Doomed to Torment

by Claire Ashgrove

  He could spend hours in her company. Days, for that matter and never tire of the constant way she challenged everything he thought he understood.

  And he could spend a lifetime right here, with her delicate body barely brushing his, her soft mouth captured beneath the hard, demanding press of his.

  He drew back, aware of what he’d unconsciously done, and braced himself for the crack of her palm against the side of his face. Instead, Isolde remained motionless, her silvery eyes wide with wonder. She breathed through parted lips that were swollen from the harsh punishment of his kiss. Her breath caressed his cheek, and the sweet scent of heather filled his awareness. Every instinct he possessed ordered him to let go and step away, but spellbound, Angus couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring himself to do anything more than dip his head in hesitant search of her mouth.

  To his surprise, she lifted into him and her lips clasped his.

  With a low groan of longing, his fingers loosened, and he slid his hands around her waist as her arms wound around his neck. Lifting her closer, he savored the mesmerizing warmth of her body meshed against his, drank in the intoxicating flavor that was all Isolde.

  No, she was nothing like Camille. He had loved his wife, but he couldn’t remember when a kiss had reached so deep inside him that he felt his heart shudder. Isolde’s tongue tangled against his, vying for dominance in a wholly satisfying way he’d never experienced. Just like her spirit, her body issued challenge that he couldn’t ignore. Desire raced through his veins, and in the unsteady beat of his pulse, his cock swelled.

  He lifted a hand to twine it through her long hair and tipped her head, deepening the kiss. She settled into his embrace, relaxing even as her mouth took on a greater demand. Something unnamable shifted inside Angus. Like a part of him moved aside to make room for her.

  His free hand skated up her ribs to cup the soft flesh of her breast. At his gentle squeeze, she let out a sound of pleasure that vibrated into him. He swallowed it down, rolled his thumb over her nipple, and breathed in bliss. Too long he’d wanted this, too many nights he’d remembered the way she filled his palm. Yearning shot through his body, urging his hips into hers. His cock brushed against her pelvis, and, despite the layer of denim that muted sensation, fire arced across his nerve-endings.

  He was thirty-two years old, and the closest he’d ever come to this needy feeling that possessed him was the night he’d lost his virginity. Even then, sensation wasn’t as sharp, the stark hunger to sink so deep inside a woman not nearly as powerful as it was with Isolde in his arms.

  With another squeeze to her breast, her mouth left his, and a gasp tumbled off her parted lips. She tipped her head back, exposing him to the tantalizing length of her throat. He slid his mouth along the delicate line of her jaw, flicked his tongue against the hollow beneath her ear.

  “Isolde,” he whispered. But what he wanted to say lacked definition. Words felt oddly meaningless.

  ****

  A tremble raced through Isolde’s limbs, threatening to steal her ability to stand. She grasped at Angus’s shoulders, her nails biting into the hard muscle there as his fingers worked magic at her breast. The slide of his thumb drove her mad. She wanted more of this incredible feeling, more of the sensation that threatened to splinter her into pieces.

  His warm breath whispered across her throat as his lips moved toward her shoulder. The fingers he had tangled in her hair pulled free to push aside the tank-style sleeve to her modest nightgown. Where cotton had covered her skin, his mouth quickly replaced. The teasing play of his tongue left her squirming in delight.

  Angus.

  Every never-ending she possessed honed in on him. The scent of his cologne, the warmth that radiated through his linen dress shirt to warm her skin, the tremor in his thigh as he strained against the desire that flowed between them. She was lost to it all. Drowning in indefinable emotion.

  Emotion she didn’t dare feel.

  Bliss skidded to a halt as the reality of circumstance lambasted her with bitter truth. Angus was sinking past her defenses. Edging around the fine line that separated her divided soul.

  Worse, he was kissing her because she reminded him of Camille, not because he wanted her. By his own admission he’d acknowledged that fact. I confront her every time I look at you.

  Dismay surfaced, along with a healthy portion of regret. Edging out of his strong embrace, Isolde pushed at his shoulders. With a shaky hand, she drew the back of her wrist across her mouth. “I’m not Camille, Angus, and you need to leave.”

  He opened his mouth as if to object. Then the fire left his eyes, and those green portals glittered hard and cold. With a stiff nod, he backed away and turned toward the open door.

  The only sound that he objected at all came with the heavy thud of wood slamming against timbers.

  Isolde let out a heartfelt sigh and dropped onto the edge of her mattress. A few minutes more, and she’d have allowed him to occupy this bed with her. She wouldn’t have objected. Wouldn’t have even realized the gravity of her acquiescence until it was too late and Angus had lodged himself inside her heart.

  Damn it all—this shouldn’t hurt so much. She’d known Angus hadn’t moved beyond Camille’s death. She’d pointed it out to him a moment before she’d let him kiss her. And she had let him kiss her. He’d given her plenty of opportunity to put him in his place and stop this nonsense from happening.

  But she hadn’t. She’d forgotten all reason and allowed Angus to take her to the heady place where sensation ruled and she could be a normal woman. One who wasn’t cursed with the promise of killing the man she fell in love with.

  The hurt she experienced now only further evidenced how dangerously close she was to taking the final step that would send her plummeting into the dark abyss of her sire’s curse.

  Pain sliced through her as her demonic blood arced in violent glee. She gasped and pressed a fist to her sternum. Her lungs cinched down like an iron vise, and her stomach balled into a fierce knot.

  Isolde doubled over. “Mother…lend me…your strength,” she bit out in a broken whisper.

  But the swift relief she needed didn’t come. It couldn’t. Her training made it possible to resist the act itself, but no matter the power Nyamah wielded, no matter the power that ran in Isolde’s own veins, nothing could override the dark yearning to satisfy her divided soul’s thirst for death. Like her siblings before her, this torment was hers to carry until she could escape with mortality.

  And though she knew she had earned the right to live again, mortality would guarantee her death, given all the damage she’d inflicted on her sire. Drandar would sweep in the moment he became aware of his daughter’s transformation and extract revenge.

  Isolde couldn’t allow that to happen. She was the one member of the family strong enough to defeat him.

  Breathing in shallowly through her nose, she squeezed her eyes shut against the agony of her soul’s conflicted desires and focused on the strength her mother passed onto her. Bit by bit, the iron bands around her lungs let go. Slowly, she pushed herself upright.

  Between the trembling of her spirit and the physical need Angus had aroused, she’d go mad this way. No wonder Dáire had defied the laws of nature to obtain the scroll that held their mother’s magic. She’d had no right to lecture him. Or Belen for that matter. If she wasn’t fully aware of what would happen if she accepted mortality, she’d be scrambling to find the next scroll and be free of this misery.

  And she couldn’t even say she loved Angus Shaw yet. Which only made the prospect of falling that far more damning.

  With an agonized groan, Isolde fell back into the bed and curled into a fetal position. Damn her sire. Damn the curse. If she could love like a mortal woman, she’d welcome Angus here, no matter what sort of damage he did to her heart.

  She craved him too much to let him go.

  Chapter Six

  Angus stalked down the hall like the devil himself was on his tail. Of all the damned fool things
Isolde could have said—did she really think he was that lost in the past? Yes, at times, when the lighting hit her just right, she looked a good deal like Camille. Enough he could understand why Thomas had thought they were the same person. But he damn sure hadn’t been kissing his former wife. He’d lost himself in Isolde and loved every minute of it.

  If he’d possessed an ounce of sense, he’d have pointed out how drastically wrong her assumption was too. Doing so might have relieved him of the terrible discomfort of unsated arousal. Between the incessant throbbing of his cock and the irritation running just beneath the surface of his skin, it would be several hours more before he saw sleep tonight.

  He passed Thomas’s room and slowed to peek his head inside. His son lay half on the bed, his torso draped over the edge of the mattress with his feet hopelessly tangled in the covers. The perfect way to catch a cold with the windows cracked open to capture the night breeze.

  Angus shook his head and quietly stepped inside. He closed the window, then crossed to the oversized bed. Slipping his hands beneath Thomas’s slight shoulders, he eased him into the bed and ran an affectionate hand down his rumpled blond hair. Thomas murmured something unintelligible, rolled onto his side, and snuggled into the old patchwork quilt.

  “Sleep tight, son,” Angus whispered as he bent to dust a kiss to Thomas’s temple.

  An unruly wisp of hair that poked straight out from the crown of Thomas’s head caught his attention, and he smoothed it down, lingering a moment longer at his bedside, amazed that such a perfect thing could exist. Only tonight, that amazement came with a strong twist of Angus’s heart.

  Why he hadn’t argued with Isolde’s incorrect assessment struck him hard. Confessing that his desire for her had nothing to do with Camille would force him to admit to the terrible fear he would somehow fail Thomas and lose him as well.

  He caught Thomas’s small hand in his much larger fingers, dropped to his knees at the edge of the bed, and pressed his forehead to Thomas’s knuckles. If he lost Thomas, he didn’t know what he’d do. And he’d die before he let harm come to him, be that in the form of paralyzing nightmares or a physical threat.

  Problem was, Isolde forced him to second-guess his decisions. Was he doing what was best for Thomas? Or was he indeed, only protecting himself?

  Sighing, Angus kissed the back of Thomas’s hand and rose to his feet. He couldn’t afford to doubt himself. With Isolde no longer here and Hatherly on its way to becoming a protected national landmark, he was Thomas’s only stability. Aysgarth opened doors for Thomas that wouldn’t otherwise. He’d invested thousands of pounds to insure his son would be admitted, and he couldn’t just walk away from it now. Not because he lacked confidence. He’d never lacked confidence in his life. He wasn’t about to doubt himself now.

  He left his son’s room and hesitated at Isolde’s door, hand lifted to the wood. If he knocked, would she listen this time? Could he confide in her, perhaps, even confess what often kept him up at night?

  If he told Isolde how many times he’d dreamt of how she would feel beneath him, would she abandon the absurd notion that his desire related to Camille?

  Probably not. He dropped his arm and moved down the hall toward the front foyer. Besides, pursuing Isolde was pointless. The divide they experienced now would only widen when she realized he wouldn’t change his mind. They stood on two opposing shores.

  His leather shoes echoed quietly through the wide stone corridor as he made his way down into the cellar. In three weeks, the height of tourist season would begin. He needed to have his personal effects sorted before he became caught up in the demands of managing Hatherly, the tourist attraction. He’d arranged to stay on through the holiday season. When it came to a close, when Thomas went off to Aysgarth, the estate would change hands.

  And at the prospect of being free from the responsibility of manager, negotiator, gracious host, and keeper of the household peace, Angus couldn’t deny a sense of relief. Maybe if Hatherly could have remained as a safe haven, a home as it once had been, he too would feel remorse over abandoning it.

  But it had lost its charm.

  Somewhere around the time Isolde quit.

  Angus scowled at the thought. Surely he hadn’t become so attached to that argumentative woman that she had made him miserable. The idea sounded ludicrous.

  Yet, he couldn’t ignore the very real fact that Isolde somehow brightened Hatherly, even if she was taking him to task.

  Determined not to dwell on that possibility, he pulled a dusty crate off an even dustier set of wooden shelving. Something heavy rolled off the top of the overstuffed box and clunked onto the shelf behind. Angus set the crate on the floor and hunkered down to peer into the dark confines.

  Tucked against the back of the stone wall, beneath a thick nest of cobwebs, lay a curious oblong length of leather. It looked…old. Like the piles of genealogical journals in his library he had yet to go through. Names and dates that meant something to the Hatherlys, but had nothing to do with the Shaws. Stuff that belonged together, but he didn’t give a damn about anymore.

  Nevertheless, if this was a misplaced portion of that collection, it belonged upstairs, not down here.

  He reached in, pulled the canister out, and ran his thumb over the brass latch that held it shut. Odd. Nothing upstairs had come with a lock. Maybe this tied into the old myth that Nadine told time and again about the mysterious disappearance of the first Hatherlys to reside in these halls. Rumor had it they’d offended the King and paid the price. He couldn’t remember the details, but the tourists loved the story.

  Chuckling, Angus flipped open the tarnished old lock. What irony to find such an ancient truth about the Hatherly origins when the legacy had come to an end.

  Paper and leather crinkled, protesting his attempts to shake it out of the canister. Tiny fragments of parchment broke free and crumbled into his hand. Definitely old. How had it gotten mixed up with all his stuff?

  With the care he’d give a priceless artifact, he eased the rolled up scroll out of the leather casing and took it beneath the overhead light. He smoothed the papers out across an old trunk and squinted at the document, prepared to see the flourished script of days gone by.

  What stared him in the face, however, brought a frown. It was written by hand, but not in English. Instead, elaborate runes covered the page from corner to corner. Like the writer had feared he or she might run out of room.

  He turned a page, noting now that he didn’t hold paper, nor the vellum he’d become familiar with through the Hatherly records. The scroll resembled cloth…only a thick waxish covering gave it substance. Not paper, not cloth…

  His frown deepened. What in the world did this have to do with anything? By all accounts it looked like a child’s scribblings. If it hadn’t been so obviously old, he’d have tossed it into the legitimate pile of trash.

  Isolde would know.

  The thought struck out of the blue, but as Angus rolled it around in his mind, he became more convinced that if anyone in his household would understand what he’d found, it would be her. While Nadine knew the artifacts in the museum, Isolde had an uncanny way of identifying things that eluded even Nadine.

  One of these days he’d have to ask her about that too. Odd that he never had. It was just another fascinating aspect to Isolde McLaine.

  Carefully, Angus rolled the parchment up, placed it back in the tanned hide canister, and latched the closure. Weariness settled into his bones, and he gave in to a yawn. Emotional fallout—had to be. Isolde had pushed him to the extent of his limits.

  He’d sort through this stuff tomorrow if she didn’t start on it.

  Flipping off the light, he left the room. Weary steps took him up the stairs, down the cold empty hall, back into the personal quarters. As he passed Isolde’s door, rustling inside taunted him with the promise of what lay beyond that heavy barrier. His body ached for satisfaction, urged him to talk himself back inside her room and satisfy his hunger.

 
; He resisted, knowing it was futile. Instead, he let himself in his own room and flicked the light switch on. It struck him then, how empty the spacious bedchamber was. How completely void of life the tall stone walls and massive claw-foot furniture were. Nothing breathed in here. Nothing held warmth. Just impersonal space that marked the emptiness in his life.

  How had he gone four years blind to his own bedroom? It was damned depressing in this room, despite the colorful red and indigo tapestry on the wall. Chilly too, he realized as he rubbed at his arms. He’d shut the window hours ago. By now, the electric heater should have compensated for the drafty walls.

  Odd. Had he been immune to this as well? Was it just another realization of how Isolde impacted his life?

  Angus dropped the canister on his nightstand, stripped out of his clothes, and crawled beneath the covers. To his surprise, the sheets were warm—as they should have been given the amount of time the heater had been running. Which meant, the odd chill clung to the air, like it had downstairs in the library. As if something watched him from afar.

  Once again, the hair at the nape of his neck lifted. Annoyed, he swiped a hand across the back of his neck. Knock it off, Shaw.

  He’d never believed in ghosts and he wasn’t about to start tonight. Isolde had him at wits end. His mind and body were drained. In the morning he’d be back to normal.

  Chapter Seven

  A high-pitched scream jerked Isolde from fitful sleep. She bolted upright, throwing the covers aside at the same time. Her bare feet had barely touched the cold stone floor when another terrified cry broke from beyond her door.

  Thomas.

  Her heart flew to her throat as she raced for her door. She jerked it open, burst into the hall, and ran the few short feet to his room, where she barged inside. Moonlight filled the bedroom, and she fumbled on the wall for the lights. When they clicked on, her gaze jerked to the bed.

  His head buried under the covers, he huddled upright in the middle of his bed. The quilt shuddered with his sobs.