In Bed With a Stranger (10 page)

She wasn’t sure she could match his self-control. She had to bite down on the insides of her cheeks to stop herself from ripping the remaining buttons from their holes. Looking up she saw that his face wore an expression of intense focus.

In contrast, his eyes were hooded, gleaming with want. She reached the last button, and they flickered closed for a second.

‘Kit—’

He took a step backwards, sinking down onto the edge of the bed and keeping his eyes fixed on hers as he kissed her midriff. Her muscles contracted in a sharp spasm of want and she gripped his shoulders, anchoring herself against the delicious tension that was already beginning to build as his mouth moved lower and he eased her knickers down.

She let out a high, desperate whimper.

But he was relentless. With maddening slowness his fingers caressed her thighs while his tongue probed and explored. Her head fell back and she thrust her hips forwards, upwards, writhing and rotating as he breathed heat against her and his tongue found her clitoris.

Sophie fell forwards, burying her face in his hair. Feeling the violent shudders of her orgasm wrack her, he held her waist and pulled her back onto the bed with him. Kicking off his trousers, he was inside her in seconds, moaning as he felt her slippery wetness close around him.

For a moment they both stilled, their gazes locked. Then, very slowly, she reached up to kiss his lips.

‘I love you.’

It was little more than a shivering breath, but it shattered his self-control. Gathering her into his arms, he cradled her against his chest, and she wrapped her legs tightly around his waist as he drove into her, strong thrusts that took him to the brink. Feeling her convulse around him again tipped him over the edge.

Ecstasy rocked him. In that moment it was possible to believe he was immortal.

‘Kit?’

Sophie’s head was resting on his chest, the beat of his heart
keeping time with the distant rhythm of the waves below. She was dazed with happiness and the relief of being close to him again.

‘Mmm?’

His voice rumbled like distant thunder deep in his chest. Love blossomed inside her and a smile spread across her face.

‘I hate to ruin the poetry of the moment, but I’m absolutely starving.’

‘That could be a problem,’ he said gravely, tracing a lazy circle with a fingertip on her shoulder. ‘I have no idea what time it is, but the shop in the village will have closed ages ago and I’m not sure there’ll be anything in the kitchen. Do you want to drive to Hawksworth for dinner?’

Sophie considered for a moment as ripples of pleasure spread down her arm and through her whole body.

‘Would it mean getting dressed?’

‘Probably. They’re quite old-fashioned about things like that round here.’

‘In that case, let’s not bother.’ Rolling reluctantly away from him, Sophie swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up shakily. ‘Jasper will just have to sacrifice his Toblerone. And we have champagne.’

‘We have an entire cellar full of it, in fact,’ Kit remarked dryly.

‘Oh, yes. I suppose so. I didn’t think of that.’

She bent down to pick up her dress, which was buried under his hastily discarded trousers. As she moved them something fell out of the pocket and skidded across the polished floor.

It was a box. A square, black velvet box.

Without thinking, Sophie went to pick it up. It was only when she was standing there, holding it in her hand and staring down at it, that her brain caught up and she realised what it might be.

Her jaw dropped. Hope and joy and excitement ballooned
inside her as she lifted her head to look at him. For a second she could only think of how incredibly sexy he looked, sprawled against the white sheets in the dying light. And then she noticed his face. It was frighteningly blank.

‘Kit?’ Her voice was a dried-up whisper. Her heart was beating very hard, as if the blood in her veins had turned to treacle. ‘What’s this?’

He sat up slowly, the muscles in his stomach and shoulders moving beneath the bronzed skin as he raised a hand and raked it through his hair in what looked like a gesture of resignation.

‘Open it.’

Her hands were shaking, making it difficult to unhook the tiny catch. The lid of the box opened with a soft creak. Sophie gasped.

The ring had a polished stone of iridescent green at its centre, but her hand was shaking so much that it caught the rose-pink rays of sun and made a rainbow of other colours shimmer in its depths. It was circled by a double row of diamonds. There was no doubt that it was very old, and very, very valuable.

She also had the feeling she’d seen it before.

‘It’s a black opal,’ he said tonelessly. ‘It’s called The Dark Star. It’s been a family engagement ring for generations.’

A memory stirred in the back of her mind. ‘Ah,’ she said with an uneasy laugh. ‘Is this that awkward moment when your girlfriend accidentally discovers the family ring you’re saving to give to someone who has the right breeding to wear it?’ Shutting the box again, she held it out to him. ‘You’d better keep it somewhere safe.’

‘Come here,’ he drawled softly.

She went towards him on trembling legs. Gently he took the box from her and pulled out the ring. Taking hold of her left hand, he brushed his lips over the hennaed vine tendril
that snaked down her third finger before sliding the ring onto it.

‘Is that safe enough?’

He pulled her back down onto the bed, taking her face in his hands and kissing her so that she wouldn’t see the despair and self-loathing in his eyes.

CHAPTER TEN

‘T
HAT
’
ll
be twenty-two pounds fifty-six please. I’ll put it on the Fitzroy account, shall
I
, Miss …?’

Fumbling in her purse, Sophie looked up. From behind a forest of neon windmills and plastic beach spades on the counter Mrs Watts was looking at her with an air of beady expectation.

‘Oh. It’s G-Greenham,’ she stuttered, caught off guard. ‘Sophie Greenham. But no, thanks, I’ll pay for it now.’

‘But you’re staying up at the castle, are you?’ Mrs Watts persisted as she waited for the money, her killer interrogation skills masked by a veneer of friendliness and a polyester overall. ‘With Master Kit? Or His Lordship as I’d still like to think of him. Such a shame. He’s so much better suited to the role than Master Jasper—flighty, he is, always has been, a bit like his mother, the second Lady Fitzroy. In America now, so
I
gather.’

‘Yes,’ Sophie confirmed helplessly, handing over the money and glancing back towards the door in the hope that rescue was about to come in the form of a large party of noisy children in search of buckets and spades and bags of sweets for the beach.

It wasn’t.

‘Oh-h-h, now that’s a beautiful ring,’ Mrs Watts said avidly, taking the notes Sophie offered, her eyes gleaming like
those of a sparrowhawk that had just spotted a fat baby rabbit as they fixed on The Dark Star. Sophie had no alternative than to keep her left hand extended as Mrs Watts leaned through the plastic windmills to examine it. Thank goodness the henna tattoo had faded. ‘I think it’s nonsense what they say about opals being unlucky, don’t you? I remember seeing this on the first Lady Fitzroy. Lady Juliet.’ She beamed up at Sophie. ‘Congratulations are in order, then, Miss Greenham?’

‘Sophie. Yes.’

Beaming, Mrs Watts placed a hand on her ample, polyester-encased bosom. ‘Oh, I’m so thrilled. Master Kit is such a gentleman, and it’s a good many years since there was a proper wedding at the castle.’ She began gathering up Sophie’s purchases and putting them all into a carrier bag. ‘Sir Ralph got hitched to his second wife down in London—she never did like it up here much—but I still remember the day he and Lady Juliet got married. The whole village turned out to watch her father walk her into church.’ She paused, a bunch of rust-coloured chrysanthemums clutched in her hand like a bridal bouquet, a distant, dreamy look in her eyes. ‘Oh, she was a picture, she was … and a
proper
lady. She would never have let the castle get into the state it has. Such a shame it didn’t last.’

Sophie resisted the urge to tell her not to expect a ‘proper’ wedding at the castle any time soon. Taking advantage of Mrs Watts’s lapse into reminiscence, she grabbed the carrier bag and moved towards the door.

‘Here, you’re forgetting your flowers. Lovely ones they are too; Mr Watts’s pride and joy—prize winners.’ Mrs Watts came round the counter to give them to her and then, bound by some weird feudal imperative, hurried over to open the door for her. Sophie felt herself blush with embarrassment.

‘Thank you, but I can manage—’

‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Watts said stoutly. ‘You’ve a position in this village now. We’re very proud of our heritage.’

Acutely conscious of her cheap chain-store dress and sneakers, Sophie went out into the late-summer sunshine. The school term had just started again so the village had emptied of holidaymakers, but there was a small group of young mothers with pushchairs standing chatting beside the green. Sophie felt a pang of longing so strong it took her breath away for a second. Her period, usually relentlessly regular, was three days late. Impulsively she turned back to Mrs Watts.

‘What
do
they say about opals being unlucky?’

She flapped a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, it’s just a silly old wives’ tale. I don’t go in for any of that kind of thing at all—horoscopes and star signs and all that hocus pocus. It’s love makes a marriage work. Love and trust and talking to each other. That’s what’s kept me and Mr Watts together for almost fifty years.’

Oh, dear, Sophie thought wistfully as she walked back up to the castle, it didn’t look good for her and Kit, then. Talking wasn’t exactly the area in which their relationship was strongest. The closeness they’d shared that night when he’d given her the ring had begun to fade again, almost from the moment he’d put it on her finger. During the days that followed Kit had been busy seeing solicitors, accountants, surveyors; picking his way through the legal tangle surrounding Leo’s will and trying to organise the work that was needed immediately to keep the castle—long neglected by Ralph—standing.

In the evenings they ate, usually in front of the fire in the drawing room, or walked on the beach. They talked, of course, about the work that needed doing, but it was more about Alnburgh’s future than their own. In fact, the most in-depth conversation she’d had about that was in a twenty-five-minute phone call with Jasper over a faint line to LA. As she’d predicted, the latest unforeseen development in the drama of Alnburgh’s ownership had come as a huge relief to him, but his happiness was tempered with concern for her.

‘It’s hardly a cosy love nest to start married life in,’ he’d sighed, with his usual ability to voice her own thoughts.

Her initial hope that their stay at Alnburgh might just be a brief one had faded as the days slipped past and Kit got more deeply involved in the business of the estate. Sophie could see how much he cared about it, and it was clear he had no plans to return to London. For his sake she would just have to try to get used to thinking of Alnburgh as home.

Her pace had got slower the nearer she got to the castle, and going from the buttery sunshine into the armoury hall was like stepping into a crypt. She walked quickly through the long gallery, steadfastly refusing to let herself look up at the animal heads to see if their eyes were following her as she went, and down the steps into the kitchen.

It was an enormous, gloomy room with a vaulted ceiling and a Victorian cast-iron range built into one end. The rest of it wasn’t much more contemporary, and the only light came from rows of windows set high up in the stone walls, and a nineteen-thirties enamel lamp that hung over the enormous table. It was a far cry from the sunny, friendly kitchen she had half imagined when she’d told Jasper that she was ready for a home.

Sophie put the shopping onto the table and went in search of a vase for the flowers. She had discovered a whole room further along the corridor entirely devoted to china of all sorts—tureens, coffee pots, rose bowls and no doubt a large selection of vases too—but she didn’t dare take anything from there in case it turned out to be too rare and valuable for Mr Watts’s chrysanthemums. Instead she took a plain cream jug from the dresser and filled it with water.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between herself and Kit, she’d decided to cook properly tonight, and lay the table in the dining room for the first time since they’d been at Alnburgh. She’d spent what seemed to her to be a ridiculous amount of money on a fillet of venison from the tiny butcher’s shop in
the village, mainly because it sounded appropriately posh to be dished up in such formal surroundings.

She picked up the jug with the flowers in and carried it back upstairs to the dining room. It was pitch black, the tall windows hidden by shutters and heavy velvet curtains. The urge to go and throw them both open was almost overwhelming, but Sophie resisted. She had made that mistake on the first day as she’d gone around trying to lighten the oppressive gloom that filled the rooms, but Kit had told her that light was bad for the paintings, and that the Victorian curtains couldn’t withstand being opened and closed too often.

Instead she flicked the light switch, and the gigantic chandelier over the table came on, along with the brass lights above the biggest portraits. Sophie put the jug of flowers on the table and stood back, hands on her hips, to look at it.

A great wave of misery and despair crashed over her.

It was hopeless, she realised. Mr Watts’s chrysanthemums might be his pride and joy, but they certainly wouldn’t win her any prizes for interior-design flair. Beside the other flowers standing in the buckets outside the village shop their mop-heads had seemed huge, but here in the cavernous dining room they looked insignificant and lost.

Like her at Alnburgh.

All her efforts to make a difference, to put her mark on the place and make it feel like home, were utterly futile, she thought, blinking back tears. What was the use of lighting scented candles in the hall when nothing could ever shift the smell of cold stone, damp earth and age? What was the point of trying to make Alnburgh feel like hers when she was reminded of its previous occupants at every turn?

She lifted her head, looking at the painted faces that lined the walls. All of them seemed to look back at her with contempt in their hooded eyes. Except one.

It was the portrait Sophie had noticed on her first night at Alnburgh six months ago, and it showed a woman in a pink
silk dress, with roses woven into her piled-up hair. What set her apart from the other sour-faced Fitzroys was her beauty and the secretive smile that played about her pink lips and gave her an air of suppressed mischief. Sophie remembered Ralph telling her that she was a music-hall singer who had caught the eye of the then earl, who had married her despite the fact that she was much younger and ‘definitely not countess material’.

She shivered slightly as his voice came back to her. ‘You and me both,’ she muttered, and was about to turn away when something else caught her eye.

The girl’s hands were folded in her lap, and on the left one, lovingly picked out by the artist’s brush, was Sophie’s ring.

So that was where she’d seen it before. A chill crept down her neck, as if it were being caressed by cold fingers. Lifting her hand, she looked from the real opal glinting dully in the twenty-first-century electric light, to the painted one on the finger of the eighteenth-century countess, remembering as she did so how her story had ended. Pregnant with a supposedly illegitimate child, suffering from advanced syphilis, the girl in the painting had thrown herself off the battlements in the east tower, to her death on the rocks below.

She hadn’t known what Mrs Watts had meant about opals being unlucky, but she was beginning to get the picture. She knew of two Fitzroy brides who’d worn the ring before her, and neither had lasted long at Alnburgh.

Rainbow had been a great believer in signs and portents; messages in everything from tea leaves to constellations. Growing up, Sophie had always dismissed it as yet another of her mother’s many eccentricities.

Hurrying quickly from the dining room, switching off the light, she suddenly wasn’t so sure.

‘The trust was set up some twenty-eight years ago now, with myself as one of the trustees. The others were the then LadyFitzroy, an army colleague of Leo’s, the senior partner in the firm of accountants he used …’

Kit’s attention began to wander. He had been on the phone to various people all day—all week, it seemed—and his head and neck and brain ached with the effort of trying to make sense of Alnburgh’s financial and legal position. It was nightmarishly complicated and excruciatingly dull, however it did give him something to think about besides Sophie, and the fact that he’d pretty much ruined her life.

As Leo’s elderly former solicitor went on Kit noticed that the library had darkened and filled with shadows. He felt a flicker of surprise. The room’s huge oriel window looked out over the beach below, and through it Kit could see that the mood of the sea had changed and that huge, swollen purple clouds had gathered over the headland to the south.

‘We took a great deal of trouble over the wording of the document to ensure there were no loopholes for Ralph Fitzroy’s legal team to use to his advantage …’

A week ago the beach had been scattered with groups of people—families with buckets and spades enjoying the last few days of their holidays, teenagers from the village with a radio and illicit bottles of cider—but now it was pretty much empty. A dog galloped along the wet sand, ears flapping, and in the distance a slim figure stood at the edge of the sea, her green cotton dress blowing up in the sudden brisk wind, her red hair flying.

A lightning fork of desire snapped through him, closely followed by a crash of guilt and despair. God, he loved her. But seeing her out there, standing in front of the swelling sea, only seemed to emphasise that elusive, untamable quality she had that had drawn him to her from the start.

And which made putting that bloody ring on her finger even more unforgivable.

That had been his chance to tell her, but he had let it pass because he knew that it would set in motion a chain of events
that was entirely out of his control. She would want him to see a doctor. And then, if the doctor’s diagnosis confirmed his fears, he would have to let her go.

And he wasn’t ready to do that yet. He’d only just found her. He wanted to make this happiness last for as long as he could.

He lifted the hand that wasn’t holding the phone and looked at it. The pins-and-needles sensation hadn’t been as bad since they’d returned to Alnburgh, and there were times when it disappeared altogether. Most notably when he was in bed with Sophie, touching her body, feeling her satin skin against his fingertips. Then he could believe that it wasn’t as serious as he thought …

‘Lord Fitzroy? Are you still there?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ Kit dragged his attention back to the voice on the other end of the phone. ‘Perhaps you could repeat that?’

‘I said, the fact that the trust was set up so long before Leo Fitzroy’s death means that the amount of inheritance tax owing is substantially reduced.’

‘That’s excellent news,’ Kit said blandly. In fact, it was the news he’d been holding out for, and the key to securing Alnburgh’s future, but at that moment it was slightly overshadowed by a sudden raging need to drag Sophie back here and take her upstairs.

‘It was partly chance, of course. When the trust was set up we didn’t know how long Mr Fitzroy would live, and frankly didn’t expect it to be more than the statutory seven-year period that would put Alnburgh out of danger from death duties. It was just lucky that he survived much longer than that.’