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He reached out as if he might touch the stone, but she warded him off, color creeping up her throat, burning her skin. “You and I both know you’re not.”
His hand hovered before lifting to stroke her cheek. His gaze scalded a path over her face as if memorizing it. The very air between them charged with anticipation. She held her breath.
“No.” His hand finally dropping away. “More’s the pity.”
How did he manage to make her feel hot and cold at the same time? To make her stomach swoop and dive and her throat close? It wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t be so. It was improper. Unseemly. Downright humiliating. She tore away from him to stalk the length of the gallery, arms crossed over her chest as if warding off a blow. “Gordon is everything a husband should be. He comes of a good family. He’s responsible and trustworthy and safe.”
“Sounds like a sheepdog I once owned.”
“Tease if you like, but if you so much as hint at who you really are, so help me, I shall murder you myself.”
“You’re so bloodthirsty, sweet, fickle Lissa.”
“Don’t call me that. And I am not fickle.”
He came up behind her, leaning close, his warm breath tickling her neck, his tone mocking and smooth and tinged with hidden laughter. “No? Then why do you wear a gift from one man on the eve of your wedding to another?”
Far from enjoying her outing, Elisabeth spent the hours worrying over what might be transpiring back at the house. Visions of Brendan disrupting, delaying, or destroying her wedding crowded her head. What he might do remained foggy, but that he’d take pleasure in causing trouble, she didn’t doubt. He was a monumental bomb-thrower. Delighting in mischief and reveling in mayhem. Should she reveal him, she’d be up to her eyebrows in both.
A trouble shared is a trouble halved, or so Aunt Pheeney would say. But there was no one to share her trouble with. Despite what she told Brendan, Lord Kilronan was away from home and none knew when he was expected back. Lady Kilronan had been Aidan’s bride for less than a year. She might not know anything of Brendan. Aidan might have chosen to remain silent on those more sordid bits of his family’s history.
No. Best to keep quiet. Brendan would leave. All would be as it was. She’d be married and leave for London as Gordon’s wife.
London. They had spoken of it. Gordon had been so excited and energetic in its praise. His position as an undersecretary’s assistant in the department of the Exchequer had been such a wonderful opportunity, and she had so wanted to please that she’d nodded and smiled and placed it aside to be worried over later. But later had become now.
She clenched her hands on her reticule. Replace Mr. Adams? What was Gordon thinking? The estate agent had served the Fitzgeralds of Dun Eyre since her grandfather’s day. He knew every stone, stick, tenant, and servant. He could recite annual crop yields, recall to the penny what he spent in outlays during any given season, loved Dun Eyre as much as she did. And who would replace him? Some stranger who would renovate and improve the house until she didn’t recognize it as her home? Someone who would supervise the destruction of her grandmother’s beloved gardens in the name of the latest fashion?
She reached for her pendant before remembering she’d torn the odious thing from her throat with a half-sob and tossed it in her jewelry case right after leaving that disastrous encounter with Brendan. She should have worn it. She could have tossed it from the cliffs and been done with it once and for all. Anger with Gordon easily became anger with Brendan.
How dare he bait her? Ask her impertinent questions? As if it were any of his concern why she wore the pendant. Leave it to Brendan to assume she carried a tendre for him after all these years. That she wore the pendant as some sort of memento to a lost love. Just showed what a conceited, arrogant, vain, ridiculous man he was.
Still some small corner of her worried that Brendan was right. Was she fickle? Did her continuing to wear his pendant signify something she wouldn’t even admit to herself? No. It was absurd. Brendan meant nothing to her, and his pendant even less. She’d prove it. She’d wear Gordon’s necklace tonight. Make a great display of its opulence and expense.
Much heartened by her decision, she listened with equanimity to Fanny’s recital of her last visit to Dublin. “We had dinner no less than three times at Dublin Castle. Once with the Viceroy himself.”
Her children’s superior intelligence. “Not yet four and little Bernard is reading.”
And the bargain she’d haggled on the last gown she’d had made. “Ten yards of beaded brocade for four and six. I couldn’t pass it by.”
It took turning into the iron gates at Belfoyle to break into her cousin’s monologue. And only long enough for her to draw breath and declare as they crested the final hill to view Belfoyle’s tangle of towers and battlements. “What a great heap! It must cost a fortune to heat.”
Elisabeth had always loved the ancient stronghold of Belfoyle. It seemed to drift among the fog-shrouded cliff tops like a fairy castle. And the Douglas family had seemed like kings and queens. The old Lord
Kilronan’s imperious dignity, his wife’s ethereal beauty. Their children, no less regal than their parents. Aidan’s confidence, Sabrina’s quiet gentility, and Brendan’s smug charm. She’d counted the days until she could be one of them. As if marrying into the family would make her brighter, smarter, more clever.
With the old earl’s terrifying murder and his wife’s death following, that glittering future had shattered. Aidan had withdrawn to a hermit-like existence, Sabrina had departed for the sanctuary of the order of bandraoi priestesses, and Brendan—
Brendan had vanished. The implications and accusations of his disappearance swirling round both Belfoyle and Dun Eyre for months following.
Now he was home. A lit fuse. A primed pistol.
It only remained to be seen how many innocent casualties he took with him when he blew.
The courier arrived just after sunset. A bloody sky cast the walls of the study in crimson light and crawling shadows as Oss showed the man in.
Máelodor offered no food or drink. Nor asked after the state of the roads or of the man’s health. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, heaving his false leg onto an ottoman to ease the pain, steepling his fingers as he regarded this latest messenger from Ireland.
He felt the man’s discomfort in his shuttered sidelong glances at the glassy, expressionless features of Oss, the wetting of his red lips, and the destruction of his hat, which he scrunched in his hairy, sausage hands but made no move to ease his tension. He fed off the apprehension and thrilled to the fear. It had always been thus. And as his body’s strength waned, it became all the more important to cultivate men’s terror of him. It served to bind them to him when all other enticements failed.
