“Don’t,” he said with a strained voice. “If you do, I may lose all control and take your right against this tree. And I cannot promise to be gentle. It is not fitting for me to take your virtue by rutting into you in the dirt.”
What surprised Juliana even more was that Cassian brought her captured hand to his mouth and kissed her palm gently.
“What we did today was for you. What comes next… We will do properly.” The corner of his mouth curved. “When you are ready to stop pretending you hate me.”
She laughed, which surprised them both.
“I do not hate you,” she said, and found, saying it aloud, that it had been true for rather longer than she had been willing to admit. “Not anymore.”
He looked at her for a moment, and something moved behind his eyes that she did not yet have a name for, though she thought she might, eventually, want one.
“Good,” he said again, and handed her back the pistol.
“We are not finished?” she asked, looking at the mark.
“No,” he agreed, settling behind her again with his hands over hers, and she was fairly certain they were no longer talking about shooting. “We are not.”
Chapter 17
“The West Tower?” The Dowager Duchess set down her fork with the particular care of someone buying herself a moment. “You have not ventured into it?”
“No… Not yet,” Juliana said carefully.
It was the fourth evening since the morning in the meadow, and Anabelle had arrived that afternoon with the energy of a woman determined to observe everything and comment on most of it. The formal dining room had been lit for the occasion, the good china brought out, and candles casting warm light across the three of them.
“Well, it is a drafty old thing,” Anabelle said, waving a hand. “We had moved the nurseries to the East Wing because of it. That was long before Cassian’s time, of course.” Her eyes took on that quality Juliana had come to recognize; the look of someone whose gaze had traveled beyond the dining room.
“Oh, what was Cassian like as a child? Did he often drift off to the West Tower?” she asked, hoping she was asking the right questions. Yet she was already feeling caution drift away, hercuriosity taking over as usual. Cassian’s jaw looked like marble.
“Cassian always did have a penchant for cold places as a boy. He liked to sit up there. Used to say the cold cleared his head.” She smiled faintly. “But now…”
The Dowager glanced at Cassian, who cleared his throat, and the silence that followed seemed to have breathed a life of its own. Juliana’s heart sank. They were all thinking the same thing. The Duke of Stonevale no longer liked the cold these days. It had become a predator that gnawed on his nerves, leaving him in unimaginable pain, which he refused to talk about.
“I have grown better fond of the warmth as of late,” Cassian confirmed with a growl. His eyes remained on the beef on his plate, his grip on his fork tightening.
His grandmother accepted it with the grace of long practice.
“His sister, Marta, loved it even more, of course,” Anabelle said in the absent, reminiscing way of the elderly, as if the words had simply slipped out before she could catch them.
Juliana kept her expression perfectly composed and said nothing. She did not dare look at Cassian.
His sister?
She was very puzzled. It was intriguing that there were no portraits of Marta in Stonevale and that nobody mentioned her in conversation. She also wondered why she had never met Marta. However, she was too afraid to ask where Marta was. What if Marta were dead? She did not want to reopen old wounds. Then again, it was the old lady who had mentioned her. Still, she decided to investigate quietly, her heart already racing with possibilities.
“More wine, Grandmama?” Cassian said quietly.
Shortly after, Juliana told them she was unwell and excused herself. Her mind was a jumble of thoughts and images: the West Tower, the scream, the Dowager Duchess’s face as she realized she had mentioned Marta in front of Juliana, and the absence of Cassian’s sister.
Why all these secrets? What if I am being haunted by Marta’s spirit?
A couple of hours later, the house had settled into silence, and the Dowager Duchess had also returned to the Dower House, only half an hour away from Stonevale. Cassian was somewhere else in the house, and the servants had retreated to their rooms. Even though Juliana was afraid of being haunted or of what she might find, her curiosity won.
She told herself she was simply going to look.
It seemed the tower smelled different from the rest of Stonevale. It carried the scent of foreboding and regret. Juliana walked the halls toward the forbidden tower. She climbed, her lungs straining as the air grew colder. It was also getting colder, but she at least had a thick robe around her. Her candle threw restless shadows on the curved walls as she climbed, her heartbeat rather louder than she would have liked.
She had almost reached the top when footsteps sounded behind her.
