Dark Obsession (15 page)

A scream yanked Nora from sleep. No, not
a
scream but many, blending into one long wail of terror. She bolted upright, then realized where she was—a coaching inn in Devon, just east of the Tamar River. She’d had a bad dream. . . . But no, those awful moans continued echoing through the room.

Beneath her, the mattress quaked. Reaching in the darkness, her hand collided with Grayson’s flailing arm. She grasped it, then threw herself across his body to still his thrashing.

‘‘Gray, wake up! It’s all right. You’re having a nightmare.’’ She cupped his face in her palms and felt the perspiration pouring off him in rivulets. ‘‘Darling, it’s all right. Please wake up.’’

In the scant moonlight she saw a vein in his temple throbbing, his lips stretched taut across his teeth. His eyelids fluttered. The thrashing subsided and gradually his moans quieted.

His eyes opened. ‘‘I—what—Nora?’’

‘‘Yes, I’m here. It’s all right. You were having a nightmare.’’

He shoved out a shaky sigh and threw an arm across his eyes. ‘‘Good God. It was . . . hideous.’’

‘‘Do you want to tell me about it?’’

She felt him go completely still. ‘‘No.’’

She wished he would, thought he needed to. But in his present state, she didn’t insist. ‘‘Well, it’s over now. Can you sleep?’’

He hesitated. ‘‘No.’’

‘‘Perhaps I could make you some tea.’’

She started to sit up, but his hand shot out and clamped her wrist.

‘‘Stay here. Please.’’ He pulled her to his chest and wrapped his arms around her, squeezing like a frightened child. ‘‘Don’t leave me.’’

‘‘Of course I won’t.’’

His trembling echoed inside her. She was about to say more to comfort him when suddenly he rolled, flipping her onto her back. His weight pinned her to the mattress and his mouth covered hers with a hunger that took her aback.

His hands roved insistently, purposefully, so much less gentle than previously. Within seconds her nightgown was stripped away. His mouth dragged across her breasts, and she gasped with shock and pleasure both as his teeth closed around a nipple, as his hand shoved her thighs apart.

A single-minded haste unlike she’d experienced with him before accompanied each action. Desperation emanated from the tension of his muscles and the force with which he held her fast.

‘‘You’re frightening me a little.’’

‘‘Perhaps you should be.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Just love me tonight, Nora. Let go and don’t think. Forget who I am—who we are. Forget everything. Just love me. For tonight.’’

‘‘You know I will. Always.’’

Grayson took her pledge into his open mouth as if starved, but for sustenance far different than food. His tongue besieged the interior of her mouth even as his erection pushed through folds of flesh gone torrid with an intensity of desire she’d not yet experienced or imagined.

Yes, it frightened her, for it reminded her of the violence she’d witnessed in him so recently, and of her growing fear of what crouched inside the gentle man she’d married.

Yet it thrilled her too, darkly, dangerously. As his body moved inside her, as he pinned her with his pale, fierce eyes, she fought past her doubts and let go, freed her mind of all constraints as he’d bade her do.

His thrusts were like a gathering storm, building to a raging tempest. She wrapped herself around him and clung, urging him deeper. Harder. She wanted this brusque, indecorous lovemaking, discovered she needed it perhaps as much as he. She relished the intimacy that broke all barriers of civility and left nothing concealed.

Yet as her cries were muffled by his greedy lips, and as he echoed those cries moments later with a staggering surge of his body, the fierceness of his passion crashed through her—jarring, volatile, violent. A passion a thousand times more shattering than she had ever bargained for.

The tang of the sea, borne on a soupy mist, filled the interior of the coach and brought with it the bitter taste of Grayson’s colossal mistake.

Outside the window to his left, the lush farmland of Helston had given way to the rugged sweep of the Lizard Peninsula, a high, rolling vista studded with outcroppings of granite and occasional thrusts of the area’s peculiar, green- and red-veined serpentine rock. From here, Blackheath Moor, the brooding stretch of land that hugged the boundaries of his Cornish home and gave it its name, surged westward to meet the upward swell of the Goonhilly Downs. The heather and gorse were in bloom, though today their vibrant purples and golds struggled to be noticed beneath the blanketing fog.

In weather such as this, a man could lose his way within moments amid the hills and moors, wander for hours or even days, only to find himself trudging in circles.

He closed his eyes to the sight, then turned his head to gaze out the window on Nora’s side. There the land edged away in a steep, wind- and rain-gouged descent to the cliffs, followed by a sheer drop to the sea. He sighed. Both views revealed a stark landscape, equally beautiful. . . . But as Grayson also knew, equally treacherous to the unsuspecting.

He considered rapping for his driver to swing the team around. Too late he realized he should have sent Nora to Cornwall on her own and remained in London. Or gone anywhere else on earth but where the memories were still so alive that they blew their clammy breath down his nape.

What had he been thinking?

He knew damned well what he’d been thinking. That Nora deserved better than being chained to a man like him. Her own tarnished reputation had proved falser than paste jewels, and would therefore fade as people observed, as he did, her gemlike qualities.

That would never be true for him. It wasn’t false that Tom was dead. It was excruciatingly real. As irrevocable as the part Grayson had played in what had happened.

But he’d yearned to give her something, some rare gift in exchange for the man he wanted to be—for her—who he
had
been for a few short hours on their wedding night.

Blackheath Grange was the only gift he could think of that might hold value for her. That might fill the gaps where her husband and lover and friend should be.

She sat gazing out the window on her side, watching the sodden scenery roll by. He wondered what she thought of Cornwall so far. Was she rethinking her desire to be here? Did she find it as dismal and inhospitable as he did? Precious few words had passed between them today, leaving only the weighty silence that had become like a third traveling companion.

When they first set out from London she’d sat close, her body warm and pliant against his side. He’d wrapped an arm around her, tossed her bonnet to the opposite seat and indulged in more than a few sultry kisses.

They’d made love in the inn last night. Frenzied, mindless lovemaking that ended in slick bodies, wildly beating hearts and a look of alarm on Nora’s lovely face. She’d assured him he hadn’t hurt her, but he didn’t believe it. Didn’t his own bruised rib prove otherwise?

The dream. He’d been half-mad when she’d prodded him from sleep. All he had wanted was to hold her close, bury himself in sweet kisses and warm flesh, reveal his dark secrets and find her willing to understand.

But some ungovernable passion had sprung up from the madness. His other side had come plundering out. The side he wished she would never come to know.

A low roll of thunder growled in the distance. He glanced across the carriage seat to discover her studying him, her expression speculative.

‘‘We must be nearly there,’’ she said. ‘‘You look as though something is about to happen.’’

The observation speared him. She was becoming far too adept at reading him. Since that afternoon in the gallery, and then later in the library at home, he’d had the unsettling sense she was gaining the ability to steal inside his brain and sift through his thoughts.

He angled a look out the window, though he knew this road so well he could identify where they were by the ruts and curves tossing the coach about. ‘‘We’ll be turning up the drive any moment.’’

‘‘I can hardly wait.’’ Yet her shadowed features hinted of apprehension, of perhaps finding disappointment in her fondest wish. Disappointment in him. And the disappointment of realizing she desired more now, so much more than the barren bargain she had once offered: her dowry for Blackheath Grange.

He hated that, essentially, that was the bargain they’d made.

Swerving, the coach maneuvered a bumpy course through an open pair of iron gates flanked by two fluted pillars. A stone gatehouse stood to the right. The roof, shiny from the rain, showed dull in spots where slate tiles were broken or missing altogether. One more repair that needed attending.

The weather-lined face of Elliot, the gatekeeper, appeared in the open gatehouse door. The man grinned and waved his cap in the air as the coach rumbled past. ‘‘Welcome home, Master Grayson.’’

He forced a smile and returned the wave. How ironic that even at twenty-eight he was still Master Grayson here, as he had been from his earliest days.

As they rounded a bend, the oaks and elms planted generations ago, along with encroaching rowans, fell away to reveal the sloping park bordered by rhododendrons so in need of trimming they spilled their heavy blossoms onto the lawn. They turned again and the house appeared in his window, its stone facade and timber-trimmed peaks gaunt against the afternoon sky. Steely clouds reflected in the mullioned windows, lending them the rheumy gleam of eyes gone blind.

Grayson’s stomach clenched at the familiar sights. He was home, yet that word had long ceased to evoke comfort or safety. He might as well be alone on a stormy sea with nothing but his own chaotic fears to guide him.

Why on earth had he returned?

Because had they remained in London, it would have been Nora who suffered for his mistakes. The incident at the gallery had convinced him of that.

‘‘It’s not as ancient as I’d thought,’’ she said, leaning at his shoulder to peer around him. Her cheerful tone rang as hollow as the felled tree they had just passed. ‘‘Not medieval at all.’’

‘‘Fire destroyed the manor in the 1520s. They razed what was left and used the original stones to rebuild. I apologize for its being so gloomy.’’

‘‘Gloomy? Hardly. It’s a glorious piece of history. I’ll wager there’s a maze of back stairwells and secret passages, for I’ve read the people of that age reveled in spying on one another.’’ A faint smile hovered about her lips. ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s even a . . .’’

‘‘A what?’’

A horrified spark ignited in her eyes. ‘‘N-nothing.’’ The unspoken word shivered in the air like a breath from the grave. She needn’t say it. Back stairs, secret passages . . . a ghost.

Was there one at Blackheath? Surely, but was it a tormented soul crying out from beyond this world, or merely his own tormented soul?

He faced stiffly straight ahead, avoiding both Nora and the scenery outside his window. He felt rather than saw her peeking at him from under her lashes. A frothy tension settled between them. She thought he was angry. True, but not at her. At so much else; at everything else but her.

For her at this moment, he felt only sorrow.

Nora could barely contain her excitement as the coach maneuvered the fiinal turn in the drive. Her fiingers, laced tightly in her lap, tensed to aching as she took in the lofty Gothic arch of the front door, presided over by the forbidding glare of a griffin’s head carved into the oak.

The door opened and a tall female figure, thin and angular beneath thick folds of black broadcloth, descended the steps.

‘‘That is Mrs. Dorn, our housekeeper,’’ Grayson murmured as a footman hurried down from behind the woman and opened the coach door. Grayson stepped down first, then handed Nora carefully to the drive.

Considerate. Gentle. But nonetheless distant. Last night he had asked her to love him—and she had, willingly and wholeheartedly, even when their passion had spiraled too high for safety.

She supposed he felt contrite for the ungentlemanly way he’d treated her, but rather than reassure, his behavior only tightened those growing knots in her stomach. Where was that passion now? Surely not hiding within this placid stranger.

A chill breeze churned her skirts and nipped at her ankles as Grayson retrieved her reticule from the coach seat. Meanwhile a middle-aged man with peppered hair and a slight stoop joined the housekeeper at the foot of the steps. With his craggy features and pitted skin he reminded Nora of the shadowy characters that often slipped in through her parents’ kitchen door at night to have a quiet word with her father.

‘‘Welcome back, Master Grayson.’’

‘‘Thank you, Gibbs. I’d like to present my wife, Lady Lowell. Nora, this is Mr. Gibbs, our steward.’’

‘‘At your service, madam.’’ Contrary to his looks, the steward spoke with the careful inflections of a London-bred gentleman. His smooth bow rivaled any in polite society. From just behind him the elder woman emitted a cough.

‘‘And Mrs. Dorn, of course,’’ Gray continued, ‘‘who has ruled over Blackheath Grange with an iron fist these thirty-odd years.’’

Up close the woman appeared nearly emaciated, her shoulders sharp within the severe cut of her sleeves. Clasping skeletal fingers at her waist, she dipped a stiff curtsy. ‘‘How very lovely to have you at Blackheath Grange, Lady Lowell,’’ she said in the clipped burr particular to Cornwall. Her flinty eyes narrowed as she took in every detail of Nora’s wrinkled carriage dress. Hers was a gaze that conveyed little affability, permitted no excuses. At least that was how she made Nora feel. ‘‘I do hope you’ll enjoy your stay.’’

Nora gave an internal harrumph, for by those words it seemed Mrs. Dorn chose to view her as a guest rather than Blackheath’s new mistress. Yet until young Jonathan Lowell came of age, mistress of this place was exactly what she would be.