Anne threw up her hands with a strangled little shriek of frustration.
He came around the desk, the coaxing look in his eye far more dangerous to her resolve than his bullying. “The two of us aren’t so different, are we? We’re both bound by duty and the expectations of others. There’s no need for you to spend the rest of your life attending to the needs of others until you’re as stiff and dried-up as you’re pretending to be.” Her mouth fell open in outrage, but before she could speak, he continued, “As for me, I have no choice but to marry someday to provide an heir to carry on the family line. And I’d already made up my mind I’d never be foolish enough to do it for love.”
Hoping to hide the fresh blow his words dealt her heart, Anne said crisply, “I’m so glad you decided to spare me the tiresome wooing.”
“All I’m saying is that in my world men and women marry for convenience every day. There’s no reason you and I can’t do the same.”
“It won’t work. We don’t suit.”
“Are you so sure about that? From what I do recall about last night, we seemed to suit very well.” The silky note in his voice deepened, sending a reckless little shiver through her womb. “If we marry, we can do that whenever we like, you know. It’s not only legal and condoned by the church, but encouraged.”
Anne had once heard that when a person was drowning, the person’s entire past could flash before his or her eyes. But in that moment, as she felt herself bobbing beneath the waves of his persistence, it was her future that flashed before hers: waking in the warmth of his arms on a chill winter morning, her cheek laid against the crisp fur of his chest; watching him heft their daughter in the air just as he had hefted little Charlotte, twirling her about until she collapsed in helpless giggles; seeing the silvery frost at his temples slowly melt through his sooty locks; spending the years softening all of his scowls into smiles until their children’s children danced around them, making the halls of Cadgwyck ring once more with the music of love and laughter and hope.
But it was a future that could never be. She’d surrendered her future in the same moment she’d surrendered her past.
“You make a compelling case,” she said. “But I’ll need some time to consider your . . . proposition.”
“I believe I can afford to grant you that much.”
She straightened, smoothing her apron and donning Mrs. Spencer’s bland mask. “Will that be all, my lord?”
He scowled. “No, Mrs. . . . Miss Spencer. I don’t believe it will.” She stood frozen in place as he came sauntering toward her, a predatory glint in his eye.
Her mask slipped as he framed her face in his hands and brought his mouth down on hers. This was a kiss no woman could resist. He crushed his mouth against hers, the harsh demand of his lips tempered by the sweeping mastery of his tongue. He raked his fingers through her hair, loosening the silky tendrils from their net until they tumbled around her face in wild disarray. By the time he stepped away from her, she was limp and breathless and aching with want. Her cheeks were flushed with heat and her lips were parted and trembling in anticipation of another kiss.
He surveyed her, his satisfaction with what he saw evident. “That will be all. For now.” His passion-darkened eyes and roguish grin promised her his kiss was only a taste of the delights to come should she be sensible enough to accept his suit.
ANGELICA CADGWYCK STOOD OVER Maximillian Burke’s bed. It wasn’t the first time she had slipped into his chamber just to watch him sleep. But it would be the last.
Moonlight drifted through the open French doors, bathing his handsome features in its silvery glow. His lips were slightly parted, the stern lines of his face relaxed in boyish repose. The sheet had slipped down to his hip bones, exposing the impressive expanse of his chest and the chiseled planes of his abdomen. She had always found it fascinating that despite his fondness for propriety, he didn’t sleep in a nightshirt or nightcap like other men, but was content to wrap himself in nothing more substantial than a moonbeam.
He was a greater mystery to her than she would ever be to him. She was still searching for clues as to what manner of man he might have become had he not been prone to such hopeless affairs of the heart.
If the two of them had met at a ball in some other lifetime, would he have asked her to dance? Would he have scrawled his name on her dance card and waltzed her out the nearest terrace door into the moonlight so he could steal a kiss? Would he have wooed her with pretty words and bouquets of roses and trips to the opera and rides in Hyde Park?
She had promised herself she wouldn’t touch him this time. But the rebellious lock of hair that persisted in tumbling over his brow posed too great a temptation. She reached to gently brush it back, her fingertips grazing the satiny warmth of his skin.
He stirred. She froze. What would she do if he reached for her? Would she be able to resist him if he sought to tug her into his bed and into his arms? After a moment, he simply nestled deeper into the pillow, murmuring a name in his sleep—a plain name that sounded like a sigh on his lips. A name that sent a wistful lance of yearning through her heart.
Not Angelica, but Anne.
It seemed his destiny would always lie in loving the right woman at the wrong time.
She withdrew her hand, holding it up to the moonlight. She could already feel herself fading. For all these years she had been nothing but a shadow, flitting through the corridors of life. But then he had come along and done everything in his considerable power to give her substance again.
She couldn’t afford to let that happen. A ghost couldn’t be hurt by the sharp edges of life. A ghost couldn’t bleed from a broken heart or dream a dream that could never come true.
A ghost couldn’t fall in love.
She pressed a tender kiss to his brow, then turned away from him and drifted across the room. She cast one last longing look over her shoulder at the bed before melting back into the wall and the past.
MAX AWOKE ENVELOPED IN the sultry scent of jasmine. He sat up abruptly, his nostrils flaring. His heart was pounding wildly in his chest, but he couldn’t remember what he had been dreaming. For some reason, that deeply disturbed him. He didn’t want to go back to being the man he had been before he came to this place—a man who didn’t dream at all.
Whatever he had been dreaming, it had left him with a nearly inconsolable sense of loss. This was different from what he had felt when Clarinda had tossed him over—deeper and more piercing to the heart. It was as if something had gone terribly awry that could never be put right again. He’d had the exact same feeling when he had ruffled through the blank pages at the end of Angelica Cadgwyck’s journal.
He glanced at the empty bed beside him, surprised by how fiercely he wanted to find Anne there, wrapped up in those rumpled sheets. He wanted to pull her into his arms just as he had last night and bury his doubts and fears in the lush sweetness of her warm and willing body.
The ethereal aroma of the jasmine hadn’t dissipated along with his dream, but had only gotten sweeter and more overpowering. He slowly turned to find the French windows standing wide open, just as they had been on his first night at Cadgwyck. He was no more able to resist their invitation now than he had been then.
He tossed back the blankets and reached for his dressing gown in the same motion, compelled by a peculiar sense of destiny. It was almost as if his every choice since coming to Cadgwyck had somehow brought him to this moment.
Slipping into the dressing gown, he padded across the room and out onto the balcony. Lacy tatters of clouds drifted across a luminous opal of a moon. He closed his hands over the cool iron of the balustrade, his gaze instinctively seeking the tower on the far side of the manor.
At first glance the tower appeared to be shrouded in shadows, the blank eyes of its windows still jealously guarding its secrets. But when Max squinted against the darkness, he saw something else—a faint glimmer that could have been a trick of the moonlight . . . or the flickering flame of a single candle, the ex
act sort of beacon a man might light to guide the girl he was seeking to seduce to a secret rendezvous.
Although it still made the tiny hairs on his nape prickle, Max wasn’t even startled when the first tinkling notes from the music box came wafting across the courtyard to his ears.
Perhaps he had always known the night would come when Angelica Cadgwyck would be ready to dance with him again.
Chapter Thirty-two
MAX COULD STILL REMEMBER the weight of the silver music box in his hands, the way its wistful notes had tugged at his heart like the echo of a waltz danced in the arms of a phantom lover. It could have been his imagination, but on this night the notes sounded even more off-key than usual, giving their song a sinister cast.
He already knew what would come next. But this time he wasn’t going to allow himself to be seduced by that tantalizing ripple of feminine laughter. He wouldn’t be lured into the darkness by a promise that could never be fulfilled. He’d had his fill of chasing ghosts. He was ready to trust his heart to the hands of a warm, living woman—one strong and sensible enough to keep all of his ghosts at bay, even the ones he’d created himself.
He straightened, loosening his hands from the balustrade. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I would have saved you if I could have.”
The music abruptly stopped.
He was turning away from the balcony railing when a woman’s scream, ripe with anguish, tore through the night, followed by the sharp report of a single gunshot.
HAUNTED BY THAT HEART-WRENCHING scream, Max raced across the second-floor gallery, dragging on his shirt as he ran. He rounded the landing and headed down the stairs without sparing Angelica’s portrait a single glance.
Unwilling to waste precious minutes crashing his way through the darkened house, he wrenched open the front door and went pelting across the weed-choked flagstones of the courtyard. Except for the wispy clouds and a misty scattering of stars, the sky was clear. On this night there could be no mistaking a crack of thunder for the report of a pistol.
The tower loomed up out of the darkness. Max had to circle it twice before he finally located an outer door. At first he feared it was bolted, but when he set his shoulder to it and shoved with all of his might, it gave way with a full-throated groan of protest. He found himself on the first floor. Shafts of moonlight pierced the arrow slits, illuminating the winding steps leading up to the top floor.
As he started up the stairs, he could hear Anne’s brisk, no-nonsense voice warning him away from this place: The stairs are crumbling and are quite dangerous to anyone not familiar with them.
He hadn’t taken the time to yank on his boots, but he was moving too fast to feel the bite of the crumbling stone beneath his bare feet. Centuries ago he might have had a sword in his hand as he made the dizzying charge up the stairs to storm the keep. Now he had nothing but his wits and the instinctive urge to help whoever had let out that terrible cry.
The iron-banded door at the top of the stairs was closed, a flickering ribbon of light visible beneath it. Max’s steps slowed. What if he was running straight into some sort of ambush? What if his suspicions were founded after all and someone in this house wanted him dead? What if someone was waiting on the other side of that door with a pistol that had not yet been fired?
His mouth set in a grim line, he shoved open the door, sending it crashing against the opposite wall.
This time there was no egret to greet him. The tower was deserted. As he padded across the room, the vacant eyes of Angelica’s dolls watched him from their shelf.
A single candle was burning in a silver candlestick on the edge of the dressing table, its dancing flame casting a warm glow over the tower. In that forgiving light it was almost possible to imagine the chamber exactly as it had been on the night Timberlake had died.
The report Max had received from Andrew Murray had brought the events of that night into crisp focus. As Max turned in a slow circle, the room seemed to revolve around him, the present melting into the past. Instead of a brisk autumn wind, he could feel a warm spring breeze drifting through windows that weren’t shattered, but propped open, their diamond-paned glass fracturing the candle’s glow into a thousand tiny flames. The lace draped over the half-tester’s canopy drifted in a snowy-white fall over the shiny brass bed. The keys of the harpsichord weren’t cracked and yellow, but white and even. The trailing ivy painted on the freshly whitewashed walls was verdant and green.
Several silk and satin bolsters had been removed from the cream-colored coverlet adorning the bed and piled on the velvet cushions of the window seat. It was a stage set for seduction.
Angelica would have had to wait for the perfect moment to slip away from her own birthday fete so she could meet Timberlake for their rendezvous. They would have already publicly celebrated the triumph of her portrait’s unveiling together—Timberlake basking in the delighted gasps and applause of the guests, Angelica stunned to see herself through his adoring eyes for the first time.
Hearing the ghostly tap of a woman’s slippers on the stairs, Max whirled around to face the door.
As she hurried up the winding stairs, Angelica could probably still hear the muted laughter, the clink of champagne glasses, and the music of the string orchestra drifting into the night through the open French windows of the ballroom. She would have appeared in the doorway, breathless from ascending the stairs so fast, the color high in her cheeks, her sherry-colored eyes sparkling with both nerves and anticipation.
Timberlake would have been standing just there, Max decided, where the candlelight would show him off to his best advantage. He would have given her that teasing smile she loved so well, his hair gleaming like spun gold. He would have looked so handsome, so dashing—like a young prince who had scaled the walls of her tower to steal a kiss. How could she resist him? How could any woman resist him?
Max closed his eyes, inhaling a phantom breath of jasmine as Angelica rushed right through him and into Timberlake’s waiting arms. Had he wooed her with a private waltz around the tower before claiming the softness of her trembling lips as his prize? How long had it taken for his embrace to become too tight, his kisses too forceful, his groping hands too free? How long before he’d shattered all of her hopes and dreams by shoving her down on the window seat and falling on top of her, his greedy hands tearing at the finery she had chosen just to please him?
Was that when she had screamed? Was that when her brother had come rushing up those stairs and burst into the tower, pistol in hand, and put an end to Timberlake and his wicked schemes forever?
Max opened his eyes. A darkened stain was on the timber floor next to the window seat overlooking the sea—a stain that hadn’t been there the last time he had visited the tower.
He crossed the floor and crouched beside it, touching two fingertips to the dark blot to find it still warm and sticky. As he lifted his fingers to his nose and inhaled, there was no mistaking the coppery tang of fresh blood.
He slowly stood, wiping his fingertips on his trousers. A gust of wind soared through the tower, extinguishing both the candle and his glimpse into the past. Moonlight revealed the chamber for the ruin it was. A jagged crack divided the looking glass in two. Rotting lace drifted from the canopy of the half-tester like a shroud for a body that would never be found. The window seat was a gaping mouth, its rotted wooden teeth lying in wait to devour anyone who ventured too near.
Without the candle to hold the darkness at bay, the night beyond the window came into sharper focus. Max sucked in a harsh breath as he spotted the woman standing on the very tip of the promontory.
He must not have forgotten how to dream after all. Hadn’t he seen her just like this once before in his dreams? Standing on the edge of those cliffs with her buttercup-colored skirts billowing around her?
He wanted to shout her name, but he knew she would never hear him over the bullying voice of the wind and the roar of the waves crashing against the cliffs.
Max took off down t
he stairs at a dead run. He slipped on a crumbling step and almost fell, but didn’t slow, not even when he reached the foot of the stairs. He burst out of the tower, emerging from its shadow to find the wind had scattered the clouds, but left the stars hanging like shards of ice against a field of black velvet.
He sprinted through the breezeway and went racing along the edge of the cliffs toward the promontory. He might be dreaming, but the sharp stones tearing at the soles of his feet felt painfully real.
As he drew closer to the promontory, he half-expected to find it as deserted as the tower. But she was still there, a slender figure standing all alone on the fragile shelf of rock that jutted out over the water.
The White Lady of Cadgwyck.
Moonlight silvered the crests of the waves behind her and limned her in its loving light, making her look less than solid. Max stumbled to a halt, his chest heaving with ragged breaths. He was terrified that if he drew even one step closer to her, he would startle her right over the edge of the cliff. The wind buffeted him with the force of a fist, as if trying to keep them apart.
She slowly turned to look over her shoulder at him, her long, dark hair whipping across her face until all he could see was the wistful regret in her eyes. Then she turned back to the sea, spread her arms as if they were wings, and vanished over the edge of the cliff.
“No!”
The hoarse echo of Max’s shout was still ringing in his ears when he lunged forward and went diving over the edge of the cliff after her.
Chapter Thirty-three
MAX WAS SINKING.
The darkness enveloped him in its seductive embrace as if it had always been waiting for him. He could hear its sibilant whisper through the roaring in his ears, promising him that all he had to do was close his eyes and open his mouth and he could sleep, never to be troubled by dreams again. He wondered if it was the same voice Angelica had heard all those years ago.