Enchanted at Christmas (Christmas at Castle Keyvnor Book 2)

by Christy Carlyle

  She was not going to answer him. He would go away, eventually.

  “I cannot go,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts. “Marry him. Begone.”

  She was not taking romantic advice from a ghost.

  “You can’t think I want to have you around.”

  “Well, really!” she said, sitting straight up in bed. “I’m certainly not the one haunting you!” she snapped softly, mindful of Gywn.

  “Go to him,” Roland said, his voice a soft purr in the darkness.

  She had the fleeting thought that Roland had been insulting only to get a reaction out of her. He seemed highly unsuited to being ignored. Men certainly hadn’t changed much in a few hundred years.

  “It’s the middle of the night. I am no wanton,” she said, tossing her braid over her shoulder as she slipped out of bed, her feet searching for her slippers.

  “Nay, you’re most assuredly not that,” Roland said. He made it sound like an insult. “Go to him.”

  “Will you stop saying that!” Rose said, pulling on her robe, and then her favorite blue shawl over that. The room, thanks to Roland, was icy. “I want nothing to do with him.”

  “Don’t you?” Roland whispered against her neck. She shivered.

  “Of course not!” she said, walking to the door.

  “He does not set your blood to racing? Your heart does not pound when he looks at you?”

  She wasn’t going to get into a debate with a ghost who thought he knew everything.

  “Will you kindly leave me alone?”

  “If you leave Keyvnor, this cursed seat of your cursed ancestors, aye, I can and I will.”

  “You are relentless,” she said, stepping into the corridor, closing the door behind her. Gwyn’s snores seemed to be tapering off.

  “I am that,” Roland said.

  Rose walked away from her bedchamber, from her warm bed, and wandered the corridors of the castle. Yet, to be honest, wandering was not exactly what she was doing. She seemed to be able to feel Lord Snowingham through the vast darkness. What’s more, she could almost believe that he could sense her approach.

  Insanity piled upon insanity. If one was insane, was it possible to measure insanity by degrees? If not, then she was already deeply enmeshed and there was little point in fighting it.

  Roland was gone. Or better said, she could not hear him or feel him. That was a definite improvement. Having no destination in mind, she made her way to the west parlor. Snow would find her. The certainty of that thought brought a half-smile to her lips.

  Insanity upon insanity.

  She was lighting a candle on a side table when Snow entered the room. He was slightly disheveled, beautifully so. His waistcoat was open, his linen shirt rumpled, his hair tousled. The look in his eyes when he beheld her was worthy of a sonnet, if she could write sonnets, which she could not. It took her breath away; she could do that.

  “Are you my destiny?” she whispered.

  “I believe I am,” he said, crossing the room, holding out his hand to her.

  She placed her hand within his; his hand was large and warm and safe.

  “Then I am your destiny?” she said, looking into his blue, blue eyes.

  “It follows,” he said. He did not smile. “I have never believed in destiny before. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  “Yes, here we are.” She pulled her hand from his and turned away from him, away from the light of that single candle glowing softly in the large room. “Where exactly are we, would you say?”

  Snow did not hesitate. “We are in a haunted castle. We have lived to see the legend of the Grimstone ring come true. We, somehow, are connected by the power within the ring.”

  “Yes,” she said, frowning at her feet, running her hands nervously over her braid. “The thing is, I don’t care for my future being decided by a ring. It is your family ring, not mine.” Snow said nothing. She turned to look at him. He was staring at her, a smile on his lips. “You find that amusing?”

  “I like you,” he said. “There is fight in you. You are not dim-witted.”

  “How kind,” she said flatly.

  “No,” he said, taking a step in her direction, closing the gap between them. He loomed over her. She did not find it disagreeable in the slightest. “I am not . . . the words I want to say seldom come to me when I command them to appear.”

  “Perhaps you should coax them,” she said.

  “As I should coax you?”

  She flushed. She could feel the heat rising to her cheeks. “I am not so bold.”

  “Aren’t you?” he said. “I seem to remember you standing at my side, ready to take on the unnatural world with only a single knife between us. I call that bold, even fierce.”

  “That doesn’t sound very feminine.”

  “It sounds wondrous.”

  He took her hands in his and smiled down at her. She smiled up at him, her hands tingling within his, her blood singing, her heart racing.

  She put Roland’s words from her mind. He was a ghost and she was gloriously alive; Roland couldn’t make her do anything.

  “No one has ever called me bold before,” she said.

  “They will from now on,” he said, running his hand over her cheek. She turned into his touch, her breath caught in her chest.

  “Is the ring making you do this?” she asked, staring up at him. His eyelashes cast shadows on his brow. She could see the golden shimmer of his unshaved cheek. He looked a man to make war on kings, and win.

  “I possess the ring. The ring does not possess me,” he said. “The ring is a tool, a tool with one purpose. When the ring is needed, the ring is useful.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” she said. She wanted to kiss his throat. She didn’t. She was not a wanton, and it was not a disgrace to be properly maidenly. She sent the thought straight to Roland and hoped he choked on it.

  “But unconvincing?” he said, stepping back from her to sit on the sofa. The coal fire in the hearth had long ago gone to ash. The room was still, coldly still, yet she was not cold. She followed Snow to the sofa and sat beside him, struggling not to rub against him like a cat. “The ring has never before been needed, Rose. It has been a simple ring. It was coming to Keyvnor that ignited the power within the ring.”

  “I am here, at Keyvnor. I play a part in this, don’t I?”

  “Yes. Destiny,” he said, looking at her, reaching for her face, stopping to fold his hands in his lap.

  “Destiny,” she said. “I suppose that there are worst things than to be a man’s destiny.”

  “As I am yours,” he said. “The thought should bother me, yet it does not.” She gave him an insulted look. He said, “I did not think I’d acquire a wife this way.”

  “A wife?” she said, turning to face him, tucking her feet under her hips.

  “What else? Can you not feel it in your blood? I can feel it in mine.”

  “Feel what?” Yes, she could feel it, the humming that turned into melody when he was near, but this was all too sudden, wasn’t it? A courtship could not be this rushed and turn out well.

  “My blood sings. Yours does as well. I can hear it, feel it. Tell me the same is true for you.” He was staring at her, his bright blue eyes seeing everything.

  “It is true,” she said, wanting to fall into his arms, resisting the need to do so.

  “I will speak to your father.”

  “Not before the wedding.”

  Snow looked at her, touching a finger to the edge of her jaw. She fought a gasp of longing. “What is wrong? Tell me.”

  “It’s too fast, isn’t it?” She wanted to tell him everything, to bare her heart, yet she resisted that need as well. “Doesn’t it all seem rushed and headlong? I can’t help feeling that I am being manipulated into this, and I refuse to be manipulated. Don’t you feel the same?”

  “Fast is not the same as rushed, and I have never behaved in a headlong fashion in my life. Who or what
do you believe is manipulating us?”

  “Oh, just in a general sense,” she said. She would not speak about ghosts. She would not.

  “Rose, tell me. Can you not feel how deeply you can trust me?”

  She could, more’s the pity. It only heightened her sense of being manipulated. What kind of girl trusted a man after two or three brief encounters? Ruined girls, for one.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  She did, completely, of all the inconvenient things. Perhaps there was a bit of the wanton in her.

  “Don’t repeat this to anyone,” she began. He shook his head, a small smile playing about his mouth. “I mean it!” she said sternly.

  “Of course,” he said, the smile disappearing. “Proceed.”

  “You know, I expect, that Castle Keyvnor has its share of rumors about unnatural things.”

  “Ghosts,” he said, nodding.

  “You are not the only one with a family legend,” she said, sighing. “I have only lived at Keyvnor for a few weeks, you understand. I am hardly an expert on these tales, and I am certainly not the sort of person who believes in ghost stories.”

  “Of course not,” he said, maintaining a straight face, yet she could sense his laughter bubbling just under the surface. “Would it help you to know I am another who does not readily believe in ghost stories?”

  “It does, actually.”

  She swallowed audibly, forced herself to look into his eyes, and said the words she had sworn never to speak. “I can hear them.”

  “The ghosts.”

  “Yes.” He did not look at her in horror. That was a promising start. “I can hear one very well, Roland is his name, and since you have come, I can see Roland. He comes to me.”

  “Often?”

  “Once was more than enough,” she said. “But, yes, fairly often.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Mostly, he insults me,” she said. Oddly, it was a relief to be able to discuss it. She felt less insane with each word she spoke. “He hates the Banfields.”

  “A good enough reason to haunt this place,” Snow said, scratching the rim of his ear.

  She was actually having a calm, informative conversation about ghosts. It had to be the oddest courtship in the history of marriage. That it would end in marriage to Lord Snowingham she had not a single doubt. She ran her finger over the top of his hand, tracing the vein that ran from his wrist down the length of his index finger, the ring a smooth bump along that track. His skin was warm; she could almost feel his blood coursing. The ring seemed a thing alive.

  “Roland wants me to marry you,” she said.

  “Does he?” Snow said, brows raised.

  “He’s quite insistent about it.”

  “And so you suspect that he is manipulating events to force us together.”

  “Yes,” she breathed. “That’s it, precisely.”

  “How would he do that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What could he do, or has he done, to force us to find each other so perfectly suitable?” He turned his hand and cupped her hand, palm to palm. Her heart seemed to beat in rhythm with his. She forced her mind to focus on the conversation she had begun.

  To be honest, she hadn’t considered it quite that way.

  “You find me perfectly suitable?” she said.

  “You know I do,” he said, brushing a kiss to her fingertips. Her blood, as usual, began to sing in her veins. “Now answer the question. I will accept as reasonable that Roland wants us to wed. The most obvious reason is that he would like you away from Keynvor, I should imagine.”

  “But why to you, in particular? Shouldn’t he be frightened of obliteration?”

  “Is that what you believe happens when the ring glows and the thunder cracks? Obliteration?”

  “I think so,” she said, looking down at the pattern in the rug. “The ring seems to make everything stronger for me. I can hear things and see things that I could only sense before you arrived at Keyvnor.”

  “The natural inheritor of the ring,” he said softly, staring down at their joined hands, “while I am the hereditary inheritor. The two of us meeting, the ring coming to life, the instant bond we share.”

  “Instant recognition, I should have said,” she said. “Do you think that’s what happened?”

  “Rose, I am not a man who listens to ghost stories, let alone believes them,” he said, “yet I am also a man who cannot discard a fact that he finds inconvenient or illogical to his thinking. I cannot deny the ring glows at certain times. I cannot deny that you are my woman, the only woman for me, and that I knew that as fact from the moment I first saw you.”

  She felt the deep abiding joy of those words enter her very bones. It was true. She had known that he was hers on the most elemental level from the moment she first saw him. If that was the power of the ring, so be it. She couldn’t even imagine life without him.

  “I cannot deny that I have felt the presence of ghosts, unnatural to this place, lost souls trapped by will or happenstance. Perhaps the purpose of the ring, the root of my family legend, is to release those souls, to send them to where they belong. ‘Tis a worthy service to perform.”

  “It sounds like an execution,” she said.

  “The dead cannot be killed a second time, Rose,” he said, touching her cheek.

  “Can’t they?” She shivered. The cold of the room seemed to be growing, touching her, pressing down upon her.

  “Would you enjoy being a ghost?” he asked, casting a quick look at the ring. She touched it; it was warm, warmer than Snow’s skin. “Is that what you want to happen after you die?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I would think the same is true for them, these lost souls. They find themselves trapped between death and life; it is not the afterlife that we hope for.”

  “No, that’s true,” she said.

  “You are for me, Rose, as I am for you,” he said, rising to stand, lifting her to stand beside him. “I might question it if I could, but I cannot. You are mine. I can think no other thought, plan no other future. I will live my life beside you or I will not live at all. Will you not say the same?”

  She looked up at him, at this tall, blond stranger who seemed to have stepped out of another age. He was a warrior and a mystic. He was fearless, and he made her feel equally fearless. She could not, and would not, live without him. She could not imagine drawing a breath without him to share it with her.

  “It is true,” she said. “It is the same for me.”

  “The legend of the Grimstone ring accompanies us, Rose, and it, and the duty of it, will pass to our son. Can you accept that?”

  The look he gave her was not fearless. He wanted her to agree, to accept, and if she did not, then he would be lost. And so would she.

  Destiny.

  “To have you, I will say yes to anything. Even ghosts,” she said, a grin breaking through the moment to enfold them both.

  “Fierce,” he said, grinning. “As I said.”

  “Don’t call me that to my father’s face. He will laugh in yours, if you do,” she said.

  He did not answer her. He apparently did not wish to speak of her father just now.

  Looking into Lord Snow’s eyes, falling into the heat of his gaze, all thoughts of her father fled. They did not embrace so much as melt into each other, fusing together, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. His arms wrapped hard around her, her foot twined itself around his calf as her breath mingled with his in a kiss that shook the foundations of Castle Keyvnor.

  The ring blazed red.

  Thunder boomed.

  There was the sharp crack as the fabric of the world ripped.

  Snow and Rose stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the cold fireplace, the gray form of a small ghost in the shape of a boy staring at them, his mouth and eyes open, an odd look of peace on his ghostly features. He seemed to almost smile, and then he was gone.

  “Paul Hambly,” Rose said. “He drowned in 1766.�
�� The knowledge appeared in her mind like words in a book.

  “Now at peace,” Snow said.

  The room was still. The candle burned. The night was silent.

  “All is well, my lady,” Snow said. “The night is still, our battles won.”

  “All is quiet, my lord,” Rose answered. “Our foes have run, and all is well.”

  They reached toward each other in unison to clasp hands. They turned in simultaneous motion to face each other. The smiles they shared were small, the satisfaction they shared was colossal, and the love they shared was eternal.

  Destiny.

  Chapter 11

  “He’s touched our tree,” Nell said. “I think it will die now.”

  “The beech will not die, not from that,” Roland said. “He has accepted his destiny. He was the kind of man who would, and not shirk his duty.”

  “He killed Paul. That was his duty, according to you,” Nell said, pulling at her long hair.

  “You tried to dissuade him, girl,” Roland said. They sat at the base of the beech tree, the moon long set, the sun about to rise. The world was quiet and still, heavy with mist, dew thick upon all living things. There was no dew upon Roland or his Nell. “He wanted an end to it.”

  “He was a Banfield and so you don’t care,” Nell snapped, her voice tight with unshed tears. “She is a Banfield. You don’t care that she’s marrying that thing.”

  “She was destined for him,” Roland said. “Now he’s cursed with a Banfield bride, poor man.”

  “You could at least pretend to care!”

  Roland turned to Nell, putting a gray hand on her gray thigh. “Paul wanted to go, Nell. He sought them out, knowing what would happen. It’s not been the same for him since his mother’s passed on.”

  “I tried.”

  “I know you did, and so did he,” Roland said. “I likely shouldn’t have told him the tale of the Grimstone and told him how Bjarke wanted to go to Asgard, sick of his ghosting half-life.”

  “No, you should not have done that. He was just a boy, Roland. Just a poor, lost boy!”

  “But he’s lost no longer, is he?” Roland said, squeezing her leg. “You hate the Grimstone, fear it, and that’s right and proper for a ghost, but if you want to escape this life, what other way is there? Find the Grimstone, find your way free.”