Loe raamatut: «Haunted By The Earl's Touch»

Chapter One

The wind keened outside the ancient walls of Beresford Abbey. Bane, following on the heels of the ancient butler along the stone passageway, noticed that only one sconce in five had been lit. Blown out by draughts? Or a sign of his welcome? No matter which, the gloom suited his mood.

‘You should have left the dog in the stables,’ the butler muttered over his shoulder.

Bane glance down at Ranger, part-lurcher, part-wolfhound, pressed to his left side. ‘The dog stays with me.’

The butler tutted. ‘And how shall I announce you, sir?’ He gestured to the open door a few feet along the gloomy corridor.

A wry smile twisted Bane’s lips. Was there a protocol to be followed? If so, he didn’t know it. ‘I’ll announce myself.’

Looking shocked, but also relieved, the doddering old man turned back, shuffling down the dim stone corridor shaking his head. A wise old bird for whom discretion was the better part of valour.

Bane approached the doorway on feet silenced by carpet. He paused at the entrance to the cavernous chamber. The flickering light from ten-foot-high torchères on each side of the heavily carved four-poster bed fell on the features of the shrunken man propped up by pillows. A face lined by dissipation and framed by thin strands of yellowing grey hair straggling out from beneath a blue silken nightcap. Bony shoulders hunched in silk valuable enough to feed a family of four for a year shook with a spasm of coughing.

A dead man breathing his last. Finally. The chill inside Bane spread outwards as he took in the others clustered at the edge of the circle of light. Two women, three men, some of whom he recognised as family. He’d investigated all of his relatives to avoid unnecessary surprises.

The older woman was his aunt, his grandfather’s daughter, Mrs Hampton, returned home as a widow. Her gown was the first stare of fashion as befitted her station. Tight curls of grey hair beneath a lace cap framed a middle-aged but still arresting face. As a young woman she’d been lovely, according to his mother, and too proud to make a friend of a lass from Yorkshire. At her side stood her son, Gerald, an almost too-pretty lad of seventeen with a petulant mouth and vivid blue eyes. The other young man was a distant fourth cousin. A Beresford through and through, slight, dapper, with blond hair and light blue eyes and a man his grandfather would have been happy to see as his heir had Bane not stood in the way.

An aspiring tulip of fashion in his early twenties, Bane had seen Jeffrey Beresford in town. They had no friends in common, but they bowed in passing—an acknowledgement of mutual distrust.

The other woman he did not know. Young, with a willowy figure, standing a good head taller than Mrs Hampton, she had inches on both young men. A Beresford also? She had the blonde hair and blue eyes to match the name, though she was dressed simply, in some dark stuff bespeaking modesty rather than style. The desire to see that statuesque body in something more revealing caused his throat to close.

Surprised him.

As a boy he’d had lusty thoughts about anything in skirts. As a man, a businessman, he had more important things on his mind. Women like her wanted home and hearth and a man to protect them. His life was about taking risks. Gambling all, on the chance for profit. No woman should live with such uncertainty. They were too delicate, too easily broken as his mother had been broken. The pain of her death had been unbearable. Not something he ever intended to experience again. Nor was it necessary. He was quite content to avoid the respectable ones while enjoying those who only wanted money in exchange for their favours, the demi-monde.

So why couldn’t he keep his eyes from this most respectable-looking of females? Who was she? He wasn’t aware of a female cousin, close or distant. Not that there couldn’t be a whole host of relatives he didn’t know about, since he didn’t give a damn about any of them. But as his gaze ran over the girl, a prickle of awareness raised the hairs on the back of his neck. A sensation of familiarity so strong, he felt the urge to draw closer and ask for her name.

Yet he was positive they had never met. Perhaps it was the wariness in her expression that had him intrigued.

A blinding flash of lightning beyond the mullioned windows lit the room in a ghostly light. An image seared on Bane’s vision. Stark otherworldly faces. Mouths dark pits in pale skin as the air moved with their startled gasps. They looked like the monsters who had peopled his childish nightmares. His enemies. The people who wanted him dead, according to his uncle. His mother’s brother.

In truth, he hadn’t expected to see family members here. He’d preferred to think of the old man alone and friendless as he gasped his last.

Just like Bane’s mother.

If not for this man, his mother might be alive today and the guilt of her death would not weigh so heavily on Bane’s shoulders. No matter how often he tried to put the blame where it belonged, on the man in the bed, he could not deny his own part in the events of that day. His thoughtless anger that had put her at risk. Hell, even his very existence, the reason she had run from this house in the first place.

Power and wealth brought invulnerability. His mother had drilled it into him since the day he could understand his place in the world. And that was why he was here. That and to see the old man off to the next world. He simply couldn’t pass up the chance to see the dismay in the old earl’s gaze.

He could count the number of times he and the old man had met face to face on one hand. But he had always been there, in the shadows, a threatening presence. Forcing his will where it was not wanted. Guiding Bane’s education, trying to choose his friends, but his mother’s brother had been more than a match for the earl. Bane still remembered his horror as he stood with his uncle on the doorstep of this house and listened to an argument over him, about money, about cruelty and murder. Accusations that had haunted him as a youth. Fed his anger at this man.

But his temper was not the hot flash of his youth, the kind that brought trouble to him and those around him. It was a cold burn in his gut, controlled, and carefully directed. Guilt over his mother’s death had taught him that lesson.

Since then, Bane had striven to be the gentleman his mother always wanted him to be. He had battled for the respect of the scions of other noble houses at school and held his head high. But at heart he was the son of a coalminer’s daughter. And proud of it. Mining was in his blood and showed in the scars on his knuckles and the muscles in his shoulders developed at the coalface.

He was more Walker than Beresford, whether or not he had any Beresford blood.

The lightning faded. Shadows once more reclaimed all but the man in the bed. As his coughing subsided, the earl’s gnarled fingers clawed at the bedsheets, then beckoned.

Resistance stiffened Bane’s spine. He wasn’t about to be called to heel like some slavering cur. But, no, apparently this particular summons was not for him. The old man must not have seen him yet, since it was the two women who moved towards the bed, Mrs Hampton nudging the younger one ahead of her, making her stumble.

Bane took a half-step, a warning on his lips, but the girl recovered inches from the earl’s warding hand, mumbling an apology.

Who was she? Some indigent relative looking for crumbs in the final hours? There would be no crumbs for any one of them. Not if Bane had a say.

‘So you are Mary.’ The old man’s voice sounded like a door creaking in the wind. ‘She said you were no great beauty, but not that you were a beanpole. You take after your father.’

‘You knew my father?’ the girl asked, and Bane sensed how keenly she awaited his answer. Her body seemed to vibrate with the depth of her interest.

The old man grimaced. ‘I met him once. Kneel, girl. I’m getting a crick in my neck.’

Like a supplicant, the girl sank down. Anger rose hot and hard in Bane’s throat on the girl’s behalf, but she seemed unperturbed by the command and gazed calmly into the dying man’s face.

She spoke again, but her low voice did not reach all the way to Bane in the shadows beside the door.

The old man glared at her, lifted a clawed hand to twist her chin this way and that. Glimpses of her profile showed strong classical features, a straight aristocratic nose. Lush, full lips. A narrow jaw ending in a decided chin. Not a classical beauty, but a face full of character.

The sight of the old man’s hands on her delicate skin caused Bane’s hands to fist at his sides, made him want to go to her rescue. An impulse he instantly crushed. A weak old man could do her no harm. And Bane had no interest in her, despite her allure.

She was not his type of woman.

Ranger growled, more a vibration under his hand than a sound. Bane glanced down at the dog and signalled him to settle. By the time he looked back, the old man had released his grip on the young woman. ‘No,’ the old man said, answering the question Bane had not heard. ‘My reasons are my own.’

The girl’s shoulders seemed to slump, as if she had hoped for a different response.

Bane remained still in the shadows, content to watch a little longer, content to choose his own moment to reveal his presence.

The old man peered into the shadows on the other side of the bed. ‘She’ll do,’ he said with a triumphant leer. His smile was a mirthless drawing back of lips over crooked yellow teeth.

The woman, Mary, jerked back. ‘I have given my thanks, my lord, I do not need your approval.’ Her words rang with defiance. Brave words, but the voice shook.

Bane ruthlessly quelled a tiny surge of pity. He had no room for pity or mercy.

Beresford wheezed a laugh. ‘Bold piece, ain’t you. No milk-and-water miss. All the better.’ He flicked his fingers in dismissal. The girl rose to her feet and turned.

Bane knew the moment she saw him. The widening of her eyes, the hesitation, the flare of recognition in her gaze, not recognition of him as a person, but of his presence. The connection between them was a tangible thing, a twisting invisible thread that kept their gazes locked. And he felt … something. A tightening of his body. The kind that heralded lust. Not something he wanted or needed right now.

He shook his head, a warning to remain silent, and it seemed she understood for she strode back to Mrs Hampton’s side as if she hadn’t seen him at all. An unwanted trickle of admiration for her quiet calm warmed his veins.

He dragged his gaze back to the man in the bed. It was time to be done with this farce. Bane forced himself not to square his shoulders or take a deep breath. He was no boy worried about his acceptance. He belonged here and he cared not a whit if they thought otherwise. He signalled Ranger to lie down, yet still he hesitated to take the first step.

The earl again looked over into the shadows on the far side of the bed. ‘You said he would come,’ he quavered.

A man trotted up to the bed. Tight lips. Eyes that darted hither and yon, never resting long enough to be read, bald pate shining. ‘He is expected, my lord. I sent word as you ordered.’ A dry, officious voice. A clerk of some sort. Solicitor, Bane decided.

‘The storm must have delayed him.’ The solicitor rubbed his palms together with a papery sound. ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow will be too late.’

A flash of lightning punctuated his words, the room once more a colourless tableau of frozen players.

Bane stepped into the lamplight in that moment. His shadow loomed black over the bed and up the wall behind the dying man like some portent of evil. ‘I am here.’

The old man’s gasp was eminently satisfying. No doubt he had carried the hope his elder grandson would miraculously die at the eleventh hour.

Thunder rolled beyond the window, drowning out the old man’s muttered words.

Bane’s lip curled. It no longer mattered what the old man said. Beresford Abbey was a few short breaths from being passed on to a man who likely had not a drop of Beresford blood.

Oh, the old man had tried to make the best of an heir he despised once he’d discovered Bane had survived to stake his claim. He’d tried to force the twelve-year-old Bane into the appropriate mould. The right sort of school, the right education. As much as his mother’s family would permit. And Bane had used what he needed to take back what was rightfully his. His mother had fled the Abbey because she feared for Bane’s life. She had lost her own, trying to keep him safe. The powerlessness he’d felt that day still haunted him. He’d fought. How he’d fought. And those men, they had laughed at him. Mocked him. After that day he had sworn he would never let anyone make him feel weak and helpless again. He never had. And never by the man lying in the bed.

He’d used the best of both his worlds. The strength of the coalminers he’d worked alongside in summer holidays and the power of the nobility given by the title he would inherit. He’d taken control of his life.

No one would ever manipulate him again. Not his mother’s brother, or the earl.

Bane glanced over at the watchers. If one of them, just one of these relatives, had taken pity on his mother, offered her their support, he might have been able to find a little mercy in his heart. But they hadn’t. He bared his teeth in a smile that would do Ranger proud.

The old earl looked him over, his red-rimmed, faded blue eyes watery, his face a picture of scorn. ‘So, the scavengers are circling.’

‘You sent for me, Grandfather,’ he said his tone mocking.

The earl’s gaze lingered on Bane’s face and he shook his head. ‘A curse on your mother for sending my son to an early grave.’

Bitterness roiled in his gut at the vilification. A drunken lord driving his carriage off the road was hardly his mother’s fault. His chest tightened until his lungs were starved. Not that he was surprised by the accusation, just by his own visceral reaction, when there was nothing this decayed piece of flesh could do to her any more. ‘But for you, my mother would be alive today.’

Yet even as he spoke the words, the old guilt rose up to choke him. The knowledge that he had done nothing to save her. ‘But she beat you in the end.’

The old man sneered. ‘Did she now?’

The urge to stop the vile tongue edged his vision in red. Involuntarily his fists clenched. His palms tingled with the desire to tighten around the scrawny neck, to feel the flesh and bones crush in on his windpipe. Watch the life fade from those cruel eyes and silence his lips for ever.

He reached for his hard-won iron control over his temper, shocked at how close it was to slipping from his grasp at this long-awaited moment, grabbed a breath of air and let the heat dissipate. He would not let his anger overpower his reason. He knew the penalty for doing so. It would rob him of his victory as it has robbed him of his mother. There was no need for anger, not now, when he’d won. He shrugged.

The old devil grinned a death’s-head smile. ‘Look at you, apeing the gentleman in your fine clothes, with not an ounce of nobility in your blood. It is a wonder decent society tolerates you at all.’

He smiled his own mocking smile. ‘They welcome me with open arms. It is the prospect of a title that does it, you know.’

Something flashed in the old man’s eyes. If Bane hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was admiration. It was more likely rage at being defeated in his plan to be rid of his cuckoo in the nest. Thanks to his rough-and-ready upbringing by his maternal uncle, and later his years of misery at school and university, Bane had no doubts about his ability to withstand any torment his grandfather might devise. He’d spent his life preparing for this moment.

He moved closer to the head of the bed, lowering his voice. ‘You sent for me, old man, and here I am. Speak your piece. I am a busy man.’

‘A coalminer. A labourer for hire.’ Scorn dripped from the old man’s thin lips like poison. Spittle spattered his chin and the lapels of the silken robe bearing the Beresford emblem in gold.

‘Aye,’ Bane said. ‘I know how to earn my keep.’ Not that he laboured with his hands any more, but he could if need be. He let his gaze drift around the worn bed hangings and worn furniture. ‘And I know how to follow your example, spending money on idle pursuits in town.’ He’d done his share of playing the debauched nobleman since making his bows at court, much to the displeasure of both sides of his family. But he hadn’t been wasting his time, no matter what they thought.

The old man raised a hand and pointed a crooked finger at the young men nearby. ‘They are real Beresfords.’ His whispery voice flicked like a whip at Bane’s pride.

He bared his teeth in a hard smile. His was, after all, the final triumph. ‘Too bad. There is nothing anyone can do about it.’

‘No?’ A calculating gleam entered the faded blue eyes and his lips twisted. His gaze darted to the far side of the bed, to the huddle just beyond the lamplight. ‘Jeffrey. Gerald. Come to me.’

The two young men came forwards. The dandy, Jeffrey, at a saunter, meeting Bane’s gaze surprisingly coolly. The younger cousin, Gerald, known to Bane only as a name, ran to the old man’s side and knelt, clutching one of those misshapen hands. ‘Grandfather, do not upset yourself.’ The boy looked up at Bane. ‘Leave him in peace.’

Beresford pulled his hand free and stared at the two young men with a wry expression. ‘These are my grandsons. True nobility. Real Beresfords.’ He turned his head on the pillow to look at Bane. ‘But whose spawn are you?’

Whose bastard, he meant. It wasn’t anything Bane hadn’t heard before. It barely registered, but the soft gasp coming from somewhere in the shadows cut at him like a whip. The girl. He knew it instinctively. He forced himself not to look her way, despite feeling the intensity of her gaze grazing his skin. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said coldly. ‘I am your legal heir, so that pair of spoiled ninnyhammers had best crawl at my feet if they want crumbs from my table.’ He took pleasure in speaking in the rough tones of his mother’s people.

The old man grunted and struggled up on to one elbow, pointing at Bane’s face with a crooked finger. ‘Think you’ve bested me, do you? You’ve got nerve, I’ll credit you that. I’ve watched you. I’ve got your measure. If you want the wealth and power that goes with the title, then you’ll dance to my tune.’

Ranger, by the door, rumbled low in his throat.

‘Grandfather!’ the young lad at his side said, trying to ease him back down on to the pillows.

His grandfather brushed him aside. ‘It takes a clever man to best a Beresford.’ His laugh crackled like tearing paper. ‘I’m only sorry I won’t be here to see it.’

Bane shot him a considering look. The old man seemed just too sure of himself. ‘I won’t be controlled, old man. You should know that by now.’

As the dying man collapsed against the pillows, his gaze sought out the young woman he’d spoken to earlier. ‘Don’t be so sure.’

Who the devil was she? Bane sent her a baleful glance. She inched deeper into the shadows, but her blue eyes, her Beresford-blue eyes, never left his face and they held a kind of fascinated horror.

The earl’s gaze dropped to his other grandsons and moisture ran down his cheeks, glistening, running into the crevasses on his cheeks. Then he drew in a shuddering breath, his jaw working. He turned his head and his eyes, still wet with tears, fixed on Bane. ‘You’ll do your duty by the family.’

‘I have no family in this house.’ Bane let his scorn show on his face. ‘You failed to be rid of me when you had the chance and they bear the consequence. The sins of the father will be visited upon these children of your line. And there will be no more.’

The old man chuckled, a grim sound in the quiet room. ‘Cocksure, aren’t you. And proud. Yet you hold the losing hand.’

The wry amusement gave Bane pause. Intimidation. The old man excelled at terrifying those weaker than himself. Bane was not his or anyone else’s victim. He’d made himself too strong to be any man’s punching bag. He leaned over, speaking only for the old man to hear. ‘You forget, it will all be within my control. My only regret is that you won’t see the desecration of your family name.’ He flicked a glance at his cousins, the coolly insolent one who hid his true nature from the world and the half-scared boy. ‘It would do them good to work at some low honest task for their bread.’

The old man groaned, but there was something odd in his tone, as if he wasn’t so much in agony, but stifling amusement. ‘You think you are such a cold devil,’ he muttered. ‘I will be sorry to miss the heat of your anger.’

Bane drew back, searching that vindictive face. ‘What have you done?’

‘You’ll see.’

A resounding crack of thunder split the air at the same time as lightning flickered around the room. The storm’s last violent convulsion.

Ranger howled. The old man jerked upright in that wild blue light, the colour draining from his face, from his clothing, from the twisted hand clutching his throat. He sank back with a sigh.

The kneeling boy uttered a cry of despair. Jeffrey leaned over and felt for his pulse. Mrs Hampton rushed forwards. The tall girl remained where she was, a hand flat across her mouth, her eyes wide.

Bane curled his lip as he looked down on the empty shell of what had once been a man who had wielded his power to harm the innocent.

Bane was the earl now. And to hell with the Beresfords.

He spared a last glance for those gathering close around the bed and shrugged. Let them weep and wail at the old man’s passing. It was of no import to him.

Weariness swept through him. After travelling hard for three days, he needed a bath and a good night’s sleep. He had a great deal to do on the morrow if he was to set his plans in motion. He had debts to pay and a coalmine to purchase.

As he turned to leave, he caught sight of the young woman hanging back, her expression one of distaste. What mischief had the old man planned for her? Nothing his grandfather could do from beyond the grave could harm Bane. But he did not like to think of yet another innocent female destroyed by his machinations.

Unless she wasn’t as innocent as she appeared. Was anyone in this family innocent? It was hard to think so. And if she wasn’t, then Bane was more than a match for her, too.

He snapped his fingers for Ranger and headed down the corridor, hoping like hell he could find the way back through the maze of passages to his assigned chamber.

While the family members hovered and wept around the body of the old earl, Mary made good her escape. Her brain whirled. Her stomach cramped. And she ran like a cowardly rabbit.

When she’d been invited to meet her benefactor, the man she’d recently learned had paid for her schooling, her every meal, for most of her life, she had wondered—no, truly, she had dreamed that at last some family member, some distant relative, had decided to claim her as their own. A childhood fantasy finally fulfilled.

She’d certainly had no idea that the man was at death’s door until the butler guided her into that room earlier this evening. And when she’d asked her question with breathless hope and seen the surprise in those watery blue eyes and the wry twist to his lips, she’d felt utterly foolish.

Was she a member of his family? The answer had been a flat no.

Sally Ladbrook had been right. The man had viewed her as a good work, a charitable impulse, and was looking for recognition before he met his end. Unless he intended to impose the obligation on his heir.

She shivered. Just the thought of the new earl’s overwhelmingly menacing presence in that room made her heart race and her knees tremble. She’d been transfixed by the sheer male strength of him, while he had stood in the shadows as still as death.

She halted at the end of the corridor and glanced back. A sliver of light spilling on to the runner revealed the location of that horrid room. Never in her life had she witnessed anything so morbid. She rubbed at her jaw, trying to erase the sensation of cold papery fingers on her skin and shuddered.

To make it worse, once the heir had stepped out of the shadows, the hatred in the room had been palpable. Like hot oil on metal, hissing and spitting first from one direction and then another, scalding wherever it landed.

And the man. The new earl. So dark. So unexpectedly large, even handsome in a brutal way. A powerful man who had overshadowed his dying grandfather like some avenging devil.

He didn’t walk, he prowled. He didn’t speak, he made utterances in a voice composed of velvet and sandpaper. And his eyes. His eyes were as deep as an abyss when he had stared directly at her. That look owed nothing to the gloom in the room, for it was the same when he stood within the light of the torches. Worse. Because she could see the pinpoints of flickering light reflected in his gaze and still make out nothing in their shadowed depths.