Dead After Dark (Companion #6.5)(59)

Her eyes widened.

His back was crisscrossed by dozens of ugly white troughs and ridges of scar tissue. He had been whipped. Someone had treated this man very badly. He opened the wardrobe and took out a nightshirt, but thought better of it. He flung it on the bed. Instead, naked, he went to the writing desk and opened a box he had set there. It was a traveling writing case. He removed paper, an inkwell, and a quill, and began a letter. After a few lines, he paused, growled in dissatisfaction and crumpled up the paper, throwing it into the middle of the carpet. He was acting exactly like he lived here, not as though he was staying for one night, quaking, in a haunted house just to prove he could do it.

Unbelievable.

He couldn’t live here. Her father owned this estate, though he hadn’t come here in centuries. She had a right to the house. She wanted to be left alone. She wanted a small existence. She wanted peace. And here this oaf came and stabled his horse in her stables, and moved in and took a bath and now was sitting, naked, writing a letter, and making her throb the way she didn’t want to throb at all any more.

Well, it wouldn’t last for long. She drummed her fingers on her arm. She had only to wait until he retired. She’d get the blood she needed from him and she would then send him packing, ashamed of his fear. If that idiot landowner her father had entrusted to oversee the place had rented it out, he would soon find that tenants were hard to come by.



Drew set down the pen and sighed. How could a letter he had composed a thousand times in his mind suddenly become so difficult to write? What did one say to a woman with whom you were wildly in love, but hadn’t seen in fifteen years? She wasn’t married, but did that mean she still pined for him? Were their stolen moments together, made all the more piquant by her father’s certain disapproval, enough to last so long? He hadn’t even made love to her. A few kisses, some heated promises, the pain of lust restrained. Did they have more than that?

Of course they did. For her love he had endured pain and humiliation, near death. He’d almost died a dozen times.

And for her he had turned himself into Drew Carlowe, respectable and very rich with an educated accent and excellent taste. The perfect husband, if one didn’t count the scars on his back, or on his soul. In coming home he risked everything. But he was no longer a feckless youth. They’d have a hard time holding him, if they realized who he was and turned him in.

Drew sanded the letter. It was the best he could do. Had Emily’s father turned her against him? She must still love him. She must. The best revenge on her father was to have his daughter in spite of all. She was of age. Drew was rich. Tomorrow, he would pay a boy from the village to deliver the letter into her hands alone. They would meet. He would woo her all over again if necessary, until she agreed to run away with him. He’d let his new father-in-law know just who his daughter had married sooner or later. That would hurt Melaphont. And then he’d take care of her father in some particularly personal way. Not right away. It was hardly conducive to a happy marriage to have one’s revenge on the bride’s father. But he had vowed to see Sir Elias Melaphont suffer for the suffering he’d caused Drew and Emily. He would not be denied.

He decided to let the letter dry before he put it into the envelope he’d addressed. He rose, gathered up the sheets, and staggered to the bed, rubbing his neck.

He’d had the oddest feeling all night that he was being watched. But he’d searched the house, all except the ruined west wing, and no one could be staying there. He was alone here. The supplies in the kitchen and the banked fire must have been arranged by the agent as a welcome to his new home, or by Melaphont himself. He didn’t like to think that. He didn’t want to be beholden to that cur for anything. Whoever had left the supplies had been very thorough. The linen closet even held clean sheets. He was grateful for that.

It was too hot to put on the nightshirt. He piled the brocaded coverlet in the corner and put the sheets on the bed himself. He realized why the villagers thought the house was haunted. It had a kind of electric feeling, as though something important was about to happen. He grinned as he plumped the pillows. The beautiful young ghost was just wishful thinking. Though here in Cornwall the supernatural was always foremost in people’s minds. Pixies and ghosts were as real to the locals as Jesus and his disciples. Perhaps the two concepts were not so different. He’d lost all belief in God a long time ago. Bible stories were just tales these days.

He turned back the sheets and blew out his candles. Without more ceremony he lay out on the bed, naked in the heat, and closed his eyes.





2


Did he have to sleep naked? The parasite in Freya’s veins that made her what she was needed blood. It itched with anticipation. But the throbbing between her legs watching him all evening was unwelcome to say the least. She had banished sexuality the day she walked away from her duty to her kind, the day her only remaining sister died through her fault. Her father was angry. But she couldn’t do it any more. She had always done everything her father asked her. He was so old, so overpowering in personality. She had been tired, sick, her mind tattered after that day that changed everything. It was her achievement, or her failure, that she had not gone home to Mirso. She had come to Ashland to heal, away from what she had been, not sure what she ever would be.

But she couldn’t possibly heal if this naked man in her house aroused all the sexuality she wanted to suppress. She crept out of the dressing room as his breathing became regular. He lay across the bed, one hand behind his neck, his body casually displayed. She didn’t want to take blood from him this way. The sensuality of it prodded her most womanly parts even now. But she needed blood, and he was here, and her resolve was weakened by hours of watching him.