“He has room for us all?”
He laughed again, this time with a bitter edge. “Room, yes, though whether he can provide His Grace the luxury he’s used to is another question. It is—Well, you’ll see it.”
Maddy saw Phillip peering at them from the carriage but knew he couldn’t hear them. “Since he wasn’t invited, he’ll take what he gets. He can find an inn if it isn’t to his taste.”
She heard rather than saw his smile. “That’s the duchess I’ve come to admire. You tell him that.”
Before she could reply, the coachman approached. “Ready to move on, Colonel.”
The moment of accord ended. Brynn helped her back into the carriage and disappeared into the dark.
*
Moonlight might havehelped, but there was none. Brynn had no intention of riding far in the heavy darkness. He had even less intention of spending another night watching the lady he had admired so much parry Glenmoor’s questions with lies. He had slept rough before. It wasn’t so bad once he’d dislodged the rock cutting into his back. Wrapped in his saddle blanket and dozing, he left his soul unguarded, and an unanticipated joy crept in. Wales wrapped itself around him for the first time in years. He could almost hear the singing in his heart.
Seeing Rhys will squelch that soon enough, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep.
He arrived home late the following day, having ridden hard into the Black Mountains, coming up the west face of a craggy peak, to see the place standing grim and solid in the sun, a fortress prepared to repel all invaders.
Brynn couldn’t shake that fancy away. Brynhafan may be no castle, but whoever had built the manor six hundred years before had fortified it well enough with thick impenetrable stone and surrounded it with an enclosure of the same. Its west face, a massive wall of limestone broken by windows far above a man’s reach, loomed as if daring him to enter. From his vantage point, he saw no door but knew it to be a heavy oak artifact located in the inner courtyard. Cold and uninviting. No sign of life softened the impression.
Welcome home, Morgan. He rode around back to the stable block built into the same solid wall, surprised to discover the gate opened easily.
The groom who looked up from his work had a welcoming smile, one Brynn hadn’t expected. “May I help you, sir?”
How did an uninvited guest introduce himself, one who hadn’t worked up courage to make himself known to his host?
“I’ll help the man.” Brynn knew that voice. Colwyn Hayes had been Brynhafan’s head groom by the time Brynn could sit a horse and a junior one before he’d been born. “Home are you, Brynn?” Nosirfrom Colwyn. No smile of welcome either. Older but no less straight-backed, Colwyn took the reins of Brynn’s horse, looking him over with a keen eye. However cold his welcome to the man, no horse would go untended on Colwyn Hayes’s watch.
Brynn pulled off his saddlebags and stepped back to allow Colwyn to see to the saddle and tack. “Decent mount,” the old man muttered. “But y’ve ridden him hard.”
“True, that. Take good—”
“Brynn?” Silhouetted in sunlight, his brother, Rhys, stood in the stable door, breathing hard.What alchemy alerted him to come running?
Brynn took two steps toward him, halted by his brother’s avid inspection of his person.
“Your letter came two days ago. I didn’t expect—” Rhys stuttered to a stop. The two men simply stared. It had been many years—too many. Rhys looked away first. “You best come in and clean up.”
“Am I welcome, then?” Brynn asked, letting go of tension he hadn’t been aware he’d harbored.
Rhys turned his back to him and stalked toward the house, expecting him to follow, answering over his shoulder as Brynn trotted behind, “Don’t be a damned fool. This is your home. You’re the one that did the leaving. Let’s get you cleaned and fed, and you can tell me what drove you to the wilds of these mountains.”
Chapter Nineteen
It was twomore days before the Glenmoor carriage lurched up the road toward Brynhafan, giving Maddy only the briefest glimpse of the forbidding manor when they turned a bend. When the coachman pulled up in front of the house, Glenmoor peered out a window. “A keep,” he murmured. “There doesn’t appear to be an entrance on this side.” He called to the coachman, “You must go around.”
Before they could move, however, the gate next to the house—one that, Maddy noticed with surprise, had been painted bright red—opened, and a neatly dressed gentleman came out to greet them, followed by two servants, who opened the carriage and let down the step. Phillip stepped down and turned to help Maddy alight.
“Welcome to Brynhafan, Your Graces,” the gentleman said with a bow. “I am Rhys Morgan, and we’ve been expecting you.”
Thank God.
Phillip appeared utterly fascinated by the grim façade of the house, but he recalled his manners long enough to acknowledge the greeting before asking, “Medieval?”
“Thirteenth century, we believe. It has its charms.”
Maddy hoped the interior was more comfortable than the cold exterior, one that looked as impenetrable as Brynn Morgan’s soul. The man who greeted them clearly was less so. As tall, as dark, and as broad-shouldered as the colonel, Rhys Morgan’s welcoming voice, sparkling black eyes, and open manner set him apart from his brother immediately.
