Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  Those rooms would be stripped to the bare necessities and revamped entirely.

  If this was to be my home, as I assumed it would be given that lords usually lived on their estates and Alexander’s business was based in London, it was going to be one exorcised of ghosts.

  So, when I found a room decorated in the soft mauves and nearly translucent blues of a dawn in a tropical paradise, I designated it as Giselle and Sinclair’s future escape when they visited. Then again, when I found a bold black and red room with an oriental theme that seemed strong and bold enough for my Elena, and once more with the small, but beautifully cozy room abutting a long-ago used nursey that I knew would perfectly suit Mama.

  On my third pass, I barely opened my eyes. I counted the marble steps as I took them, feeling the cold, smooth rock under my feet, the way my hand fit perfectly to the carved curves of the bannister as my palm slid across it. I breathed in the yeasted, damp scent of the kitchen and the wet, close air of the greenhouse perfumed with hundreds of exotic flowers and the slightly acrid tint of the pond water there. I imagined scenes of laughter in the den where I’d once played chess with Noel, transposing an image of Alexander and I playing there instead, shedding our clothes each time we capitulated a piece to the other. I thought of the massive Douglas fir Riddick would cut down for us from the forest in the back that we would decorate for Christmas and place in the corner of the main living room, and of the stockings we would hang from the famous black marble fireplace with its demons and angels intertwined up the columns.

  When I reached the kitchen, I stopped in the doorway to watch as Douglas gave a sound little speech to some of the new staff Alexander and Riddick had already hired.

  “I run a tight ship, lads and lasses.” Douglas gestured grandly to his kitchen wearing the bandage over his cut head like a crown. “This is a serious place of business because food and pastry are serious undertakings. I won’t have any of you cocking up my schedule, so adapt quickly or you’ll be sent packing, you hear? The duke and duchess have been through…a lot in the last fortnight, or really, in the last two decades. They don’t need willful or imbecilic servants making a shambles of their happily ever after.”

  A young boy, no more than sixteen, tentatively raised his hand. “’S true that the lord killed his own father in the back garden, then?”

  Douglas’s boyish face contorted with a glare as he rapped his wooden spoon over the boy’s knuckles where they lay on the table. “Ask another impertinent question again and you’ll be gone from here. There will be no idle gossip about the master and mistress of Pearl Hall, not where I can hear you if you know what’s good for your knuckles and your bellies, and not where his Grace can find out, if you know what’s good for your safety and your pocketbooks.”

  I was tempted to laugh at Douglas’s threats, but instead, I arranged my face into a polite mask and stepped up to say, “Chef O’Shea is correct about one thing.” I waited as the staff all whipped toward me with varying awed and terrified expressions. It was clear they had all heard about Noel’s and Rodger’s deaths, about the pall over Pearl Hall, but I wouldn’t have them being scared of Alexander and me. “He is a fearsome beast when he’s angry.”

  I winked at them, and they all shifted awkwardly in their seats, sharing looks that questioned whether they were meant to laugh or not.

  Douglas stepped in with a shake of his wooden spoon at me. “You’re one to talk. I’ve not met a woman so grumpy as you when you’ve not eaten.”

  I shrugged. “Happily, you keep me well fed.”

  Douglas preened for me, and I laughed, moving over to press a kiss to his rosy cheek. I’d always been affectionate, but in the wake of the latest events, I found myself unable to see Riddick and Douglas, two of the knights who had risked their lives to help me, without touching them. It was only one of the myriad of ways I sought to show my gratitude and love for the next few decades.

  Some of the staff looked horrified by my closeness with Douglas, so I decided to nip that in the bud before I continued my tour of the house. I sat on the edge of the table even though Douglas swatted at me and smoothed my robe so that it covered my legs as if it was a priceless gown.

  “Listen, I’ve no doubt you heard the stories about what has happened at Pearl Hall recently…and maybe not so recently. As with any place of history, there are many stories here, both good and bad. What I want to promise you is this: there will be no more bad stories here. At least, not while Xan and I live. The past is done and, quite literally, buried. If you wish to stay on at Pearl Hall, know that you do it not just as a servant but as part of a family. We will expect you to do your duties, but we also expect you to contribute to the positive atmosphere of the home. You see, we have loads of new memories that need planting in these gardens and hanging on these walls. If you don’t feel you can keep mum on the past and any strange goings-on you may find happen here, then no hard feelings, but please leave. If you think you’d be happy in a home, however grand Pearl Hall may seem, please stay and I’ll be so happy to know you as the opportunities arise.”

  Collectively, the group of twelve or so servants blinked at me, but none of them rose to leave the table so I took it as a good sign. With a sigh, I stood and pressed another kiss to Douglas’s cheek in farewell.

  He stilled me for a moment with a hand on my arm. “Not mistress more than a day and you’re already the best duchess Pearl Hall has ever seen, ducky.”

  I blinked away the sharp sting of tears and squeezed his hand before I dropped it in a mute but poignant thanks. Then I swept from the room and continued my third walk of the house.

  I ended my third pass in the gymnasium and found Riddick waiting for me there, his eyes closed as he meditated seated on the ground in the middle of the mats.

  Smiling, I crept toward him, not so much as a bone creaking or a joint popping as I made my way toward him and prepared to startle him out of his wits.

  He cracked open an eye just as I reared back to scare him, and drily stated, “Heard you before you crossed the threshold, duchess. Even silk has a sound.”

  I scowled down at my robe and then back at him. “One of these days, I’m going to scare the pants off of you, Riddick.”

  He raised his brows as he unfolded his long, wide body and stood. “I doubt very much that my employer would be pleased his wife had seen me starkers.”

  I blinked and then burst out laughing, holding my stomach to contain my glee. “Riddick,” I gasped. “Did you just make a joke?”

  His face was expressionless as he said, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  I giggled again and had the immense satisfaction of seeing his lips twitch at the corners. I followed him as he led the way to the fencing equipment and didn’t say I word when I noticed he had laid out some of my old fitness clothes for me to change into. I knew thanking him for his thoughtfulness would only embarrass the quintessentially British stoic man.

  But when he said softly, in his coarsely accented voice, so different than Xan’s posh English, “You were right brave, you were, Cosima. Never been prouder of a body in my entire life, and I was in the army,” I caved.

  My arms were around his square torso in a second, my cheek pressed just under his rock-hard pectoral muscle. I felt as if I was hugging a boulder, and for a long moment, he was as still as one.

  Then one arm wrapped gently, tenderly around my back, and the other found my head where it rested for a moment before patting me awkwardly.

  “There, there,” he grunted. “No need to get all wound up. Everything’s sorted now, and you can finally have some peace, hmm?”

  I looked up, up, up at him with my arms still locked, barely, around his middle, and I gifted him with one of my megawatt smiles. “You know, Riddick, that I love you very much, don’t you?”

  A blush lay waste to his pallid skin like a forest fire, and his eyes shifted uneasily through the room as if he worried Alexander was in wait to accuse him of putting the moves on his wife. I bit back my l
aughter at his discomfort, but decided to put him out of his misery by breaking free of my hold. I turned my back to give him a moment to compose himself and selected my rapier from the wall of weapons.

  “I’m a bit out of practice,” I said over my shoulder as I took my things to get changed. “But if you lose, you have to go riding with me. I miss Helios.”

  I left the room laughing as Riddick grunted his disapproval. He hated horses, and he was too much fun to discomfort not to make the most of the bet and win our little wager.

  A few hours later, I was laughing again as I flew over the acreage of Peal Hall on Helios, her sleek, powerful body churning up the earth in our wake. I peered over my shoulder to see Riddick as a speck on the hill behind me, his mount moving at a jerky, slow pace under his large form. There was no doubt in my mind Riddick had let me win purposefully. My left arm still burned slightly from the bullet graze and my feet were tender as I executed my footwork, slowed slightly by the pain. But Riddick had given me the victory as his own way of telling me he loved me too, and I appreciated it even as I giggled at his uneasiness on a horse.

  I buried my laughter in Helios’s soft, hay smelling golden mane and kicked her into a soaring gallop. We transected the field of poppies Alexander’s mother had planted to remind her of her girlhood home in Italy, and dodged through the tight weave of trees in the forest before bursting through the clearing and up over the tallest peak so that I could survey every inch of the Davenport estate from atop my steed.

  Helios and I were both panting, my monotone cream riding set saturated with sweat like my mare’s pale gold coat. My body would ache even more tomorrow after the unfamiliarity of the long, hard ride, but I knew I would relish it.

  It was worth the ache and more, every single thing I’d been through to know every inch of the land I could see—the purpling heather over the far moors, the last of the morning fog swirling in the bowl of the valley near the little village of Thornton, the dark shadowed forest stretching horizontally over the estate like a belt cinching it all together—was all ours.

  His and mine.

  Mine, because I was his.

  And by his own repeated declaration, he was mine.

  Riddick plodded up the hill on his dappled grey mare, his forehead beaded in sweat, his short hair plastered to his head, and his expression deadly.

  “All right, Rid?” I asked jauntily with a tip of my riding hat.

  He scowled, his heavy brow compressed over his glittering eyes, but he didn’t say anything until he drew abreast of my mount. Then, he reached out to tug one of my thick plaited pigtails hard enough to make me wince but not enough to hurt, and he vowed, “I will never, ever go riding with you again. Alexander will have to buy a utility vehicle if he wants me charging off after you across the grounds.”

  I tipped my head back to laugh at the great blue bowl of the sky, and when I recovered enough to tilt my chin down again, Riddick was riding off down the hill. I frowned as I made to call after him, but a voice beside me startled me into paralysis.

  “I’ve seen you in some magnificent postures,” Alexander said mildly as if we were in the middle of a conversation already. He sat atop his great black stallion with his gloved hands crossed over the tooled leather pummel of the saddle. With his long, muscular thighs encased in stone-coloured riding pants and tall glossy black boots, and his wide shoulders and narrowed waist cinched in a velvet black blazer, Alexander looked every inch the lord of the manor. I took in the stubble lining his jaw like flecks of pure gold and noticed the strain in his cheeks from biting back a smile. “But it has to be said, Cosima, you are a sight to behold right now.”

  Warmth suffused my chest and split my lips into a smile so wide, they ached. “It may be because I don’t think I have ever been so happy. I feel as if I could float away.”

  “The threats that have weighed you down for so long are gone, so I’m not surprised you feel that way. Though”—he urged Charon closer to me so that he could snag my chin between his cool gloved fingers and force my eyes intently to his—“you will always have me to tether you.”

  I used my chin to urge his hand over my cheek and leaned into him. “I’ve always been partial to you holding me down.”

  Xan’s face broke into one of his rare, beautifully creased smiles that made his eyes gleam like polished silver. I reached over to trace my thumb over the shape of that smile and then chuckled when his teeth nipped at the pad.

  “You’re happy too,” I told him because even though he seemed the same staid, regal man with a face like a mask and eyes like two cold stones, I could sense the shift in the air around him. He too seemed lighter.

  “I’ve been happier with you in every moment we’ve spent together than I have ever been in the entirety of my life without you,” he admitted easily as if his words didn’t mean absolutely everything to a girl who had never been loved so candidly in her life by a man other than her brother.

  “Do you think…?” I ventured before halting the stream of words by biting my lower lip.

  Alexander glared at me when I didn’t continue and then carefully unhooked my teeth from my mouth. “Do not hold anything back from me, my beauty. You are a mystery I’ve spent too long waiting to unravel, and the process begins now. I want to know everything.”

  “I don’t want to jinx it,” I said with a wince because it was ridiculous to believe in such trivial superstitions after everything we’d been through.

  His face settled feature by feature, brick by brick, into a stone wall of somberness. I gasped as he twisted to fit his hands under my armpits and half-dragged, half-lifted me from my saddle onto his where he settled me with my legs draped over his thighs, a diamond of space between our groins, one powerful arm around my waist and the other wrapped in my pigtails so that my head arched back and my mouth bloomed open just under his.

  Alexander spoke with a wry, almost nervous twist to his lips, an energy in his eyes that spoke of nearly boyish eagerness and vulnerability. “The tale usually goes, there is a desperate princess locked away in a tower in need of a valiant knight to slay her dragons and spirit her away to a happily ever after, but our truth is different. It was me who needed you, Cosima. I sensed your bravery the moment you stepped in to save the life of a man you didn’t know in a random Milanese alleyway, and I knew it for sure when you refused to break for me, when you promised I wouldn’t win your heart or your spirit unless I could earn them. You saved me from an eternity of hell I wasn’t even perfectly aware I was living. You gave me reason to slay my demons, reason to doubt my own villainy, and now, that part of our lives is over.”

  The arm around my waist shifted so that he could rub his smooth leather-clad thumb over my cheek, and he rested his forehead against mine. The wrinkles in his forehead smoothed out as he closed his eyes and released a sigh like a man atoned for his sins by God.

  When he moved back an inch to lock eyes with me, his blazed with the fury of an inner flame. “But hear me when I say that time is over. I don’t need you to save me anymore and neither does your family. You have martyred and battled enough. It’s time to hang up your sainthood and your sword because if something ever comes for us again, it will be me who pays the toll, me who takes up the lance. I will never ever let anyone touch you again. You see, my beauty, you taught me what it takes to be a hero, so I’ll be prepared if the mantle ever has to be taken up again.”

  His thumb continued to move across my cheek, wiping away the tears as soon as they spilled from my lids. A hiccough worked its way up my throat, a precursor to heavy, bloated sobs that wracked my entire body with shudders and gasps.

  Alexander held me as I cried, crushed to his chest so tightly I could feel the steady, heavy thud of his heart against its cage. It was that beat that finally soothed me because it reminded me that Alexander was the greatest man I’d ever known, but more than that, there was a dark, dangerous beast inside his chest that would break free if anyone tried to fuck with us again.

  And
I would never bet against that beast.

  I knew he would keep me safe from harm.

  “I was going to say,” I whispered through my snot and tears, my voice so thick it seemed I spoke through a cotton-filled mouth. “Do you think we get our happily ever after now? I mean, what happens after this?”

  There was something utterly poignant about the way Alexander tilted my chin up with his big hands, their strength subtly reined so that they could brush tenderly over my wet cheeks, collecting my tears. His face was serious as I had ever seen it, features heavy and almost stern as he stared down at me, but it was his eyes that drew my focus. They were wide, dark and light in equal turns like sunlight filtering through storm clouds, and so sincere with love it made my breath catch.

  “What happens after this?” he mused as he took my hands in each of his and methodically bit the pad of each finger before kissing each knuckle. “What happens after this is we move you properly into the house. We put your books in the library, your clothes beside mine in our closet, and your portrait next to mine in the Hall of Mirrors. I go to work in the city, you go to work wherever that may take you, and we both come home to each other here. We’re already married.” Alexander pressed his lush mouth to the enormous canary yellow diamond on my left ring finger. “But I see a proper honeymoon in our future, wherever my bride desires. And children. When we are ready, as many children as you’re willing to give me.”

  Tears were falling again, but I was never able to think about our miscarriage without them. It hadn’t been the right time or place to have a child, but the devastation was still very real. Knowing that I once again had the chance to have a baby with Alexander’s mercurial grey eyes and gorgeous British accent filled every empty space inside me with unequivocal joy.

  “But for now,” Alexander said, an impish grin twisting the left side of his firm mouth. “We must return to the house so that I can give you a very belated wedding present and an early birthday gift.”