Beauty and the Duke (30 page)

Hampton was kneeling beside him. “What do we do
with the bloke?”

Maxwell groaned and stirred. “Bastard.” Erik climbed to his feet but Becca threw herself into his arms.

“No,” she said against his cheek, “he can no longer hurt us.”

Christine placed her hand on his arm. “Becca is right. He is irrelevant to our lives, Erik.”

Erik looked over his sister’s shoulder at Hampton. “Is everyone accounted for?”

“It looks as if only this part of the cavern collapsed,” Joseph said. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

For moment as they all stared at the depression, Christine knew everyone was thinking the same. It had been a grave for seven years. Then Hampton and Hodges dragged Maxwell to his feet. He saw Erik and began to struggle. “No. It wasn’t my fault! No!”

Becca smashed him over the head again with the tree branch.

“Bloody hell!” Maxwell groaned.

“Bloody hell back to you!” Becca would have smashed him again, except Erik stopped her. “You have very nearly ruined our lives!” she shouted as Erik held her back.

Taking the weapon from her hand, Erik told Hampton to escort Johnny to Dunfermline. “Let his father deal with him,” Erik said, and they all listened as Maxwell was dragged off yelling and cursing before Hampton tossed him to the ground and trussed him like a boar ready for the spit.

Erik turned his attention to Aunt Sophie and the weaponry still clutched in Aunt Sophie’s hand like a medieval warclub. “You would have been proud of your sister,” Sophie said.

“Aunt Sophie is the one who felled him first,” Becca
deferred.

“I merely helped, dear.” To Erik, she said, “I have faced down cannibals. I would go into battle with her anytime.”

Hodges came out and said you had returned. Then we saw Johnny Maxwell. “I thought he had killed you.” She pressed her cheek against his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Are you, Elf?”

Her mouth turned up into a smile. “Yes. Yes, I believe I am.”

With his other arm, Erik reached around Christine’s shoulders, while Becca took Aunt Sophie’s arm and they started walking. “Then let us go home to Erin.”

After a moment, Becca asked, “Now that no one can think bad things about us any longer…maybe we can open the ballroom for my debut,” she said.

Erik chuckled. “I think I will, Becca,” he said, then brought his gaze to Christine’s. “But I have something I want to do first.”

E
rik and Christine tore up their contract that night. They were married a week later, repeating the same vows they had spoken months earlier.

No bargains. No contracts. A ceremony sealed by the love they shared and the promise that light shone on their future. Warmed by his strength, Christine faced him and repeated the words mirrored in his eyes. Aunt Sophie, Joseph, and Amelia and Becca stood around them. Erin her flower girl. Erik’s mother had missed the proceedings, but only because she had taken her first trip out of the country in thirty years and did not return for months. But everyone else was present to share this moment. Christine had found new purpose. Or it had found her. She no longer cared to discern the difference or to sift through the logic of her happiness when nothing had turned out as she had originally planned. And, yet, nothing could have felt more right. More perfect.

The ring stayed on Christine’s hand for one more hour that day, and then it just slipped loose and came off. She had not wept as the ring fell off her finger and into the grass, though the moment was bittersweet. Yet, she knew in her heart it was time to surrender the band of silver to whatever fate it would bestow on another. Still she kept it in her dresser for another week, looking
at it, but discovering nothing new about what it really was. She only knew there was magic in her happiness. Her hand went to her abdomen.

That evening she knocked on Aunt Sophie’s door. She hoped her aunt would remain a permanent fixture at Sedgwick Castle and Becca and Erin could become her students so Aunt Sophie could teach them both that the world stretched far beyond the walls of Sedgwick Castle, and that dreams were made, not born, and that anything worth having is worth fighting for.

Her aunt lowered the book in her hands to her lap as Christine knelt by her chair. A fire warmed the room. “What is it, dear?” Aunt Sophie asked.

“I believe it is time to give this back,” Christine said, taking Aunt Sophie’s hand and folding her fingers around the ring.

For a long time Aunt Sophie said nothing. But in those first few moments as her hand closed around the band of braided silver, the air stirred and hummed with electricity as if coming to life around them, and Christine wondered if Aunt Sophie felt it as well.

Aunt Sophie had not spoken anymore about the ring since that day when they had been in the tower. Now Christine asked the question that she had wanted to ask.

“You said the ring belonged to Great-Grandmamma. Will you tell me now where this ring came from?”

Sophie opened her palm and stared at the silver band. “I believe she found it in the vaults of an old abbey in Scotland. The entire legend of the ring began when she met my great-grandfather shortly after putting it on. He was a fierce Scottish lord bent on vengeance, which she somehow turned into love. She became the first archeologist in the family.”

“What about you? Did you ever try on the ring?”

“No. I was afraid.”

“Why? If you do not believe in its power.”

Her eyes took on a faraway look. “My mother told me once that life takes us along paths we may not want to go. I was afraid of the choice I would be forced to make, fearing it would change who I was. I had important goals and dreams, you see. I did not want to take the chance on some unseen entity shaping my life. I was my own person, after all. Then…it no longer mattered. The choice was taken away from me when my Reece died. I did go on to become a well-known anthropologist. I did things few women dreamed of doing. I helped create the historical museum that now exists. I had your father to care for. And then I had you.”

“But if you
could
go back and change the past, would you?”

Aunt Sophie patted Christine’s hands. “That question is wrought with peril when one has already lived one’s life and is nearing the end of that journey. But how does one change only part of the past without changing all one’s future?”

Christine laid her head in her aunt’s lap. “Oh, Aunt Sophie. Sometimes I think you are a victim of your own analytical thinking.”

The Sedgwick curse died an ignoble demise the following week when Erik celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday in peace and harmony and utter lack of drama. Becca had her coveted debut the next month, the first ball held at Sedgwick Court in eight years, and Lady Rebecca Bonham, who turned seventeen the week before, danced her first waltz—even if it was with her brother.

Seven months after the ball, on one April morn, Christine gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Eleven months later, the devil duke of Sedgwick welcomed a son. Even
tually Christine would bear another son and daughter, both dark-haired like their father. She never did become the renowned paleontologist that she had once thought she’d wanted more than anything in the world. But she did help Joseph Darlington become one. He and Amelia settled near St. Andrews, where he taught classes and raised their own three children. Christine and Joseph went on to discover more great beasts on Sedgwick land, spawning the myth that a great sea monster still haunted some of Scotland’s lochs. As for Sommershorn Abbey, Babs and Dolly grew up to take the reins of the school, and Christine watched it grow into a fine institution, a haven for young women.

Then one summer evening, she and Erik returned with the entire family from St. Andrews after attending a formal ceremony commissioning the beautiful stone library he had designed for the university and which had finally opened to the world.

Christine had been sitting outside on the terrace watching Mrs. Whitman try to corral the children, the youngest of whom had just begun to crawl and had recently discovered the joys of eating dirt from the rose garden. And as old Beast curled up in Christine’s lap, his rumbling purrs pulling Erin to her side, Christine wished her own father could see her now. For she was truly happy. Christine knew then that along with love she had been granted her greatest wish.

A family of her own.

An incomparable gift to her soul, and cementing her place in the world for generations to come.

It was quite late when Christine climbed the stairs to the tower room. She found Erik at his desk in the study. Because this was the only room in all of Sedgwick with windows so grand and large, she shared the space with Erik. Or he might argue that his small corner of heaven
did not nearly equal her larger three corners that he seemed to jealously covet, since he had moved up here years ago.

His boyish grousing usually won him a sympathy kiss. But tonight he wasn’t working over his designs. His elbows on the desk, he was reading something in his hands and did not hear her approach until she was leaning over his shoulder. “Why so serious?” she asked.

“Mother has announced her intent to wed again. She has asked us to lend our consequence to her upcoming nuptials by attending next summer.”

Christine took the placard from his hand. “It should be beautiful at Eyre House in July.” She peered over the rim of her spectacles at her husband. “They have been seeing each other for years, you know.”

Erik grunted. Sliding into his lap, Christine wrapped her arms around her husband’s broad shoulders. “Lord Eyre lost everything, Erik. He has done as you’ve asked and remained away from here. Perhaps it is time to allow Erin to meet her grandfather. He is old and he is alone.”

Lara remained in a private asylum outside Edinburgh, and Lord John had died years ago during an outbreak of typhus while he had been awaiting trial.

“And your mother has not been inconvenient to have around when she visits. She
has
made a valiant effort. The children like her. And look”—Christine tapped the invitation—“she has asked you to give her away.”

Erik lifted her hand into the light. “Whatever happened to your ring?”

She curled her fingers around his and brought them to her lips. “I returned it to Aunt Sophie, to whom it belongs.”

His eyes captured the dim candlelight. Even after all these years, her heart never failed to skip a beat when
he looked at her as if she were the only woman in the world. His sherry-colored eyes were now a midnight shade in the near darkness, consuming her with both tenderness and the fierce heat of his emotions. He still possessed the power to make her forget her name just by looking at her.

“You aren’t about to tell me you have fallen out of love, are you?” She had meant the words as a jest, but deep down she had always harbored an inkling of fear that something catastrophic would befall her once the ring was gone.

The intensity in his eyes tightened the small knot in her chest. “And all these years I half believed that ring had made you fall in love with me.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in magic.”

“I did not used to believe in giant sea monsters either.” He pushed the hair from her face. A faint tremor went through his hands as he held her face in his palms. “Do you ever regret not finding your dragon?”

She nuzzled his palms, warmed by his touch and his concern. “My dragon found
me
, your grace. A big ferocious bull dragon and four little dragons have claimed me as their own, my love. I have been happily imprisoned in their lair ever since.”

Impulsively she traced the tip of her finger along his bottom lip. “Besides, I have turned my attention to sea monsters.”

The topic piqued her interest, much as it always did when it entered the conversation between them. “Did you know it is quite possible Joseph and I found a link between the sea monster he discovered in the cavern and a modern-day ostrich?”

Erik chuckled, then said her name softly, first against her hair and then her lips, diverting her before he received another lesson in bird anatomy when the
only anatomical life form he wanted to explore sat in his lap. “I love you,” he said fiercely. His tongue was hot and hard as he took her mouth in a kiss that devoured.

Erik had learned much in the years since he had married Christine. Twice.

Logic for his wife was not necessarily logic for the mainstream. Christine lived to the chords of her own melody. He needed that balance and her unique perspective. He needed her laughter. He’d never felt more alive when he saw himself in her eyes. Nor known a deeper peace in her arms.

After a long, hungry moment in which they shared a passionate embrace, he carried her down the stone staircase to their large bed, joining her beneath the goose-down covers. Instinctively, his hands moved over her body. She laid her mouth to the curve of his neck and suckled. He pulled her away and, turning her beneath him, lifted his head until he could see her lips and feel the rush of her breath against his mouth. “The last time you set your teeth to my neck, I had a bloody time explaining to our eldest why I had a happy face imprinted on my throat.”

Christine’s smile widened a fraction. He felt the primal jolt of more than arousal. “Tell me again how much you love me,” she said. “And I will give you a happier face lower down where no one will see.”

He slipped one hand around the back of her neck and kept her where she was, beneath him and weighted by his body. She was smiling up at him, a temptress bathed in moonlight. A beacon in the night. “I love you,
leannanan
.”

He breathed a soft sigh, answering hers as he nuzzled her ear. “I love you,” he said again.

Inordinately humbled to know she loved him, too.

“I love you. I love you,” he said the words a dozen times.

And Erik Boughton, the devil duke of Sedgwick, knew no bounds to the capacity of his heart. Growling softly he filled her with his heat.

He would be no true dragon worth his salt if he did not growl fire or shake his tail and, on very special occasions, fly her to the moon. Tonight he eagerly delivered all three.