He was not even defending himself—even from her!
“Are we fighting, leannanan?”
The mockery in his tone was too much an affront.
But the depth of her feelings stunned her, not only because their argument left her hurt and confused, but also because she did not understand him. How could he not have defended himself? “You are either blind or a coward, Erik,” she whispered. “You allowed Johnny Maxwell to make a fool of you.”
A long, ugly silence followed and Christine regretted the words ere they left her lips. The carriage stopped and she realized they had arrived in the inner courtyard. No one had come to open the door.
“It appears we have arrived home, madam.”
“Home?” she said in an unsteady voice. “Is that where we are?”
Most of the rooms were closed off and still covered in shrouds. He wouldn’t allow her in the keep. He spent half his sleepless nights in the library. He was estranged from his mother, practically so from his sister whether he realized it or not. No one came to visit. “The only one who seems able to tolerate your behavior is your daughter.”
His face hidden in the shadows, Erik opened the door. He stepped out easily, being of a height that did not require the use of a step. He set his hands on her waist and pulled her out of the carriage with little effort, his touch scalding her even through layers of fabric. She strode past him, only to have him snatch her arm and spin her about. “I am still your husband, Christine,” his voice was soft, not with tenderness, but a warning she had never heard in his tone before.
“And you would think of me as chattel, like all your other possessions. You do not own me.”
“Aye,” he said, laughing. “But I can buy your services well enough. Tell me,” his breath brushed her hair just above her temple, “what exactly did Maxwell say that was not the truth? Are you more embarrassed because he made a fool of me? Or because I did not grab up the gauntlet and slap him for you?”
Her face burned at the truth of his statement. He had turned her angry words inside out and flung them back at her where they pricked her with scorn. That was the crux of her anger. Her fury.
Johnny Maxwell had spoken the truth when he had asked how much Erik had paid to purchase her for his wife. But it was Erik who wounded her deeply.
She yanked her arm from his grasp. “If I were a man, I would have…I would have—”
“Shot him between the eyes? If you were a man, you would not be my wife and therefore would not be here at all, Christine. Darlington would. I could have hired him for a lot less trouble.”
“Let go of me.”
She would have struck him had he not been standing so close with his body pressed against hers. “Take my restraint as a wedding gift, my love. For had I touched Maxwell, I would have killed him in front of a dozen witnesses. Then a widow you would be when they hung me from the gallows for the cursed deed. Not even a laird or a peer of the realm is immune from the law when it comes to murder.”
He let loose her arm and she stumbled back. Turning on her heel, she took the stairs. The door opened and she swept inside past Boris, caring little that she left her husband outside, staring at her back. She took the flight of steps to the second floor and found her way to her chambers. Her hands shook when she slipped the key into the lock and did the same for the other door. She didn’t wait for Annie to help her undress. She slammed the door to her dressing room and wriggled out of her gown, and finally, garbed in her nightdress and robe, she pressed trembling fingers to her temple and berated her idiocy.
No light shone from beneath the door connecting her room to Erik’s, but she heard him stirring inside. She should have been more circumspect with her temper, she thought, burying her face into her pillow.
Later, her eyes clear, she faced the door. But the only beast in the castle who came to her bed that night was her cat.
By early afternoon, the Sedgwick carriage had come to a stop at the end of the circular drive. Erik descended the coach. Absently clutching a lion-headed walking stick, he tipped up his hat as he peered at Eyre Hall.
Constructed of honey-colored stone and bleached gray by time, the once grand Eyre Hall had fallen into disrepair. A medieval chapel stood at the far edge of the property protected by tall pines and remained as it had for hundreds of years. Erik had married Elizabeth there.
“Will you be wanting me to remain at the carriage?” Erik’s driver said from beside him.
No liveryman came to greet them. The roads being what they were, it had taken half the day to get here by coach. He could have just ridden here by horseback but he had wanted the formality. He was, after all, who he was. In the beginning, he’d allowed the Maxwells a certain leeway. But last night would never happen again. “Remain here,” Erik said.
He reached the top step when the door suddenly opened. The butler stood there, speechless. Lady Lara suddenly appeared.
“Erik”—she stepped outside and shut the door behind her but kept her hand on the latch—“please, you mustn’t be here. You should not have come.”
“Where is Johnny, Lara?”
Her eyes widened. “He isn’t here.” She opened the door and edged back inside. “It is not safe for you here. You must go away.”
Erik placed his hand on the door to keep her from slamming it in his face. Her face snapped up to his, alarmed. “Then I will see your father.”
“He is abed. Your presence will only add more strain to his heart.”
“More strain than he has already endured because he has refused to allow Elizabeth to die?”
“Please. I will not be able to defend you to him this time.”
“I have not asked you to do anything for me, Lara. I have never asked you to stand between your family and me.”
“Then be grateful that I have. I have been your only friend.”
“Grateful, Lara? I took your advice once long ago when you asked me to give your father time. And then it was too late.”
Lara’s wet, luminous gaze dropped to her hands. “I am sorry for that. But Papa would rather blame you than accept his own culpability in my sister’s death. He is like you. Stubborn. He even wants to believe she is still alive because he needs to believe in something, or I fear he will die.”
“Are you the one responsible for the letters?”
“I swear I have written no letters. I swear on my life, Erik.”
“Just like you swore on your life that you and I were together the night Elizabeth vanished.”
“We were together. I saved your life, Erik. They would have arrested you that night.”
“Or you saved your own life. For Christ sakes, Lara, tell me you are not involved in this insanity?”
Erik looked over his shoulder as a horse approached at a clipped pace up the drive. John Maxwell reined in near the carriage and in a single fluid motion was off his horse, then walking in long strides toward Erik. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “What are you doing here?” Maxwell demanded.
Lara moved between Erik and her brother. “Nothing, Johnny. He is leaving.”
“Then why are you crying, Lara? What did he say to you?”
She touched the corners of her eyes and looked oddly at the dampness that came back on her fingertip. “I think…” She lifted her head and looked at Erik. “I think he believes me responsible for those letters, Johnny.”
“You came all this way from your castle to insult Lara? The one person in this bloody family who has ever defended you?”
“Are you going to call me out, Johnny? Did you not try to do that before?”
“Did you not run like the coward you are?”
Erik came down a step and met him at the bottom. “You’re hotheaded, Johnny. Ye always were. When you defend another’s honor, know what it is you are defending. Know the difference between a truth and a lie.”
“The truth?” Maxwell grit out. “Have you not already destroyed one of my sister’s lives. And are now trying to destroy the other?”
Maxwell lunged. Erik stepped aside, caught Maxwell’s ankle by the hook of his walking stick and pulled. The man sprawled face-first into the overgrown flowerbed. He lay there a moment, stunned. He rolled and came up to his knees.
Erik raised his cane and held it out with both hands, firmly gripping each end. “Just because I allowed you to vilify me and mine last night does not mean I will allow it again.”
“Bastard!”
Erik propelled the cane like a staff and knocked Maxwell against the collarbones, then thrust in an upward motion against his chin, snapping back his head, landing him again in the mud, this time on his backside. The third time Johnny rose to strike, Erik hit him in the jaw with his fist, the impact throwing him beneath his horse. The stallion reared. Erik stepped over Maxwell’s prone form and took the bridle with one hand, calming the horse with gentle words. He looked over his shoulder at Maxwell, who remained on the ground, and Lara weeping and kneeling at his side, her gray gown spread around her like a cloud. Maxwell brought the back of his hand from his lip. Blood oozed from a cut.
“Go away!” Lara beseeched. “Before there is nothing left of our lives.”
Erik dropped the reins of the horse atop Maxwell’s mud-caked chest. “Count yourself lucky I did not kill you last night. If you ever insult my wife again I will not show the same restraint.”
Erik turned on his heel and came to an abrupt stop.
Robert Maxwell stood at the top of the stairs. He was a big man, his red hair lighter than it had been years ago, but still fit for a man in his sixties. He looked from his two children to Erik. Then he peered across the lake at Sedgwick Castle, a small blur in the distance, as if confused by Erik’s presence.
But to Erik it was as if the whole world had aged a hundred years while he had been asleep and he had just now opened his eyes. He felt…alive again, as an unfamiliar montage of emotions spilled through him.
“You and I can still find peace between us, Robert. For the sake of my daughter, your granddaughter. For the sake of the relationship we once shared, we can sit down and talk. Something we should have done years ago.”
Lord Eyre’s eyes darkened. “The relationship we once shared? Peace? I wish to God I had never known ye, Sedgwick. Now get off this land.”
Erik’s eyes fell briefly on Lara and Johnny. Both had come to their feet. Lara lowered her gaze. Johnny did not look away. Erik expected to see hatred in the man’s eyes, and that was exactly what he got.
With one last glance at the old manor house, Erik lifted his cane from the ground, then stepped into the coach.
At one time he would not have blamed any of them for their mistrust and anger. Now he accepted the problem as theirs and no longer his. Though he did not acquit himself of his responsibilities in the events that had changed their lives, he accepted that he had taken the first step to heal himself—at least—realizing that it was not so much that he had to forgive them, but that he needed to forgive himself.
A fierce storm battered the vales and craggy cliffs of Sedgwick for a week. The winds and rains swept across the loch like a fierce, angry beast testing its power over the besieged castle and all its occupants, before retreating again to hide behind the face of a bright blue sky.
Christine lay across the settee in the sitting room. She’d been two weeks late, and for a brief period these past few days she thought maybe…
She disliked this time of the month. She cried too easily. She ate the wrong things. Her clothes did not fit properly. And as she lay in bed with a wet rag on her face, she knew it was moments like these that handicapped a woman in a world run by men.
Annie brought her meals to her room. But by the third evening, Christine had pulled herself out of her doldrums. She was a Sommers, by God, and Sommers women endured. The next day she went downstairs and set to work organizing the contents of all the trunks she had brought with her from London. Her manuscripts and fossil specimens had been too long consigned to oblivion, stacked in an old room, ignored by her and the rest of the world.
By the end of the week, Christine decided it was time she found the housekeeper again and view the rest of the castle. She needed a room with ample light and large enough to accommodate her collections, and with a floor strong enough not to collapse beneath its weight. Others might never read anything she had written or see anything she had found, but Christine refused to see her life’s toil banished to trunks and crates because she could not find an adequate place to work.
Armed with newfound purpose, Christine untied the scarf from around her head, unpinned the apron from her gown and left the rooms where her crates were being stored. She climbed the stairs to the main floors. She stopped a chambermaid carrying an armful of linens and asked where she would find the housekeeper at this time of day. She ended up on the second-floor corridor.
Christine came to an abrupt stop when she nearly tripped over a fish lying on the floor. On further inspection, she saw that it lay atop a tin plate attached to a braid of long twine. Following the string down the corridor, she saw that it looped around a corner and into Aunt Sophie’s chambers. Her aunt sat on the floor working over a ball of twine.
“What are you doing, Aunt Sophie?”
Aunt Sophie quickly put a finger to her mouth. “We are catching ourselves a cat, my dear,” she whispered.
A child’s giggle sounded from behind Christine. Erin sat crouched next to the wall, watching the hallway like a scout for Wellington, on the lookout for French troops.
“That beastie of yours doesn’t want to play today,” Aunt Sophie said. “So Erin went to the kitchens and found herself a fish.”
“Have you considered that the fish was in the kitchen for a reason?”
“Sssh.” Aunt Sophie waggled her hand. “You’re the one who told the child to bribe the cat. Now off with you. You are making too much noise.”
Christine looked from her outlandish aunt to the little girl sitting next to the wall with a huge smile on her face. She giggled and covered her mouth when she saw Christine’s eyes on her. She and her aunt had clearly struck up an odd friendship. Christine was surprised, since Aunt Sophie had forever resisted teaching at the abbey because she abhorred children. Was this all it took then, to recapture one’s fading youth? To get down on one’s hands and knees and see the world again through the eyes of a child?
Christine sighed. Poor Beast was doomed. His days of independence were numbered, she thought, as she hunted down her cat and brought him up to the corridor so he could discover the fishy lure for himself. Anyone who worked so hard to woo the beast’s affections surely deserved a chance to win his heart.
Chapter 15
Christine stopped just this side of a double doorway. “The ballroom, mum,” Boris said.
With a nod, Christine turned. “Thank you.”
Her first glance into the ballroom touched a pair of Venetian chandeliers overhead. No draperies marred the view where a long row of French doors opened to the terrace and sunlight pooled on the floor. Erik stood at the opposite end of the room across the polished oaken floor, his sword in momentary riposte and another short sword angled just at the level of his head. He lunged and retreated as he performed some sort of master’s wheel. He looked to have been at the ritual for a long time. Sweat dampened his hair.
He wore no shirt. His leather breeches were cut close to his thighs. Those were no safety-tipped foils he held, but heavy steel-forged swords, and still he moved across the floor as if he performed nothing more strenuous than a waltz.
This was a man in control of his body. A man who could easily have broken John Maxwell’s neck with his bare hands.
As Christine observed him, Erik saw her and stopped. Her chin lifted as he lowered his arms to his side and something indiscernible seemed to burn the air between them. His muscles rippled with barely detectable movement as he stood watching her. Then he turned and walked to a table against the wall. He set down the swords and, slapping a towel around his neck, waited for her ap
proach.
Though she’d oft heard him now in his private chambers next to her own apartments at night, he had not come to her bed since they had argued. She should have sought him out earlier, she told herself, as she stood hesitantly on the threshold mustering the courage to approach him.
Christine strode across the polished floor and stopped in front of him. Up close, he smelled salty and hot, and she found herself trapped by her need to touch him. She would rather have his hate than the indifference she sensed in him as she approached. Yet, it was not indifference she saw in his eyes now.
“You are very adept with swords,” she said.
He chuckled. “Is that a compliment I hear coming from your lips, leannanan? Or an insult?”
She folded her arms. “I am just surprised, that is all. I would have a word with you.”
He waited as she struggled to form her thoughts. “As you can see, my schedule is clear today,” he prompted. “I am at your leisure, Christine.”
“I would apologize for my behavior this past week. I should never have called into question your courage, Erik. You are the last man in the world I believe a coward. I overstepped my bounds by involving myself with something that was not my concern. Our contract does not give me the right to interfere—”
“Fook the contract. I don’t give a fig about the contract between us.”
Taken aback by his vehemence, she inhaled her shock. She had seen him show less emotion facing John Maxwell. “But we have an agreement.”
“Agreements can change.”
Would he remove her from the estate, prohibit her from hunting her fossils? Shut her out of his life as he had his own mother? “We both signed that contract. No more. No less. Isn’t that what you told me?”
Boris entered the room just then, escorting Erik’s solicitor, the verbose Mr. Attenborough, and another well-dressed gentleman. “Your grace,” Boris said. “Mr. Attenborough has asked to speak with you.”
Without looking at them, Erik bid the men to remain where they were. “I accept your apology, Christine,” he politely said. His hand stopped her from leaving. He presented his cheek for a wifely peck. “If you will?”
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