Lady of Seduction (4 page)

“Grant, come back here and listen to me!” she cried.

“Good night, Caroline,” he said, and closed the door firmly behind him. To her shock, she heard a key turn in the lock, and
her anger flared even hotter. The villain had trapped her in this chamber, just as he had in that warehouse.

She threw back the blankets and swung her legs off the side of the bed. When her feet touched the floor, another wave of dizziness
hit her, and she staggered back. He was right—she was still too ill and weak to fight him. She needed a good night’s sleep.
But tomorrow would be a different story. Tomorrow she would get her strength back, and she would fight him with everything
she had.

For now, she contented herself with throwing a pillow as hard as she could at the door. She crawled back onto the mattress
and curled up on her side as sleep crept in to claim her.

“This is not over, Grant,” she whispered. “I promise you that.”

Grant heard the dull thud of something hitting the door just above his head. Nothing shattered or exploded, and
there were no shouts or screams—tantrums didn’t seem to be Caroline’s style. But he could still feel the blistering heat of
her anger even through the thick wood.

Good.
He wanted her anger. It was better than her pity.

He leaned his forehead against the door and listened for any more sounds from the room beyond. There was the rustle of the
bedclothes, a few incoherent murmurs, then silence.

He closed his eyes and imagined Caroline lying there in the center of the big bed, her dark mermaid’s hair spread out in waves
over the pillows, the pale skin of her throat and shoulders against the white gown and the dusky coverlet. In his vision,
she was neither angry nor pitying. She smiled, a joyous, glorious smile, and held out her arms to him in welcome. He slid
into the haven of her embrace and inhaled deeply of her sweet perfume as she kissed him.

All forgiven, the past forgotten.

He opened his eyes and stared blankly at the locked door. The old wood might as well be vast thickets of thorny forests and
fire-breathing dragons for all that lay between him and Caroline Blacknall. That vision would never in a thousand years come
true. She would never forgive him, and he didn’t deserve it.

Now she was a woman, the promise of her almond-shaped dark eyes, high cheekbones, and her wide, sensual mouth grown into real
beauty. Not the fashionable blond perfection of her sister Anna, but something elegant and unique. And her mind seemed as
cool and determined as ever, despite what she had suffered on the sea.

She wanted
The Chronicle.
As much as he wanted to give her anything she asked for, anything to make her leave Muirin Inish and never return, he couldn’t
give her
the book. He just had to distract her until she could get off the island. And if he remembered correctly, the best way to
distract Caroline Blacknall was with a library.

He smiled reluctantly when he remembered that party at his Dublin house, where he found Caroline hiding in the library. Her
face glowed as he showed her his treasures, the things he shared with few people—especially when he placed
The Chronicle
in her hands. None of his mistresses had ever been so excited when he gave them diamonds and expensive carriages as Caroline
was to hold that book.

So he would pile volumes and volumes in front of her until she could see nothing else of what was happening on Muirin Inish.
He had work to do—and she had to be gone before it all came together.

He pushed away from the door and hurried down the twisting, worn stone stairs to the library below. The room was a vast space,
full of shifting shadows that curled around the corners and twisted up to the beamed ceiling. The fire had gone out, and the
place was bone-chilling cold. Grant quickly lit the lamp on his desk near the tall, narrow windows and went to work.

He cleared all his papers and letters from the locked drawer. Surely nothing so flimsy as a lock would keep Caroline out.
She was probably only still in her locked chamber because she was utterly exhausted. He would have to take care to hide the
documents very well, especially those in French.

He piled them up along with a few books he would rather she didn’t see, but one paper wasn’t where it should be.

“Damn it all,” Grant muttered as he knelt down to dig into the recesses of the drawer. It was not there. He turned
out the other drawers, dumping out sticks of wax, bottles of ink, and ledger books onto the faded carpet.

“Blast!” He pounded his fist on the floor—only to see it flutter from the drawer before him. How could he be so careless,
after everything? He wasn’t paying attention to his business.

“Sir?” a tiny, frightened voice said. “Is that you?”

And he was careless again. Usually no one could creep up on him at all. He was too distracted.

Grant rose from behind the desk to see that it was the young housemaid Maeve who hovered in the doorway. She held a candle
high in one hand, its flame casting an amber glow over her round face. Her skin was pale beneath the copious freckles, her
eyes wide and startled.

It had been thus ever since the terrible tragedy of Bessie, the maid who took a tumble from the tower—or was pushed from it.
One more black sin to his name. Now everyone was even more frightened of him than before.

“Yes, Maeve, what is it?” he said, more brusquely than he intended.

Her eyes widened even more. “I just—Mrs. McCann said I should light a fire in here, in case you wanted to read later. It’s
been even damper than usual.”

“I’m almost done for the evening. You can go now.”

“Yes, sir.”

She started to turn away, but froze when Grant called out, “Has anyone been cleaning around my desk of late?”

“Oh, no, sir,” the maid answered in a trembling voice. “You said we shouldn’t. I just dusted the tables and some of the shelves,
sir, like Mrs. McCann told me.”

“Did you happen to move any papers while you were dusting?”

“No, sir. Did I do something wrong?”

Feeling like an utter bully, Grant shook his head. “Not at all, Maeve. You can go now.”

She scurried away, and Grant kicked at the desk leg in frustration. One false step and they could all tumble down into disaster.

He thought of poor Bessie falling from the tower, and for a terrible instant, it was Caroline’s face he saw, her dark hair
streaming behind her as she fell to the sea. Her scream he heard.

“I
will
protect you, Caroline,” he said. “This time I will protect you. Whether you like it or not.”

T
he sound of someone singing out of tune pulled Caroline from her dark sleep. At first she thought it was just another strange
dream, like all the others that had plagued her through the long, restless night, dreams of drowning and lightning and Irish
gods with bronze-brown hair. Maybe it was a siren singing on the rocks below?

Caroline pried her eyes open and rolled over to find no such thing. It was only a housemaid in a plain brown dress and white
mobcap, who knelt by the grate raking up the ashes and singing.

“And who are you me fair pretty maid, and who are you, me honey? I am me mother’s darling!” she warbled softly along to the
scrape of her brush on the hearth stones, oblivious to the room around her.

It was the most wonderfully ordinary thing Caroline had seen since she arrived in this unreal, spooky place. There
were
real people here, not just ghosts! Not just Grant Dunmore with his hard, haunted eyes.

She stretched out on her back to listen to the maid’s tune, one of her own favorite Irish folk songs, and stared
up at the canopy above her head. A pale gray morning light was beginning to creep in at the window, heralding the end of the
long night, but there was still the staccato patter of the rain against the glass and the rumble of the thunder in the distance.
The storm was not yet over.

The green velvet canopy and bed hangings were old and faded, yet Caroline could make out the patterns of the gold embroidery,
the entwined forms of dragons and flowering vines. If she stared too long, she feared their twisting shapes would creep down
to wrap around her and trap her there forever.

She had to escape from Muirin Inish, which she started to fear
was
cursed, just as the villagers in the mainland inn had told her when they heard her destination.
You can’t go there, miss,
they protested in horror.
There are demons and evil spirits!

Caroline laughed them away. Evil spirits only lived in the old tales that she loved to study. Muirin Inish was only an island,
a lump of rock where once there was a monastery and a church, a great pilgrimage site. Now—well, now, she feared she should
have listened a little closer to their warnings.

The maid’s song ended, and Caroline turned her head to see the girl had laid fresh fuel in the clean fireplace and was gathering
up her bucket. Surely she wouldn’t leave Caroline alone just yet!

“Are you already finished?” Caroline asked. She sat up in bed, gathering the rumpled blankets around her.

“Oh, miss, you startled me! I thought you were sleeping,” the girl cried. She dropped her bucket with a clatter, and powdery
gray ash spilled out. “Now Mrs. McCann will box my ears for sure.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Caroline jumped down from the bed and hurried over to kneel beside the maid
and inspect the damage. “Surely we can clean it up so no one will know?”

As the maid watched with wide eyes, Caroline caught up the brush and tried to sweep the spilled ashes into a pile. She only
seemed to scrub them deeper into the threadbare old hearth rug.

“Obviously I am hopeless at this,” Caroline said. She pushed her tangled brown hair back from her eyes and stared down ruefully
at the mess. “I certainly don’t want to be the cause of trouble for you.”

The maid laughed and took the brush away to start sweeping herself. Caroline saw that she was quite young, surely no more
than fifteen, with a very freckled nose, blue eyes, and dark red curls escaping from under her crooked cap. A dark smudge
marred her cheek, and her apron was dusty.

The efficient housekeeper at Caroline’s girlhood home at Killinan Castle would never let a maid like that out of the kitchens,
but she had a nice smile and seemed so
normal.
After the shipwreck and meeting Grant again, Caroline craved a bit of normal.

The girl shook her head. “There’s not many who’ll come work here at the castle, miss. They’re all scared of the master, of
the ghosts. Mrs. McCann has to take what she can get, even if it’s only me.”

“Have you seen any ghosts here, Miss…?”

“I’m Maeve, miss, Maeve Kinley, and I haven’t seen any such thing.” Maeve seemed rather disappointed about that. “I’ve heard
things, though, especially since poor Bessie died.”

“Bessie?”

Maeve frowned, and for the first time, a shadow flickered over her open expression. “I shouldn’t have said anything about
that.”

Caroline was most intrigued. This place seemed so full of mysteries and tales, even more than one of the romantic books Anna
loved, which boasted dark foreign villains, ruthless smugglers, virtuous heroines, and crumbling ruins by the dozens.

“You can tell me,” Caroline whispered. “I won’t tell a soul. Surely if I’m to be trapped here until the storm clears, I should
know of any ghosts to beware?”

Maeve glanced at her uncertainly. “I don’t think it’s ghosts you need to beware—not
just
ghosts, anyway. And if Bessie’s spirit is here, I’m sure she wouldn’t hurt anyone. She’d just be sad, miss.”

“Who is, or was, Bessie then?”

“She was housemaid here before me. She was the daughter of a farmer from the mainland, and she was lonely when she came here
to work. She would come into my mum’s tavern in the village on the other side of the island, and we got to talking. She was
nice, but quiet-like. Sad, like I said. And then…”

It
was
like one of Anna’s novels. Sad heroines in black castles. Somehow Caroline was sure that she wouldn’t like the end to this
tale, but she felt compelled to hear it nonetheless. “And then?”