The Temptation of Your Touch (18 page)

He held himself as still as a marble statue beneath her hands as she captured a thick lock of his hair between her fingers and gave it a tentative snip. She was clever enough to realize her power over him in that moment was nothing but an illusion, easily shattered by nothing more than a look or a touch.

“Was this the sort of task you once performed for Mr. Spencer?”

She glanced down to find him surveying her face, his expression inscrutable. “On occasion,” she replied, her hands slowly gaining in confidence as she moved around him.

“And was yours a happy union?”

“For a time. As are most.”

“Just how long have you been on your own?”

Forever,
she almost blurted out before remembering it only felt that way. “Nearly a decade.”

A frown touched his brow. “That’s a very long time for a woman to make her own way in this world. Was there no one to look after you after you lost your husband?”

“I’m quite capable of looking after myself, and I’ve found all the family I need right here at Cadgwyck. What of you, my lord?” she asked, hoping to shift the attention away from herself. “How long have you been
on your own
?”

She expected him to chide her for her impertinence, but he simply shrugged and said, “All my life, it seems.”

Their eyes met for the briefest of seconds, then she continued snipping gently away at the right side of his hair until its length matched that of the left. She shied away from cutting it any shorter than the rugged line of his jaw. His sooty locks tended to wave and curl even more without the extra weight bearing them down.

“There,” she said when she had finished, guiding him around on the stool so they could both admire her handiwork in the looking glass. “I believe that should do it. At least until you get to a proper barber.”

Without thinking, she reached down and feathered his freshly trimmed hair between her fingers, much as she would have done Dickon’s. Their gazes met in the looking glass and her hand froze in midmotion. No matter what duty he required of her, she had no right to touch him in such a familiar manner.

She moved to jerk her hand back, but he caught it in his own, his powerful fingers curling around hers, steadying the faint tremble he found there. He held both her gaze and her hand captive, and for a breathless moment she thought he would bring her hand to his lips or use it to inexorably tug her into the warm shelter of his lap.

Instead, he gave it a gentle squeeze. “Thank you, Mrs. Spencer.”

Assailed by a curious mixture of relief and disappointment, she slid her hand from his, then whisked her apron from his shoulders. “Will there be anything else, my lord?”

Still watching her in the looking glass through hooded eyes, he opened his mouth, then closed it again before saying softly, “No, Mrs. Spencer. I believe that will be all.”

Anne drew the door shut behind her, then sagged against it, her breath escaping her in a wistful sigh. Pippa had been right all along. Their new master
was
more dangerous than all the rest.

But for all the wrong reasons.

Chapter Sixteen

“P
LEASE, DEAREST . . .
I
HAVE
faith in you. I just know you could remember if you’d only try a bit harder.”

Max was crossing the entrance hall the next morning when he recognized his housekeeper’s voice drifting out of the drawing room. He froze in his tracks. He’d never been given to eavesdropping, but something about the soft, coaxing note in her voice—a voice that was usually crisp and edged with pride—was riveting.

“I tell you, I can’t remember!” Max recognized Hodges’s voice as well, though he’d never heard the butler sound quite so petulant. “I’ve wracked my brain until my head aches but it won’t come to me!”

“Perhaps if you gave it just one more go?” Mrs. Spencer urged.

Max eased close enough to the arched doorway to peer into the room.

Hodges was seated in a Sheraton chair that had one splintered leg propped on a book. Mrs. Spencer was kneeling beside him with a hand resting on his thigh. She was peering up into his red-rimmed eyes, hope and desperation mingled in her expression. “You mustn’t give up. You’re our only hope and we’re running out of time. Oh, please, darling . . .”

Max stiffened. If she begged him like that, he wasn’t sure he could refuse her anything.

“It’s just not there! Can’t you see I’m doing the best I can?” Hodges wailed, burying his ruddy face in his hands.

“Of course you are.” She gently patted the old man’s leg, her shoulders slumping in defeat. “There, there, dear. It’s all right. I’m so terribly sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard.”

Max cleared his throat.

Hodges jerked up his head, and both of their gazes flew to Max’s face. The sheen of tears in the butler’s eyes was unmistakable, just as was the frustration and guilt on the housekeeper’s wary face.

“Is there something amiss?” Max asked. “Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

Mrs. Spencer rose to her feet, her shoulders once again ramrod straight. “Dear Mr. Hodges has simply forgotten where he put the key to the wine cellar. I’m sure he’ll remember before we have need of it.”

Max glanced at her waist, where her ever-present
ring of keys still hung. She was lying to him. Her gaze might be bold, even challenging, but all that meant was that she had been lying for so long she had become fluent in the language. Max had lived a lie himself for almost a decade. He knew just how easily that could happen.

Hodges had averted his eyes and was gripping the carved arms of the chair in a futile effort to hide the palsied trembling of his hands.

Aside from threatening to dismiss the both of them, Max had little recourse. And if he did that, he might never learn what they were hiding. “Don’t overtax yourself, Hodges,” he said, returning his thoughtful gaze to Mrs. Spencer’s face. “Sometimes things that go missing have a way of turning up where you least expect them.”

M
AX AWOKE THE FOLLOWING
morning to the patter of rain against the French windows of his bedchamber. He considered braving the cliffs for his usual morning walk, but by the time he finished breakfast, the rain was falling in relentless gray sheets past the wall of windows in the dining room, obscuring even the tempestuous tossing of the sea.

Another man might have found the hushed gloom and the steady drumming of the rain on the roof cozy. It would have been a perfect opportunity
to return to the study, light a fire to burn off the damp, and continue to review the account ledgers and correspondence left by the former masters of Cadgwyck Manor. He had come here ostensibly to manage the estate, not haunt it himself. But the very idea of spending the day trapped behind a desk, devoting himself to the same inconsequential drivel that had consumed his attention for most of his life, suddenly seemed unbearable.

He was passing a window in the stairwell after breakfast when the rain abated just enough to allow him to catch a glimpse of the tower standing sentinel on the other side of the courtyard. He ducked his head, peering through the curtain of gloom. The mere sight of the tower quickened his senses in a way no dusty ledger ever could. He hadn’t realized until that moment just how much he had missed Angelica’s visits.

An unexpected smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. If his White Lady wouldn’t come to him, then perhaps it was time to go to her.

I
T TOOK
M
AX NEARLY
half an hour to make his way across the house to the west wing. He could simply have thrown on an overcoat and hat, slipped out one of the terrace doors, and crossed the wet cobblestones of the courtyard, but he wanted to avoid the
prying eyes of the servants. Their efforts to set the house to rights hadn’t yet progressed this far. Along the way he passed darkened rooms crowded with furniture slumbering beneath ghostly white sheets. A pair of towering doors decorated with peeling gilt opened onto a cavernous ballroom where Angelica Cadgwyck must once have danced in the arms of her adoring suitors. After Max was forced to detour around his third locked door, he began to regret not bringing his housekeeper’s ring of keys with him.

Or perhaps his housekeeper herself.

He finally reached a windowless corridor with rotting floorboards that groaned ominously beneath his boots. The gloom grew so thick he was forced to feel his way along the walls for the last few steps of his journey until the corridor ended in a door.

After fumbling about for a minute, cursing himself for not having the forethought to bring a candle, he finally located an iron handle and gave the door a shove. It resisted for a moment, as if reluctant to yield its secrets, then surrendered with a gusty sigh.

Max found himself standing on the first floor of the tower, blinking with relief to discover he was no longer in darkness. Just as he had suspected, the tower had most likely been the keep of the original castle. Murky light stole through arrow slits set at intervals in the stone walls. The winding stairs hugging the exterior wall were crumbling in spots and
slick with the rain blowing through the arrow slits and trickling through the cracks in the wall. Despite that it would be only too easy to slip, break his neck, and remain undiscovered for days, Max’s steps were strangely confident as he started up the stairs.

They wound their way up to an iron-banded, oaken door that looked far older than anything else Max had encountered in the house. Unlike the door at the foot of the stairs, this one gave easily beneath the cautious push of Max’s hand.

Before he had a chance to get his bearings, a white shape flew directly at his face.

Chapter Seventeen

L
ETTING OUT A GUTTURAL
cry, Max instinctively threw up his hands to protect his eyes. From the frantic beating of the wings about his head, he quickly realized it was not some wailing banshee accosting him but a confused egret that had darted in through one of the broken windowpanes. Once the bird realized Max wasn’t a threat, it quickly lost interest in him and went soaring up to land on one of the rafters, where it sat prettily preening its feathers.

Bemused by his own reaction, Max shook his head, thankful his acerbic housekeeper hadn’t been around to see
that
.

As his surroundings reclaimed his attention, he turned in a slow circle, gazing about him in rapt fascination. Because of its dilapidated state, he had assumed the tower would have been unoccupied for generations. Instead, it was as if he’d stumbled
upon the abandoned abode of some fairy-tale princess who had just stepped out for a decade or two and would soon return in a flourish of satin and silk and a cloud of perfume. Max moved deeper into the room, beguiled against his will by the romance of it all.

The round chamber occupied the entire top floor of the tower. Dirt and mold stained the stone walls, but at some point they had been whitewashed and decorated with an intricate pattern of ivy eerily similar to the real ivy now creeping through the shattered windows.

A tarnished brass bed sat between two of the lancet windows, the rotting lace adorning its half-tester drifting in the rain-scented breeze. A delicate cherrywood harpsichord sat nearby. Max could easily imagine a young girl’s graceful fingers tripping lightly along its keys, charming forth some timeless melody from Bach or Handel. He wandered over and touched a finger to one of its yellowing keys, striking a wheezing note that made him wince.

A tall, oval looking glass with a jagged crack down the middle of it hung in a frame designed so it could be tilted to reveal the one gazing into it at the most flattering angle. As Max reached up and adjusted it, he almost expected to see another face gazing back at him. But all he saw was his own countenance split
in two by that crack, expressionless and draped in shadow.

Turning his back on the looking glass, he wandered over to one of the windows overlooking the cliffs and the sea. The cushions of the window seat had rotted away long ago, but Max could still see a young woman curled up on them with a book in her hand, while the rain beat against the diamond-paned windows on a day just like this, as cozy and secure as the egret would be when she returned to her nest.