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It was a second before she realised Jasper had stopped at the foot of another small flight of stairs leading to a gloomy wood-panelled corridor with a single door at the end.
‘Your room’s at the end there, but let’s go to mine. The fire’s lit, and I’ve got a bottle of Smirnoff that Sergio gave me somewhere.’ He took hold of her shoulders, bending his knees slightly to peer into her face. ‘You look like you could do with something to revive you, angel. Are you OK?’
With some effort she gathered herself and made a stab at sounding casual and reassuring. ‘I’m fine now, really. I’m so sorry, Jasper—I’m supposed to be taking the pressure off you by posing as your girlfriend, but instead your parents must be wondering why you ended up going out with such a nutter.’
‘Don’t be daft. You’re totally charming them—or you were until you nearly fainted face down on your plate. I know the fish was revolting, but really …’
She laughed. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘What then?’
Jasper was her best friend. Over the years she’d told him lots of funny stories about her childhood, and when you’d grown up living in a converted bus painted with flowers and peace slogans, with a mother who had inch-long purple hair, had changed her name to Rainbow and given up wearing a bra, there were lots of those.
There were also lots of bits that weren’t funny at all, but she kept those to herself. The years when she’d been taken in by Aunt Janet and had been sent to an exclusive girls’ boarding school in the hope of ‘civilising’ her. Years when she’d been at the mercy of Olympia Rothwell-Hyde and her friends …
She shook her head and smiled. ‘Just tired. Honest.’
‘Come on, then.’ He set off again along the corridor, rubbing his arms vigorously. ‘God, if you stand still for a second in this place you run the risk of turning into a pillar of ice. I hope you brought your thermal underwear.’
‘Please, can you not mention underwear,’ Sophie said with a bleak laugh. ‘The contents of my knicker drawer have played far too much of a starring role in this weekend already and I’ve only been here a couple of hours.’ Her heart lurched as she remembered again the phone conversation Kit had overheard on the train. ‘I’m afraid I got off on completely the wrong foot with your brother.’
‘Half-brother,’ Jasper corrected, bitterly. ‘And don’t worry about Kit. He doesn’t approve of anyone. He just sits in judgment on the rest of us.’
‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’ said Sophie. ‘It’s Kit’s opinion you’re worried about, not your parents’.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Jasper said ironically. ‘You’ve met my father. He’s from the generation and background that call gay men “nancy boys” and assume they all wear pink scarves and carry handbags.’
‘And what’s Kit’s excuse?’
Pausing in front of a closed door, Jasper bowed his head. Without the hair gel and eyeliner he always wore in London his fine-boned face looked younger and oddly vulnerable.
‘Kit’s never liked me. I’ve always known that, growing up. He never said anything unkind or did anything horrible to me, but he didn’t have to. I always felt this … coldness from him, which was almost worse.’
Sophie could identify with that.
‘I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘now I’m older I can understand that it must have been difficult for him, growing up without his mother when I still had mine.’ He cast her a rueful look. ‘As you’ll have noticed, my mother isn’t exactly cosy—I don’t think she particularly went out of her way to make sure he was OK, but because I was her only child I did get rather spoiled, I guess …’
Sophie widened her eyes. ‘You? Surely not!’
Jasper grinned. ‘This is the part of the castle that’s supposed to be haunted by the mad countess’s ghost, you know, so you’d better watch it, or I’ll run away and leave you here …’
‘Don’t you dare!’
Laughing, he opened the door. ‘This is my room. Damn, the fire’s gone out. Come in and shut the door to keep any lingering traces of warmth in.’
Sophie did as she was told. The room was huge, and filled with the kind of dark, heavy furniture that looked as if it had come from a giant’s house. A sleigh bed roughly the size of the bus that had formed Sophie’s childhood home stood in the centre of the room, piled high with several duvets. Jasper’s personal stamp was evident in the tatty posters on the walls, a polystyrene reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, which was rakishly draped in an old school tie, a silk dressing gown and a battered trilby. As he poked at the ashes in the grate Sophie picked her way through the clothes on the floor and went over to the window.
‘So what happened to Kit’s mother?’
Jasper piled coal into the grate. ‘She left. When he was about six, I think. It’s a bit of a taboo subject around here, but I gather there was no warning, no explanation, no goodbye. Of course there was a divorce eventually, and apparently Juliet’s adultery was cited, but as far as I know Kit never had any contact with her again.’
Outside it had stopped snowing and the clouds had parted to show the flat disc of the full moon. From what Sophie could see, Jasper’s room looked down over some kind of inner courtyard. The castle walls rose up on all sides—battlements like jagged teeth, stone walls gleaming like pewter in the cold, bluish light. She shivered, her throat constricting with reluctant compassion for the little boy whose mother had left him here in this bleak fortress of a home.
‘So she abandoned him to go off with another man?’
Sophie’s own upbringing had been unconventional enough for her not to be easily shocked. But a mother leaving her child …
‘Pretty much. So I guess you can understand why he ended up being like he is. Ah, look—that’s better.’
He stood back, hands on hips, his face bathed in orange as the flames took hold. ‘Right—let’s find that bottle and get under the duvet. You can tell me all about Paris and how you managed to escape the clutches of that lunatic painter, and in turn I’m going to bore you senseless talking about Sergio. Do you know,’ he sighed happily, ‘he’s having a tally of the days we’re apart tattooed on his chest?’
The ancient stones on top of the parapet were worn smooth by salt wind and wild weather, and the moonlight turned them to beaten silver. Kit exhaled a cloud of frozen air, propping his elbows on the stone and looking out across the battlements to the empty beach beyond.
There was no point in even trying to get to sleep tonight, he knew that. His insomnia was always at its worst when he’d just come back from a period of active duty and his body hadn’t learned to switch off from its state of high alert. The fact that he was also back at Alnburgh made sleep doubly unlikely.
He straightened up, shoving his frozen fingers into his pockets. The tide was out and pools of water on the sand gleamed like mercury. In the distance the moon was reflected without a ripple in the dark surface of the sea.
It was bitterly cold.
Long months in the desert halfway across the world had made him forget the aching cold here. Sometimes, working in temperatures of fifty degrees wearing eighty pounds of explosive-proof kit, he would try to recapture the sensation, but out there cold became an abstract concept. Something you knew about in theory, but couldn’t imagine actually feeling.
But it was real enough now, as was the complicated mix of emotions he always experienced when he returned. He did one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet without feeling anything, and yet when he came back to the place he’d grown up in it was as if he’d had a layer of skin removed. Here it was impossible to forget the mother who had left him, or forgive the studied indifference of the father who had been left to bring him up. Here everything was magnified: bitterness, anger, frustration …
Desire.
The thought crept up on him and he shoved it away. Sophie Greenham was hardly his type, although he had to admit that doing battle with her at dinner had livened up what would otherwise have been a dismal evening. And at least her presence had meant that he didn’t feel like the only outsider.
It had also provided a distraction from the tension between him and his father. But only temporarily. Ralph was right—Kit hadn’t come up here because the party invitation was too thrilling to refuse, but Ralph’s seventieth birthday seemed like a good time to remind his father that if he didn’t transfer the ownership of Alnburgh into Kit’s name soon, it would be too late. The estate couldn’t possibly survive the inheritance tax that would be liable on it after Ralph’s death, and would no doubt have to be sold.
Kit felt fresh anger bloom inside him. He wasn’t sure why he cared—his house in Chelsea was conveniently placed for some excellent restaurants, was within easy taxi-hailing range for women he didn’t want to wake up with, and came without ghosts. And yet he did care. Because of the waste and the irresponsibility and the sheer bloody shortsightedness, perhaps? Or because he could still hear his mother’s voice, whispering to him down the years?
Alnburgh is yours, Kit. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s not.
It must have been just before she left that she’d said that. When she knew she was going and wanted to assuage her guilt; to feel that she wasn’t leaving him with nothing.
As if a building could make up for a mother. Particularly a building like Alnburgh. It was an anachronism. As a home it was uncomfortable, impractical and unsustainable. It was also the place where he had been unhappiest. And yet he knew, deep down, that it mattered to him. He felt responsible for it, and he would do all he could to look after it.
And much as it surprised him to discover, that went for his brother too. Only Jasper wasn’t at risk from dry rot or damp, but the attentions of a particularly brazen redhead.
Kit wondered if she’d be as difficult to get rid of.
Sophie opened her eyes.
It was cold and for a moment her sleep-slow brain groped to work out where she was. It was a familiar feeling—one she’d experienced often as a child when her mother had been in one of her restless phases, but for some reason now it was accompanied by a sinking sensation.
Putting a hand to her head, she struggled upright. In the corner of the room the television was playing quietly to itself, and Jasper’s body was warm beside her, a T-shirt of Sergio’s clasped in one hand, the half-empty bottle of vodka in the other. He had fallen asleep sprawled diagonally across the bed with his head thrown back, and something about the way the lamplight fell on his face—or maybe the shuttered blankness sleep had lent it—reminded her of Kit.
Fragments of the evening reassembled themselves in her aching head. She got up, rubbing a hand across her eyes, and carefully removed the bottle from Jasper’s hand. Much as she loved him, right now all she wanted was a bed to herself and a few hours of peaceful oblivion.
Tiptoeing to the door, she opened it quietly. Out in the corridor the temperature was arctic and the only light came from the moon, lying in bleached slabs on the smooth oak floorboards. Shivering, Sophie hesitated, wondering whether to go back into Jasper’s room after all, but the throbbing in her head was more intense now and she thought longingly of the paracetamol in her washbag.
There was nothing for it but to brave the cold and the dark.
Her heart began to pound as she slipped quickly between the squares of silver moonlight, along the corridor and down a spiralling flight of stone stairs. Shadows engulfed her. It was very quiet. Too quiet. To Sophie, used to thin-walled apartments, bed and breakfasts, buses and camper vans on makeshift sites where someone was always strumming a guitar or playing indie-acid-trance, the silence was unnatural. Oppressive. It buzzed in her ears, filling her head with whistling, like interference on a badly tuned radio.
She stopped, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she looked around.
Passageways stretched away from her in three directions, but each looked as unfamiliar as the other. Oh, hell. She’d been so traumatised earlier that she hadn’t paid attention to Jasper when he pointed out her room …
But that could be it, she thought with relief, walking quickly to a door at the end of the short landing to her left. Gingerly she turned the handle and, heart bursting, pushed open the door.
Moonlight flooded in from behind her, illuminating the ghostly outlines of shrouded furniture. The air was stale with age. The room clearly hadn’t been opened in years.
This is the part of the castle that’s supposed to be haunted by the mad countess’s ghost, you know …
Retreating quickly, she slammed the door and forced herself to exhale slowly. It was fine. No need to panic. Just a question of retracing her steps, thinking about it logically. A veil of cloud slipped over the moon’s pale face and the darkness deepened. Icy drafts eddied around Sophie’s ankles, and the edge of a curtain at one of the stone windows lifted slightly, as if brushed by invisible fingers. The whistling sound was louder now and more distinctive—a sort of keening that was almost human. She couldn’t be sure it was just in her head any more and she broke into a run, glancing back over her shoulder as if she expected to see a swish of pink silk skirt disappearing around the corner.
‘I’m being stupid,’ she whispered desperately, fumbling at the buttons of her mobile phone to make the screen light up and act as a torch. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’ But even as the words formed themselves on her stiff lips horror prickled at the back of her neck.
Footsteps.
She clamped a hand to her mouth to stifle her moan of terror and stood perfectly still. Probably she’d imagined it—or possibly it was just the mad drumming of her heart echoing off the stone walls …
Nope. Definitely footsteps.
Definitely getting nearer.
It was impossible to tell from which direction they were coming. Or maybe if they were ghostly footsteps they weren’t coming from any particular direction, except beyond the grave? It hardly mattered—the main thing was to get away from here and back to Jasper. Back to light and warmth and TV and company. Shaking with fear, she darted back along the corridor, heading for the stairs that she had come down a few moments ago.
And then she gave a whimper of horror, icy adrenaline sluicing through her veins. A dark figure loomed in front of her, only a foot or so away, too close even for her to be aware of anything beyond its height and the frightening breadth of its shoulders. She shrank backwards, bringing her hands up to her face, her mouth opening to let out the scream that was rising in her throat.
‘Oh, no, you don’t …’
Instantly she was pulled against the rock-hard chest and a huge hand was put across her mouth. Fury replaced fear as she realised that this was not the phantom figure of some seventeenth-century suitor looking for the countess, but the all-too-human flesh of Kit Fitzroy.
All of a sudden the idea of being assaulted by a ghost seemed relatively appealing.
‘Get off me!’ she snapped. Or tried to. The sound she actually made was a muffled, undignified squawk, but he must have understood her meaning because he let her go immediately, thrusting her away from his body as if she were contaminated. Shaking back her hair, Sophie glared at him, trying to gather some shreds of dignity. Not easy when she’d just been caught behaving like a histrionic schoolgirl because she thought he was a ghost.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.
His arched brows rose a fraction, but other than that his stony expression didn’t change. ‘I’d have thought it was obvious. Stopping you from screaming and waking up the entire castle,’ he drawled. ‘Is Jasper aware that you’re roaming around the corridors in the middle of the night?’
‘Jasper’s asleep.’
‘Ah. Of course.’ His hooded gaze didn’t leave hers, but she jumped as she felt his fingers close around her wrist, like bands of iron, and he lifted the hand in which her mobile phone was clasped. His touch was as cold and hard as his tone. ‘Don’t tell me, you got lost on the way to the bathroom and you were using the GPS to find it?’
‘No.’ Sophie spoke through clenched teeth. ‘I got lost on the way to my bedroom. Now, if you’d just point me in the right—’
‘Your bedroom?’ He dropped her wrist and stepped away.
‘Well, it definitely won’t be here. The rooms in this part of the castle haven’t been used for years. But why the hell aren’t you sharing with Jasper? Or perhaps you prefer to have your own … privacy?’
He was so tall that she had to tilt her head back to look at his face. The place where they were standing was dark and it was half in shadow, but, even so, she didn’t miss the faint sneer that accompanied the word.
‘I just thought it wouldn’t be appropriate to sleep with Jasper in his parents’ house, that’s all,’ she retorted haughtily. ‘It didn’t feel right.’
‘You do a passable impression of indignant respectability,’ he said in a bored voice, turning round and beginning to walk away from her down the corridor. ‘But unfortunately it’s rather wasted on me. I know exactly why you want your own bedroom, and it has nothing to do with propriety and everything to do with the fact that you’re far from in love with my brother.’
It was those words that did it. My brother. Until then she had been determined to remain calm in the face of Kit Fitzroy’s towering arrogance; his misguided certainty and his infuriating, undeniable sexual magnetism. Now something snapped inside her.
‘No. You’re wrong,’ she spat.
‘Really?’ he drawled, turning to go back along the passageway down which she’d just come.
‘Yes!’
Who the hell was he to judge? If it wasn’t for him Jasper wouldn’t have had to ask her here in the first place, to make himself look ‘acceptable’ in the contemptuous eyes of his brother.
Well, she couldn’t explain anything without giving Jasper away, but she didn’t have to take it either. Following him she could feel the pulse jumping in her wrist, in the place where his fingers had touched her, as fresh adrenaline scorched through her veins.
‘I know you think the worst of me and I can understand why, but I just want to say that it wasn’t—isn’t—what you think. I would never hurt Jasper, or mess him around. He’s the person I care most about in the world.’
He went up a short flight of steps into the corridor Sophie now remembered, and stopped in front of the door at the end.
‘You have a funny way of showing it,’ he said, very softly. ‘By sleeping with another man.’
He opened the door and stood back for her to pass. She didn’t move. ‘It’s not like that,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You don’t know the whole story.’
Kit shook his head. ‘I don’t need to.’
Because what was there to know? He’d seen it all countless times before—men returning back to base from leave, white-lipped and silent as they pulled down pictures of smiling wives or girlfriends from their lockers. Wives they thought they could trust while they were away. Girlfriends they thought would wait for them. Behind every betrayal there was a story, but in the end it was still a betrayal.
Folding her arms tightly across her body, she walked past him into the small room and stood by the bed with her back to him. Her hair was tangled, reminding him that she’d just left his brother’s bed. In the thin, cold moonlight it gleamed like hot embers beneath the ashes of a dying fire.
‘Is it common practice in the army to condemn without trial and without knowing the facts?’ she asked, turning round to face him. ‘You barely even know Jasper. You did your best to deny his existence when he was growing up, and you’re not exactly going out of your way to make up for it now, so please don’t lecture me about not loving him.’
‘That’s enough.’
The words were raw, razor-sharp, spoken in the split second before his automatic defences kicked in and the shutters came down on his emotions. Deliberately Kit unfurled his fists and kept his breathing steady.
‘If you think finding your way around the castle is confusing I wouldn’t even try to unravel the relationships within this family if I were you,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t get involved in things you don’t need to understand.’
‘Why? Because I won’t be around long enough?’ she demanded, coming closer to him again.
Kit stiffened as he caught the scent of her again—warm, spicy, delicious. He turned away, reaching for the door handle. ‘Goodnight. I hope you have everything you need.’
He shut the door and stood back from it, waiting for the adrenaline rush to subside a little. Funny how he could work a field strewn with hidden mines, approach a car loaded with explosives and not feel anything, and yet five feet five of lying redhead had almost made him lose control.
He hated deception—too much of his childhood had been spent not knowing what to believe or who to trust—and as an actress, he supposed, Sophie Greenham was quite literally a professional in the art.
But unluckily for her he was a professional too, and there was more than one way of making safe an incendiary device. Sometimes you had to approach the problem laterally. If she wouldn’t admit that her feelings for Jasper were a sham, he’d just have to prove it another way.
CHAPTER SIX
SOPHIE felt as if she’d only just fallen asleep when a knock at the door jolted her awake again. Jasper appeared, grinning sheepishly and carrying a plate of toast in one hand and two mugs of coffee in the other, some of which slopped onto the carpet as he elbowed the door shut again.
‘What time is it?’ she moaned, dropping back onto the pillows.
Jasper put the mugs down on the bedside table and perched on the bed beside her. ‘Nearly ten. Kit said he’d bumped into you in the middle of the night trying to find your room, so I thought I’d better not wake you. You’ve slept for Britain.’
Sophie didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d been awake most of the night, partly because she’d been frozen, partly because she’d been so hyped up with indignation and fury and the after-effects of what felt like an explosion in the sexual-chemistry lab that sleep had been a very long time coming.
He picked up a mug and looked at her through the wreaths of steam that were curling through the frigid air. ‘Sorry for leaving you to wander like that. Just as well you bumped into Kit.’
Sophie grunted crossly. ‘Do you think so? I thought he was the ghost of the nymphomaniac countess. No such luck.’
Jasper winced. ‘He didn’t give you a hard time, did he?’
‘He thought it was extremely odd that we weren’t sharing a room.’ Sophie reached for a coffee, more to warm her hands on than anything. ‘I’m not exactly convincing him in my role as your girlfriend, you know. The thing is, he overheard me talking to Jean-Claude on the train and now he thinks I’m a two-timing trollop.’
‘Oops.’ Jasper took another sip of coffee while he digested this information. ‘OK, well, that is a bit unfortunate, but don’t worry—we still have time to turn it around at the party tonight. You’ll be every man’s idea of the perfect girlfriend.’
Sophie raised an eyebrow. ‘In public? In front of your parents? From my experience of what men consider the perfect girlfriend, that wouldn’t be wise.’
‘Wicked girl,’ Jasper scolded. ‘I meant demure, devoted, hanging on my every word—that sort of thing. What did you bring to wear?’
‘My Chinese silk dress.’
With a firm shake of his head Jasper put down his mug. ‘Absolutely not. Far too sexy. No, what we need is something a little more … understated. A little more modest.’
Sophie narrowed her eyes. ‘You mean frumpy, don’t you? Do you have something in mind?’