Wolfsgate (13 page)

She pulled the coverlet higher around them. Justine remained awake for a long while, studying her husband’s relaxed face.

Brandon’s hand sifted through her hair which slid like thick ropes of silk through his fingers. He had woken to find her head on his chest, her hands curled into her body at his side like a child’s, her legs bent by his waist. He pulled the bedcovers over her shoulders in a sudden surge of protectiveness.

Just moments ago he had been gripping Justine’s waist, crumpling her nightdress in his hand, his lungs squeezing for air. Fragments of another dream had awoken him. Luckily he hadn’t woken her. He smoothed the thin garment down over her warm skin and then sank his fingers back into her mane of thick hair letting out a sigh.

How she bewildered him.

“I’m still not sure if I can trust you,”
he had said to her earlier during his bath.

There had been no pleading on her part, no teary-eyed imploring, no batting of those beautiful, long eyelashes. None of the usual feminine tricks that were catalogued in his memory and no attempt at a seduction with him naked in a tub under her very hands. No, no typical feminine maneuvers whatsoever. He had waited for the signs, yet they never came. She had even answered his accusatory questions with genuine frankness.

His head sank back into the pillow. Even as a young girl Justine had been guileless, and he and Annie had always been protective of her. Now he was lying in her bed next to her, feeling something other than brotherly protectiveness, something vibrant, and fervent, and dark. He exhaled, his hand stroking over his painful erection.

Annie had always said they couldn’t fool anyone with Justine around, who often unwittingly spoiled many of the schemes she frequently planned against the rest of them.
‘It’s a gift Justine, don’t ever change. Dissembling has become second nature for us,’
Annie had once said hugging her stepsister close.

Brandon had laughed as well because it was true. Any sort of lying or pretense had always been a challenge for the young Justine.
‘You’re shy,’
he had told her once when he had sensed her irritation with herself.
‘But that simply means you’re sensitive. You see and understand things others don’t.’

His father had trusted her straight on his deathbed, hadn’t he? Lord Jeremy was not a man easily fooled. He had certainly kept his brother Richard, a weak character whom he barely tolerated, at bay for years, making sure his visits to Wolfsgate were few and far between. That was probably why he had agreed to let Justine stay at Wolfsgate for longer patches after her mother had died. He had offered the innocent girl a respite from a stepfather and stepbrother who obviously never gave too much of a damn about her and much preferred London society to the country. And now years later, this orphaned, abandoned girl had saved his bloody life, nursed him back to health, and protected his inheritance all the while.

One artless, unworldly young woman.

Well, not too artless, for she must have had guile to pull off some sort of scene at the hospital to get him released. He would have liked to have seen it. She had even used a borrowed wedding ring to play her part. And the cryptic accounting with Davidson behind William and Richard’s backs? No, this girl had done a lot of growing up over the years out of grim necessity. His finger coiled a springy curl of her hair.

He had to trust her.

He wanted to.

JUSTINE’S LIPS BRUSHED AGAINST A WALL OF WARMTH
. She burrowed closer to the soft solidity surrounding her as she licked her dry lips. Her tongue swiped against something taut and smooth which pulsed under her touch. There was movement over her bare thigh, which was trapped in between two massive legs and…

Justine’s eyes flew open and her breath stuck in her chest. The room was engulfed in inky darkness. It was still the middle of the night, and her body was entwined with Brandon’s. Justine tried to extract her leg from his as gracefully as possible, which proved to be impossible. Thankfully, he shifted slightly and his legs released hers. She twisted away from his very appealing, very naked, heat-saturated form never having been more grateful for the darkness. Justine eased back against her pillow once more.

The mattress moved beneath her. Brandon let out a groan and drew his body up against the headboard, adjusting the pillows behind him. His fingers drifted across her bare shoulder then down her back. Her eyes flew open once more.

“Justine? Are you awake?” His fingers swept the hair from her neck sending tingles skittering across her skin.

“Yes.”

“Tell me more of what has been going on here since I left for the Indies,” he said, his voice low, gentle.

She turned over on her back. His face loomed over her, his loose, dark hair almost touching his shoulders. Clearing her throat, Justine pushed herself up towards the headboard.

“Can you not sleep?” she asked.

He rubbed his eyes. “I’m always dreaming, always waking.”

“You need a bedtime story then?”

“Yes that’s it.” He let out a soft chuckle. “Give us a fairytale, would you? Why don’t you tell me about our wedding?”

Justine let out a laugh. The richness of it flowed over his weary muscles like warm oil. She drew her knees up to her chest and faced him. “That sounds rather bizarre doesn’t it?”

“It does, but I think we should embrace it. We are living most peculiar circumstances. Tell me.”

“Once upon a time a stepfather and stepbrother explained to a young lady that the prince of the castle, feared lost at sea in a horrible shipwreck, had been found in a hospital in the great city. He was, however, physically frail, scarred, and considered insane.” She drew out her voice as if she were recounting a horror tale. Brandon laughed.

“They wanted her to see the young prince in his misery, so they took her to the dungeon where they kept him. He was in oblivion, muttering to himself, dirty and disheveled. He was so changed, so utterly different from the prince she had known. It frightened the young lady, made her sad. Then it made her angry.”

“I remember the lady’s eyes, her voice,” Brandon murmured. “She made an oath, did she not?”

“She did.”

“Say it.”

Justine took in a breath. “She promised the prince she would not leave him there alone, that she would come back for him, that she wouldn’t let them destroy him.”

“You kept that promise,” he whispered.

Her fingers curled into the bedlinen at his side, and she cleared her throat. “The doctor told the young lady that the prince’s heart was no longer strong. ‘See,’ they assured her, ‘he’s dying, you’ll be a widow in no time.’

“Is that what they said?”

“But she felt horrible for she knew agreeing to this would mean betraying the prince and the King. She pleaded with them, but they only laughed at the idea that procuring a wife for the prince was proving to be so difficult.”

Brandon sighed. “Yes. Quite comical.”

“They said if she didn’t marry the prince, they would find someone else for her, someone she would surely not like. They reminded her that they could have turned her out after her mother had died, but they hadn’t. They had taken care of her and allowed her to thrive at Wolfsgate Castle as part of their family. Therefore, she must do as they bid her.”

“They returned to London where they purchased a special license to marry without the usual bans and arranged for a parson to officiate at the prince’s bed. The prince only mumbled something about velvet. The parson obligingly took that as an ‘I will.’ They put a quill in the prince’s hand, and he scratched on the registrar’s document with some assistance, then they handed it to the young lady to sign. Thus, the young prince and the young lady were married and became Prince and Princess of Wolfsgate Castle. The End.”

“Ah, quite the remarkable affair, I’m sorry I have no recollection of it.” He rolled onto his back and let out a dry laugh.

“And I am sorry I am able to remember it so well.” Justine glanced at him. “After that I stayed home, didn’t go out really, except to the tenants or the rare errand in the village or to visit Annie’s grave and to church on holy days. William declined any invitations I received, telling everyone I had taken ill over your loss and Lord Jeremy’s death.”

A twist of images and emotions billowed in the shadowy darkness of the room.

Justine let out a sigh. “Through all of this I clung to the fact that you were still alive, and it was within my power to change their game, if only I would take the risk and try. Like you had tried to find Annie in the dark rain. You left your warm bed in the early hours of that cold and rainy morning and ran down to the creek half-dressed to find her.” She blinked at him. “Maybe that’s why William resents you so much. It’s not that he blames you for her death, but he blames himself for not having tried to save her. You were the one who ran to find his sister before he could even get himself out of bed, because I had gone to you.”

“What would Annie say if she could see us together now?”

“Oh, she’d have a right laugh, I expect.”

“Well, we owe this all to medieval Traherne tradition,” Brandon muttered. “With me alive yet unfit, and with you as my wife under their thumb, they did what they wanted with my money and my holdings.”

She nodded. “The very day after I became your wife William demanded a large sum of money from the estate. Once I even saw him take some of your parents’ jewels and several paintings.”

Brandon leaned closer to her. “Does he have a problem with gaming?”

“I never had that impression, but I’m not sure. He rarely allowed me to go out socially with him and Richard.”

“William kept Davidson on so the estate would continue to generate its most basic income, but I wasn’t allowed to spend much on maintaining Wolfsgate or to keep a servant other than Molly. I kept in touch with the tenants and the basic goings-on with Mr. Davidson’s assistance.”

“You did very well considering the circumstances,” Brandon said.

“All this time I felt tremendously guilty that you were languishing in hospital. I wanted to figure out a way to bring you back.” Her fingers twisted in the sheets. “Recently, William demanded money again, a lot of money, and I did something.”

“What did you do?”

“I forged a letter from your broker in Jamaica saying that a drought had wiped out most of the sugar cane crop that year and any financial reserves you and your partners had were used to cover the losses.”

Brandon’s eyes widened.

“They’d had a dry season there, we had read about it in the papers. That’s what gave me the idea, made it believable. I needed time to figure out a way to get you back, see how ill you really were. Davidson and I even managed to intercept a letter that arrived from the partners in Jamaica where they wrote that they had been lucky and the drought hadn’t wiped out their crop. Imagine!” Justine shook her head. “I was desperate to convince William that things were falling apart here without you.”

His fingers stroked her forehead. “You did the right thing, Justine.”

“William was livid,” she said. “I knew that he was considering renting the house. Eventually he would find some other way to drain it until there was nothing left. I wrote to the hospital, and they said you were actually doing fine, but under heavy sedation. Dying, indeed. Hope I had not known for so very long was suddenly real.

“In the meantime, through a friend at his club in London, William heard that your Jamaica partners were having their annual meeting in Edinburgh. He decided to go and introduce himself in your stead and took his father with him. He would surely find out that the letter I had produced about the money lost in the drought was a fake. It was now or certain doom. I left for London immediately with Davidson, hoping we would return before he did.” She gripped his arm. “Forgive me, Brandon, for not having tried sooner,” she whispered. “You suffered, and I let it go on.”

“This has nothing to do with you, you brave girl. There is nothing to forgive.” His fingers skimmed her face. “This is all on William.”

She bit her lip and suddenly leaned over her side of the bed, sticking her hand under the mattress and removing a small satin pouch. She opened it and took out a key. “This is a key to a cabinet in the kitchen.”