Lord of Ice (26 page)

He closed his eyes with a pained expression, then hesitantly forced the words out. “Something . . . happened to me on Guy Fawkes Night, Miranda. The cannon salutes, the fireworks—I can’t explain it.” He dragged his eyes open and stared at her in despair. “I forgot where I was. I was in Knight House, sitting with Alice and Harry while Lucien was out on an errand—he had asked me to look after them—and something inside of me snapped.”

“Snapped?”

“I thought I was back at the war. Don’t ask me what happened, for I can’t recall. All I know is that when I came back to myself, I had a knife in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. I don’t remember picking them up. Don’t you see? I could have hurt someone, Miranda. I could have killed someone. Never mind Alice—a defenseless woman. I could have hurt Harry. I could have hurt the child,” he whispered, his voice breaking with anguish.

Longing to take him into her arms to comfort him, she grasped the latch of the stall door and started to open it, but he stopped her, gripping her wrist through the bars.

Her startled gaze flew to his face.

He stared fiercely at her. “Go into the house. You know my reasons. Now go away.”

“No,” she said softly. “I want to help you.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“I didn’t want your help either, at first, but you have to trust me. This is the right thing to do. Let me hold you.”

“Stay away from me,” he whispered.

“Stop pushing me away!” she cried, her face flushing.

“What do you think, that you can nurse me back to health, as though I had a cold?” He sneered. “I’ll only drag you down with me. There is no cure. I should know. I’ve tried everything.”

“By yourself! You haven’t tried letting someone love you, take care of you.”

“I don’t need that. I never have.”

“So arrogant,” she whispered in outrage. “Heaven forfend that the great Winterley should ever need anyone. You stupid man! You’re like a lion with a thorn in its paw that bites the person who comes to help it.”

“I could do much more than bite you, my dear. I could reach through these bars and snap your lovely neck. Do you realize that?”

“You don’t frighten me,” she said. “I would rather take the risk than run and leave you here alone. You’re not the only one who’s looked death in the face, Damien Knight. I watched my parents die and was powerless to help them, but by God, I will not lose you. You must try. You must fight this—but not alone. You’re an army man; you know our forces couldn’t possibly have won without the men coordinating their efforts.”

“The men. Precisely. We do not expose our women to such dangers.”

“Why must you be so stubborn? You can’t be all
that
mad, or Uncle Jason would not have named you my guardian.”

“He didn’t know. I hid it,” he snarled. “I hid it from them all. Only Lucien knows. Alice has an inkling, for she was there, but you’re the only one who’s seen the ugly, unvarnished truth.”

“Obviously, then, I am the only one who can help.”

“God, why won’t you listen?” he roared, shoving back from the stall door with an abrupt motion that startled the mare. “What’s it going to take to get it through your head, girl? I’ve told you the truth. I can’t make it any clearer.”

“Yes, you’ve told me,” she countered staunchly, “and I’m telling you, you’re going to need a better reason than that to get rid of me.”

“A better reason?” he exclaimed.

“Yes, because I still say we could beat this together. I
know
we could.”

“Very well, then, here’s one you might believe: You’re beneath me, Miranda. How’s that? You’re penniless and illegitimate, and I’m an earl.”

To every person there are certain words that must not be said; Damien knew what these words were for Miranda, who, until the day she had arrived at Knight House, had been rejected on all sides because of her mixed parentage. To him, the words were a last resort, chosen with deadly precision. He watched her courage crumble and the light of her faith in him extinguished in her eyes, but he could no more unsay them than a highwayman could call back a well-aimed bullet. He could only stand there, mute with pain at the wound he had inflicted, but holding firm for her sake against the river of remorse that nearly drowned him.

Slowly, she absorbed the cruel, cutting remark. For a long moment, she was silent, searching his face. Then she looked away and swallowed hard.

“You are right,” she said, her voice rather choked but steady. She nodded stiffly. “These are facts that I cannot deny. Forgive me, Lord Winterley. I shall trouble you no more.”

She was gone in a moment, pivoting with a slight dizziness in the motion, then walking quickly down the aisle of the barn.

He steeled himself against the urge to chase after her, catch her up in his arms, and never let her go. She slipped out the barn door. Once she was out of sight, he heard her light footfalls break into a run toward the house. He closed his eyes and lowered his head in a wave of suffering, while Fancy nudged with her velvety muzzle at his coat pocket.

“You incompetent bungler!” Algernon roared, cuffing his servant on the ear.

Egann yelped at the blow and went flying across the office, stumbling over his lame foot to sprawl on the floor in a whimpering heap. “I’m sorry, my lord. I did what you told me—”

“I did not tell you to fail, but so you did. Twice. You are useless. Get up and stop sniveling. I’ve got to think.” Algernon paced in frustration, his hands braced on his hips. The stealth of his aim was compromised with each near miss, but worse was his own traitorous relief at the failure of Egann’s second attempt on his niece’s life.

Algernon had finally seen Miranda FitzHubert for himself at Lady Holland’s Christmas party, though he had kept his distance and had left before she or any of the formidable Knight brothers had noticed him. He trembled with queer sensations flooding through him as the vision of the young, vibrant beauty haunted his mind—so full of life and freshness and zest. He had never seen a more exquisite, more graceful creature. She was a Botticelli goddess, with her laughing green eyes, her roundish, pink cheeks, and her sable ringlets falling in artful coils across her shoulders. She glowed with health; aye, he thought, she was made for throwing fine, strapping sons. She had all of Fanny’s gaiety and Richard’s fire.

Fanny.

Once upon a time, Algernon Sherbrooke had loved Fanny Blair. At twenty-five, he had thrown himself into his quest to win the famous actress as his mistress. He had been so attentive, so conscientious, but just when she had begun to flutter down into his grasp like some exotic butterfly, along came his elder brother, Richard, with his charm and popularity, his fortune, his good looks, his title. Richard had callously snatched her from his very grasp. That slut had gone willingly enough.

Later, they both had tried, Richard and she, to explain their feelings for each other in a way that would not wound him, but Algernon had simply swallowed his humiliation, conceding to their illicit union with gentlemanly grace . . . outwardly. He had learned his lesson about love that day. It was a bad investment.

But now there was young, luscious Miranda. He wished he had not seen her, for since the moment he had lain eyes on her, he had fought with himself in the hopes that perhaps there was some other way. The feelings she roused in him, her uncle, were appalling for obvious reasons, stirring the embers of a passion he had thought extinguished long ago. Yet she made him realize what a lonely, dried-up, old man he had become, though he was only forty-five, old before his time. Such a waste, such a waste, he thought, brooding, pacing in his office.

“Master—” Egann started meekly.

“Shut up.”

Just then, the dogs let up a din in the entrance hall. Algernon stalked to the door of his office and flung it open, an order to the butler on the tip of his tongue to keep those damned animals quiet.

To his surprise, he saw that the reason for their clamoring was the arrival of their favorite, Crispin. Algernon narrowed his eyes as Crispin tried to slip past him and up the stairs without being seen.

“Crispin. Have you no manners, boy?”

Top hat in hand, his son halted and turned to him, scratching his eyebrow. “Er, hullo, Father.”

It was most unusual to see the boy at this early hour of the evening.

“Dining at home tonight?” he asked suspiciously; then his face drained of blood. He looked at his son’s pale countenance and felt sick to his stomach. “You’ve been at the gaming hells, haven’t you?” he demanded in a voice that shook. “How much?”

“Father—”

“How much did you lose?”
he roared, not caring if the deuced Frogs heard him all the way across the Channel.

He had expected the usual denials, excuses, the boyish attempts at charm, but the full peril of his son’s latest losses hit him when Crispin threw his fine hat down on the floor, sat on the bottom stair, and buried his face in his hands in a pose of utter despair.

“Oh, you worthless cur,” Algernon whispered.

“I’m sorry, Father,” he wrenched out. “A thousand pounds. I lost it all.”

Infuriated, Algernon seized his son by the arm and dragged him into his office, slamming the door behind him.

A second later, he heard his wife tapping timidly on the door. “My lord, is our son in there with you?”

“Leave us!” he bellowed through the door. With shaking hands, he shoved his charming, spoiled son into the chair.

Egann crawled over to Crispin and crouched like a dog by his polished boots—the best that money could buy.

Crispin rested his elbow on the chair arm and dragged his hand through his guinea-gold curls like a newly fallen angel. “I’m a failure, an utter failure,” he whispered, still weeping. “I know it, Father. I cannot seem to do otherwise.”

“Yes,” Algernon snarled in his face, “you are a failure. You have brought this family to the brink of ruin. I hope you have not gone to another of those moneylenders for a loan, because I cannot repay it. Do you understand, Crispin? You have ruined me. You have ruined your father.”

Tears filled Crispin’s blue eyes. “I shall fix it, Father. I’ll think of something. I’ll find work—”

“Work?” He backhanded him hard across the face. “What do you think we are, middle class?”

Crispin looked up, startled, his cherubic face tearstained and red with the slap.

His heart pounding as inspiration gripped him, Algernon pointed a warning finger in his face. “I will tell you exactly what you are going to do, my boy, and if you utter so much as one syllable of complaint, I will leave you to the loan sharks to cut their pound of flesh from you as you deserve.”

“Anything, Father,” he whispered.

“There is a girl. An heiress. She has a fortune, Crispin, a fortune that no one else knows about but I . . . and Egann and now you, as well.”

Crispin’s tongue flicked over his lips. “A . . . substantial fortune?”

At last, an intelligent question from the fool. Algernon’s lips thinned in a feral smile. “Does fifty thousand pounds sound significant to you?”

His son’s eyes widened.

“Now, God may have denied you no more sense than he gave a hen, my boy, but he gave you looks. You will woo this girl and win her, or we are finished, Crispin. Do you understand? Me, you, your mother, your sisters. I mean debtor’s prison.”

Horror, then resolution, filled his youthful face. “I will win her, Father. If it is the last thing I do.”

“She is well guarded. She has many suitors.”

“I don’t care if she were the sultan’s virgin sister, nay, kept in an ivory palace with a horde of janissaries to protect her. I vow I shall win her somehow. I know I’ve failed you in the past, Father, but this I can do. Just tell me who she is and she is mine.”

His hazel eyes hardened in satisfaction. “She is your little bastard cousin, Crispin. Miss Miranda Fitz-Hubert. And I don’t want to hear one word from you about marriage between first cousins becoming unfashionable. So help me, if you say it, I will put you through that window. It is an aristocratic tradition and perfectly legal.”

Crispin searched his eyes. “I have heard of this girl. They say she is beautiful.”

Algernon made no comment.

“Is she not the ward of Colonel Lord Winterley? His brother, Lord Alec Knight, is my good friend. I can gain an introduction through him—”