A Perfect Storm (29 page)

I do not know what to do. Although they are quite so unalike no person should expect it, William and Jude are never at a loss for conversation. You have seen this as well. I’ve often sat in front of a fire with them in the evenings and marveled at how they are never reaching for topics on which to speak, or ever shy to share an opinion. Often they are quite loud and disagreeable, but always they come together as friends the next day. Now I see it is more than friendship. Much more.

From the moment I witnessed this intimacy between William and Jude, I have done nothing but consider what should happen next. I have not confronted them. I confess that I do not know what to say or do. I have begun to think I should make an excuse and return to England. I would tell William I plan to come back to Ravenstoke but in fact remain in England forever. As much as I believe he and I have a true friendship, he has never been so passionate with me as I witnessed him with Jude seven days ago. Jude has always been my favorite sibling. And while I do not know what to do or how to face him during this time, my love for him and my memories of the support he has always given me as a sister who often disagreed with our parents remains strong. Perhaps it is better to let them be together at Ravenstoke, and I return home to find something of a new life there. Perhaps to find a clandestine love one day for myself, as now I know it can not only exist, but flourish.

I am in great need of your council, Jane. Of the two of us, you were always the one to think clearer and remain calm in a moment of crisis. I pray this letter does not disgust you and that I never hear from you again. I await your sage advice.

Your desperate friend,

Calliope.

“Wow.” Sophie had to read the letter a third time and then a fourth. Like Calliope, she didn’t exactly know how to feel. On the one hand, it was quite wonderful that these two men had found each other in a time when such an attraction was not only scandalous but also illegal. All the same, how heartbreaking for Calliope to discover her husband had not given her passion because he was in love with her brother.

From other historical documentation, Sophie knew that Calliope had taken her friend’s advice and remained at Ravenstoke. Now Sophie wondered if the woman—very pretty, according to two drawings Sophie had seen—had been able to find someone in America to love her the way she deserved. She had to have been a kind and empathetic person, as she’d never revealed to the authorities the relationship she’d discovered between William and Jude. Back then, with the beliefs people held about homosexuality, as well as discovering her husband was not only cheating on her but doing so with another man who was her brother, she easily could have sold him out, and nobody would have judged her for doing it.

Wide awake now, Sophie let her mind wander as she shut down the computer.
Do I have to research you next, Calliope
? Her heart hurt for the solitary life of the wife as much as it did for two men who had to keep their love in hiding.
Did you find a man for yourself
? By the end of her life, had Calliope understood what it was like to be passionately in love and loved equally in return?

Sophie had yet to go through all of the documentation pertaining to Ravenstoke. Perhaps an answer already lay hidden in that information. Or maybe, just maybe, Lucien already knew the answer.
No time like now to ask
. Sophie hopped out of bed, revved up with adrenaline for this new day. One look at herself as she passed by a mirror—not to mention got a whiff of herself—and she screeched to a halt. Naked, beyond disheveled, bruised in a few places from what she’d participated in—reveled in—last night, and ripe with the smells of sex once again, and Sophie changed her plans.

While pulling on her shirt and skirt—Lucien had torn her panties beyond repair—Sophie decided a shower and a fresh set of clothes were first on her agenda. Then, after having breakfast, or more accurately, lunch by now, she would gather up her Ravenstoke files and go find Lucien in the study.

Whether he was ready or not, she was coming at him for round two.

* * * *

Sophie had just stepped out of the shower, still slick with moisture, when “Lucien! Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch!” thundered through the castle.

In Royce’s voice.

What the heck?

Royce roared for Lucien again, clearly at the top of his lungs. Rage filled his voice, and Sophie started moving with lightning speed. She grabbed the first dress from the wardrobe she could pull on over her head, tripped over her feet, and thudded to the floor as she tried to yank on a pair of panties. She got herself back upright and didn’t bother with anything else.

The words Royce yelled rang clear in Sophie’s ears, but they didn’t make sense. Royce knew Lucien? His tone held a definite sense of familiarity.
Oh
. Sophie stumbled again but picked herself up and kept moving. So this was why she was here. It had something to do with Royce. Lucien and Royce were nearly the same age, and they were both strong, unyielding men. Maybe they’d gone to college together?
Oh. No
. Sophie staggered.
It couldn’t be
. Royce worked out of Atlanta, and Lucien used to own a club in the same city. Once she’d seen where those clubs were located, Sophie should have put two and two together and figured out at least the beginnings of her presence at Ravenstoke. Only she never would have picked her uptight, overbearing brother for someone who frequented a sex club.

Sophie shivered. A thousand new questions popped into her head, but she kept running toward her brother’s shouts anyway. She ran down the hall toward Lucien’s wing of the castle and turned just in time to see Magnus hold the study door open for Royce. Her tall, muscular brother paused at the door, swore, and uttered, “I should have known you’d still be at his side.” He shoved into the study, and Sophie heard him add, “I guess blindly worshipping one Cabot bastard wasn’t enough for you.”

Magnus snarled, but Royce had already taken up yelling at Lucien again, so he surely didn’t see it. Just as Magnus moved to shut the door, Sophie shoved her way inside. “I have every right to be in this room too.”

With only a rise of his brows, Magnus let Sophie into the study.

Sophie shivered again. Where she’d been toasty only moments ago, nothing but icy cold swirled around her bare legs and arms now, creating goose bumps in its wake. Her stomach churned, and she knew with a sick certainty that whatever had her brother in such a rage had to do with her and Lucien.
And what we’ve done since my arrival at Ravenstoke. Not an accident
. She’d known from the start.

From across the desk, Royce lunged for Lucien, but Magnus jumped in, grabbed Royce by the arms, and wrestled him into a chair. Royce was a big man, but Magnus was even bigger. After a mighty struggle, Royce stopped fighting, and Magnus stepped away.

Royce bared his teeth at Lucien, and he had such a blunt, square jaw and face he looked like a brown-haired, brown-eyed grizzly. “I will kill you for what you’ve done to her, you sick bastard.” Venom coated each hissed word. “I will put you in prison for it, where you will rot away the rest of your miserable life.”

For just a split second, Lucien glanced at Magnus. No more than a blink, but when he shifted his focus back to Royce, his stare changed to something full of familiar distance. “You’ll never prove I was behind it. My lawyer will make the claim that anyone at Ravenstoke could have done it, and you will not be able to successfully pin it on any single one of us.”

Royce surged again. Once more Magnus shoved Royce back into his seat. Through clenched teeth, his mouth barely moving, Royce hissed, “I will make it my life’s mission to destroy you. I promise.”

No fire, nothing but flat gold lived in Lucien’s eyes. “You can try. I don’t care. I did what needed to be done.” He steepled his hands and tapped his fingers against his chin. “You’re lucky I didn’t do worse, Emerson. A sibling for a sibling.” Finally a hint of something volatile sparked life in Lucien’s stare. As he softly added, “I did warn you,” fingers of icy cold danced down Sophie’s spine, and she went very still.

“It was a baseless fucking warning almost eight fucking years ago!” Royce roared down the walls. “You weren’t in your right mind!”

Lucien’s pupils flared just a hair. “I’ve learned a great deal about patience. You knew me well enough to understand that I never issue empty threats.”

Feeling as if she watched a chess match without being privy to the rules, Sophie jumped between her brother and Lucien. She spun on Lucien first. “What is going on here?” Then she glared at Royce and flinched at the hurricane churning in his dark stare. “What are you accusing him of doing to me?” Her mind didn’t have to spin. It could only be one thing.
The sex
. “I’ve consented to everything that happened here, Royce. And how do you even know?” Before the thought
Lucien told him in order to lure him here, because he was using me as some kind of revenge
could fully process itself in Sophie’s mind, Magnus shot up and circled around to Lucien’s side of the desk.

“Allow me,” Magnus murmured. After a few seconds of clicking, Magnus spun the monitor around to face Sophie and cranked up the volume.

Oh. My. Lord
. Sophie’s stomach fell straight out of her, and she stumbled to a chair. Before her, filling the screen, was a Web site with her name blazoned across the top. Box after box of videos playing filled the space, each one showing her in the throes of the sexual indiscretions she’d engaged in here at Ravenstoke. Not only video, but the cameras had captured sound too. Noises of her moaning and begging for various sexual acts mingled with the groans and shouts from the other people at Ravenstoke—Lucien included—and filled the study in a sexual symphony.

Horrified, she flicked her gaze over the scenes, the air rushing from her lungs as she watched. First Lucien spanking her while she watched Jade and Emma through a lust-filled gaze as the women got off on each other on the conference table. Then she shifted to watch Lucien with his face in her pussy and his finger in her ass, with her back arched over the arm of the chair in the St. Andrew’s cross room, begging him to do more, with Magnus fucking Cale and Jade sucking his cock visible in the scene too. A full-color, high-def image of her chained to the table last night, with Cale whipping her and Jade and Emma worshipping her breasts filled her vision so vividly she could even see Lucien pacing in the background. In a different scene, a hoarse cry from Lucien tore her gaze farther down the screen just in time to watch herself rip the torpedo dildo from Lucien’s ass, only to shove it back in again and begin to fuck him, obvious sexual pleasure on her face as she did it. From just a few short hours ago, she saw herself bound spread eagle on Lucien’s huge bed, and the man, his beautiful nude body glistening with sweat, pounding away at her to her lust-filled groans of delight. And—
oh my, please no
—finally the sincere but awkward night where she’d ridden the dildo she’d attached to the bench was there to complete her humiliation.

All of these moments now living on the World Wide Web. For anyone who searched her name to see.

The sounds and images bombarded her brain, her heart, killing her. Pain ripped through Sophie’s gut and chest. She suddenly dived forward and shut off the monitor, unable to see and hear it anymore, and threw the room into silence.

Wetness burned behind her eyes, but she stiffened her back and looked right into Lucien’s dead stare. “This was what you were doing all along?” She couldn’t help it, her voice cracked. “Seducing me and filming me so you could put me on the Internet?”

Lucien raised one of those goddamned arrogant brows. “You had good instincts right from the start, Miss Emerson.” His mouth, no longer appearing kind in the slightest, twisted with cruelty. “You should have listened to them.”

Still breaking inside, Sophie whispered, “But why?”

Royce shoved out of his chair and yanked Sophie to her feet too. “Because he’s crazy,” he shared while pulling her to the door. “He thinks I killed his brother, and he refuses to believe the evidence and complete lack of facts that proved to every sane person that I didn’t.”

“You poisoned him!” Lucien shot to stand too, and he jabbed his finger at Royce as if it had a dagger attached to the end. “You gave him the drugs and told him to take them! You knew he was upset that you’d left him. You might as well have killed him with your own bare hands.”

Unable to process the vile hatred Lucien was spewing, Sophie tugged against her brother’s attempts to get her out of the study. Not only had Lucien and Royce known each other, but Royce and Josh had been romantically involved? And Lucien held Royce responsible for his brother’s death?
Not possible
. Sophie looked up at Royce, into eyes that had always only held love and kindness for her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
He couldn’t have. He’s not capable
. She didn’t understand.

As if sensing her turmoil, Royce parted his lips as all the color fled from his face. “Sophie. No—”

“Yes!” Lucien’s righteous rage exploded within the room and crackled against every surface and person in his vicinity. “You no longer get to shield her from this or, worse, fucking outright lie to her. You fucking look at me, and you listen to every word I speak, you goddamn murderer.” As Sophie stared and listened, she could envision Lucien as an animal, snarling while all of his hackles stood straight up on end.

Lucien narrowed his stare to amber slits in Royce’s direction and viciously said, “You count yourself lucky that I chose this method of payback for your precious sister, because I could have done much worse. I thought about killing her, you son of a bitch. I thought about it more than once. For eight years, I fucking considered it and could even see myself doing it. But I didn’t. I devised a different plan, one that will kill her soul over and over again by degrees.” Lucien finally sat back down, but not a hint of the flames burning around him ebbed. “I do not kill Sophie’s body, as you did to Josh,” he said, his voice dangerously soft, “but I have killed her career and any chance of a relationship with a man who won’t secretly or even openly consider her a whore. Every time a boss or a boyfriend hears the name Sophie Emerson, some colleague in the field or a buddy will have visited this Web site and direct that person to take a look, and they will know everything she did here. So now you learn to live with this version of your sibling’s murderer getting away with the crime”—he looked straight at Royce and didn’t flinch—“the way I’ve had to learn to live with Josh’s.”