Craving the Forbidden (Mills & Boon Modern) (The Fitzroy Legacy - Book 1) (13 page)

The door swung shut behind them, giving a bang that echoed through the empty halls. They fell back against it, Sophie pressing her shoulders against the ancient wood as her hips rose up to meet his. Her hands slid over the sinews of his back, feeling them move as their bodies pressed together and their mouths devoured each other in short, staccato bursts of longing.

‘Soph? Soph, darling, is that you?’

‘Jasper,’ she whimpered.

Kit pulled away, jerking his head back as if he’d been struck. They could hear footsteps approaching across the stone flags of the hall. Beneath the light of the vast lantern high above, Kit’s face looked as if it had been carved from ice.

Helplessly Sophie watched him turn away, then, smoothing her skirt down, she went forwards, willing her voice not to give her away.

‘Yes, it’s me. We didn’t expect you back so …’

Her words trailed off as Jasper appeared in the doorway. His face was swollen and blotched from crying, and tears still slid from his reddened eyes.

‘Oh, my darling—’ she gasped.

Jasper raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘He died.’

And in an instant Sophie was beside him, taking him into her arms, stroking his hair as he laid his head on her shoulder and sobbed, murmuring to him in a voice that ached with love.

Over his shoulder she watched Kit walk away. She willed him to turn round, to look back and catch her eye and understand.

He didn’t.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A
ND
so, not quite a week after Ralph’s lavish birthday party, preparations were made at Alnburgh for his funeral.

Kit returned to London the morning following Ralph’s death. Sophie didn’t see him before he left and though Thomas murmured something about appointments with the bank, Sophie, rigid with misery she couldn’t express, wondered if he’d gone deliberately early to avoid her.

She was on edge the whole time. It felt as if her heart had been replaced with an alarm clock, like the crocodile in
Peter Pan
, making her painfully aware of every passing second. The smallest thing seemed to set her alarm bells jangling.

The bitter weather continued. The snow kept falling; brief, frequent flurries of tiny flakes that were almost invisible against the dead sky. Pipes in an unused bathroom burst, making water cascade through the ceiling in a corner of the armoury hall and giving the pewter breastplates their first clean in half a century. Thomas, who since Ralph’s death seemed to have aged ten years, shuffled around helplessly, replacing buckets.

After that time in the hall Sophie didn’t see Jasper cry again, but his grief seemed to turn in on itself and, without the daily focus of sitting at Ralph’s bedside and the hope of his recovery to cling to, he quietly went to pieces. He was haunted by regret that he hadn’t had the courage to come out about his sexuality to his father, driven to despair by the knowledge that now it was too late.

Sophie’s nerves were not improved by a lonely, insecure Sergio ringing the castle at odd hours of the day and night and demanding to speak to Jasper. She fielded as many of the calls as possible. Now was not the time for the truth, but the charade had come to seem pointless and the main difficulty in Jasper and Sergio’s relationship was not that it was homosexual but that Sergio was such an almighty, selfish prima donna.

On the occasions when Jasper did speak to Sergio he came off the phone with hollow eyes and a clenched jaw, and proceeded to get drunk. That was something else Sophie was worried about. It was becoming harder to ignore the fact that as the days wore on he was waking up later and making his first visit to the drinks tray in the library earlier.

But there was no one she could talk to about it. Tatiana barely emerged from her room, and Sophie sensed that speaking to Mrs Daniels or Thomas, as staff, would break some important social taboo. Of course, it was Kit that she really longed to talk to, but even if he had been there what could she say? Unless she was prepared to break Jasper’s confidence, any concerns she expressed about his welfare would only serve to make Kit think more badly of her. Who could blame Jasper for drinking too much when his girlfriend had been about to leap into bed with his brother, while he was with his dying father?

As the week dragged on she missed him more and more. She even found herself counting the days to the funeral, where she knew she would see him again.

Looking forwards to a funeral, she told herself bleakly, was a mark of a truly bad person.

The day before the funeral Sophie was perched on top of a stepladder in the armoury hall. Taking down the antique pistols that had got soaked in the burst-pipe deluge, she dried them, one by one, as Thomas was anxious that, left alone, the mechanisms would rust. Sophie was very glad to have something to occupy her while Jasper huddled on the drawing room sofa, mindlessly watching horseracing.

Her roots were beginning to come through, and what she would really have liked to do was disappear into the bathroom with a packet of hair dye, but there was a line of shallowness that even she couldn’t bring herself to cross. Anyway, the pistol-cleaning was curiously therapeutic. Close up, many of them were very beautiful, with delicate filigree patterns engraved into their silver barrels. She held one up to the light of the wrought-iron lantern, feeling the weight of it in her hand and wondering under what circumstances it had last been fired. A duel, perhaps, between two Fitzroy brothers, fighting over some ravishing aristocratic virgin.

The despair that was never far away descended on her again, faster than the winter twilight. If she was ravishing, or aristocratic—or a virgin for that matter—would Kit feel enough for her to want to fight for her?

Theatrically she pressed the barrel of the gun to her ribs, just below her breasts. Closing her eyes, she imagined him standing in front of her, in tight breeches and a ruffled white muslin shirt, his face tormented with silent anguish as he begged …

‘Don’t do it.’

Her eyes flew open. Kit was standing in the doorway, his face not tormented so much as exhausted. Longing hit her first—the forked lightning before the rumble of scarlet embarrassment that followed.

‘Tell me,’ he drawled coolly, picking up the stack of letters that had come in the last few days, ‘had you considered suicide before, or is it being here that’s driven you to make two attempts in the last week?’

Sophie made an attempt at a laugh, but it dried up in her throat and came out as a sort of bitter rasp. ‘It must be. I was perfectly well adjusted before. How was your trip?’

‘Frustrating.’

He didn’t look up from the envelopes he was sifting through. Sophie averted her eyes in an attempt not to notice how sexy he looked, especially from her vantage point where she could see the breadth of his shoulders and the way his hair curled into the back of his neck, however, her nipples tingled in treacherous recognition. She stared at the pistol in her hand, polishing the barrel with brisk strokes of the cloth.

‘I expect you’ll be going back to London yourself when the funeral’s over,’ he said absently, as if it were of no consequence to him.

‘Oh.’ The idea had come out of the blue and she felt suddenly disorientated, and a little dizzy up there on the ladder. She took a quick breath, polishing harder. ‘Yes. I expect so. I hadn’t really thought. Are you going to be staying here for a while?’

He took one letter from the pile and threw the rest down again. ‘No. I’m going back.’

‘To London?’

To give her an excuse not to look at him she put the gun back on its hooks on the wall, but her hands were shaking and it slipped from her fingers. She gave a cry of horror, but with lightning reactions Kit had stepped forwards and caught it.

‘Careful. There’s a possibility that some of these guns might still be loaded,’ he said blandly, handing it back to her. ‘No. Not London. Back to my unit.’

For a moment the pain in Sophie’s chest felt as if the gun
had
gone off.

‘Oh. So soon?’

‘There’s not much I can do here.’ For the first time their eyes met and he gave a brief, bitter smile. ‘And at least it’s a hell of a lot warmer out there.’

Sophie’s heart was thumping hard enough to shake the stepladder. She could tell from his offhand tone and his abstracted expression that he was about to walk away, and she didn’t know when she would see him alone again, or get the chance to say any of the millions of things that flooded her restless head at night when sleep wouldn’t come and she lay awake burning for him.

‘I only came back to pick this up.’ He held up the letter. ‘I have an appointment with Ralph’s solicitor in Hawksworth, so—’

‘Kit—wait.’ She jumped down from the stepladder, which was a bit higher than she thought, and landed unsteadily in front of him so he had to reach out a hand to grab her arm. He withdrew it again immediately.

Sophie’s cheeks flamed. ‘The other night—’ she began miserably, unable to raise her head. ‘I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t a mistake. I knew what I was doing, and I—’

His eyes held a sinister glitter, like the frost outside. Beautiful but treacherous. ‘Is that supposed to make it better?’

She shook her head, aware that it was coming out wrong. ‘I’m trying to explain,’ she said desperately. ‘I don’t want you to think that Jasper and I— It’s not—we’re not—’

Kit’s mouth twisted into a smile of weary contempt. ‘I’m not blaming
you
for what happened—it was just as much my fault. But I don’t think either of us can really pretend it wasn’t wrong.’ Moving past her, he went to the huge arched door and put his hand on the iron latch. ‘Like you, I don’t have that many unbreakable rules but I wasn’t aware until recently that one of them is that you don’t touch your brother’s woman. Under any circumstances.’

‘But—’

‘Particularly not just because you’re both bored and available.’

The cruelty of his words made her incapable of reply. The door gave its graveyard creak as he opened it and went out, leaving nothing but an icy blast of winter in his wake.

The windscreen wipers beat in time to the throbbing in Kit’s head, swiping the snow from in front of his eyes. But only for a minute. No sooner was the glass clear than more snow fell, obscuring everything again.

It seemed hideously symbolic of everything else in his life right now.

In London, trying to make some sense of Alnburgh’s nightmarishly complicated legal and financial position, he had come up against nothing but locked doors and dead ends. But at least there he had had some perspective on the situation with Sophie.

Being back within touching distance of her had blown it all out of the water again.

Was it her acting ability or the way she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, or the fact that watching her rub the barrel of that gun had almost made him pull her down off the ladder and take her right there, against the door, that made him want to believe her? Wanted to make him accept it without question when she said that a little thing
like being Jasper’s girlfriend
was no obstacle to them sleeping together?

He pulled up in the market square and switched the car engine off. For a moment he just sat there, staring straight ahead without seeing the lit-up shops, the few pedestrians, bundled up against the weather as they picked their way carefully over the snowy pavements.

Since his mother had left when he was six years old, Kit had lived without love. He didn’t trust it. He had come to realise that he certainly didn’t need it. Instead he had built his life on principles. Values. Moral codes. They were what informed his choices, not
feelings
.

And they were what he had to hold on to.

He got out of the car and slammed the door with unnecessary force and headed for the offices of Baines and Stanton.

The Bull was beginning to fill up with after-work drinkers when Kit came out of his meeting with the solicitor. He knocked back his first whisky in a single mouthful standing at the bar, and ordered another, which he took to a table in the corner.

He intended to be there for a while; he might as well make himself comfortable. And inconspicuous. On the wall opposite he noticed the Victorian etching of Alnburgh Castle. It looked exactly the same now as it had done a hundred years ago, he thought dully. Nothing had changed at all.

Apart from the fact it was no longer anything to do with him because
Ralph Fitzroy wasn’t his father.

It was funny, he thought, frowning down into the amber depths of his glass, several whiskies later. He was a bomb-disposal expert, for God’s sake. He was trained to locate explosives and disarm them before they did any damage, and all the time he’d been completely oblivious to the great big unexploded bombshell in the centre of his own life.

It explained everything, he mused as the whisky gave a sort of warm clarity to his thoughts. It explained why Ralph had been such a spiteful
bastard
when he was growing up. And why he had always refused to discuss the future of the estate. It explained …

He scowled, struggling to fit in the fact that his mother had left him with a man who wasn’t his father, and failing.

Oh, well, it explained some things. But it changed everything.

Everything.

He stood up, his chest suddenly tight, his breath clogging in his throat. Then, draining his whisky in one mouthful, left the bar.

Wrapped in a towel, still damp from the bath, Sophie put her bag on the bed and surveyed the contents in growing dismay.

Out of long habit she hadn’t ever bothered to unpack, so she couldn’t, even for a moment, enjoy a glimmer of hope that there might be something she’d temporarily forgotten about hanging in the wardrobe. Something smart. And black. And suitable for a funeral.

Black she could do, she thought, rifling through the contents of her case, which was like a Goth’s dressing up box. It was smart and suitable where she fell down.

Knickers.

How could she have been so stupid as to spend most of the day looking for displacement activities and polishing pistols when she could have nipped out to The Fashion Capital of the North, which must surely do an extensive range of funeral attire? But it was way too late now. And she was pretty much left with one option.

She’d balled her last unlucky purchase from Braithwaite’s in the bottom of the bag, from whence she’d planned to take it straight to the nearest charity shop when she got back to London, but she pulled it out again now and regarded it balefully. It was too long obviously, but if she cut it off at the knee and wore it with her black blazer, it might just do …

Rubbing herself dry, she hastily slipped on an oversized grey jumper of Jasper’s and some thick hiking socks and set off downstairs. It was late. Tatiana had retired to her room ages ago and had supper on a tray, Thomas had long since gone back to his flat in the gatehouse and Sophie had helped a staggering, slightly incoherent Jasper to bed a good hour ago, after he had fallen asleep on the sofa watching
The Wizard of Oz
. However, the fact that all the lights were still on downstairs suggested Kit hadn’t come back yet.

Her heart gave an uneven thud of alarm. Passing through the portrait hall, she looked at the grandfather clock. It was almost midnight. Kit had said something about him going to see the solicitor—surely he should have been back hours ago?

Visions of icy roads, twisted metal, blue lights zigzagged through her head, filling her with anguish. How ridiculous, she told herself grimly, switching the light on to go down the kitchen steps. It was far more likely that he’d met some old flame and had gone back to her place.