“He called you a slag!” John roared.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, her breath spreading in an opaque circle in front of her.
Even though his motions made no noise, she could sense that he stopped pacing. “Doesn’t. Matter?” he said with a great deal of emphasis on all the T’s.
She closed her eyes. “I’ve been called that and worse. I’m used to it.”
“How is that bloody possible?” he thundered. “You’re…well you’re—”
“I’m ruined,” she said gently, finally gathering the strength to turn around.
She had expected to see him be incredulous, but not his head cocked to the side in doglike befuddlement. “What? Ruined?”
She breathed in a deep breath through her nose, preparing to lose his respect and regard. Mourning it already. “This is why I am not with my family at Christmas. Or any holiday, really. I’m persona non grata in the eyes of society. My reputation couldn’t be lower if I actually sold myself on Whitechapel High Street.”
At that, he became impossibly still.
“It happened long ago,” she explained, already exhausted. “I fell in love with William Mosby, Viscount Woodhaven. He gave me a ring with the largest diamond I’d ever seen. We made love beneath the Paris sky…”
“And then?” he growled.
“And then he married Honoria Goode, the daughter of my father’s shipping rival, for her dowry was ten thousand pounds more obscene than mine.”
“He broke his word to you.” The statement was murmured softly, almost without inflection. “Did he break your heart?”
Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“Well…not irreparably at first. Not until he—until he published a pamphlet scoring the lovers he’d had. Prostitutes, mostly. But I was on the list, and my score wasn’t very favorable. Pathetically eager, but impossible to please, he said. He called my… my um…” She looked down, wondering why it was so difficult to say. Why she’d stopped feeling ashamed so long ago, but was suddenly afraid of the opinion of a dead man. “Well he said I am broken.”
The rickety chair at the bedside shattered against the far wall.
“Have you no brothers?” John thundered. “Your father didn’t kill him in a duel?”
She stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment for a moment. He was magnificently angry. His muscles seemed to build upon themselves as he heaved in breaths to a chest she could still mostly see through to the fire on the other side.
The effect was rather apropos, as the flames licked at his chest, seeming to ignite the scarlet coat with the same inferno that blazed in his eyes.
“Well,” she answered somewhat demurely. “Duels have been illegal for some time now.”
He gaped at her. “You’re joking.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You mean to tell me, there is no recourse to besmirched honor?” He gestured broadly as if he couldn’t comprehend the idiocy. “Any blighter can walk around and say whatever they might to defame an innocent, and others do what… believe them?”
It did sound rather ridiculous the way he said it. “If they’re a man of influence, they are believed,” she answered. “That seems to be the way of it. I mean, there are libel laws, but…that recourse is rarely taken.”
He made a disgusted face and threw a gesture at the door toward the chaos on the other side of it. “This age isn’t enlightened, it’s barbaric.”
“I don’t know about that. Fewer people die in duels, so…I suppose you might call that progress.”
“Not in my opinion. Not this bloody—” He whirled on her. “What was his name again?”
“William Mosby.”
“William… I’d cheerfully murder the ponce myself. I’d strike his entire legacy from the annals of time until—”
“No need.” Vanessa held her hand up against him. “Truly. He’s…well, he’s met his fate. What’s done cannot be undone.”
Suddenly. Miraculously. His features softened as he looked down at her, his arms dropping to his sides as he lingered close. Closer. His hand reached out as if to lift her chin, but he never quite managed. “I am sorry that you suffered.”
She summoned that false-bright smile for him. The one she’d learned so well. “I am lucky, in many respects. I still have a generous stipend from my father, to assuage his guilt, I imagine, for keeping me away from them socially. And with it I plan to see the world. I go on adventures like this one. And, reputation-wise, I’ve nothing to lose, so I may do what I please.”
His brow furrowed in consternation. “But you’re alone. Why not have a companion to take on such adventures with you?”
She let out a very unladylike snort. “The idea of compelling someone to keep me company with coin never appealed to me. Besides, then I’d be responsible for them, wouldn’t I? And, if I’m honest, very few would consider an association with one as besmirched as I a very desirable position. No one would consider my references a boon.”
The look on his face caused her own to fall. She couldn’t bear the tenderness. Or the pity.
“It is not so much suffering,” she all but whispered. “When there are so many in the world who know such pain, my bit of shame and isolation seems rather small in comparison.”
He dipped his head, his lips hovering above her forehead. “Suffering can be profound or prosaic, but it is suffering all the same. Yours is not inconsequential.”
His words melted her like honey decrystalizing in the summer heat. His presence washed over her like silk flowing in a breeze. Insubstantial, sensual, and yet compelling.
“You’re not broken,” he said. “You’re not ruined. Not to me.”
“You’re being kind,” she choked out over a lump of emotion lodged in her throat.
“I mean it,” he said fiercely.
She ducked away from him, turning to hide the burn of tears, pinching the bridge of her nose against their ache. She was too proud for this. She could not come apart in front of a veritable stranger.
“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“You—have a ruthless side,” she admitted breathlessly. “It—um—it makes my blood rush around a bit.”
He was close again. Right behind her. His presence a relentless affectation. “I frightened you?”
“No! I mean. Not entirely. You’re the only person who has ever stood up for me before,” she admitted, moving toward the fire and smoothing her dress down her thighs in a nervous gesture.
“Then why retreat from me?” he persisted.
She could tell the flames nothing but the truth. “When you touch me I…Well, actually, you don’t touch me. But you were able to hold on to inanimate objects. To do a man violence.”
He let out a long breath. “I’m little better than an awareness most of the time. Something I could slip in and out of at will at first, but the longer I tarry, the more I spend in the void. But there are holy days—solstices and equinoxes where, if I concentrate very hard, I can become something like corporeal. At least, for a moment. I can will things to move, but it depletes me. On nights like Na Fir Chlis I am the most visible, but I cannot sustain contact for long.”
“I see,” she whispered.
His voice ventured closer, until she could almost feel his warm breath against her ear. “When I reached for you in the bath, my hand went through you… You felt that?”
“I feel—something. Not your skin, per se. Something else. It’s like…” She cast about for the word. “A tingling. No, stronger than that. A vibration, perhaps.”
He made an amused noise deep in his chest. “Really?”
“It’s disquieting.”
“Does it cause you pain?”
“No. No, quite the opposite.”
“The opposite?” He drifted around her, standing so close to the flames a normal man would have caught. “The opposite of pain is pleasure.”
She retreated a step. “So it is.”
He advanced, his
eyes liquid pools of carnal promise. “Does my touch pleasure you, Vanessa?”
“I don’t—I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Why?” he pressed. “Why after being so fearless, is it pleasure that scares you? Do you fear your desire for it?”
She swallowed. “Yes. Maybe. I couldn’t say.” She feared the ruin it had already brought her. The derision of another lover. Another man she thought she might care for. Who might profess to care for her. She feared the strength of her feelings, her desires, after only knowing this man for the space of an hour.
His hand reached out, a tremor visible in the long, rough fingers. His palm caressed her face, but not in the way she wished it would. It was there, but it wasn’t. The warmth of his touch lingered; a callus might have abraded her soft cheek. There. Right there. But also, just out of reach.
It was both bliss and torment. The vibrations of his energy, of the very striations etched into the palm of his hand, were tangible. But whatever touched her was not flesh. Not exactly.
It was enough to make her weep, the longing she sensed in the gesture. The cavernous pain she read etched into the grooves branching from his eyes, and in the tension of his skin stretched tight over his raw, beautiful bones. “I haven’t touched a woman in a lifetime. In a handful of lifetimes.”
“Do you want to?”
“Is that an invitation, Vanessa?” His voice was like liquid velvet, his eyes twin azure flames. “If I could, would you let me?”
“I—Um…” She was a quivering, boneless puddle of sensation. Of desire. Her loins ached, moistened, bloomed for him. Her lips plumped and her skin burned to be touched.
Her entire body was one thrumming chord of need.
Was she the only one undergoing this torture? “John?” she whispered, turning her head out of his palm, if only to spare them each more impotent longing. “Can you feel desire as you are?” she queried. “Can you—erm—manifest it? Physically?”
His lips actually stirred her hair as he growled against her ear. “I’ve been hard as a diamond since the moment I watched you undo your buttons.”
Chapter Five
John leaned back and let his admission crash into the space between them, overflowing it with heady, carnal, unspoken reveries. His. Hers. All amalgamating into one frustrated frequency of need.
All the chaos of the common room had gone quiet, no doubt Bess had kicked everyone to their beds. In this abandoned corner of the structure, he and the comely Miss Latimer might have believed they were the only two people in the whole of the Highlands.
John watched her intently as she stared—or rather—glared at him. Unblinking. Her chest rose and fell beneath the high-necked blouse as she very distinctly did not allow herself to look down.
She’d have found the answer to her question if she had, straining against the placket of his trousers.
However, after what he’d just discovered about her, he realized he might have been too forward. Might have overwhelmed a woman who’d only just been harangued by undesirables.
He closed his eyes and stepped back, allowing her space. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Squirming with shame and regret, she instantly buried her face in her hands. “No. That is—the fault is mine. I asked you the vulgar question. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“I order you to stop feeling shame,” he said with a stern frown.
She looked up at him askance. “You can’t command emotions, that’s not how they work.”
“I can and I will,” he shot back, looking to goad her past her mortification. “I insist the blame for our—indelicate interaction be placed on my shoulders. I’ve forever been a man too plain of speech. Too blunt and coarse and forbidding. It made for a successful Lieutenant Colonel, a mediocre nobleman, and well… ripe shit at relationships.”
The tremulous tilt at the corner of her mouth told him his candor was working. “Which relationships?” she queried, her relentless curiosity returning. “With women, you mean?”
“’Twas doubtless why I remained a bachelor at five and thirty. I assumed one took a wife like one took a hill in combat. It was all strategy and espionage, if not an all-out battle. I was built to win, not woo, and I frightened many a maidenly noble lady into the arms of some gentler, more civilized man.”
She wrinkled her nose at that rather adorably. He wasn’t certain how to interpret the expression, but that didn’t stop him from continuing, if only to put conversational space between their previous fraught interaction.
He marched around her, exploring the space of his chamber with his hands clasped behind him. He did his best not to prowl like the predator he was. To draw his tense shoulders away from his ears. “My social ineptitude reached past the fairer sex to anyone, really. My parents. My brother, James. Even after everything, he came to claim my remains all those years ago. Or perhaps he only returned for the ring, and taking my benighted bones back to the de Lohr crypts was an afterthought, though I couldn’t say I’d blame him.”
“The ring?” She grasped onto the one subject he’d only mentioned as an afterthought.
“A de Lohr signet. Given to my templar ancestor—the Lion Claw, they’d called him—by his ladylove so many generations ago.”
John summoned a picture of the piece into his mind. The head of a lion had been etched into the precisely crafted purest gold; rubies set into the ocular cavities as if the blood spilled by the apex predator reflected in his eyes.
“Surely your brother came to collect you, and the ring was the afterthought.”
“You underestimate the significance my family put on that ring,” he said gruffly. “And you didn’t know my brother. We did not part on the best of terms. I regretted that. I was a hard man to know, and I did not understand his impulsive passions. His depth of emotion. And, if I’m honest, I envied him his freedom as the second son, his shoulders unencumbered by the weight of the de Lohr name.” Unbidden, John looked into the past, seeing the familiar face of his brother, the disappointment in his eyes the last time they spoke. “I am confident James made a better Earl than I might have. At least, I hope he did.”
“The Earldom of Hereford is still one of the most wealthy and respected titles in the Empire,” she explained gently. “If that is any condolence to you.”
It was, actually. “You’re kind to say so. I don’t get word of such things up here. It’s mostly clan gossip and peasant revelry.”
Something about that elicited a giggle from her, and when he looked, her silver eyes were twinkling like the little diamond bobs in her ears. “We don’t call them peasants anymore. Not that it should matter to you much, I suppose.”
He chuffed out his own sound of mirth. “Yes. A more enlightened age, you’ve mentioned.” He was about to ask her to tell him about it when she began to pace as if puzzling something out.
“So not even your remains are here in Scotland. I still find it extraordinarily peculiar that your bones should rest in the de Lohr crypts but your spirit should be restless here of all places. Did you visit this inn before you died?”
“Never.”
“Perhaps you killed the previous proprietor in the war?”
“No, I’m certain it has something to do with Carrie Pitagowan and her blasted curse.” He’d been over and over it in his mind, and he wasn’t exactly excited to rework it with her. “Do you happen to know any witches who might be able to break it?”
She ignored his dry sarcasm. “What about her Chamber of Sorrows?”
At the mention of the room, he went still.
She continued, pacing the length of the bed. “I asked Bess, and she told me that Carrie went to Jacobite battlefields and took things, especially from English officers. I’ve noticed you have no saber nor hat nor medals upon your jacket.” She whirled on him, ceasing her pacing as she held her hands up in a motion that might stop the entire world so it might listen to her next sentence. “John! What if she took your ring?”
Christ b
ut she impressed him. She’d been here all of five minutes and she’d discovered what it’d taken him decades of eavesdropping to find out.
“I have no doubt my body was looted after the battle, by starving, angry highlanders. But I’ve searched the Chamber of Sorrows. Nothing in it belongs to me.”
John had done many distasteful things in his life as a soldier, and also in his short tenure as the heir to an Earldom, but smothering the enthusiastic light shining from Vanessa Latimer’s open, upturned face had to be the worst.
Still, he could tell he’d not defeated her as the wheels and cogs of what he was coming to understand was a sharp and restless brain didn’t cease their machinations. “Can you take me to this Chamber of Sorrows?”
“Certainly, though it’s not far.” He motioned to the wardrobe, a piece of furniture almost as tall as he was. “The Pitagowans have merely covered the door with this.”
She circled the thing, tapping on her chin as she was wont to do. Testing its heft with a little push. “I don’t know if I can move it.”
John didn’t know if she could either, which meant he’d have to. “I’ll do what I can to help you.”
Clearly heartened, she gifted him with a brilliant smile that sparked a little flicker of joy in his guts before she flattened her back against one side, bracing her feet on the ground to pit her entire weight against the thing. It scraped and budged, but only an inch or so.
John joined her, levering over her and bracketing her head with his arms. If someone walked in at this moment, that person would do well to assume they were about to kiss.
Or had just finished doing so.
As if she’d read his thoughts, her eyes dropped to his mouth. Her tongue snaking out to moisten her own lips.
John’s lids slammed closed as lust roared through him. “Goddammit, Vanessa. Push.”
The wardrobe gave way beneath their combined efforts, and he all but leapt away from her and retreated to the opposite end of the room.
It’d been a long time since he’d asserted himself onto the world of the living so often in one night. It tired him. Weakened him in so many ways.
A Very Highland Holiday Page 12