The crowd shuddered and began muttering. The festive mood was shattered.
“Enough,” Damien said, his eyes again scanning the crowd. He did so with what seemed unusual attention.
“I’d never much believed that old saying that freezing to death was a peaceful and pleasant way to go,” Brice gasped in agreement. The sudden arctic blast had all but taken her breath away. “Now, all questionable testimonials aside—I’m sure it’s untrue.”
To both her delight and trepidation, Damien put his arm around her and pulled her into the shelter of his body. It slowed their progress, but it kept the worst of the wind off of her. It also brought them close enough that she could feel the warmth of his spent breath as it hurried by her ear.
“We’ll be out of this in a moment,” he assured her in a calm voice.
“Have you seen a weather report? Will the storm get much worse?” Brice asked, shuddering at the feeling of cold—a million invisible ants boiling over her skin. She
hated, hated, hated
being cold.
“Yes, and quickly, but we won’t see the lightning for another forty-eight hours,” Damien said. He looked excited and suddenly energized. Pulling a strange device swathed in rubber from his coat pocket, he pressed a button and called for his car, telling the driver where to meet them. Seeing her curious look, he told her: “I can’t use a cell phone. Something about the magnetic field of my body scrambles the signal. It’s worse in lightning storms. So I use a walkie-talkie when I must be out.”
“Oh…are you sure about the lightning?” Brice asked, wanting to talk about his
magnetic field
, but deciding it was a bit personal.
“Yes. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get just the right combination of atmospheric conditions for a light show. The roof of Ruthven Tower is mainly made of iron, and it attracts the electricity.”
“And this is a good thing?” Brice asked. She allowed him to guide her through the crowds, keeping between her and the street and making sure that no one touched her.
“Yes, oddly enough. You can’t imagine what those gargoyles look like with Saint Elmo’s fire dancing over them. In a really big storm, a sort of aurora-borealis effect happens as well. Such storms are rare—but I think we may get one for Christmas.”
“You can tell?”
“I have a sort of inner barometer when it comes to the weather,” Damien answered. He paused at the curb, and his black sedan rolled to an all but silent stop in front of them. He quickly ushered Brice into the quiet warmth of the car. “Miss Ashton?”
“Brice,” she corrected, relieved to have hot air washing over her chilled skin. He seemed to forget that she preferred to be called by her first name every time he got lost in a moment of reflection or inner debate. The habit made him seem very English—and charmingly old-fashioned.
“Brice.” Damien turned to her. His expression was pensive. “I have a suggestion to make. I fully realize that it is very forward of me, and will understand completely if you would prefer not to accept.”
She nodded encouragingly when he paused, but her heart had began a heavy beating. It seemed that she’d been right about the effects of pâté.
“Would you consider being my guest tonight? I mean, staying with me rather than going to your hotel?” He waited, head tilted to one side. “For that matter, please stay as long as you like. If the weathermen are correct, travel during this storm will be all but impossible.”
Brice blinked, willing the delightful fog of wine to retreat just a bit so she could give the matter some thought. Before she could answer, he went on: “I have a large library filled with rare and unusual reference material which I would be reluctant to let out of my possession, and it might be that you would find working there more comfortable than being at the hotel and having to commute through this weather…which is getting worse,” he added, looking out the car window and frowning at the thickening snow.
Oh—he was offering his library!
Brice swallowed, feeling foolish. Then she was staring into his heated gaze and reconsidering what he was saying.
His library! That was cheating!
It was the perfect lure—way better than the clichéd,
Come up and see my etchings
. He knew her too well.
Brice made herself stop the words of acceptance from hurrying off her tongue and to think carefully. Her impulse was to say yes—
yes!—yes!
She felt very at home with Damien Ruthven now, and absolutely lusted after the contents of his library that he dangled as a lure.
But she also seemed to be lusting after the man, and quite possibly he after her. There was an attraction between them that didn’t appear to end with the respect of one intellect for another of close kin. She realized, with a small shock of revelation, that her physical desire over the last few hours had actually become a low-grade fire that burned the nerves just beneath the skin. And it intensified every time they touched. Did he feel it too? Looking into his eyes, she had to believe that he did.
Perhaps it was mostly the result of her hormonal cycle and a long period of abstentious behavior, but there was also something about Damien Ruthven that fueled these flames and made her feel recklessly impulsive.
Maybe she was incinerating brain cells to fuel her libido, and that was why she wasn’t receiving any inner warnings that she should be cautious even when she gave herself time for reflection.
As though truly able to read her mind, he said: “You hesitate—but ask yourself how often will you have this chance. You don’t want to spend Christmas alone in a hotel anyway. How dreary that would be.”
No, Brice admitted, she didn’t want to stay at the hotel. She wanted to spend the holidays in front of a roaring fire in Damien’s library, drinking hot mulled wine and talking about Byron with this handsome man who seemed to truly understand him, and who didn’t think her peculiar for being fascinated by the dead poet.
And supposing—just considering the improbable—that something did happen between her and Damien, would that be so terrible?
No
, her body answered emphatically.
“Can it be that you doubt me? Do I need to reassure you that my intentions are honorable?” His dark eyes were suddenly dancing.
Brice thought unexpectedly about what Caroline Lamb had written in her diary after Lady Westmoreland’s ball where she had first encountered Byron.
Mad, bad, dangerous to know. That beautiful face is my fate
. Brice had always had little sympathy for the spoiled, neurotic creature who had chased Byron shamelessly, but she finally understood what the woman meant. Though Brice had always doubted tales of love—or even of overwhelming lust—at first sight, she had to admit that if she were younger and less wounded—or simply more romantic—she might similarly be thinking of Damien as her doom.
“Does your silence mean yes, that you have reservations? If so, I believe I can dredge up a proper speech to reassure you.”
She wasn’t at all certain that she wanted to hear that he would be a gentleman, so she interrupted him before he could make any such declaration.
“No speech is necessary. I’m not concerned about your…integrity. And thank you for the offer,” Brice added, her manners coming to the fore. “I gladly accept—on condition that we actually talk about Byron. That is what brought me here, after all.”
“Oh, we will, I’m certain.” And then, almost under his breath Brice heard him add, “Given his ego, there’s probably no avoiding it.”
“What does Ninon say about this?”
—Louis XIV
The night
Shows stars and women in a better light.
—Byron
“My honored father—I am eleven years old. I am big and strong, but shall certainly fall ill if I continue to assist at three masses every day, especially on account of one performed by a great, gouty, fat canon who takes at least twelve minutes to get through the Epistle and the Gospel, and who the choirboys are obliged to put back on his feet after each genuflexion. This all depressing, I can assure you. Well, I am done twiddling with the rosary beads while mumbling Aves, Paters, and Credos. The present moment is the one for me to inform you that I have decided to no longer be a girl, but to become a boy. As I am now a son, it is your duty to take over my education immediately, and I shall tell you how it is to be done.”
—Letter of Ninon de Lenclos to her father
Brice looked out of her bedroom window, marveling at the glow that suffused the city. The worst of the atmospheric violence was over, though not gone. The wind still howled intermittently, as though the sly storm were snoring and napping off the coast. She had the feeling that it was gathering strength for another assault rather than resting up before it moved on. If she were paranoid, she might even think that that storm was encircling the city, zeroing in on Ruthven Tower.
Brice had thought she understood about cold. She had a wool coat, a thick scarf, lined gloves, and a highly evolved mammalian brain that supposedly allowed her to prepare for a changing environment. But this storm was something different, a thing never encountered in southern climes. She might as well be a naked babe stranded on an unsheltered rock in a blizzard for all the protection her clothing afforded her. The storm felt like a killer, a vicious evil stalking the city. She hoped the homeless had found shelter before dark, because Death rode the frozen air and would happily gather up any souls left alone in the cold streets.
Yet it wasn’t the cold keeping her awake now. It was her too-busy brain.
In spite of the freakish encounter with a suddenly hostile Nature, her evening had been wonderful, and Damien Ruthven had kept his word—or implied word—that he would be a gentleman while she remained in his home. When midnight crept around, he’d poured a brandy, shown her to her room, and left her with nothing more than a smile—and nerves that shrieked because she hadn’t been given a good-night kiss. Or more.
Brice got back into bed and tried for a third time to get comfortable.
What was wrong? She’d had a hot bath and stepped into her favorite nightgown. Since her bed was a confection of down, comfortable and warm, and she was not usually of an insomniac temperament, Brice should have had no trouble dropping off to sleep. Yet here it was, three A.M., and she was still wakeful, in bed and then out again like a jack-in-the-box.
It was probably the library, calling to her. Rare tomes had a way of whispering when there was no other noise to drown out their honeyed words.
Brice rolled over, pulling the comforter over her ears, and tried humming herself to sleep. It didn’t help. She felt restless, feverish. And Damien’s face kept appearing before her even with her eyes firmly closed.
Something
was
calling to her, that was for sure. Deciding that it had better be the books and not her host, she finally got up. She slipped on a robe and quietly opened her door. Nothing stirred.
Satisfied that she was unnoticed, Brice padded down the short hall that led to the first floor of the library. She’d find something to read—that was the ticket. Something boring and statistical.
She paused inside the opened French doors, listening carefully. The library had a cathedral-like silence, which was not to suggest that it was conducive to peaceful prayer. Any historian could tell you that murders happened in cathedrals too.
Something was waiting for her. Something that might be very good. It might also be very bad.
Brice shivered and cursed her too-active imagination. This was ridiculous. Nothing was here—nothing! But she decided—for no particular reason, she assured herself—against turning on the lights while she wandered around. Instead, she climbed carefully up the steep spiral stair, relying on the city glow from the tall windows to show her the way into the aerie.
In that eerie light the room looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment of searching her memory, Brice realized that the library was almost a duplicate of one in Newstead Abbey. It was even furnished in a similar manner to one of the paintings of the interior done during Byron’s life.
She looked about quickly for a skull cup, like the one Byron had made of the monk’s skeleton he had found in the garden as a child, but there was none about.
Of course not. The similarity might even be an accident of taste. Newstead Abbey was a mansion built on the graves of the dead. She had never liked its setting. Who could live in a cemetery? This place wasn’t like that at all. Well, perhaps a little. It was just that the spiral stairs reminded her of something—maybe a scaffold in the moonlight—and the placement of the windows that brought Byron’s ancient home to mind.
Not pausing again until she reached the final tier of books, she climbed carefully up the last curving stairs and began inching along the catwalk. The railing reached her waist, but she suffered some strange form of vertigo so that it didn’t seem high enough to provide safety.
Brice was only half surprised when she reached a set of glass doors and saw her host standing outside, looking over the city.
His “magnetic” field had probably called her up here.
Or maybe she was actually still abed and dreaming all this.
She wasn’t taken aback, but the longer she thought about it, the more his being outside seemed peculiar. For one thing, the weather was still bitter. No more snow fell, but the temperatures was below freezing. Damien’s occasional breath was actually turning to frost and falling down about his feet.
Brice exhaled sharply, making her eyes focus.
Bare feet?
Damien wasn’t wearing a coat or shoes. Also, he wasn’t so much standing as squatting on the ledge, a careless hand resting on an iron chain. He looked more than a little bit like the large gargoyles he perched between. As she watched, steam began rising from his body in a cloud, and it swirled about him in a slow counterclockwise cyclone.
Torn between the temptation of opening the door and asking him why he was out in the night, and stealing away before she was noticed spying on him, she hesitated in the shadows.
He was beautiful, as beautiful as any midnight that had ever been. And it was not just his body that was appealing. She had found her prejudices dying out one after the other as they dined. Brice had barely noticed when the first small lie fell out of her mouth. She was used to social fabrication, but usually felt at least a small qualm when she involved herself in one. But not last night. And what should have been social lies, social politeness, had soon turned out as truth: She’d come to trust him—to actually want to speak her mind to him without reservation. And, lacking her previous distaste and wariness, resistance to his native charm was proving much harder to come by.
But he was also very odd, and—at least for her—maybe dangerous. She knew this, though she couldn’t say from what direction danger would come. However nonspecific, she believed her intuition. As sure as the sun would show up in the east tomorrow morning, she knew he would be trouble for her if she allowed herself to get any closer.
Or maybe it was guilt speaking. Could it be that simple?
Brice exhaled slowly and thought hard about the possibility.
Former friends—all well-intentioned people—had often said to her in smug, self-congratulatory voices that they, too, had suffered loss and yet survived to go on to better lives. They said she was clinging to her grief because of guilt—guilt that didn’t belong to her—and using it to push people away. At the time she had thought it nonsense. But were they right after all? Had she used tragedy to keep the world at bay?
On the few occasions when she had been confronted with this theory, Brice had firmly resisted the urge to tell these people that their losses—whatever they were—were unlikely to have carried the same terror and sense of helplessness that came from being trapped upside down in a car while an icy stream rushed in through a shattered windshield. That, while it was sad they had lost whomever, they had never watched the person they loved most in the world drown while they looked on, unable to help because their own broken body was pinned in place by a crumpled dashboard and a root-choked riverbank with branches sharp as spears.
She hadn’t said anything then, but she had been angry. And only those who understood her need to grieve—and, yes, to feel guilt for surviving when Mark hadn’t—had remained her friends. All others had been dismissed from her life.
And once the first anguish passed, she had adjusted. Mostly. There had only been one time, a black midnight when she had been very lonely and more than a little drunk. She didn’t like to think about it, but that February night she had almost been tempted into the suicide tango; a short, passionate dance with death that seemed to offer the only quick and easy way out of the guilt and grief and loss.
But a kindly Fate had intervened, and She had come in an interesting guise. At the moment that Brice had reached for the bottle of tranquilizers on her bedside table, she had seen Byron—or rather, his photograph—staring up at her from the pages of a book of poetry. His eyes were intense, his lips slightly smiling.
Leaving so soon?
he seemed to ask.
The great poet had looked better than the Grim Reaper—braver and kinder—so she had danced with him instead.
Brice exhaled slowly. Her breath was shaky and irregular. Even now, the memory of how close she had come to giving up frightened her.
They said that some sorrows grew sweet with time, and that bitter fruit could ripen into something beautiful. But that hadn’t been true of her loss. Still, she had thought she’d managed to keep the bitterness from poisoning all of her heart and the rest of her life. Was it so strange that she could never look back and think there was some silver lining to what had happened? Was it strange that she never looked back at all, period?
Brice shook her head sharply.
Enough
.
It was true that she rarely felt entirely free. And very little happened in her life. Very little that was exciting or dangerous, that is—idiocy and annoyance happened all the time. But these days, though she wasn’t carefree, she was rarely lonely either. Reawakened curiosity about Byron was always with her. The fascinating questions—and sometimes even more fascinating answers—were her constant companions. They kept the shadows away while the old grief and guilt slowly diminished in size and lost the cruel fangs and claws that tore at her dreams. And if she still had some problems with being confined in small spaces, at least she wasn’t having panic attacks anymore. She
was
healing.
But she had to admit the memory of her grief was still there, deep in her once-broken bones, and sometimes—like at Christmas, and perhaps especially now that she had met a living man who fascinated her—those bones were bound to hurt.
She looked out at Damien, so still that he seemed made of stone, so beautiful that he stole her breath away, and so distant that he didn’t seem human. Was that why she liked him? Because he wasn’t anything like the man she had loved and lost?
“Bah,” Brice said softly. “It’s all psycho claptrap. I’m just coming down with a cold.”
She touched a hand to her face. Yes, there was fever. She was ill and probably hallucinating. At the very least, she was exhausted and her judgment was therefore impaired. The throbbing in her body was not desire, it was sickness. What she needed was sleep, the kind to be had in the solitude of her room.
Sighing, half with self-disgust and half with regret, Brice retreated along the catwalk, staying in the shadows as she returned to her room.
She hadn’t opened the door to join him. It was probably just as well. Though she appealed to him with those eyes that studied everything so intently while her brow furrowed and she rested her small chin in her delicate hand, he needed to be wary, to think things through.
Naturally, her open admiration of him—of Byron; he needed to be clear about that—was a lure. It was difficult to resist a woman who spoke of him with such passion and intensity, whose adoration and longing shone like a candle in the winter night that had become his soul.
But he needed to practice caution for that very reason. She wasn’t the first wounded woman who had called to his tender side, and he hadn’t forgotten that such affairs, when rushed, nearly always ended in tragedy. Even when allowed to develop in the fullness of time, they still often ended badly—in heartbreak and hatred and death, if they went far wrong. And cruel indifference and apathy, even if they did not. His memory was a graveyard of dead loves, and he still mourned them on the occasions that he allowed himself to pass by.
No, it was best that she had turned away tonight, that she hadn’t ventured out to see the wildness in his eyes and the network of scars on his chest, and started asking questions. What she had witnessed was odd enough behavior in the hours just before dawn.
Perhaps she would think it all a winter’s dream and not ask difficult questions in the morning.
Damien wasn’t at all sure what he’d been doing outside anyway. Yes, he always enjoyed storms, and this kind of storm was particularly rare and invigorating, but it was too cold even for him. And though he was feeling uneasy, it didn’t seem likely that he would actually be able to spot any danger from up there.
Danger.
He couldn’t see anything, yet danger lurked nearby. In spite of what the private detectives had told him, he knew in his bones that peril lay ahead. He had developed a sort of sixth sense that warned him when doom was closing in. It had saved him more than once—from financial disaster, from an earthquake, several times from ambush, and once from a drug addict set to rob and murder him for the price of a fix. That instinct said mortal peril was near.