Beauty and the Duke (23 page)

“Mayhap there is one consolation for us, my love,” he whispered against her mouth, spreading her thighs as he pushed inside her. “We are made for this, you and me.”

Erik made love to her. Or she to him.

Christine did not know. Nor did she care.

She had come to Sedgwick to find a dragon. Not a myth, but one that might have once truly existed. It was the reason she married Erik.

And the reason why she later came awake in his bed upstairs in the darkness as warm arms encircled her and gently turned her on her back, and she felt that melting
pleasure inside her all over again.

Christine cradled Erik’s head against her breasts, feeling his tongue against her hardening nipples. Then his mouth was hard against hers and her arms wound around his neck. He caressed her buttocks as she moved against him, opening her legs to join with him, and within minutes he had filled her, and the dragon in her dreams became the one in her arms.

A
n hour before dawn Erik rang for Boris. Erik had left Christine asleep in his bed where he had carried her earlier. He’d finally risen and dressed.

Now Boris stood in the doorway of Erik’s private sitting room. Wearing a nightshirt and stocking hat, the aging man was a thin silhouette framed by the light behind him. “Did you summon me, your grace?”

Erik glanced at the clock on the mantel above the fireplace. “My apologies for waking you so early, Boris.”

“Yes, your grace. I came. I thought perhaps there might be a crisis.”

“It is too early for a crisis, Boris. I have personal business with which to attend and will be away from Sedgwick Castle. I need you to see that Lady Sedgwick gets this in the morning.” Erik handed him a wooden box holding the heavy iron key to the tower. He could have been handing over the key to his heart for all he knew. He’d felt strange all evening. “The place will need to be cleaned. But you stay out of the tower yourself. Too many bloody stairs, else someone will be calling me to bring an undertaker back.”

“Yes, your grace. Thank you.”

“Do you mind not calling me ‘your grace’ with every
single syllable you utter, Boris. It is not necessary. And I find myself tiring of it.”

“Yes, your…sir,” Boris hesitated. “You have packed?”

“My valise has already been removed to the coach. I can see myself downstairs. I do not want the household awakened.”

“Yes. Very well.”

Erik pulled on his leather gloves. “My wife goes nowhere without Hamilton to escort her.”

“He will guard her with his life.”

“Thank you, Boris. I appreciate his loyalty. Just see that Hamilton keeps her safe. That will be all.”

“Good morning then.”

Erik turned back into the room. She lay on her side watching him.

He sat on the edge of the bed. His gaze slipped downward to caress the naked curve of her waist and each breast. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He pulled the covers over her shoulders. “The keep is yours to do with as you will,
leannanan.
”

His gaze hesitated on the hand that came to rest on his. A small corner of his mind cherished the urgency in her touch. “Thank you,” she said.

Erik pressed his palms against the pillow, bracketing her between his arms and his body, teasing the curls at her temple with his breath before he kissed her one more time. “Sleep.”

“You will keep yourself safe?”

Their warm breath mingled until at last, his thumb traced her bottom lip and he kissed her lightly. “Always.”

Erik walked the corridor to his daughter’s rooms, the cloak billowing out around his calves with his stride. Quietly opening the door, he let himself inside.
A lamp burned on the table just inside her room. He walked to her bed. The doll she usually slept with no longer lay beside her. Instead, her arm lay protectively wrapped around Christine’s orange cat. Both slept soundly. For a moment, shaking his head, all he could do was stare down at her, then he bent and gently kissed her curls.

She didn’t know just how many times he had come in here during the night to watch her. He had never been very good at expressing tender feelings of affection. Never whispered the words
I love you
, to anyone. Not to Becca or Elizabeth or his own daughter. He didn’t even know if he knew how.

Once outside, he greeted his driver and footman with a nod, stopping briefly to glance up at the tower keep before he climbed into the carriage. As the coach rolled away, he dimmed the lamp and stared at the rivulets of rain slanting across the glass. He understood why the people of Scotland were known for their fierce resilience and independence. The weather alone bred stamina. A person had do grow tough or perish.

He was relieved that Christine had never been the type to simply surrender to circumstance and perish.

Christine stopped on the top-floor stair landing, then stepped into a room shrouded in a gloomy shadow, unsure what she would find. Having left Mrs. Brown and Aunt Sophie on the second floor, she had come up here alone to look around. She tied back the heavy curtains and, after coughing and choking on the dust, put her hands on her hips and surveyed her surroundings. Weak light stole through the leaded windows. Dust coated everything. Yet even through the grime, Christine could see that with a solid cleaning, the room could be magnificent again. The keep itself
might be a throwback to the days of fifteenth-century medieval warfare, but the old master’s chambers inside had been gently tamed by modernization. The floors were carpeted in the colors of autumn. Corinthian stone columns supported the airy Wedgwood-style papier-mâché ceiling, in juxtaposition with the wild landscape outside.

Christine walked into an adjoining sitting room and tied back those curtains as well. She could make these upper rooms her workspace. They were big enough for her needs, the lighting ideal and the gothic ambience a perfect suit to her tastes. Still, there was a sadness in the cold shadows that pervaded her thoughts as she touched a hand on the wooden seat just below the window.

From the sitting room she continued her exploration higher into the tower, slowly climbing the circular stairway to an upper room. Here she glimpsed her first hint of the destruction of which Erik had spoken. A chair and table were overturned. A lamp shattered. Her feet crunched on glass and, startled by the sound, she cautiously lifted her skirts. She moved into the chamber and came to an abrupt halt.

Several tall glass-fronted cabinets lined the wall, their doors shattered. Tables were upturned. Papers and books raked from the shelves and strewn in heaps over the debris-ridden floor. Nothing had escaped the inhuman destructive force that had gone through this room and the adjoining one.

Knowing who had done this only made the scene more horrific. Saddened by the destruction, Christine backed away and returned to the floor below.

She would take out the bedding, tapestries, the draperies and all the carpeting. She would remove the furniture. She would make these rooms alive again.

The sound of clacking against the stone stairs leading into the lower bedroom drew her around. She hurried downstairs and peered into the circular stairwell.

“Good
God
, girl!” Aunt Sophie gasped. “You will be the death of me!”

Christine hurried down and took Aunt Sophie’s elbow as she helped her the rest of the way upstairs. “I told you not to come up these stairs.”

“And how exactly did you plan I should get here? Fly?” Leaning against the silver head of her cane, she waved away Christine’s concern and looked about her. “Do not tell me you intend to live here. Why, the servants will rebel and throw you off the battlements.”

Christine walked to the window and looked out across Erik’s world. “But you can’t deny the beauty of the scenery. These rooms are perfect, Aunt Sophie. Not just to work in, but to live in as well.”

Christine leaned against the glass and looked down into the unkempt courtyard. “I shall surprise him when he returns from Dunfermline.”

Daylight seeping in through the leaded glass touched the silver band on her right hand, drawing her out of her daze.

She found herself tracing the ring on her finger.

There was a reason she had always lived by certain rules of pragmatism, she told herself. Rules kept her from behaving like her idealistic students who believed in such silly things as magic, curses, and one’s destiny being divined by a braided band of antique silver. And yet, pragmatism aside, she did believe.

She believed so hard and with such passion, she knew everything
must
work out. Christine closed her eyes. “Have you ever wanted to touch the wind, grab on to it with all of your might, and let it take you wherever it willed?”

When Aunt Sophie failed to respond, Christine dropped back down to earth with a mental thud. She slowly turned. Aunt Sophie was sitting in a high-back velvet tufted chair, like a queen on a throne, staring at her. “I have suspected all along that something was wrong with you,” her aunt said. “I should have checked you for a fever and put you to bed with a cold compress long ago.”

“Do you believe in magic, Aunt Sophie?”

Aunt Sophie crossed her hands over the silver knob of her cane. “Do
you
?”

Toying with the ring, Christine found herself hesitating. Aunt Sophie’s gaze dropped to Christine’s hand.

The room seemed to grow quiet. “Come here.” Aunt Sophie motioned for Christine to stand in front of her. “Let me see what trouble you have got yourself into now.”

Christine did as Aunt Sophie bid, feeling much like a child called to task for disappointing her elders. She knelt beside the chair.

“Give me your spectacles,” Aunt Sophie said. “It’s about time I saw the world around me a little clearer.”

Christine eased the glasses off and handed them over to her aunt. Aunt Sophie applied them to her nose, tilted her head up and down, then took Christine’s hand and examined the ring in the light.

Christine had always wondered how her aunt could see so well at her age and now realized she could not. Aunt Sophie’s vanity surprised her for Christine had always thought her aunt immune to the opinions of others.

She caught Aunt Sophie peering at her from over the top of the spectacles. As if she had read Christine’s mind, she said, “It is not my vanity that keeps me from wearing spectacles. It is admitting to myself that I am old.”

With a sigh, Aunt Sophie returned Christine’s spectacles and sat back in the chair. “I gave that ring to the granddaughter of a friend of mine as a…”

“Joke?” Christine helpfully supplied.

“I am hardly that cruel. Babs needed a lift. Something to get her mind off her mam’s passing. She needed a miracle and I gave her one. At least in her mind.”

“Her mind? Babs’s wish to come to school at the abbey came true.”

“Pah! There was no magic involved. I already knew she’d been accepted at the abbey. I am the one who paid her tuition to remove her from beneath her father’s thumb. They had no money. He was preparing to send her to a workhouse.”

Christine paled. “But Amelia and Joseph…”

“Were making eyes at each other before he went to Edinburgh. You were just too blind to see anyone or anything outside the walls of your laboratory.”

Christine shook her head, refusing to believe that the simplest of explanations could account for everything that had happened to her since Erik had knocked at her classroom door. Her heart began to race.

She
needed
to believe. Aunt Sophie did not understand what was at stake. “There is power in this ring, Aunt Sophie. I know there is.”

“The ring did not bring Sedgwick back into your life, dear. He had been in contact with your papa for months about fossil finds on this estate. There are no special powers that made you his wife and brought you to Scotland.”

Christine refused to be dissuaded. There
was
magic in this ring. There
had
to be. She rose to her feet in a whisper of burgundy silk and white lace. “My entire life I have been searching for what I have before me now.”

“Are you referring to Lord Sedgwick or your beast, Christine? A few months ago Sedgwick was not in your life.”

Christine pressed her thumbs to her temple and wanted to tell her aunt to stop it!
Go away. “Why can’t I have both?
Don’t you understand, I
have
to believe, Aunt Sophie.”

“If all of this is magic, what happens when the ring comes off?”

“
Why
must it come off? See?” She held up her hand. “It is on my finger.”

“Then what?” Aunt Sophie quietly asked. “Sedgwick falls in love with you and you spend the rest of your life happy, or do you spend it doubting yourself? And him? You must be worthy of your wish.”

The tenor in Aunt Sophie’s voice both startled and frightened her because it suddenly answered a question. “Papa did not get this ring from a Gypsy trader, did he?”

Aunt Sophie waved her hand dismissively. “It is a silly ring with a silly Arthurian legend attached to it I found in my great-grandmother’s hope chest. Your father discovered it one day. He must have been only twenty at the time. Always searching for that elusive magic elixir that would make his life complete. He had two passions in his life, archaeology and your mother. In those days, there was no paleontology or name for people who hunted fossils.”

“Mam left Papa after he took off the ring…”

“You can only want
one
thing
most
in the world, Christine.” Aunt Sophie rose. “And you must be worthy of your own wish. Spells and enchantments are all fine and well, but for all the magic on King Arthur’s side, in the end, Britain’s mighty savior lost his Guinevere, and
his life, and the sword went back into the lake. Nothing will endure if you are not first worthy of your own wish.”

Beast had abandoned her.

Christine recognized desertion when she saw it, and, a fortnight later, as she was making her way to the stables to meet Hamilton, she finally saw her traitorous cat following Cook down into the scullery that led to the kitchens. He hadn’t made so much as one visit to her since she had moved into the tower.

Hamilton met her at the stable door. Miss Pippen was saddled, ready and standing next to his shaggy gelding. Hamilton dropped into step with her as she passed him to the mounting block. “You are up early again, mum. Will we be off to the same place as we were yesterday?”

Christine pulled on her gloves. “No, I think we will move east.”

Seven days in a row, Christine had pulled poor Hamilton out of his bed before dawn. Yesterday he’d fallen asleep on a bed of pine needles, and Christine had had three hours to explore the higher elevations without having to worry that the lumbering man would break his neck attempting to follow her into the rocks. She’d wanted to find a better view to see the surrounding crags and dips. She’d mapped out trails on Erik’s estate that needed closer inspection. At this rate, she could be here a decade and not see all the sections.

Erik couldn’t wait that long for answers.