Neither of them spoke.
Rolling off her, he sprawled on the pillow beside her, dragging her against him. A second passed, then two, where they both settled into the sanctuary of their own thoughts, a less volatile place to be. His hand moved into her hair and his lips touched her temple, the thickness of desire still between them.
“I didn’t know you spoke Gaelic,” he said.
“You’re Scots,” she said sleepily, wondering why such a simple feat as learning a language should surprise him. She only spoke a little. “It would be a dishonor to you if I did not prepare myself for my place here.”
Christine pondered his silence but was not sure what she had said. Perhaps it was not that she was a quick study that perplexed him—surely he must know such things as learning languages were not difficult—but that she had cared enough about who he was to do so at all.
Chapter 9
Aunt Sophie’s presence stopped Christine the next morning when she arrived downstairs dressed to depart the inn. “Mrs. Samuels has gone on ahead with the luggage,” Aunt Sophie informed her, eyeing her carefully as she wriggled her hands into her gloves. “Mr. Attenborough said we will arrive at Sedgwick Castle late this afternoon.”
“You needn’t have remained behind because of any concern for me.”
Her aunt sniffed. “I hope he has fed you, because the carriage is waiting, my dear.”
“I have eaten, Aunt Sophie.”
She stepped outside into the sunlight. Her husband stood near the coach speaking to Mr. Attenborough, looking every inch the devil duke people suspected him of being. With the exception of a spot of white beneath his jacket, he was dressed entirely in black, from his jacket that emphasized his shoulders to the waistcoat, trousers, and shiny boots that hugged his calves.
In the bright morning sunlight of the new day, only the tenderness between her legs had given hint of the many exceptional and unexpected pleasures she had shared with him last night and this morning.
As he turned slightly, his jacket opened to reveal a braided chain looped through his buttonhole to his pocket, and a shirt open at his throat. He paused mid-sentence when he saw her and her heart skipped childishly. His eyes raking her and the blue velvet traveling garment she wore, he dismissed his solicitor and approached. “Madam.” He offered his arm.
Bessie and her daughters waited just outside the door. Christine paused to thank them for their kindness, her words leaving the timorous trio standing a little taller as she stepped past them. They had not moved from their place when a few moments later the coach lurched forward.
Erik braced his body against the sway of the coach, his arm across the back of the squabs and his hand casually resting against her shoulder.
Christine glanced at him but found him engaged in dialogue with Mr. Attenborough and Aunt Sophie sitting across from them. She was vividly aware of the warm, clean scent of him, her place beside him as comfortable as she could be, traveling by coach over bumpy roads, until his long fingers came to lay beside her jaw and turned her face to look up at him.
“You are comfortable?” he asked.
His voice caressed her much as it had last night while his hands and mouth had worked sinful magic on her body, the mere memory making her flush like a silly virgin bride in front of Aunt Sophie and Mr. Attenborough.
“I am merely admiring the view,” she said, smiling at Aunt Sophie, who peered at her as if she might reach over and test Christine’s face for fever.
“Just past that oak tree is where the first duke of Sedgwick was beheaded as a traitor to King Henry II for fighting on the side of the Scots during one of the many rebellions,” Mr. Attenborough said.
“Good heavens!” Aunt Sophie gasped, pressing her nose to the glass. “Which oak tree?”
Mr. Attenborough pointed to the tall, sweeping oak they had just passed.
“What an ignoble beginning,” Aunt Sophie said.
“Nae at all,” Mr. Attenborough said. “Most Scots found it an honorable end to get themselves beheaded or drawn and quartered in their fight against the Anglish. It was a mark of courage and their sacrifice for Scotland.”
Aunt Sophie peered at Erik. “I thought the Sedgwick duchy was part of an original English patent.”
“It is,” Erik said. “But Sedgwicks have always been Scots.”
To Christine, the countryside lay like a breathtaking tableau painted by the color of the sky and thick oak trees. They traveled a northeasterly road meandering over rolling hills and across sweeping vales that slowly receded and gave way to lonely crags, and climbed steadily higher. Furtively, she glanced at Erik, looking out the other window, his expression as remote as the landscape. Even in the daylight away from the shadows, he was compelling to her, and she felt a strange impulse to ask him what he was thinking. He turned his head, met her gaze, and she watched the corner of his mouth crook. Like her, he seemed content enough to let Attenborough carry the conversation.
“We’ve close to four hours of this,” he said against her ear.
Tilting her head sideways as she stared up at him, Christine quietly asked, “Are you warning me or apologizing?”
“We’re sharing a coach with a lawyer,” he said in amusement, shifting so he could better adjust her against him. “You are welcome to use my shoulder if you want to rest.”
She told him she could remain awake—after all, in her mind, he’d had the same night as she—but the carriage’s movement lulled her, and her eyes drifted shut before a mile had passed. Her dreams were vivid and filled with a flame-spewing beast, sharp claws and wings extended. Not her father’s vision of a dragon but hers, and this one frightened her.
Something jolted her awake and she opened her eyes, her head leaning on Erik’s shoulder, her thoughts jumbled. Across from her, Mr. Attenborough and Aunt Sophie remained talking as if the world had not just stopped.
The terrain outside the window had become starker as they seemed to be climbing in elevation. Looking up at Erik, she met his eyes. His gloved hand came up and slid behind her head, resting at the nape of her neck, almost protectively as he gently stilled her.
“Rest, Christine. You have a long day ahead.” The warmth in his lazy tone told her she had a long night as well, and he must have glimpsed the carnal awareness in her eyes. “My staff is fervently waiting to welcome you.”
Unsure if he had just made a jest with that double entendre about his staff, she resettled her head against his arm, breathing him into her senses rather than challenging him with a smile. The beast in her dream faded into the mists, though she could not vanquish it entirely as she’d begun to recognize its source—a growing apprehension at the thought of her arrival at Sedgwick Castle. An edginess that had not completely solidified until last night when Erik had told her they were already on land that belonged to the Sedgwick duchy. The carriage would be traveling on his land for hours.
When she had agreed to Erik’s proposal and later signed their contract, she had answered all pertinent questions she’d asked herself about being his wife, but she’d not soundly considered every detail about what it meant to be his duchess. Clearly, her title would not stop her from persuing her goals. She would discover her beast and make history, as long as she met her contractual obligations to him, which also included searching the estate for the bones of a past wife. Someone with whom he’d loved and had a child—after Christine had left him, all those years ago.
Absently, through her gloves, she fingered the silver “wishing” ring that had yet to come off her finger.
She’d never allowed herself to wonder what would have happened all those years ago if she’d remained in England and fought for the cursed duke of Sedgwick—and, if she had, would she have been the one who perished of scarlet fever? Would it now be her bones lost in the crags of Fife waiting to be found?
Even as she told herself the existence of magic and curses was about as likely as seeing a leprechaun, a kind of resolute logic had taken root this past month.
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br /> Because of Erik, she was on her way to getting what she had worked so hard to achieve her entire life, what she had sacrificed everything else to have.
So she did not understand her continued restlessness.
Finally, she gave up attempting to sleep, opened her eyes and rejoined the living, not realizing at first, that not only had she slept with her cheek pillowed against Erik’s chest curled up against his warmth like a contented feline on a feathered bed; but he’d allowed her to sleep like that for hours. The terrain had changed dramatically. Somewhere a river roared and crashed in the form of a waterfall from the stone escarpment soaring behind her. She sat up abruptly, adjusted her spectacles and peered out the window just as the road came across the top of a basin overlooking the river valley. The verdant landscape vanished for a moment behind the trees, then slowly came back into view.
Sedgwick Castle sat in the distance in all its tempestuous beauty, half hidden in the mist and the glare of an outlying lake.
“Good heavens!” Christine heard Aunt Sophie’s whisper. “Sedgwick Castle really is a castle.”
“The tower is the oldest part of the keep,” Mr. Attenborough said with his usual authority about all things Sedgwick as he pointed over Aunt Sophie’s shoulder. “His grace rebuilt it some years ago to save it from crumbling to stone. We’re still farther away than it looks. The river divides the bottomland. Since the flooding began last summer…” His voice faded in Christine’s mind.
Sedgwick Castle was indeed a real castle, with its vine-covered towers and turrets built around an older medieval stone keep. Sunlight captured the visual melodrama, and Christine had drawn in a breath at the sight of the rugged beauty spread out before her. Distant crags spiked upward like sharp dragon’s teeth against the turbulent sky—a perfect complement to the feudal citadel the hills protected. Unmarred by the opulence that usually plagued such ancient duchies, Erik’s baronial heritage was instead a world captured in time.
Behind her, the laird of that castle had not yet spoken but she could feel his thoughts, his presence inside her head more dominating than the dragon haunting her dreams. She twisted around to face him.
Having just spent the past few hours declaring herself magic free, he had to present her with a world taken from the pages of Grimm’s fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. The irony did not escape her.
And she almost laughed.
A perfectly reasonable reaction in her opinion, except Erik, upon presenting her with his ancestral home, was looking to her for something more lucid than peals of laughter. But it was Erik who surprised her by chuckling first.
“No regrets, leannanan?”
This was the land he hadridden across as a boy. A world that had shaped him. A world she wanted to explore. She had no regrets.
The thought had no sooner formed and she’d spoken it aloud before the front wheel crashed into a deep pothole. The coach dipped, then lurched sideways, throwing her across Erik’s lap. This was followed by a sharp resounding crack of the axle shattering before the carriage came to a shuddering stop.
“Are you telling me this might not have been an accident?”
Four hours after the accident Erik stood in his library and faced his engineering foreman across the desk.
Erik had put down two of his best horses tonight. He loathed killing any animal. He tolerated the loss of life even less if the accident had occurred because of carelessness and outright neglect. But deliberate sabotage would have been reprehensible.
Hodges tipped back his floppy hat with a finger. He wore a rain slicker in deference to the drizzle that had begun to fall shortly after the accident that afternoon. “I am saying we were up there last week to inspect the road as ye required of us. The pothole was not there. It could have been man-made. We found a pickax in the woods not far from the accident. Mayhaps someone intent on doin’ mischief. Lights have been seen flickering in those hills. Some credit the sightings to your late wife’s ghost and…” Clearly seeing where this dialogue was heading, Hodges cleared his throat. “Or maybe there be highwaymen in these parts—”
“Hodges,” Erik interrupted. “No highwaymen have been in this area for twenty years. And I find it highly improbable a ghost or anyone crashed the coach. That road is not the main one into Sedgwick or the surrounding hamlets and is rarely used by anyone, including me.”
He tossed last week’s engineering report he’d been reading on the desk. Most of that road, which cut through the crags separating Sedgwick from the rest of Fife, had been there for centuries, having been carved through the rock and forests by conquering armies that had overrun Scotland at one time or another. A rockfall had made an older portion of the road impassable years ago.
“Still”—Hodges scratched his bewhiskered cheek—“it would nae take much more than a gully wash to make a small hole into a crater. It was raining the evening before the accident. The horses come a cropper and went sailin’, yer grace. Terrible waste of fine horseflesh it was too.”
“Get Bailey here from Dunfermline,” Erik said. “He’s the civil engineer who repaired that road last month and reassured me it was safe. I want him up there by next week. I want to know why there is a four-foot-wide pothole that nearly swallowed my coach. If someone deliberately did this, then I will know who.”
“Aye, your grace.” Hodges hesitated at the doors leading outside onto the terrace, clearly circumspect and considerate of the housekeeper who would not welcome the mud on his boots, and turned back into the room, aware of Erik’s dangerous mood. “Will her grace be all right?”
With a taper of fire burning in the lamp on his desk, Erik could not see Hodges’s face in the darkness. “She suffered a severe bump on the head. She is resting.”
When the carriage had dropped into the hole, her head had slammed against the door with a crack that seemed as loud as the sound of the axle breaking. Erik still remembered the sound. The physician had been with her almost from the moment Erik’s retainers brought her in unconscious.
Lady Sophia had reassured him she was still alive. His housekeeper had sworn she’d briefly spoken when they’d removed her gown and cleaned the blood from her hair. The physician told him that she did not suffer any broken bones and only needed rest.
But Erik had not been able to go to her room, stand over her bed, and look into her face. He wouldn’t have been able to do so without wondering if he were somehow to blame…if he really was cursed and had doomed Christine by marrying her. No logical man would have given weight to these fears, but at the moment Erik was not feeling logical.
“Make sure Bailey contacts me after he finishes the inspection.”
Hodges nodded then left by way of the terrace door. Erik reached for a glass and the crystal whiskey decanter on his desk. Movement behind him made him turn. His butler stood silhouetted against the light in the corridor. “I have lit the fire in your chambers and set out your brandy,” Boris said. “Lady Sedgwick is asleep.”
Erik considered the empty tumbler in his hand, then set it down. “Do you believe in ghosts or curses, Boris?”
“No, your grace.”
Erik’s gaze went to the clock atop the mantel. “Has the physician gone for the evening?”
The doctor lived in the sleepy Sedgwick hamlet five miles east of the castle. If Erik had taken the main road around the craggy hills, they would have ridden through the village.
But Erik had been vain or foolish, perhaps both. He’d wanted Christine to see not just Sedgwick Castle but the entire valley as he saw it, as most had rarely seen it from high in the hills, wrapped in mist and sunlight. A moment of childlike whimsy, he thought in disgust, banishing the vision and pushing past the clutter of his thoughts.
Boris informed him that the doctor would return in the morning and that Lady Sophia was with Christine, most of the drama of the day now died to a whisper in the candlelight. “We have finally got your sister to bed,” Boris said. “I believe Lady Rebecca will recover in the morning when she sees that Lady Sed
gwick has not been felled by the curse.” The elder cleared his throat. “Not that any of us believes such nonsen—”
“Have you located my daughter yet?”
“Yes, your grace. My guess is she is the ‘ghost’ that fairly scared Lady Sophia’s maid to death earlier this evening and caused her to drop the tea service she was bringing to her ladyship. Fortunately, nothing was broken.”
Erik had not forgotten his daughter in the melee of that afternoon’s drama, but her absence was not abnormal, since she usually only made an appearance when she wanted to be seen. He knew most of her hiding places, but this evening he had been too preoccupied to find her until Boris informed him she had not eaten her supper.
“Where is Erin now?”
Boris cleared his throat. “That is what I came to tell you.”
Five minutes later, Erik entered Christine’s sitting room. Lady Sophia was seated by the fire. His gaze darted around the dimly lit room. He wasn’t sure what he was going to find after following the line of nervous servants down the corridor. He felt his body relax slightly. He shut the door.
“Lord Sedgwick,” Lady Sophia said without turning her head.
“I was told my daughter is being held prisoner in this room…”
Lady Sophia sniffed. “If you are referring to the owner of those little bare feet hiding behind the curtains, I will credit that you have come to the correct conclusion. We are in what one might call an impasse. I believe I am owed an introduction after having helped clean up the tea tray Mrs. Samuels dropped. The lady Erin believes she is hiding.”
Erik’s boot heels made little sound on the carpet. He slowly drew back the heavy drapery. His daughter stood there, clutching an old porcelain doll to her chest. Her chin rose. “Come now, Erin.” He knelt in front of her and gently tilted her chin. “It is time to come out of hiding. Everyone has been looking for you.” She shook her head as much from stubbornness as fear.
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