Enchantment & Bridge of Dreams (5 page)

Above them, the wind raged on, hurling sheets of rain down onto their frozen bodies. Lightning split the sky, sending an ancient beech smoking to the ground. The world seemed to cry out and twist on its axis, unable to endure this confrontation of relentless opposites.

And then suddenly there was no world and no time, only the two of them. Only the naked need that swept out of some other place to engulf them.

Kacey shuddered, rain sliding chill and forgotten down her face.

Draycott frowned. “You're freezing,” he muttered, almost to himself. “You'll catch pneumonia out here.” Unconsciously, his grip softened, his fingers cupping her shivering shoulders. “Come back to the abbey with me, Kacey Mallory. Let's begin again.” There was a note of desperation in his voice. “I'm afraid I've been a bloody fool. You don't have to be one, too.”

Kacey could barely breathe for the intensity of the feelings flowing over her. For the touch of his hard body from her neck to her knees. For the need to feel him far closer still, bodies bared, skin pressed inch to sweat-slick inch.

As they slid into passion's raw center.

When had everything changed? she asked herself dimly. When had she become this strange new person, this wanton creature of hot desire and reckless need?

Dear God, what was happening to her? His touch was too keen, her need too raw.

Settle down, Katharine Chelsea. It's just all those female
hormones talking. Maybe you've gone too long without listening to what they had to say.

And they were certainly talking right now—with a vengeance, she thought.

“Kacey?”

One word, but the way he said it, slow and uncertain, nearly pushed her over the edge.

“I—I can't go back.” Her words were no more than a whisper. “I won't. I can't ever go back. Not
there—
not with
you!
”

“You must. The Whistler's waiting for you.” He paused, studying her tense features. “I saw you in the long gallery, you know. You loved looking at it. You adored it with your eyes. No, don't try to deny it, Kacey. Your eyes couldn't lie—not about a thing like that.”

Another shudder ripped through her. It was madness even to consider what he asked. She knew instinctively that she had to get away from this place, from this man. Yes, far away—before she did something crazier still. “Please…”

“Think of it,” Draycott whispered, his lips feathering over the chill curve of her ear. “No one else has even seen the canvas for one hundred years. You'll be the first to touch it, to learn its secrets. It's waiting there right now, Kacey. All you have to do is come back with me.”

It was the lowest sort of bribe, but Nicholas Draycott didn't care. He couldn't let her go—not this way. Not yet. She was either his sweetest dream or his worst nightmare, and he had to find out which.

Kacey gnawed at her bottom lip. Her body shook, from the cold and the struggle to control some dark, nameless yearning.

But she was losing. Nicholas could feel it in the quiver that ran through her shoulders.

“
Now,
Kacey.”

“Oh, all right. Yes, damn you.
Yes!
”

His smile was dark triumph itself. But when he took her hand and tried to pull her back toward the house, Draycott found it was going to be a little more difficult than he'd thought.

Scowling, Kacey dug in her heels. “On three conditions,” she shouted against the wind.

“Name them,” he yelled back.

“First, we call New York and verify my credentials. I want no more questions on that score.”

“Done.”

“Second, you move my things—such as they are—into the gatehouse.”

Draycott's response was slower this time. “Very well.”

“Third, you give me the gatehouse key. No, make that
all
the gatehouse keys.”

The Englishman's eyes darkened. “I can't do that,” he countered flatly. “There are reasons—”

Kacey spun about and began to stride over the downs toward the village.

“Oh, all right, damn it! One of us has to be sensible about this.”

Muttering darkly, Draycott searched for her boots and bent down to shove them on her feet. Scowling, he shrugged out of his coat and pulled it over her head. In the process, his arm encircled her shoulder. Her breast grazed his rib.

They froze, while the rain hammered down on his makeshift tent. For long breathless moments neither moved, caught in the warmth and darkness beneath.

Her hip nudged his thigh; her chin brushed the naked skin at his neck.

Draycott muttered a curse.

You think you're safe, but you're not, Kacey Mallory,
his eyes warned from the darkness.
I'll have you. I'll have you every way there is to have a woman. You couldn't stop me if you wanted to. And you don't.

Somehow she heard his silent challenge, attuned to him as she had never been to any other man.
Not now,
her jade eyes answered.
Not ever, Englishman. You can look forever, but you'll never find me.

With a little gasp, Kacey broke free and stumbled forward over the grass, knowing no danger could match that of being caught in this man's arms.

Almost immediately she slipped in the wet grass and fell to her knees. Without a word, Draycott swept her up into his arms and strode forward across the glistening sweep of lawn.

Somehow her hands slid around his neck; somehow her fingers combed through his wet hair.

Kacey felt him shudder.

And then the shuddering was hers.

The gatehouse before them, Kacey raised wild, dazed eyes. In the darkness, the towers stood stark and forbidding. The house seemed almost to watch them, a thing of power and tangible will.

Determined to hold sway forever over these ancient acres. In spite of whatever frail, hapless humans might stumble across its shadowed paths.

Kacey frowned, trying to ignore the chill tendrils of fear that swept down her spine. Trying to ignore the angry power of Draycott's tensed shoulders beneath her hands.

How did I ever consider this place comforting? she wondered as the brooding Englishman carried her beneath the stone arch into the silence of the abbey's watchful, waiting walls.

 

T
HE STORM PASSED ON TO
the north soon after their return. In careful silence, a white-haired butler showed Kacey to a room on the gatehouse's second floor. After reminding her to lock her door, he walked downstairs. A few moments later she heard him lock the ground-level entrance door.

Somehow the sound did little to reassure her.

She walked slowly to the bed and was asleep by the time her head touched the large and ornately embroidered feather pillow.

Twice she came awake during the night, her breath jerky, her muscles tense. But each time, the room was just as she'd left it—velvet bed curtains half pulled, behind a damask wing chair that had seen better days.

Moonlight spilled through the casement windows.

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat.

So that was it! Kacey felt a surge of relief. Just the wind shaking the glass. Just the wooden window frame creaking.

She lay back slowly, holding the bed linens protectively against her neck. It was cold for a June night, and she found herself wishing once again for her bags, which had been lost on the flight from New York. Back at Heathrow, she'd requested that they be shipped on to the abbey, when they were found.

She was reminding herself to phone the airline once again in the morning when her eyelids grew heavy. Her fingers twisted in the pristine sheets, monogrammed with dragon-entwined coronets.

How good it feels to be home again, she thought dimly just before her eyelids closed for good.

 

I
N HIS BEDROOM
, N
ICHOLAS
tossed down the agricultural journal he'd been reading and began to pace. The article had been boring enough—he should have fallen asleep hours ago. But sea-green eyes drifted before him, and a vision of tawny-colored hair.

Lips soft and proud by turns, and a body sweet beyond imagining.

With a low curse, he tried to fight the haunting pull of her, to forget the dreams.

But it was no good.

He knew without the slightest hint of a doubt that
she
was the woman in those dreams.

And he the man.

When finally he could pace no more, Nicholas sank tiredly into a chair by the window. The moon was thin and chill, like cobwebs on his face.

He slept—and was tossed instantly into dreams.

Thunder. The slash of rain and wind.

His hands fought the empty air. “Katharine! Come back—you must not go!” His eyes were stark, desperate with fear.

The wind swept back her cloak, and he saw her face. Green-eyed, chiseled beauty at cheek and chin. Her porcelain skin glazed with tears.

Guilt wedged in his throat. He had driven her away. He and Adrian, with their constant quarreling and their everlasting jealousy.

And then her wild, shrill scream, twisting his heart into a thousand pieces.

“Nooooooo!”
His pulse thundering, Nicholas jerked upright in the chair. At the window a tree branch scraped the glass.

Only the dream, he told himself, trying to steady his breathing. Only an illusion.

But tonight the pain was far worse, because tonight Nicholas had sensed that it all might have turned out differently if he hadn't been so bloody stupid.

He stared out into the silver night, choked by a wave of regret, realizing that this dream was more real than anything he'd ever known.

 

S
ILENT AND SILVER, THE
moon rose over moat and meadow, dappling yew forest and hedgerow in ice and shadow. Beneath its molten light, the walls of the abbey seemed to shimmer and change, rendered faint and then finally insubstantial.

Like a paper castle in a paper landscape.

An owl cried once from the dark stand of yews at the brow of
the hill. A night creature rustled and scurried through the dense shrubbery lining the moat.

Wrapped in a timeless dream, like a sleeper waiting to be kissed back to life, the ancient stones slept on.

The eyes were keen and clear in the moonlight.

Dark and bottomless, they studied the home wood, then swept down to the darkened windows of the turreted gatehouse.

There,
the motionless figure thought. So close.

And yet she might just as well have been an eternity away.

The eyes clouded, harsh with regret. But regret was a useless thing. “Regret is life's bitterest poison.” Hadn't he read that somewhere, eons ago?

Noiseless, the figure glided across the clipped lawns. The night seemed to hold its breath, the wind to still. As if of its own accord, the oak door swung open.

No light was lit to guide him, nor did the dark figure require any. He found the bedroom by feel and memory alone. He had memories enough for a hundred lifetimes, after all.

And then the moon met him in greeting, poured in a luminous pool on the bare wooden floor. Almost as bright as her hair spilling over the white linen pillow, he thought. Almost as beautiful as her smile, faint and soft and infinitely sweet now in sleep.

The darkness trembled. Will became being. Emotion turned to brooding substance.

A shadow fell over the sleeping woman's face.

Outside the wind rose, shaking the casement, tossing gravel and broken twigs against the gatehouse.

Dreaming still, she twisted restlessly, dimly sensing nature's distant warning.

The glass panes shuddered, and the shuddering turned to rapping. Then the rapping, too, changed—became low, urgent drumming. Beside the window, the thick damask curtains rippled and flared out, with the slow grace of an underwater scene.

The brooding eyes swept over the sleeper's face, issuing a silent command.

Wake up,
they whispered.
We have waited long for you, and now the time for sleep is past.

The phantom eyes waited, raw with hunger.

But for now, seeing her was enough. There would be time for all the rest in the long dreaming midnights of summer yet to come.

Since, of course, she could never be allowed to leave this place again.