“She goes to the old monastery, right up into the bell tower. I found her there one day, all huddled up on the floor crying her eyes out for her mother. When I spoke to her, I think she thought for a minute I was Elizabeth’s ghost. Poor little mite, the look on her face broke my heart! And you think she doesn’t need you, Sebastian? She does. You are her father, and she needs your love.”
“May God damn you to hell.”
His voice was so quiet that for a moment Julia was sure she must have misheard. But the look in his eyes told her that she had not. He looked like a man enduring the torment of hellfire. The expression terrified her, but after only an instant he turned and with long jerky strides left the room.
“Sebastian!” Julia jumped to her feet and went after him, but stopped in the doorway, defeated. As furious as he was, he would not want to listen to another word she had to say. She would wait for him to regain his self-control, and then maybe they could talk again. She was determined not to let the subject alone.
She stayed in the library for a while, glancing idly through book after book without really seeing a single word printed in any of them, trying not to look at the picture of Elizabeth and Chloe at all. Something about that picture affected her profoundly, and she was sure that it must affect Sebastian. Why did he keep it in the room where he spent most of his time? There was no answer, and there were many. But she didn’t know which was the right one, and she refused to speculate any further. The Sebastian she had come to know was not the kind of man who would murder his wife. But then he was not the kind of man who would neglect a young child, his own child, either. So there was no answer for her in that. She could only go by her gut instinct that told her that Sebastian was not guilty of murdering Elizabeth. The case against him was just a web of gossip and innuendo.
Finally acknowledging that he would not be returning to the library that night, Julia went to bed. A sleepy Emily helped her off with her clothes and into her nightgown, and then Julia sent her off to bed and crawled beneath the covers herself. In the pitch darkness it was possible to imagine all kinds of hellish reasons for Sebastian’s violent aversion to his daughter. But she resolutely refused to consider the most persuasive of those: guilt. There could be any number of other explanations. Perhaps he was a man who simply did not like children. Or perhaps Chloe wasn’t really his child. That explanation would make sense if she had never seen Chloe. But Sebastian’s mark was upon the child, much too obvious for anyone to ever deny.
It seemed like she had just fallen asleep when she heard the screams. Over the months she had lived at White Friars, she had become accustomed to the sounds of Chloe’s occasional nightmares. They never lasted long, and lately she had been sleeping through them as just another sound of the night. But tonight they were frenzied, high pitched and terrified—and they did not stop. Perhaps something had happened to the child—or the nursemaid?
Julia did not stop to speculate further. Jumping out of bed, she caught up her white silk wrapper, threw it around herself and hurried from the room. Chloe’s chamber was farther along the same corridor, just beyond the place where it veered into the west wing. As Julia rounded the bend, a spluttering candle in hand, she had to fight an impulse to clap her hands to her ears to block out the shrill echoing shrieks. A score of servants in their nightclothes were before her, she saw, gathered around the open doorway to Chloe’s room. Elbowing her way to the front, she stopped short at the scene before her.
Chloe, silver-gilt hair in childish plaits that tumbled over the front of her prim, flower-print nightgown, was backed into the far corner of her room. Her face was as ghostly white as the finest English china, and her hands were held out in front of her as if to ward something off. Ceaseless piercing screams poured one on top of the other from her throat despite the frantic shushing of Miss Belkerson, who was trying without success to comfort the child, and Mrs. Johnson, who was hovering uselessly on Chloe’s other side. Chloe’s blue eyes were as saucer-wide as her mouth, and fixed with an expression of abject terror on Sebastian, who stood towering over her, his face as white as hers.
“Please, Miss Chloe, please….” Miss Belkerson was muttering disjointedly, her eyes darting with agonized entreaty from Chloe to Sebastian and back again.
Mrs. Johnson was made of sterner stuff. Pointing the candle she carried at Sebastian, she said, “If you’ll leave us, my lord, I’m sure Miss Belkerson will get her quieted down. I’m sorry to have to say it, and you can dismiss me for it if you wish, but you should never have come in here, not even if the little lass was sleeping. Now you’ve likely scared her out of what little wits she has left. It was not well done of you, my lord, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”
Miss Belkerson, looking distraught as she tried to push down Chloe’s outstretched arms, nodded once as if in agreement, then caught herself and cast another frightened glance up at Sebastian. He stood as white and motionless as if he had been carved from stone. Suddenly he pivoted, moving like a man just awakened from a nightmare, and walked from the room.
As soon as he was out of Chloe’s sight the screams lessened in intensity. Julia, hand pressed to her mouth, watched as Chloe subsided into a sobbing heap in Miss Belkerson’s arms. Poor child, poor child…. But poor Sebastian, too. He had looked as if he had suffered a death blow. Something was terribly wrong between him and his daughter, but whatever it was, he deserved compassion, too. She turned suddenly, lifting the skirts of her wrapper and nightgown, and practically flew from the room. She did not want him to be alone after this.
“Sebastian.” She caught up to him at last in the great hall, and reached for his shirt-clad arm. He turned on her with such an expression of fury that she shrank back.
“Are you satisfied now?” he demanded savagely. “I told you to keep your nose out of things you know nothing about, but you just had to stick it in, didn’t you? Do you see now why I avoid my daughter? The merest sight of me terrifies her into a screaming frenzy!”
He bit off the last words with such anger that Julia took another step backwards. He noted her retreat, acknowledged it with a bitter, sardonic smile, and turned his back on her without another word. Watching him as he strode away, Julia knew that she had to go after him, to offer what comfort she could. Whatever he was, whatever he had done, to her he was still Sebastian, her Sebastian. She owed him her loyalty if nothing else.
“The master’s in a bad way, Miss Julia.” Johnson had appeared in the hall behind her in time to hear that last savage exchange and had also been present in the gathering of servants outside Chloe’s room.
“I know, Johnson.” Julia smiled briefly, abstractedly, at the butler’s concerned face. Taking her courage in her hands, she turned to follow Sebastian to his last refuge, the library.
XV
Pausing momentarily at the closed door, she took a deep breath and entered without knocking. The fire that was lit against the increasingly chill nights provided the only light in the room, and it had died down to a few smoldering embers. By the faint orange glow she could see him standing with his back to her, head thrown back as he drained the contents of a glass. He immediately poured out more brandy, and cursed as the bottle ran dry before the glass was full.
“Shall I have Johnson bring more brandy?” Julia spoke quietly as she closed the door behind her. He swung around snarling, his hand clenched around the glass as if he were thinking about hurling it at her head.
“Get out of here.”
“Sebastian, I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.” She stayed near the door, unmoving, trying to read his expression through the shifting shadows.
“You still don’t understand. It’s not your business to understand. So get the hell out of here and leave me alone. I wish you’d done it in the first place.”
He turned away from her, lifting the glass to his lips and tossing back the contents in a single gulp. He moved jerkily to one of the two big wing chairs facing the fire and sat down in it, his long legs sprawling out before him.
“Ring for more brandy. Then go.” His voice was scarcely more than a rough murmur as he stared into the fire. Julia hesitated, then crossed to the bell pull. When Johnson tapped discreetly on the door, she opened it and sent him for more brandy. But when he left, she stayed, hovering near the door so that Sebastian would not remember her presence and order her to leave again. When Johnson reappeared with the brandy and two glasses she took the tray from him with a brief reassuring nod in answer to his anxious look. Sebastian might not know or care, but despite his usual autocratic manner the servants were fond of him.
Julia carried the tray to a small table near Sebastian’s elbow, and he roused himself enough to look at her as she poured out a glass for him. From the wild red-rimmed glitter of his eyes and his uncoordinated movements, Sebastian had already had far too much to drink. She didn’t know how well he held his liquor, but she had seen enough men drinking to know that shortly he would be extremely well to live indeed.
“I thought I told you to go away.” He sounded more tired than angry now.
“Yes, you did. Here, take this.” She handed him the glass, then poured a half measure into the other glass. With the bottle in one hand and the half-full glass in the other, she sank to her knees beside his chair, curling her legs up beneath her.
“You drinking too?” A sideways glance took in her half-full glass. “Planning on keeping me company, are you? I assure you, I’ll do much better alone.”
He took a long swallow from his glass, and then another, then returned his attention to the fire. Julia, watching him, felt her heart swell with pity. He looked so—so alone. She moved a little so that her shoulder was just touching the long hard stretch of his thigh. He needed someone now very much, she thought.
“Softhearted little thing, aren’t you?” He must have felt her unspoken sympathy because his eyes veered toward her with an ugly sneer in their depths. “First Timothy, now me. Why don’t you go find some stray kittens or something to waste your sympathy on?”
Julia looked up at him, guessing that he was lashing out at her because of his own desperate pain, and not knowing how to respond. He needed to talk, she knew, needed to pour out the hurt festering inside like pus in a wound. But she did not know the words to touch the place where he had held it so long buried. Anything she said was liable to turn him once again into a raging, mindless beast.
“Damn it, quit looking at me like I’m some dumb, hurt animal.” His sudden snarl made her jump. Her eyes had been fixed on his face, she realized, and hastily she dropped them to the fire. She could feel his hostile gaze on her averted cheek. After a moment she looked back at him, helplessly drawn.
“Sebastian, you need to talk about whatever it is that’s wrong with Chloe.” She didn’t know how else to say it, and hoped her gentle tone would blunt the sharp edge of his anger.
He said nothing for a long moment while she looked up at him with huge golden eyes, her black hair loose and cascading down over the thin white silk of her wrapper. In the soft glow of the dying fire he looked more devil than angel, she thought.
“So you think I need to talk, do you?” The words were drawled in a gritty undertone quite unlike anything she had ever heard from him. A hard smile played about his mouth, twisting the elegantly carved lips into a satyr’s grimace before disappearing to leave them grimly straight. “Talk’s not what I need.” He laughed, the sound harsh. His eyes glittered with a strange hot light as they moved over her.
Julia felt her heartbeat quicken as his eyes touched on her body, which he must know was naked beneath the flimsy covering of her nightclothes. If any other man had looked at her like that, she would have been frightened. But despite everything, she was not afraid of Sebastian.
“Tell me about Chloe, Sebastian.” Her quiet voice brought his eyes up from their insulting appraisal of her bosom as it swelled against the thin silk wrapper. He stared at her for a moment, his expression ugly.
“I’m tired of talking,” he said in a thick guttural voice Then before she had any inkling of his intention, he let his glass fall with a dull thud and slosh of splashing brandy and reached for her. Her own glass fell too as his hands closed over her upper arms, dragging her up so that she was half-lying across his lap.
“Sebastian!” Shocked by the unexpectedness of his action, her eyes were huge golden pools staring up into the narrowed, glittering slits of his. His face was flushed with drink and something else. His mouth was twisted into a sneering half-smile. A vein pumped visibly just above the open collar of his shirt, and his hands were vice-tight on her arms.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered, wincing with pain as his fingers tightened until they were digging deep into her soft flesh. He smiled, a tigerish smile that made her eyes widen. This was not Sebastian, not her Sebastian. This was a violent, brutal stranger.
“Good. I want to hurt you.”
The guttural mutter was not his voice. Julia writhed, trying to pull her arms free of his paralyzing grip. Suddenly this man was frightening her. The icy mask was gone, shattered into a thousand pieces. In its place was a tortured, twisted mortal man in pain himself and capable of inflicting pain.
“I’ll enjoy hurting you.” And then he dragged her up so that her head was pressed back against the crimson velvet squab of the chair. She was sitting on his lap, her legs bared to the knees by nightclothes that twisted across them, her eyes huge as he stared into them with that travesty of a smile twisting his lips. Staring helplessly back into those icy blue depths she thought she knew how the victim of a cobra must feel: mesmerized, incapable of any kind of movement. Although her legs were free, it never occurred to her to kick him; although she could have struggled and fought and screamed, that never occurred to her either. She just lay back against the velvet chair and returned him look for look with a kind of dreamlike fascination while he grew hard and heavy beneath her and his breathing quickened.
“Don’t, Sebastian.” Her voice was a husky, pleading murmur. It was the only protest she made as he leaned toward her, his eyes fixed on hers as his lips sought her mouth. A twisted grimace of a smile was his only response, and then his lips were on hers, not harshly, as she had expected, but soft, the merest whisper of a caress against her own. His mouth felt so warm, so right. At its touch a hot rush of feeling shot through her veins, and she moaned suddenly as all the exquisite memories of the last time he had kissed her came flooding back. Her eyes closed, and her arms came up to twine around his neck with the strength of the damned.
“Julia,” she heard him mutter, but she was beyond speech herself, beyond anything but this molten spiraling urgency to kiss and touch and caress.
His mouth opened over hers, his tongue tracing the outline of her lips before urgently demanding entrance. She opened her mouth for him, opened it wide and welcomed him, driven by a need so fierce that she was shaking with it. She could never have enough … His mouth was hot and hard and hungry as it took hers with an urgency that had her mewling tiny sounds of ecstasy. His hands were moving over her, as hot and hard as his mouth, touching her in places where she had never been touched, lingering over her breasts until her nipples ached with tension and she cried out and arched her back. His hands roamed further, molding her waist and thighs and the secret feminine nest where her legs joined.
She was on fire for him, incapable of speech or thought or anything but this hot liquid feeling, melting in his arms, his to do with as he pleased. Somehow they slid from the chair to the floor and she was lying on her back on the rug, the scent of spilt brandy and man heady in her nostrils, the shadowy beauty of him looming over her as he bared her body by pulling her nightclothes up to form a bunchy twisted line above her breasts, which ached and throbbed with need. His hands found the soft swelling shapes, cupping their pale roundness while his fingers stroked over the pebble-hardness of her nipples. Julia thought she would die with the pleasure-pain of it.
And still he was kissing her. Ravenous kisses that made her head spin and her se
nses reel, fiery kisses that awakened in her an answering fire, wonderful kisses, magical kisses, making her feel things she had never imagined she could feel.
He was lying on her now, heavy and solid, crushing her into the carpet so that she could almost feel each separate fiber as it imprinted itself into her spine. The smooth texture of his buckskins chafed at her legs, while the linen of his shirt was rough against her breasts and his buttons cut into her soft skin. She clutched his back, nails digging into the solid flesh beneath the shirt, reveling in the strength of his muscles. And then suddenly it occurred to her to want to feel his skin against hers.
She moaned, tugging at his shirt until it came free of his trousers and then burrowing her hands up beneath the soft linen to touch his flesh. Smooth, hot flesh over rippling muscles, slick with sweat. She ran her hands up over his back to his shoulder blades, nails lightly scoring his skin, her breath coming in fast little pants as he took her mouth.
“Christ.”
She barely heard the word, muttered as he shifted, doing something with his clothes. Moaning, she pulled him back to feel something hard and hot and naked pulsing against her thigh. His mouth claimed hers once again in a swift searing kiss, and then his head was moving lower, tracing a path across her face to her neck and then over the soft rise of an arching breast. He took the nipple in his mouth and she gasped. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, wonderful, marvelous, trailers of fire shooting down into her belly and thighs. He suckled her like a babe and she responded with soft little cries, her fingers on the back of his head, reveling in the soft silkiness of his hair as she pressed his face to her. His hands were moving too, stroking over her belly and the tops of her thighs before finding their way to the thick nest of black curls and stroking there too. She stiffened as he first touched her there, but his hard fingers were gentle as they slid between her legs, leaving liquid fire wherever they touched.
Loving Julia Page 15