Snowbound in the Earl's Castle

by Fiona Harper

  They waited.

  Nothing.

  He tried again.

  Same result.

  ‘Here... Maybe two voices are better than one.’

  Before he realised what she was doing, Faith jumped up and joined him on the table. She wobbled as her back foot joined the other one and instinctively grabbed on to the front of his jumper for support. Marcus looked down at her. Her eyes were wide and her breath was coming in little gasps. His brain told him it was just the shock of almost tumbling down onto the hard stone floor, but his body told him something rather different.

  Kiss her, it said.

  Faith’s mouth had been slightly open, but she closed it now, even as her eyes grew larger.

  Nothing happened. Nobody moved. He wasn’t even sure either of them breathed. He could read it in her face. She’d had exactly the same thought at the same time, and she was equally frozen, stuck between doing the sensible thing and doing what her instincts were telling her to do.

  He wasn’t sure who moved first. Maybe they both did at the same time. Her fingers uncurled from the front of his sweater and she dropped her head. He looked away. It seemed neither of them were ready to take that leap.

  He turned back to the window and yelled, venting all his frustration through the narrow gap. After a second Faith joined him. When they were out of breath they waited, side by side and silent, for anything—the sound of footsteps, another voice. All they heard was the lap of water against the edge of the path outside and the distant squawk of a goose.

  He jumped down from the table, got some distance between them. ‘There’s nobody out there. Too cold, too dark.’

  Faith sat down on the table and then slid onto the floor. She stayed close to it, gripping on to the edge with one hand and tracing the fingers of the other over its grainy surface. ‘What about people inside the castle?’

  He shook his head. ‘The walls are at least a foot thick. I doubt if the sound even left this room.’ He checked his watch. ‘It’s not long until dinner, though. Someone will miss us soon.’

  She nodded, but still looked concerned.

  Marcus knew she had good reason to. Another hour, at least, and he’d already thought about kissing her once. Thankfully he had a solution to their current predicament that his ancestors wouldn’t have had. He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket.

  Signals in the area could be patchy, especially near the castle. He checked the display on his phone. One minuscule bar of signal, but maybe that was enough. He tried dialling the estate office, just in case anyone was still there. His phone beeped at him. Call failed. The signal indicator on his phone was now a cross instead of any bars. Damn.

  ‘No signal,’ he said to Faith. It seemed these thick stone walls could withstand any means of escape.

  She jumped up onto the table again. ‘Here. Pass it to me.’

  Silently he handed his phone over, and she held it up to the window and pressed a button to redial. He held his breath, but a few moments later she shook her head and handed the phone back to him.

  ‘Try sending a text. I’ve worked in plenty of old buildings, including basements, and sometimes I can get texts even if I can’t receive calls.’

  He nodded and tapped in a message to Shirley. She always kept her phone in her pocket. In a home like his, sometimes shouting up the stairs wasn’t enough. Mobiles were usually pretty reliable—but obviously not when most of the room was underground and surrounded by water.

  An icon appeared, telling him it was sending, but a minute later his phone was still chugging away. The blasted thing wouldn’t go.

  He put the handset up near the window, balancing it on the frame. ‘Better chance of getting a signal,’ he said. ‘Now we just need to wait.’

  He stole a look at her. Her mask of composure was back in place. No one would guess that moments ago she’d been flushed and breathless, lips slightly parted... It was as if that moment on top of the table had never happened.

  Right there. That was why his warning bells rang—why he shouldn’t think about kissing her. It had nothing to do with her nationality or her background, and everything to do with Faith herself.

  The woman who lived behind those high walls of hers—Technicolor Faith—would be very easy to fall for. He felt he’d always known her, had been waiting for her to stroll across his lawn and come crashing into his life. He could feel that familiar tug, that naïve, misguided urge to lay everything he had and everything he was at her feet.

  But that ability of hers to disconnect, to detach herself emotionally, was what kept him backing off. At least Amanda had tried; Faith McKinnon would always be just a fingertip out of reach.

  Coward.

  He ignored the voice inside his head, knowing he was right. He wasn’t going to be that weak ever again. So he decided he needed to do something to fill the rest of the time rather than just stand close to her, staring at her.

  Conversation would be good. It would stop him thinking about doing other things with his lips. But Faith had already resisted his attempt to talk about her family, so he needed another subject. Thankfully, he knew her favourite one. If he could get her talking about the window the hour would fly by.

  ‘You believe Samuel Crowbridge made the window, don’t you?’ he asked.

  She trapped her bottom lip under her teeth and then let it slide slowly out again, exhaling hard, as if she didn’t quite want to say what she was about to say. Marcus tried not to watch, tried not to imagine what it would feel like if it were not her teeth but his lips...

  ‘Yes...yes. I do,’ she said, and that light he’d been both dreading and waiting for crept into her eyes. ‘But believing isn’t enough. I need solid proof.’

  ‘For yourself? Or for others?’

  She looked perplexed. ‘Both. You can’t put stock in dreams and wishes, can you? At some point you have to have hard evidence.’

  Marcus frowned. ‘Sometimes one doesn’t have that luxury,’ he said, his tone bare. ‘Sometimes you just have to do without.’

  That was what he’d done after his father’s death. No one had really known the truth of what had happened. He’d tried very hard to believe what people had said—that it had just been an accident—but the collapse of the family firm had started him questioning everything about his father, and he hadn’t been able to shake the cynical little voice inside his head.

  ‘Of course hard evidence is preferable, but it’s not always there. Sometimes you just have to take a leap and hope you’re jumping in the right direction,’ he added.

  Faith gave him a weary look. ‘Unfortunately the academic community don’t share your faith in gut instincts.’

  ‘Have you found anything more about the other painting? Hope, wasn’t it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not much. The family who own it aren’t ones for sharing. I can’t even find a picture of it. They also own any sketches and documents pertaining to the original commission, so it’s unlikely I’ll get any confirmation from that source.’ She opened the rolltop of an old bureau that had previously been blocked by a hatstand, and coughed as the dust flew into the air. ‘That’s why finding something here at Hadsborough is so important. It could be my only chance.’

  As she searched a small smile curved her lips. He instinctively knew she was thinking about something that amused her.

  ‘What?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘A goofy coincidence. It’s just that the names of the three paintings are almost a match for me and my two sisters.’

  Marcus’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Faith, Hope and Charity?’

  She walked towards him slowly. ‘No, my littlest sister would have gone nuts if that was the case. Mom switched Charity to Grace.’

  ‘What are the odds?’ he muttered. ‘Are you the oldest?’

  She shook her head and leaned against the desk next to him. ‘Mom never was one for sticking to convention. I’m in the middle. We all used to complain about our names, of course. Can you imagine the teasing we got
at school?’

  He made a wry face. ‘I went to an all-boys boarding school. If that’s not an education in just how abominable children can be, I don’t know what is.’

  She nodded in sympathy. ‘Grace complains the most, even though I think she’s got the best end of the deal.’ She gave him a devilish little grin. ‘But when we were younger Hope and I had a way of shutting her up.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  She nodded, then smiled to herself at the memory. ‘We used to tease her that Gram had talked Mom out of calling her Chastity, so she could have had it a whole lot worse!’

  He couldn’t help laughing, and she grinned back at him before hopping up and sitting at the other end of the table. They weren’t touching. Quite.

  She’d forgotten to put those barriers back down, hadn’t she? Even though they’d veered off the subject of the window and onto something more personal. He should say something to kill this moment, move away...

  But he didn’t. Just a few more seconds to find out what really lay beneath Faith’s high walls. The chance might not come again, and he’d be safe once she retreated behind them once more. She always did.

  ‘It sounds as if you’re close,’ he said.

  Faith’s smile disappeared. ‘Not really. Not any more. It all changed after...’

  He shifted so his body faced hers more fully. ‘After what?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. It’s too...’ She shook her head and closed her eyes. ‘Your family...they’re so different to mine.’

  He guessed she was talking about somebody having misbehaved. ‘You’d be surprised what the rich and powerful get up to just because they can,’ he said, a dry tone to his voice. ‘The second Duke was a bigamist, the third Duke had more illegitimate children than he could count and the fourth Duke lost Hadsborough in a drunken game of dice and won it back again the next night. And those are just the highlights. There are plenty more stories to tell about the Huntingtons.’

  Faith shook her head, but she was smiling. ‘Not the same, and you know it. All those things make your family sound dashing and exciting. My family just makes people shake their heads and look sad.’

  A stab of something hit Marcus square in the chest. Suddenly Faith wasn’t the only one on the edge of revealing something big.

  ‘Oh, mine make people shake their heads and look sad, too,’ he said.

  ‘No, they don’t...’ Faith began, laughing gently, assuming he was teasing. But when she met his eyes the laughter died. ‘They do?’ she said, blinking in disbelief.

  They did. And he found that for the first time in over eighteen months he wanted to tell someone about it. Someone who wasn’t connected. Someone who didn’t care, who wouldn’t invest. He suddenly realised that Faith’s walls made her the perfect candidate.

  ‘I worked for my father until just before he died,’ he said, his voice deceptively flat and unemotional. ‘He’d started up an investment company thirty years before, and things were going really well... At least I thought they were.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have seen it coming. He was always so sure of himself—too sure—as if he thought he was indestructible. It made for great business when the markets were good. He liked to take risks, you see, and they often paid off.’

  She nodded, waited for him to continue.

  ‘But in the last few years, with the way the financial climate had been—’ he made a face ‘—being daring didn’t cut it any more. In fact he lost a lot of people a lot of money. But my father was gripped by the unswerving belief that he could turn it around. He kept risking, kept gambling, kept losing... The company went bust. People lost their jobs.’ He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I knew what he was like, even though I didn’t know the extent of his recklessness. I should have done more. I should have stopped him.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Marcus, what your father did. He made his own choices.’

  Marcus swallowed. That was what he’d been afraid of.

  Not on the business front. People had called Harvey Huntington a swindler, but that hadn’t been true. He’d just had an unshakeable belief in himself, hadn’t thought he could fail so badly. And when he had... Well, the unshakeable man had been shaken to the core. He’d never quite recovered.

  ‘About a year later they found his car wrapped round a lamp post,’ he added baldly.

  Faith gasped and her hand covered her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘The inquest ruled it an accident,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘He’d been drinking, and he never did like to wear his seat belt. But there were rumours...’

  Faith’s eyes grew wide. ‘You mean that he’d meant to do it?’

  Marcus just looked at her. ‘That’s about the gist of it.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ she said, horrified.

  ‘I try not to.’

  Faith reached over and laid her hand on his arm. He looked down at it. They hadn’t touched since their first meeting, and that one simple, spontaneous gesture completely arrested him. He looked back at her face—really looked at her—and saw warmth and compassion and gentle strength. Instead of climbing back behind her walls, he could feel she was reaching out to him, and it made him ache for her in an entirely new way.

  No. He couldn’t want this. Shouldn’t.

  But he could feel himself slipping, forgetting why.

  ‘You can’t take the blame for this, Marcus. It was nothing to do with you.’ She shook her head as she talked. ‘You can’t carry this round with you, believe me. For your own sanity you have to find a way to separate yourself, to disconnect.’

  That pulled him up short. She was good at that, wasn’t she? He needed to remember that.

  ‘Is that what you did?’

  She stopped shaking her head. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Disconnect?’ he said. ‘I might be too wrapped up in my family, but you seem cast adrift from yours. Is that how you cope? Running away? Living in a different country? I can’t do that, Faith. I have to stay and fight—for Bertie, for my children and their children.’

  He knew he sounded angry, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He was angry with her for showing him parts of herself she’d never let him have, at his father for leaving him in such a mess, even at Hadsborough for the way it hung around his neck like a millstone. Telling her the truth had opened a floodgate. And he needed desperately to break this sense of intimacy weaving its way around them both and binding them together. He needed to push her away, to make that soft compassion completely disappear from her eyes.

  She pulled her hand back and glared at him, and he knew his accusations had struck home. He should have been pleased.

  ‘You don’t know anything about me, so don’t you dare judge.’

  ‘I’m not judging you,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I don’t know anything about you. Because every time anyone asks you block them out.’ It irritated him that she’d been able to run from her family, to taste freedom, when he’d been trapped by his. ‘So shock me. Tell me. Tell me what awful thing happened to make you avoid your home and family like the plague.’

  * * *

  Faith looked up at him, her eyes huge, and swallowed. For a few hot seconds she’d been furious, but then something else had crept up on her and taken her completely by surprise—the urge to do just what he suggested.

  Could she tell him? Would it really be as easy as that? She never wanted to talk about this. Not to anyone. And especially not to the rest of her family.

  But he wasn’t family. And she was thousands of miles away in a soundproof cellar. Somehow it seemed safer to let the words out here than anywhere else.

  Also, Marcus had shared something incredibly painful and personal with her, and she couldn’t ignore the sense of imbalance that left her with. She needed to get them back on an equal footing again so she could put her defences in place.

  ‘You...’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’ve always known who you are, where you
belong in the world. I don’t know if I can explain it...’ She swallowed. It had been so long since she’d talked about this with anyone that she didn’t know if the words were still there. ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she whispered.

  He held her gaze. There was still fire in his eyes, but it was softening, brightening. ‘Try the beginning,’ he said in a low voice.

  Faith nodded and moistened her lips. ‘My mom... She’s a bit of a...’

  How did she put this? Calling your own mother a flake out loud, no matter how many times you did it in your head, did not seem right.

  She shrugged. ‘She likes to move around, has sudden passions for hobbies or places—even people—that are all-consuming.’ Faith looked down at her denim-clad thighs. ‘While they last. And they never do last.’

  Marcus gave her his half-smile, the one that curved the right side of his mouth so deliciously. ‘A bit like Bertie, then?’

  She gave an exasperated puff. ‘No way! Bertie is sweet and charming. Mom... Well, Mom is just...infuriating.’

  He laughed a dry little huff of a laugh. ‘And you don’t think I find my grandfather the slightest bit exasperating?’

  Faith pinned her bottom lip in the centre with her top teeth. Okay, maybe he had a point there. But she doubted he’d find her mother sweet and charming. Nutty as a squirrel, maybe.

  ‘The same pattern applied to her marriage. She and my dad were on again, off again, for so long. And then one day he’d had enough of trying to make her see sense and he left. Or that’s what I thought at the time.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘My mother left my father under very similar circumstances. She loved him, even though he was a bit of a cad, but she couldn’t deal with all that and this place as well. Eventually she had enough.’

  A well of sympathy opened up inside Faith. She knew just what that was like, to see a parent leave, promising it was nothing to do with you, that it was the grown-ups who were to blame.

  ‘How old were you?’ she whispered.

  ‘Nine,’ he replied baldly.

  She nodded. Almost the same age she had been when Greg McKinnon had left the family home for the final time. She reckoned she and Marcus had more in common than she’d first thought.