She tried to push them away, to focus only on the kiss, but it didn’t work. Images flashed through her mind, Spencer’s visions, his fantasies of her, of them. Shocking, alluring, at once both titillating and frightening, she could barely make sense of it all. Poleaxed as she was by her own feelings, the influx of another’s heightened emotions overwhelmed her. Swamped by them, she struggled to breathe, to hold onto the moment that she’d wanted so desperately but that was now falling quickly out of her reach.
His arms closed around her, crushing her to him. For just a moment, that sensation, the security of being held by him pushed everything else away. The strength of his arms around her, the heat of his body against hers, the images that unfurled before her mind’s eye— products of his desire that she was far from immune to—compelled her to be bold. Her hands roamed over his chest, his shoulders in a nonverbal invitation that he clearly understood. His hands began a journey of their own, traveling over her ribs, tracing the line of her collarbone, the rounded curves of her shoulders. One finger traveled over her skin, in a single line from the hollow of her throat, along her breastbone, tracing a lacy pattern on tender flesh. All the while, his mouth moved over hers, his teeth scraping over and gently nipping at her lips, his tongue sliding languorously against hers.
He caressed the upper swells of her breasts with the backs of his fingers and Larissa shivered with the sensation. When he cupped her breast in his hand, his thumb unerringly finding the taut peak, she stiffened in his embrace. She wanted him, she trusted him. And then the unthinkable happened. From Spencer, she saw clearly his memory of her the day he’d found her. Broken, battered, half starved, still dressed in the torn and dirty gown that she’d worn when her stepfather deposited her on Moreland’s doorstep to pay his debts.
That memory unlocked so many of her own. Fear reared its ugly head. Moreland’s face flashed in her mind, twisted and cruel. He’d taken her virginity, robbed her of her innocence, and as his memory intruded, she feared she’d never truly be free of it or him.
Pressing her palms firmly against, Spencer’s chest, she pushed against him. Whether it was due to the brandy or to his desire, it took a moment for him to register that she wished for him to stop. When he finally stepped back from her, his hands dropped to his sides and she could see the regret on his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “You granted a kiss and I took liberties I should not have.”
What could she possibly say? Every liberty he’d taken she’d been eager to give. But her past had left something broken inside her, and in him, as well. She feared that in his mind and in her own reality, she would forever be the frightened, broken girl he’d found at a posting inn. Unable to speak, overcome by the misery that bloomed inside her with that thought, Larissa did the only thing she could. She fled, leaving Spencer calling after her as she ran to her room.
Larissa awoke with a start, the jolting of the carriage pulling her from sleep. It wasn’t a muggy evening in the full heat of summer, but a harsh and cold winter’s day. It had been more than six months since her shocking lapse of propriety with Spencer but her traitorous memory made it feel as if it had been yesterday.
A blush stained her cheeks as the dream replayed in her mind. How many times had she dreamed of that night in the library? Dozens? No, she thought glumly, it had been hundreds. Sometimes, she dreamed it just as it happened that night, yet other times, courtesy of the education offered by the fantasies Spencer had inadvertently shared with her, her dreams were of an entirely different nature. In some of her dreams, the intrusive moment of panic never occurred. Those were the dreams that left her the most shaken.
Scooting forward to the edge of the seat, she peered through the curtained window into the dimming light of the late afternoon. It was an affectation, something to discuss other than the dream that had woken her.
“It’s later than I had imagined,” she said softly.
Dorcas, the rather unlikely maid she’d hired at the first posting inn on her ill-advised journey, grunted in response. “Them horses was pulling a carriage before you was born.”
Larissa said nothing, but leaned back against the seat and placed a weary hand to her neck, attempting to ease some of the tension gathered there. Anticipation warred with fear. She wanted desperately to see Spencer, to explain why she’d run from him, but he would be angry with her for a multitude of reasons. He had left England to escape her, after all, and now she was chasing him down like a hound after a fox. The impropriety of the situation didn’t even bear considering.
He’d be furious, she surmised as she stared down at her clenched hands. His jaw would tighten and of course his eyebrow would lift only slightly and to anyone who didn’t know him well, his expression would be inscrutable. But she knew all the tell-tale signs of his heightened emotions. She had made a study of him over the course of several years. His every gesture and expression were committed to memory. Whatever happened, she would not back away from him again. In the six months since he’d left Briarwood in the dead of night, she’d decided that she was quite done with running and hiding. Fear would not control her anymore.
The maid leaned forward and looked out the window. She leaned back abruptly and shuddered. “This ain’t a good place, miss. I don’t know what folks would live so dark and dreary! Them woods!” she exclaimed.
Larissa sighed. “Those woods.”
“That’s what I said, ain’t it? Them woods look to be full of wicked, evil things. Beasties and spooks, miss, ’tis all they’re fit for!”
Larissa spared another glance for the passing scenery. Dorcas’ command of the language might be rather coarse, but her mind was clearly quite keen and she was not wrong in her estimation. The surrounding woods were certainly atmospheric in a foreboding and slightly terrifying manner. “You are quite safe in the carriage, Dorcas.”
“Won’t be staying in the carriage though, will we? Have to get out some time,” the maid offered somewhat philosophically as she removed the cap from the flask she’d been sipping on all day. A tonic, she’d said, to ease her stomach when traveling.
Larissa couldn’t be certain but she strongly suspected that the small canteen held not a tonic at all, but gin. The maid’s words had become progressively more slurred during the journey. Of course, beggars couldn’t be choosers. She’d left Briarwood under the cover of darkness, leaving nothing more than a note behind for Rhys and Emme that she’d gone to visit their aunt, Lady Isabelle Harding. Emme would know it for a lie as neither of them would ever willingly spend time with their shrewish relative but by then it would be too late. She would have reached Kinraven and Spencer.
Opening her reticule, Larissa removed the purloined letter that had started her on this journey. It had come addressed to Rhys but as he and Emme had gone to London she, in her insatiable need for some word of how Spencer fared, had taken it. As she reviewed the contents, she felt no regret for her larceny. It was more than just concern. Spencer needed her. Try as she might, she’d been unable to ascertain what was happening with him.
Larissa stared down at the letter and read the words that she’d long since committed to memory for the hundredth time.
Rhys,
I have written little in the last months, and now I find myself writing for the one reason that I despise above all things. I am begging for your help. When I came to Kinraven, the inhabitants here muttered about curses and dark deeds. I dismissed them. I labeled them all superstitious fools and paid little heed to their warnings. More the fool, I.
I can no longer tell what is real and what is not. Ugliness from the past bleeds into the present and I see such dark, unimaginable things that I can only assume it is the curse or that I have gone entirely mad. Please, my friend, I need you here. I trust no one at Kinraven. They whisper and watch me with a sly intent and greed that I cannot fathom.
As for your last letter, I did read it and I am glad to know that she is well. But I beg you not to mention her to me again. The darkness
of my present state of mind is all the proof that I needed that any hope in that direction should be forfeited. I am a danger to myself, to others, and I cannot imagine what she would think of me now.
The letter wasn’t signed. It simply stopped abruptly, the penmanship growing more erratic and difficult to read from one line to the next. Yes. Something was terribly wrong. The lesser of her gifts, the intuition that she’d always depended on, had flared to life. She could not see precisely what was happening, but that did not make it any less real or threatening. Spencer was in terrible danger. Her dreams of him, while typically of an embarrassingly carnal nature, had also hinted at that. She’d seen the swirling darkness around him, the confusion and—she hesitated to even think it, but it was there regardless … there was evil surrounding him. She could sense it, and she feared for him. He would not welcome her presence at Kinraven but she meant to stay and help him regardless.
“If’n you read that one more time, it’ll fall apart,” her newly acquired companion pointed out rather sarcastically. She’d met Dorcas at the posting inn in the village beyond Briarwood. The woman, ill-kempt and coarse as she appeared, had been willing to travel with her to Scotland by ship. Even with her reputation in tatters, because she remained unmarried, a chaperone of some sort was necessary, though any attempt to classify Dorcas as an aid to propriety was farcical.
“Who’ll we be visiting again?” Dorcas demanded, and her harsh voice was unaccountably loud inside the closed carriage.
“The Earl of Kinraven,” Larissa replied evenly. “You will address him as ‘my lord’ and as I imagine the household is quite formal, you should speak only when spoken to unless we are in private.”
Dorcas guffawed. “If’n I weren’t fancy enough for you then you ought not to have hired me!”
Larissa borrowed a page from Spencer’s book and kept her expression cool and inscrutable, staring at the maid with a slight arch in her brow as the only indication of her displeasure. “When I hired you, I was under the impression that you were merely a fellow traveler at the inn and not a patron of their taproom! Give me that flask!”
Dorcas gasped and drew back, holding the flask to her flat, scrawny chest. “It were a gift from my late husband!”
Larissa huffed out a breath and rolled her eyes. “You told me you’d never been married, that your engagement to a young vicar had ended when he was tragically struck down by a runaway carriage!”
Dorcas stopped her squawks of protest for a second and Larissa could all but see the wheel of lies spinning in the cagey woman’s mind. Finally, offering up a gap-toothed and lopsided grin, Dorcas said, “Right! I was married to me late husband before I was engaged to the vicar! ’Tis a terrible life of tragedy I’ve lived, miss. A wee dram of gin is my only comfort!”
Throwing her hands up, Larissa gave in. “I don’t care so long as when we arrive at Kinraven your mouth is too full of gin to speak!”
“Now that’s a fine idea you have, miss! A fine idea!” Dorcas said enthusiastically as she uncapped the flask again.
The carriage hit a deep rut in the road. Dorcas bounced on the seat and the flask went sailing, gin spilling all over the dirty upholstery as the maid wailed in misery. “Oh! That bloody bastard! He did it a’purpose!” Dorcas squalled.
“I doubt that very seriously, Dorcas,” Larissa stated evenly.
“You’d think a fine lady like you could have hired a better coach than this! What was you thinking?” Dorcas demanded angrily.
“I fear this was the best hired carriage available in Oban, Dorcas,” Larissa said, her tone reflected a level of patience she did not, in fact, possess at present. The lumpy seated, poorly sprung and none too clean conveyance was the only hired coach left in Oban. It was the season, after all, and any family of means had headed to either Edinburgh or London.
“I’ve ridden in farm carts better sprung than this,” the maid groused.
“Were they driven by your late husband or your affianced vicar?” Larissa demanded sharply.
Dorcas opened and closed her mouth several times, but apparently thought better of what she had planned to say. She resumed grumbling under her breath and stared forlornly at her now empty flask.
Larissa attempted to achieve a more secure and hopefully more comfortable perch on the seat. Every pothole and rut was a new form of torment. Her entire body ached from the incessant jostling, not to mention the sleepless nights that had plagued her all through the journey. Dorcas, meanwhile, had slept like the dead and snored like a braying ass.
Dorcas shifted on her seat and Larissa did have a moment of sympathy for the woman. Rail thin, she hadn’t an ounce of padding on her skeletal frame, and undoubtedly the seats were quite miserable for her, poorly sprung as they were.
Larissa gazed out the window again, noting that the sky had grown alarmingly dark. “I do hope we aren’t getting a storm. Snow could be disastrous here!”
“Snow or no snow,” Dorcas muttered. “Should have known better than to let some hoity-toity woman with more shillings than sense cart me off to the wilds of Scotland! I’ll be back on English soil if I have to walk!”
At the end of her patience with the other woman’s grousing, Larissa glared at her. “That can always be arranged.” As if sensing that she was treading on dangerous ground, Dorcas wisely closed her mouth and said nothing further.
Larissa savored the peace for a moment, but then gave a startled cry as the carriage lurched sharply. She could hear the coachmen calling out to the horses to slow. Curious, Larissa parted the curtains and looked out. They appeared to be firmly in the middle of nowhere. It had taken them hours to come this far at his plodding pace; they’d left the inn at first light! “Whatever is the coachman thinking?”
“Let me see to this,” Dorcas said and rose to her feet.
“No!” Larissa said abruptly. If she allowed Dorcas to speak to the man, he’d abandon them for certain.
Climbing down from the carriage with no small degree of difficulty, her traveling dress snagged on the side of the coach. The fabric ripped and she sighed wearily in resignation, “Sir?” she called out. “What has happened?”
“I’ll go no further!” the man shouted back, clearly terrified.
“Why the devil not?” Dorcas shouted from inside the carriage.
Fearing that things would not go well, Larissa shushed the woman again. “Forgive my companion, sir. She is unaccustomed to travel. Is there a problem with the carriage, then?” Larissa asked, her tone mild.
The driver jumped down off the box and began untying their trunks. “’Tis not the carriage, miss, but the destination that’s the problem. I’ll no go another inch closer to that hell-spawned place!”
“Kinraven? But you agreed to take us there! You’ve been paid to transport us from Oban to the castle!” she protested, clearly dismayed by the driver’s abrupt reversal on the matter. He’d only been too happy to stow their bags for them atop the coach and assist them inside. Now, in the middle of nowhere, he planned to simply abandon them. It made no sense.
The man pointed to the fork in the road ahead with a trembling finger. “’Tis the harpy!” he cried.
Larissa followed his gesture, frowning in confusion. There was nothing unusual about the fork in the road. The path simply split into two different directions, diverging around a copse of large trees. It was the cawing of the bird that alerted her. A large bird perched atop one of the branches, the dim evening light reflecting off its shiny black wings. It cawed again, the harsh cry splitting the silent stillness of the evening air. Unnerving, yes, but hardly an indication of doom! “It’s simply a blackbird!” she protested. “Surely you cannot imagine it to be anything else?”
“A blackbird!” He cried. “And it sits at a fork in the road with its back to us!” He uttered these words as if they were supposed to have some significance for anyone other than him.
“Yes, but I hardly see how that signifies,” Larissa replied in as patient a tone as she could manage.
Patience was proving to be a precious commodity.
“Idjit! ’Tis a lot of gypsy foolishness!” Dorcas called out again, her tone sharp and hard.
“Dorcas, hush!” Larissa said, a warning note in her voice. If they had any hope of reaching Kinraven before full dark, it was the man before them who appeared to have turned into a raving lunatic. “Let’s not be hasty in our judgements! Sir—.”
He dropped the first of their many trunks onto the road where it landed with a disturbing thud. “Ye canna sweet talk me, miss, so you needn’t waste yer breath. ’Tis an omen and I’ll not court misfortune by carting the two of ye another inch! Ye can walk to Kinraven from here.”
“We could but for the luggage. Perhaps,” Larissa said coaxingly, “you could take it back to the last village we passed and leave it at the inn? We could send a cart for it later and go the rest of the way on foot.”
“Nae. ’Tis the devil’s work I’ve been hired to do… I was tempted by the coin offered, but I’ve seen the error of me ways. I’ll be leaving ye here with yer thirty pieces of silver! I’ll not truck with witches!” he said as the last of their large trunks sailed to the ground. Her valise and Dorcas’ single worn bag followed. When he climbed down from the coach, he pulled a leather pouch from his coat and flung the coins he’d been paid earlier into the mud. “Good riddance to ye!” As he uttered the last, he opened the door to the coach and all but dragged Dorcas out.
Dorcas shouted at him the whole while. “Coward! Ham-fisted bugger! What sort of man leaves helpless women by the roadside? ‘Taint no bloody wonder the English whipped—.”
As he pulled away, he shouted back, “Twasn’t the bird that was the harpy, ’twas yer bloody maid!”
“A pox on you!” Dorcas called out. “And I’m a companion! Not a maid, you arse!”
Larissa sighed wearily and pinched the bridge of her nose as if to ward off a headache. It was far too late for that. Her head pounded and now, clearly, her feet would ache as well because they would have no choice but to walk the rest of the way.
The Dark Regency Series: Boxed Set Page 52