn’t remember. Now . . . I have doubts. It doesn’t matter how many times I have told Samuel what happened. He cannot seem to recall for himself. But then he was burned and I was not. Considering his temperament, a blank memory might be for the best.”
Samuel’s demanding shout resounded profanely in the pensive lull: “Come out! Come out, wherever you are! I need volunteers to put me in a pair of manacles and lock me in the pantry. Ladies are not excluded from participation.”
Alice reached for her whiskey. “He’s been like this from the day he was born,” she whispered. “He’s never going to change.”
“I hope not,” Lily said, coming to her feet. “I’ve gotten used to being entertained at all hours.”
Chapter 38
Alice complained over breakfast the next day that Lily could not continue to act as St. Aldwyn’s housekeeper. She would soon become the Duchess of Gravenhurst. Samuel openly agreed. At this point, however, he would have agreed to practically anything either woman asked of him, because he wasn’t really paying attention to their requests.
He planned to complete his revisions in the next few days and send a partial of the current book off to Philbert, along with the last chapter that still did not feel right but would have to do. He swore he wasn’t going to commit himself to another Wickbury until well after the wedding. Perhaps not even until after his honeymoon.
But with Lily and Alice amusing each other for a while, he could sneak off for a good stretch of work. They wouldn’t even notice he was gone. Then, over their second pot of coffee, Alice said, “You’ve always known how I feel about the castle, Samuel.”
“You like to visit once every so often,” he said absently, wondering if his paper and pens had arrived. He always started the week with a fresh crow quill and new paper. It was a ritual he had observed for years.
“I want to live there,” Alice said. “In the castle.”
He lowered his cup. “Live there?”
“Yes,” she said, not shrinking at his tone.
“It’s uninhabitable,” he said with a frown.
Lily broke in. “Alice said that Lawton has restored much of what the fire damaged.”
He stared at her. “But what about all the ghosts? We know they aren’t real, but other people don’t. She’ll become known as an eccentric.”
“Well, she has to live somewhere, Samuel,” Lily said, “and the castle is ever so much closer than Lynton. She and I will be close to each other.”
He grunted. “I suppose I will have to look it over, to make sure it is safe.”
“May I come?” Lily asked. “I do have some experience as a housekeeper.”
Samuel realized he’d been caught in a clever female snare. Lily knew he wasn’t about to leave her alone after Grace’s confession. If he did, it would only be to hunt Kirkham down and bring him to justice.
Alice also had to know he would not refuse her a home. He did, however, wish to make sure the castle was sound and not the mausoleum that it had become in his imagination.
“So it is all right if we leave tomorrow?” Alice asked, unsuccessfully holding back a grin.
“That soon?” he said. “It will take longer than a day to load the coach and collect my writing supplies.”
“We’ve already packed a few necessities,” Lily admitted, biting her lip. “Just in case you agreed. The staff can bring whatever else you need.”
“Wicked women,” he said in resignation. “What would my life be without them?”
The duke’s coach could follow the ancient track only so far. A menhir said by the locals to be one of the devil’s first teeth marked the road that climbed to the castle. Only the moor folk, the gypsies, and the occasional rider used it now. Every so often the coachman stopped so that he, Samuel, and the footmen could join forces to roll a rock that obstructed the way.
By sunset the coach started to descend the steep incline. Lily stared out the window at the castle so that she would not stare at Samuel. The last time she’d traveled in this coach she had been hoping to forget her past. And she had been wickedly tempted to throttle him.
Now they were traveling together to meet his past, and she was tempted to do things to him, with him, that she hadn’t dreamed possible during her initial journey.
The glint in Samuel’s eye, when inevitably she did meet his gaze, promised he had plenty of other dreams in mind. The look she gave him in return said she was more than game.
“I can see Lawton on the west barbican flying the Gravenhurst standard!” Lady Alice exclaimed. She swung away from the window, lifting her folded gloves to fan her face. “It’s awfully warm in here all of a sudden, isn’t it? I shall be glad to get out in the cool air.”
From the approach Castle Gravenhurst presented a forbidding countenance to discourage the uninvited. A pack of wolfhounds prowled the inner bailey. Their unholy howls raised the fine hairs on Lily’s neck. She glanced up slowly. Evening mist enshrouded the darkened towers. The teeth of the raised portcullis grinned as if preparing to snap the invaders in one fell bite.
“Good heavens,” she said to Lady Alice as the duke led the way across the groaning drawbridge. “I think His Grace has a good point. Are you certain you could live here? It does have a certain atmosphere.”
Alice glanced back across the moor and took a deep, bracing breath. The servants of St. Aldwyn’s straggled up the incline in the cart, lanterns flickering like fairy lights. “There is nowhere like Castle Gravenhurst in the world.”
Lily stared straight ahead, disinclined to argue. She glimpsed Samuel striding ahead in his cloak. Suddenly seven or so hounds materialized from the mist to encircle him. He pulled his small traveling case from their slobbering welcome and laughed, motioning over his shoulder for Lily and Alice to follow.
“I’m going in ahead,” he said as Lawton darted out from the northwest barbican to call back the hounds.
“Should we let him go alone?” Lily whispered to Alice.
“Why would we stop him?” Alice asked softly.
Lily didn’t answer for several moments. She could barely make out Samuel’s figure in the shadows, although he appeared to know where he was going. She felt a sudden chill, an awareness of something malignant in the air.
She looked up. An ominous shadow moved on the walkway that connected the two gatehouse towers. She blinked. How silly of her. It was only the Gravenhurst standard.
Samuel was the one who had made up all the stories about ghosts haunting the castle. There was nothing more menacing at Gravenhurst than unhealed memories, and those were unsettling enough. Lost in her thoughts, she suddenly noticed him looming i
n front of her.
“What is the matter?” he asked, taking her hand.
Warmth returned to her veins in a welcome rush. “Nothing. I don’t know my way around, that’s all.”
“It looks different in the day.”
She shook off her trepidation. It was hard to be afraid of anything with Samuel beside her.
Chapter 39
The castle interior was not as dreadful as Lily had anticipated. The wall torches threw warm shadows toward the oak beams of the great hall and across the heraldic panels below. Whatever Samuel felt as he and Lily trailed Alice from one room to another, he did not reveal. Alice avoided the spiral staircase, which Lily assumed led to the solar.
She glanced at it once. Any damage the old fire had inflicted either was not visible from where she stood or had been repaired. She looked up to see Samuel staring past her with a resigned expression. “I remember playing up there,” he said, pulling her by the arm as if protecting her from some unseen menace. “And not much else.”
Alice took Lily’s other arm. “We had a family of jackdaws that set up residence in the fireplace after everyone left,” she said. “Lawton said it was almost impossible to move them out.”
“That is because jackdaws mate for life,” Samuel said. He lowered his head, his mouth grazing Lily’s ear. “And so, by the way, do St. Aldwyns.”
Two hours later the servants’ cart rumbled over the drawbridge and deposited the staff in the bailey, providing the disruption that Samuel needed to explore by himself. He climbed the spiral staircase and walked straight to the solar. Bittersweet memories of his life before the fire rose up in his mind. The old dogs lying in front of the hearth, muscles twitching. His father begging him to pay attention to the chessboard while his mother read quietly to Alice and his two younger sisters from Perrault’s fairy tales.
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