Winterset (3 page)

A trace of a smile so faint she wasn’t even sure it was there tugged at his lips for an instant. “I fear the butler was not best pleased to see me. Especially since I did not come alone.”

Her eyes flew to his face at his words.
Was he going to say that he was married? Had he brought his wife? His family?
Anna’s heart squeezed within her chest. “Indeed? You brought a party with you?”

“My sister and her husband. They thought they might be interested in purchasing Winterset. And my twin brothers—they were, once again, without a tutor.” His mouth curved into an actual smile now, albeit a rather rueful one, and his eyes lit with humor and affection.

Anna remembered the look very well, and seeing it now was like a knife slicing through her. “Ah…Constantine and Alexander.”

His eyebrows rose. “You remember their names? I am surprised.”

She did not tell him that she remembered everything he had told her—nor that she had written them down in her journal like a lovesick schoolgirl. “They are difficult names to forget,” she told him quickly. “Two Greats in one family.”

“They are difficult boys to forget, as well,” he went on in the same easy tone, without the earlier awkwardness that had been in his voice. Then he seemed to remember how things stood with them, for he looked away and his body shifted, returning to its former awkward stiffness.

“I—how are you doing?” he continued abruptly, frowning down at her.

“I am well, thank you,” Anna said, noting that there had been no real concern in his voice. He had sounded, in fact, more annoyed than anything else.

“Then there has been…nothing unusual happening around here?”

Anna looked at him oddly.
What did he mean?
Was he pointing out to her the dull contrast of her life to the exciting London life that he could have given her? She stiffened, her face turning defiant. “No. I fear that only the most ordinary things occur around Lower Fenley. It is not the sophisticated sort of place that you are accustomed to, I’m sure.”

He raised a brow, obviously nettled by her words. “You have no idea what I am accustomed to,” he retorted sharply.

He stopped, pressing his lips together as if to hold back whatever words had sprung to his lips. “I should never have come back here,” he went on, his voice bitter.

“No, perhaps you should not,” Anna agreed, and turned quickly away to hide the sudden, unwelcome glint of tears that had sprung into her eyes.

“Anna…” He started toward her, then stopped, a soft oath falling from his lips.

Her throat was suddenly tight and full. She knew that she could not speak without bursting into tears. Hurriedly, Anna began to walk away. She could not bear it if he followed her, she thought. Yet when she heard the rustle of movement behind her, then his quiet command to his horse and the sound of the animal’s hooves as he pounded away from her, she felt perversely insulted.
He was so eager to get away from her!

She turned, looking back toward Reed. He was galloping away, a magnificent figure on his horse. Tears blurred her vision. Then she turned, blinking the water from her eyes, and strode toward home.

As he rode home, Reed called himself ten times a fool. He had rushed to Winterset, unable to rid himself of the uneasy certainty left by his dream that Anna was in trouble—and equally unable to convince himself that there was no reason why he should be the person to help her out of whatever it was.

But nothing had gone right since he made the decision to come here. He had come up with a most reasonable excuse for returning to Lower Fenley: He intended to sell Winterset. It made sense; he knew that a logical man—a man who was able to let go of a nonsensical romantic fantasy—would have sold it years ago. He could go back to Winterset to look it over and decide what repairs needed to be done in order to sell it, even stay to make sure that the renovations were done to his liking. It was a logical-enough idea that Anna would not assume that he had come there just to see her—especially not after three years had passed. It would also, he thought, be something that his family would accept without questioning him.

He had bought the house three years ago when he had been seized with the idea that he should purchase a country house, a home of his own, separate and apart from his beloved and eccentric family. He envisioned it as the place where he would someday bring a bride and raise a family. Inquiries had brought up word of Winterset, a large manor house in Gloucestershire that had lain vacant for almost ten years. It had been the seat of the de Winter family, a noble family whose numbers had dwindled away over the years until there was only the last Lord de Winter left. Unmarried and childless, Lord Charles had left England ten years earlier for Barbados. Apparently he had decided not to return, and the house had been put up for sale by Sir Edmund Holcomb, de Winter’s brother-in-law and the guardian of his estate while Lord de Winter was abroad.

A description and drawing of the house had intrigued Reed, and he had ridden to Gloucestershire to see the place for himself. What he had not expected was that on the first day he saw the house, he would meet the woman whom he wanted to be his bride.

The house and surrounding grounds had been everything he had wanted—spacious and elegant, built of honey-colored stone, with just the sort of odd, piquant touches to make it intriguing—and he had bought it, then settled into the most-habitable wing while he began the process of rebuilding it. And as he did so, he courted Anna Holcomb. For a few weeks, he had spun happy dreams, but they had all ended the day he had asked her to marry him. She had rejected his suit in terms that allowed for no possibility of her changing her mind. The next morning Reed had left Winterset, and the house had once again sat empty.

He had told no one in his family about what had happened at Winterset three years ago, except for his older brother, Theo, his closest sibling and one whom he could count on never to reveal a secret. The sympathy of his sisters had been more than he had thought he could bear at the time, and he had an innate reluctance to reveal something so deeply painful even to those who loved him. Being a family rather given to odd fits and starts, no one had really questioned his abandoning the home he had bought, but he suspected that returning there out of the blue would set up just the sort of questions that he wanted to avoid. Selling the house would, he hoped, be the sort of logical, boring business matter that no one in his family would want to hear more about.

That much was true. His mistake, he knew, had been bringing the matter up at the breakfast table. He had hoped that only his father and mother, or perhaps his sister Thisbe and her husband, Desmond, might be there, all of whom had little curiosity about matters outside their chosen fields and who would accept his explanation for his sudden departure with few questions.

Unfortunately, when he had arrived in the breakfast room somewhat later than was his custom, he had found it a scene of great activity. His brother, Theo, Thisbe’s twin and the heir to the family title and estate, had been home for almost six months now and was apparently growing restless again, and he had arisen early that morning for a ride in the park and was just then sitting down to breakfast. His sister Kyria and her husband, Rafe, had recently returned from their honeymoon in Europe, which had extended itself into two years and a tour of Rafe’s native United States, as well, bringing with them their six-month-old baby, a strawberry-blond beauty named Emily. His other sister Olivia and her husband, Stephen, had come to London with their own toddler, John, when Kyria and Rafe returned, and they had come over early this morning to visit.

And shortly after Reed walked in, the twelve-year-old twins, Alexander and Constantine, had come charging into the room, their hair sticking out all over their heads and smelling faintly singed, to chatter excitedly about the experiment with electricity that they had conducted under Thisbe’s supervision.

At that point, Reed knew, he should have kept his mouth shut and told his father later, in the duke’s workshop, where he puttered about with his beloved objects of antiquity. But, foolishly, he had opened his mouth and stated his intention to return to Winterset to sell the house. Theo, who knew about Anna, had narrowed his eyes as he looked at Reed, and asked him one or two piercing questions.

Then Kyria had declared that perhaps she and Rafe would be interested in buying the place themselves, as they were considering establishing a country home in England. Before he knew what had happened, Theo had suggested that Rafe and Kyria should accompany Reed on his trip to Gloucestershire and look at the house, and after that, the twins had begged to be allowed to come along, too. As Con and Alex were once again without a tutor, the last one having left in a huff when the twins’ boa constrictor had mysteriously wound up in his bed one evening, the duchess had seized upon this suggestion with a great deal of warmth, saying that it would give her time to find a more suitable tutor. Then Kyria had decided that she would bring her friend Rosemary Farrington with her, as she had a remarkably good eye for interiors.

Reed had groaned inwardly, sure that Miss Farrington had been thrown into the mix in another one of Kyria’s valiant attempts to find him a wife, as he had never before noticed that Kyria had trouble deciding on anything on her own. Kyria had always been an inveterate matchmaker, and marriage seemed only to have made her worse.

He had argued valiantly that he intended to leave as soon as possible, but Kyria had countered that after two years of traveling, she was an expert at packing quickly, and the twins, of course, were ready to go at a moment’s notice, needing only to extract a promise from Thisbe and Desmond that they would make sure that the parrot and boa and the rest of the twins’ menagerie were well taken care of. As for Rosemary, Kyria could vouch for her speed and efficiency, as well as her willingness to take off on a lark.

Finally Reed had given in, knowing that to continue to argue further against their joining him would only result in exactly the sort of curious questions that he was trying to avoid. He would have far preferred to have gone alone, but he had to admit that taking several members of his family with him would make the trip appear more normal and conveniently mask his real purpose.

Kyria had kept her promise of packing and moving with speed, and within a day they had set out, travelling not by train, as Reed had originally intended, but in Kyria’s new victoria, an elegant low-slung open carriage that Rafe had recently bought for his wife, with Reed and Rafe riding alongside, followed by a slower wagon of personal servants and luggage, as well as a groom with several more horses for the twins, Kyria and their guest.

When they arrived at Winterset, Reed had immediately talked to the butler, then to the local solicitor, Mr. Norton, and even to the caretaker of the place, subtly inquiring about what had been happening in the area. Frustratingly, he had come up with no indication that there was anything amiss locally. He had tried to keep any inquiries about Miss Holcomb casual, but he thought there had been a definite spark of interest in Norton’s eye when he answered that Miss Holcomb and her brother were in the best of health.

It occurred to Reed that he had been both precipitate and foolish in placing so much importance on a dream. No matter how vivid it had been, no matter how it had shaken him, it was, after all, only a dream. A rational man, he reminded himself, would not forget that.

Still, he could not dislodge the feeling deep inside that it had indeed been important, and he knew that he had to find out more. He needed, he knew, to talk to Anna, to see her and judge for himself whether or not anything was bothering her. For that reason, he had ridden out this afternoon, heading along the path to her house. It was one he had taken many times in the month he had spent courting her, and just riding along, looking at the beautiful landscape around him, had filled him with a poignant sense of loss and regret.

He wasn’t sure what he intended to do. He had learned from the butler that Sir Edmund, Anna’s father, had died two years ago, and her brother, Christopher, was now in charge at Holcomb Manor. He did not know Sir Christopher, and according to the polite code of society, it would be correct to wait until Christopher came to call on him, as Reed was the visitor to the area. On the other hand, Reed had called at Holcomb Manor many times before when he had lived at Winterset, so it would not be breaking any rule of conduct, really, to call upon Anna.

It would, of course, be awkward in the extreme.

However, he could think of no other way to talk directly to her. He certainly had no intention of sitting around, kicking his heels, waiting for Sir Christopher to call on him so that he could return the call, or for Anna to call upon his sister, which seemed unlikely, given the circumstances.

It had seemed heaven sent, then, when he had spied her walking in the distance, and he had kicked his horse into a trot, eagerness rising up in him.

He had seen the stricken expression on her face when she had looked up at him, and it was only then that he had realized his eagerness was out of proportion to what he should feel. His second thought had been that her beauty had not diminished in the three years since he had seen her. She had, if anything, grown even more beautiful—or perhaps his memory had simply been unable to recall the full extent of her beauty.

He had dismounted and then stood, feeling like a fool, knowing that she did not want to speak to him, or even see him; that was obvious from the way she stood, poised as if she might run away at any moment. Their conversation had been awkward and stilted, and he had found out nothing from her that he did not already know.