A woman, her head pillowed on his bed, her breath feathering against him with the shallow, measured rhythm of sleep.
Heaven knew, he’d wakened more than once to the discomfort of finding himself in bed with a woman whose name he wasn’t certain of, whose face he doubted he’d recognize if he were ever to run across it in a crowd. But this was not his bed in the chamber above the Ball and Claw. His fingers stole out to touch the carvings that some Jacobean craftsman had created for one of Aidan’s Kane ancestors.
This was Rathcannon, Aidan thought numbly. But how could it be?
He tried to shake free of the thick layer of silt that seemed to shroud his brain. He never brought his women here. From the day he had brought Cassandra to the castle, he’d spent his nights alone in this solitary bed.
Yet this was definitely a woman here beside him. And there was something oddly familiar about her, something about the vulnerable curve of her cheek, dappled by the watery morning sun that streamed through the window. He struggled to get a better look at her face.
Who the devil was she? A shiver of unease rippled through him, shaking that astonishing sense of peace. More disturbing still, what was she doing here? Aidan bloody well would have asked her, if he could just summon the strength.
But his throat felt like a white-hot poker had been rammed through it. His arms and legs throbbed as if he’d run to Dublin and back.
With eyes still rimmed with the sandy grit of fever, he tried to focus on the figure resting on his bed.
One hand stole out with the greatest of care to brush back the web of brown locks that veiled that feminine face as delicately as the fine-woven lace of the mantillas he’d seen so often on the Peninsula. As the tumbled curls fell away, Aidan stilled.
Norah.
Why was the mere echo of her name an empty, aching place inside him?
She was supposed to be gone. He’d arranged for the coach to take her to Dublin. He’d placed three hundred pounds in an envelope and instructed the coachman to slip it into her trunk without her knowledge, to make certain she had enough to get by on until she could get settled somewhere.
Norah was going to leave. Wasn’t that why he had… what? Drunk far more brandy than he should have to drown out the memory of Cassandra running from the room, hurling accusations? Hadn’t he used the fiery liquor to obliterate the memory of Norah, her face so fragile, her eyes so soft and wounded, it had been all Aidan could do not to go to her and take her in his arms, to kiss her until she could never go away?
No. He’d wanted the brandy—craved the oblivion it promised—but he’d never taken more than a sip. He had felt so damned strange. Sick, weak down deep in his very bones. And he’d feared… what? That the brandy would loosen what hold he still had on himself, that under its influence he would open the door that joined his bedchamber to Norah’s, that he would take her into his bed, force her to see that she could find the passion she was searching for there? That he could make her feel… beautiful?
His own vulnerability doused what little remnants of peace still lingered, flooding him with an uncertainty that made his palms damp, his jaw tighten.
Norah…
Had he breathed her name aloud? She stirred, as if accustomed to hearing the slightest sound, being aware of the most subtle movement. As if she were attuned to every pulse beat of his heart.
“Hush, it’s all right. You’re safe. Safe.” The words echoed from her lips as if she said them a hundred times. Her fingertips, cool and soothing, groped for his hand.
She raised her head, blinking her eyes as if to clear them. Never had Aidan seen a woman in such a state of disrepair. Her hair was a tangled mess, robbed of all luster, the color gone from cheeks always far too pale. The bodice of her gown was limp and crumpled, lines from his rumpled bedsheets pressed into her breasts. But in the instant those great, dark-ringed eyes met his, Aidan doubted he had ever seen anything more beautiful.
“Aidan?” she choked out his name. “Aidan… oh, thank God! I can’t believe you—you are…”
“What I am is… insane. You look like… the devil,” he managed to croak out.
Her hand fluttered to her hair. Tears trickled down her cheeks. But she was laughing. “I must look a sight.”
“You do. Why the blazes is it… I want to… kiss you?”
She gave a raw laugh and placed her lips on his brow, cool satin, seeping in to calm the troubled waters of his mind.
“What the hell… has been… going on here?”
Her gaze dipped down to a fold of coverlet. “You were ill,” she allowed, catching her lip with her teeth. “Poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” A cold blade slipped into Aidan’s vitals, and he struggled to lever himself upright. “What the—”
“No! Don’t strain yourself!” Norah cried in alarm, forcing him back onto the mound of pillows. “It was an accident. She slipped the potions into your—”
“The brandy! But she’s dead!”
“No! Cassandra is fine! Just worried to distraction about you. I’ll send for her at once.” With that the woman bounded to her feet and exchanged a few words with someone just outside his door. Aidan heard a whoop of triumph, then the sound of someone running down the corridor, bellowing in a way that made his head feel as if it were about to blast apart.
When Norah returned there were pink stains on her cheeks, and she caught at her lower lip with her teeth like a nervous child.
“I think you should know that—that Cassandra is none too pleased with me at the moment. In fact, I doubt you’ll have any trouble now convincing her to give up her notion of having me for a mother.” She smiled, but the corner of her mouth trembled. “In fact, she’s informed me on multiple occasions she quite dislikes me now.”
“Dislikes you?”
“Yes. You see, I—I wouldn’t let her in, when—”
She never got the chance to finish the sentence. Cassandra barreled in, a whirlwind of rose-pink gown and fluttering hair ribbons, her blue eyes seething with anger, puffy from crying. The sight of her wrenched at a place where Aidan’s heart was still raw.
“Papa! Papa, I can’t believe you’re well!” The girl landed on him with such wild joy she drove the breath from Aidan’s lungs. “I’m so sorry, Papa! I didn’t mean to!”
Aidan still felt damned weak, but he held his daughter with all his strength, stroking her golden curls, burying his face against the sweetness of her hair. “Of course I’m well. You must know nothing could ever make me leave you.”
“Me either. You, I mean.” The girl’s voice crackled with unshed tears. “Except that she made me leave.” Cassandra cast Norah a vitriolic glare. “She wouldn’t let me stay with you.”
Aidan raised his gaze to Norah’s, the woman’s face suddenly very still, stoic.
“Papa, I tried to send her away, just like you wanted. I hate her!”
“Hate?” Aidan echoed, stunned.
“I hate her,” Cassandra sobbed. “I thought I killed you, and she would barely ever let me come into your room!”
“Cass, hush.” He clasped the girl close, his brow lowering as he peered over at Norah Linton. The woman’s face seemed cast in the most fragile crystal, as if the slightest jarring would shatter her. Without a word, she slipped from his bedchamber into her own.
“Norah?” he called out, wanting to stop her, but she only shut the door, gently but firmly, behind her.
Chapter Twelve
Aidan grasped his daughter’s chin, raising it until he could look into her tear-reddened face. “Cassandra, what the blazes is this all about?”
Words tumbled out, anguished confessions of gypsy potions and desperate attempts to gain entry into his room, horrible tales that let Aidan know exactly how close he had come to dying. While the villainess who reigned over all was the tyrannical Norah Linton, who allowed no one else to tend him in his illness, the dictatorial woman who had taken perverse delight in having Cassandra hauled bodily from the room on the merest whim.
>
Cassandra’s revelations confused and unnerved him. Why would the Englishwoman stay with him when he had a whole castle full of retainers at Rathcannon? Servants who were in Kane employ? And why the devil wouldn’t she let Cassandra sit with him, if it could have given the girl some comfort? Worst of all, why had she looked so damned fragile as she had slipped away?
He raked the whole maddening incident over and over in his mind, while he held the crying Cassandra, soothing her, until at last she drifted off to sleep.
After summoning the footman to carry her back to her own room and put her in Mrs. Brindle’s capable hands, Aidan ordered the youth to bid Norah to return to the chamber.
She entered the room a quarter of an hour later, her face scrubbed, her hair caught up in a prim knot atop her head. The rumpled gown had been exchanged for one of India muslin, printed with sprays of violets, a purple sash beneath her breasts, long sleeves skimming down to overlap pale kid gloves.
Only her eyes were the same. Tired. Resigned. Filled with quiet yearning. For what? The question nagged at Aidan.
She was fingering the brim of a particularly fetching bonnet, of white straw with cream lace and a cluster of silk violets. “I hope you don’t object, but I asked Sean to ready the coach to take me to Dublin. You had given the orders before you were ill, so I was relatively certain you’d have no objections.”
Aidan was surprised to feel her words thud in his chest, and he hated himself for feeling so off balance, so strange. Damn the woman anyway. “Of one thing I can be certain,” he said levelly. “Cassandra won’t be enacting any Cheltenham tragedies over your departure now. I was anticipating—or should I say, dreading—quite a performance before.”
“No. I’m certain her ladyship won’t even bestir herself to say goodbye.”
Her ladyship. It could have been mockery, it could have been scornful; instead, the all-too-fitting sobriquet sounded tender, more than a little sad.
“Norah, what the devil happened between you two?” Aidan demanded, his tone more gruff than he’d intended. “Hellfire and damnation, the night of Cassandra’s Curse, the two of you were bosom friends. Now I think the girl could serve you up a helping of her poisonous raspberry syrup with a smile. She claims to hate you.”
He regretted the careless words the instant he saw Norah wince, her fingers tightening on the brim of the bonnet. “Does it really matter why? I should think you’d be grateful for the change. Better for the girl to rid herself of any romantic notions about me and what it would’ve been like had I stayed.”
“Which notions are those? Nonsensical ones like you wearing yourself to a shade while nursing me back to health?”
She flushed.
“Cass is damned determined to convince me that the reason you kept her from my room during my bout with the gypsy potion was because you were struck with a wave of pure meanness. That you are a tyrant of the worst order.”
“It must have seemed so to her. It was horrible for her, not being able to be with you.”
“All that considered, you must have had some reason to bar her from the room.”
“You were so sick, in hideous pain. I didn’t think you would want her to—to hear when you…” The words trailed off, fragments of memories spinning through Aidan in their wake.
A taloned beast trying to tear its way out of his belly, terror welling in the slashes it made. Norah barging into his chamber, her hair tumbled over her shoulders, her dressing gown flowing over soft breasts, the primrose hem skimming her feet. Her eyes wide and a little frightened.
He could picture himself trying desperately to drive her from the room, before she could see… see what? That he was losing himself a piece at a time to a pain he’d felt once before? To nightmares he’d experienced again and again and again?
Nightmares…
Ice water poured through his veins, flooded him with humiliation. “Bloody hell,” he breathed. “I wasn’t—she didn’t hear—Delia, she didn’t hear about Delia!”
“No. No.” Norah crossed to him, one hand instinctively reaching out to his. She caught herself just before their fingers brushed, and her lashes dipped over eyes suddenly filled with shyness. “I promise you, she heard nothing.”
Cassandra hadn’t heard him raving like a maniac, fighting things that didn’t exist except in his own tortured mind. She hadn’t heard his cries, his rage, his desperation, Aidan realized with a relief so thick it made his stomach churn. Cassandra hadn’t, a voice inside him mocked, but this woman had.
He could see the reflection of his own horror imprinted in that exhausted face, could see it in the empathy that shone from those dark eyes.
Shame all but choked him. It made him lash out in a desperate effort to resurrect boundaries between the two of them and regain his footing. “Sean was to have put three hundred pounds in your trunk. Inform him I ordered that amount to be doubled, for your services as nurse.”
Hurt darted into her eyes, her chin tipping up a whisper. “I don’t want your money. You can’t pay me for what I did. I chose to—”
“You’ll damn well take it! What are you going to do, go begging in Dublin for your supper?”
He saw the glint in her eyes, knew the instant she was going to spin away and stalk from the room. His hand flashed out, and he manacled her wrist none too gently with his hand. A cry escaped her lips, despite the fact he could see she was battling to suppress it.
It was a cry not of astonishment, Aidan realized, but of pain. She tried to pull away, but he gently hauled her toward him. Clasping her upper arm, he stripped back her sleeve and peeled away the glove. What he saw forced a sickened gasp from his lungs.
Bruises, from fresh purple to wild discolorations days old, darkened that ivory skin, finger marks Aidan knew had been imprinted into Norah’s hands by his own. What the devil had he done to her during those hours he couldn’t remember? Why the hell had she let him? Let him hurt her?
The notion that he had caused her this kind of pain made Aidan cringe. When she tugged again, he let her hand slip away. She buried it in her skirts.
“It’s nothing,” she claimed. “I have always bruised easily.”
As Aidan stared into her face, he could see it was the truth. Not only her delicate skin, but deeper; there were countless bruises far deeper in Norah Linton’s spirit, where the careless and the cruel had hurt her.
“Please, Sir Aidan, it’s already forgotten.”
“I won’t forget.” Aidan’s gaze swept up to hers. “What you did for me. What you did for Cassandra.” He shifted against the mound of pillows. “Norah, why did you stay?”
“You were so terribly sick.”
“Why should you have cared? I’ve been nothing short of a bastard since the first moment you arrived at Rathcannon. What if it hadn’t been the gypsy potions? What if I’d been stricken with some kind of sickness, something contagious?”
“I couldn’t just leave you.”
Why did these simple words stun Aidan to his core? Even early on in his marriage to Delia, his wife wouldn’t have so much as handed him the basin if he were ill. No, it would’ve been too vulgar, too distasteful. And as for the idea of Delia letting him clutch at her hands, claw at her until her skin was marred—she wouldn’t have caught his hand to keep him from falling into an abyss if she were in danger of chipping one of her nails.
Loyalty. Steadfastness. Unselfishness. Courage. Aidan knew enough of the world—and enough of women—to realize how rare these treasures of the spirit were. If Norah hadn’t left him when he’d needed her, he was certain she would never abandon his daughter.
Even so, would he be able to bear looking into those eyes, knowing all they had seen? She had glimpsed the darkest corners in Aidan and seen his vulnerability—a vulnerability he’d sworn no woman would ever see after Delia had left him scarred.
He raised his gaze from the coverlet to Norah’s features, features not dazzling the way that Delia’s had been, but rather soft, kind, caring. She poss
essed a quiet loveliness that made him want to reach out and curve his hand over her cheek. And he would shelter her, keep her safe from storms forever, if she would let him.
“Norah.” His pulse beat erratically in his throat. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t go.”
“I suppose I can postpone my departure for however long you need me here. I’m certain it won’t be long before—”
“I don’t want you to postpone leaving Rathcannon. I want you to stay here. Permanently.”
“Permanently? But I thought we’d agreed—”
“I want you to be my wife. I need you. Cassandra needs you. And I think that you need us.”
The bonnet slipped from her hands, and in her haste to pick it up she stepped on part of the brim. “This is… I mean, I’m astonished you…” She made a wounded little sound.
“Astonished I what? That I’ve finally had the wit to realize what a gem has been dumped on my doorstep? Norah, I still can’t promise you hearts and flowers. Love. But I can take care of you, shield you so you’ll never be at your stepfather’s mercy again. I can give you the home you long for, and… a family of your own. A husband. A daughter.”
“But you said…”
“I said a damned sight too much.” He grimaced. “Truth is, I was doing my damnedest to get you to run screaming from Rathcannon of your own free will. I’m not proud to say that I would’ve just as soon avoided one of Cass’s temper tantrums. Then, in the castle ruins, I was determined to use you for Cass’s sake.”
“And now? You’re going to tell me things have miraculously changed?”
Aidan raked one hand through his hair. “Do you know, in all the years I’ve had Cass to myself, I’ve never been able to name a guardian for her? Oh, financially, she’s well taken care of. There is enough money in trust that she can live like a princess for the rest of her life. Her affairs are in the hands of the most honorable solicitors in Christendom. The staff here at Rathcannon would walk through fire for her.”
“You’ve taken wonderful care of her.”
Lords of Ireland II Page 91