These Haunted Hearts: A Regency Ghost Story Page 6

  With a stumble, she burst free of the seething cloud of red. Miles groaned and dragged her into his arms, muttering an incoherent litany of love and relief. Calista sagged against him in exhaustion and started to cry.

  Around her, the red lights circled in confusion, then one by one, winked out to nothing. The air suddenly seemed cleaner, cooler, untinged by the low buzz of malevolence.

  Josiah glanced up to see Isabella approaching him, a smile transfiguring her face, too. At last she looked like the woman he’d kissed so passionately on their wedding day. At last he read neither suspicion nor hatred in her eyes as she looked at him.

  She reached for his hand. It was the first time she’d touched him since he’d woken to this new century.

  “Isabella—” he stammered. Turbulent hoped crammed his throat, making a wreck of eloquence.

  She was trembling. So was he. Her touch contained magic. It always had. Now she made him feel alive, as if he was once again that joyful bridegroom of so long ago. His fingers closed hard around hers in a silent assertion of union that he defied her to deny.

  How fiercely he’d loved her, loved her still. And staring into her brilliant black eyes, he could almost imagine that she remembered just how she’d loved him in return.

  He could never have killed her. Never. Whatever she’d done. Whatever she believed. He’d rip his beating heart from his chest before he’d hurt her.

  She raised a finger to her lips and turned to watch as Miles and Calista drew apart. Calista stared across at Josiah and Isabella and one of her beautiful smiles lit her expression, almost as if…

  “Do you see them?” she whispered to Miles.

  The young man kept his arm around his bride’s shoulders. “I do.”

  Astonished, Josiah realized that he and Isabella had become visible to the couple. He raised his hand in a heartfelt gesture of blessing and Miles bowed in acknowledgement. Isabella curtsied with flirtatious grace, her wide skirts swaying into a graceful bell.

  “It must be Josiah Aston and Isabella Verney,” Calista said breathlessly. “You know, he doesn’t look…wicked.”

  “No, he looks like a man besotted. Believe me, I know the signs.” Miles pressed his lips to Calista’s hair in a caress that expressed adoration and gratitude in equal measure.

  “Calista and Miles, I wish you both—” Josiah began, but Isabella squeezed his hand and shook her head.

  “They can’t hear us.”

  “But they can see us.”

  “No longer,” she said softly.

  Calista turned to Miles. “They’re gone,” she said regretfully.

  “Yes.” Miles drew her closer into his body. “Do you believe in ghosts now?”

  The girl responded with a choked laugh. “I don’t know. I suppose I must.” She tilted her chin so that she could gaze into her lover’s eyes. “Whatever I believe, we’re going to burn that bed and throw the ashes into the sea.”

  Miles smiled down at her as if he beheld a priceless treasure. “We are indeed, my love. Now kiss me before I go mad.”

  “With pleasure,” she sighed and pressed her lips to Miles’s with a sensual confidence that gladdened Josiah’s heart.

  Josiah blinked to clear his vision as a strange wall of gray descended. He blinked again, but still the fog enveloped the couple, made them seem strangely distant for all that they embraced only a few feet away. The gray encroached on everything around him except Isabella who still burned as brightly as a candle in his sight.

  Isabella’s regard was open and trusting as he’d longed to see it. “Do you remember everything, Josiah?”

  Just like that, he did.

  Memory crashed through him with the force of a towering wave. Reeling under the onslaught of recollection, his clasp tightened on Isabella’s hand. “When you told me you weren’t a virgin, I acted like an ass and lost my temper. We were in the Chinese bedroom.”

  “Standing near the bed.” She released his hand and turned to face him.

  He’d acted like an ass but he hadn’t killed her. He’d known that he hadn’t, he’d known it to his bones, but it was a mighty relief to have the truth confirmed. “You remember too?”

  “Yes. At last. I was so angry with you. Angry and guilty. I should have told you before we married, but I couldn’t bear to think you’d forsake me.”

  “I’d never forsake you,” he said.

  “I know that now.” Without giving him time to digest that extraordinary expression of trust, she went on. “Then a voice started to repeat every petty resentment I’d ever felt toward you and somehow made the resentments cause for hatred.”

  “Whatever possessed Calista possessed you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Wicked red eyes and a snide whisper telling me I needed to escape you any way I could before you broke my heart.” Her voice cracked and her eyes glittered with tears. “Oh, my love, how could I have doubted you? Can you ever forgive me?”

  Josiah smiled down into her lovely face and reached out to cup her cheek. He could still hardly believe that at last he was free to touch her. “I’m the one who should ask forgiveness.”

  With breathless speed, long ago events slammed into order. He’d carried his bride into the Chinese room and started to kiss and undress her. He’d never been so happy in his life—he’d never imagined such happiness was possible—until she’d abruptly pulled away and whispered a shaken confession that she wasn’t a virgin.

  Like an arrogant blockhead, Josiah hadn’t told her that her affair didn’t matter a tinker’s damn, that she’d married him and he’d love her forever. Instead, he’d succumbed to an excess of masculine pride and started to shout his disappointment and anger at her. Isabella’s remorse had swiftly transformed into characteristic defiance.

  Then with an eerie abruptness that made sense to him now that he’d witnessed the deadly forces stalking Calista, Isabella had fallen silent. She’d cast him one last look as though her heart shattered into a thousand pieces, then whirled away and fled the room as if devils pursued her.

  Devils indeed.

  Panicked by her incomprehensible actions, he’d abandoned his pique and his pompous insistence on a full confession. He’d raced after her down to the next floor, but not fast enough to save her from flinging herself down the stairs. Barely had her terrified scream echoed through the great hall before she lay broken and silent on the tiles below.

  After that, the world went mad. Nobody, particularly Lord Fenburgh who had never liked him, ever questioned that the Earl of Stansfield had killed his new bride. Josiah had been too numb with grief to mount a convincing defense. Part of him, a large part, had believed that the trial in London, the disgrace, the hanging were just punishment for failing to protect his beloved.

  His beloved…

  “And now, my glorious Isabella, we have eternity,” he said gently, extending his arm with a formal gesture, as if they were guests at a court ball and he invited her to dance.

  “I can’t wait,” she whispered, smiling at him as she’d smiled at him at their wedding so many years ago. She accepted his arm and turned toward the stairs with an elegant flick of her skirts.

  His heart finally at peace, Josiah escorted Isabella down the curved staircase and into the light.

  Also by Anna Campbell:

  A Rake’s Midnight Kiss (September 2013)

  Days of Rakes and Roses (August 2013)

  The Winter Wife: A Christmas Novella

  Seven Nights in a Rogue’s Bed

  Midnight’s Wild Passion

  My Reckless Surrender

  Captive of Sin

  Tempt the Devil

  Untouched

  Claiming the Courtesan

  Exclusive Excerpt of

  The Winter Wife: A Christmas Novella

  Chapter One

  North Yorkshire, Christmas Eve, 1825

  THE CRASH OF shattering wood and the terrified screams of horses pierced the frosty night like a knife.

  Sebastian Si
nclair, Earl of Kinvarra, swore, brought his restive mount under control, then spurred the animal around the turn in the snowy road. With icy clarity, the full moon lit the white landscape, starkly revealing the disaster before him.

  A flashy black curricle lay on its side in a ditch, the hood up against the weather. One horse had broken free and wandered the roadway, harness dragging. The other plunged wildly in the traces, struggling to escape.

  Swiftly Kinvarra dismounted, knowing his mare would await his signal, and ran to free the distressed horse. As he slid down the muddy ditch, a hatless man scrambled out of the smashed curricle.

  “Are you hurt?” Kinvarra asked, casting a quick eye over him.

  “No, I thank you, sir.” The effete blond fellow turned back to the carriage. “Come, darling. Let me assist you.”

  A graceful black-gloved hand extended from inside and a cloaked woman emerged with more aplomb than Kinvarra would have believed possible in the circumstances. Indications were that neither traveler was injured, so he concentrated on the trapped horse. When he spoke soothingly to the terrified beast, it quieted to panting stillness, exhausted with thrashing. While Kinvarra checked its legs, murmuring calm assurances, the stranger helped the lady up to the roadside.

  The horse shook itself and with a few ungainly jumps, ascended the bank to trot along the road toward its partner. Neither animal seemed to suffer worse than fright, a miracle considering that the curricle was beyond repair.

  “Madam, are you injured?” Kinvarra asked as he climbed the ditch. He stuck his riding crop under his arm and brushed his gloved hands together to knock the clinging snow from them. It was a hellishly cold night. Christmas tomorrow would be a chilly affair. But then of course his Christmases had been chilly for years, no matter the weather.

  The woman kept her head down. With shock? With shyness? For the sake of propriety? Perhaps he’d stumbled on some elopement or clandestine meeting.

  “Madam?” he asked again, more sharply. Whatever her fear of scandal, he needed to know if she required medical assistance.

  “Sweeting?” The yellow-haired fop bent to peer into the shadows cast by her hood. “Are you sure you’re unharmed? Speak, my dove. Your silence troubles my soul.”

  While Kinvarra digested the man’s outlandish phrasing, the woman stiffened and drew away. “For heaven’s sake, Harold, you’re not giving a recitation at a musicale.” With an impatient gesture, she flung back her hood and glared straight at Kinvarra.

  Even though he’d identified her the moment she spoke, he found himself staring dumbstruck into her face. A piquant, vivid, pointed face under an untidy tumble of luxuriant gold hair.

  Furious and incredulous, he wheeled on the milksop. “What the devil are you doing with my wife?”

  ***

  Alicia Sinclair, Countess of Kinvarra, was bruised, angry, uncomfortable, and agonizingly embarrassed. Not to mention suffering the aftereffects of her choking terror when the toppling carriage had tossed her around like a pebble in a torrent.

  Even so, her heart lurched into the wayward dance it always performed at the merest sight of Sebastian.

  She’d been married for eleven miserable years. Their short interval living as man and wife had been wretched. She disliked her husband more than any other man in the world. But nothing prevented her gaze from clinging to every line of that narrow, intense face with its high cheekbones, long, arrogant nose and sharply angled jaw. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, more cynical if that was possible. But still handsome, still compelling, still vital in a way nobody else she knew could match.

  Damn him to Hades, he remained the most magnificent creature she’d ever seen.

  Such a pity his soul was as black as his glittering eyes.

  “After all this time, I’m flattered you recognize me, my lord,” she said silkily.

  “Lord Kinvarra, this is a surprise,” Harold stammered, faltering back as if anticipating violence. “You must wonder why I accompany the lady—”

  Oh, Harold, act the man, even if the hero is beyond your reach. You’re safe. Kinvarra doesn’t care enough about me to kill you.

  Although even the most indifferent husband took it ill when his wife chose a lover. And Kinvarra had always suffered an overabundance of pride. There wasn’t the slightest hope that he’d mistake Alicia’s reasons for traveling on this isolated road in the middle of the night. She stifled a rogue pang of guilt.

  Curse Kinvarra, she had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.

  “I’ve recalled your existence every quarter these past ten years, my love,” her husband said equally smoothly, ignoring Harold’s dismayed interjection. Although the faint trace of Scottish brogue in Kinvarra’s deep voice indicated that he reined in his temper. His breath formed white clouds on the frigid air. “I’m perforce reminded when I pay your allowance. A substantial investment upon which I receive woefully little return.”

  “It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I linger in your thoughts,” she sniped. She refused to cower like a wet hen before his banked anger. He sounded reasonable, calm, controlled, but she had no trouble reading the tension in his broad shoulders or in the way his powerful hands opened and closed at his sides as if he’d dearly like to hit something.

  “In faith, my lady, you speak false. Creatures of ice have no use for a heart.” A faint, malicious smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Should I warn this paltry fellow that he risks frostbite in your company?”

  She steeled herself against Kinvarra’s taunting. He couldn’t hurt her now. He hadn’t been able to hurt her since she’d left him. Any twinge was merely the result of temporary shakiness after the accident. That was all. It couldn’t be because this man retained the power to stick needles into her feelings.

  “My lord, egad, I protest.” Fortunately, shock made Harold sound less like a frightened sheep. “The lady is your wife. Surely she merits your chivalry at the very least.”

  Harold had never seen her in her husband’s company, and some reluctant and completely misplaced loyalty to Kinvarra meant she hadn’t explained why the Sinclairs lived apart. The accepted fiction was that the earl and his countess were polite strangers who by mutual design rarely met.

  Poor Harold, he was about to discover the nasty truth that the earl and his countess loathed each other.

  “Like hell she does,” Kinvarra muttered, casting her an incendiary glance under long dark eyelashes.

  Alicia was human enough to wish the bright moonlight didn’t reveal quite so much of her husband’s seething rage. But the fate that proved capricious enough to fling them together tonight of all nights wasn’t likely to heed her pleas.

  “Do you intend to present your cicisbeo?” Kinvarra’s voice remained quiet. She’d long ago learned that was when he was most lethal.

  Dear God, did he plan to shoot Harold after all?

  Her hands clenched in her skirts as fear tightened her throat. Lacerating as Kinvarra’s tongue could be, he’d never shown her a moment’s violence. But did that extend to the man she planned to take into her bed? Kinvarra was a crack shot and a famous swordsman. If it came to a duel, Harold wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “My lord, I protest the description,” Harold bleated, sidling further away. He’d clearly also heard the unspoken threat in Kinvarra’s question.

  Oh, for pity’s sake. Was it too much to wish that her suitor would stand up to the scoundrel she’d married as a silly chit of seventeen? Alicia drew a deep breath of freezing air and reminded herself that she favored Lord Harold Fenton precisely because he wasn’t an overbearing brute like her husband. Harold was a scholar and a poet, a man of the mind. She should consider it a mark of Harold’s superior intelligence that he was wary of Kinvarra.

  But her insistence didn’t convince her traitorous heart.

  How she wished she really was the callous witch Kinvarra called her. Then she’d be immune both to his insults and to this insidious attraction that she’d never con
quered, no matter how she tried.

  “My lady?” Kinvarra asked, still in that even voice that struck a chill into her soul sharper than the winter wind. “Who is this…gentleman?”

  She stiffened her backbone and leveled her shoulders. She was made of stronger stuff than this. Never would she let her husband guess that he still had power over her. Her response was steady. “Lord Kinvarra, allow me to present Lord Harold Fenton.”

  Harold performed an uncertain bow without stepping any nearer. “My lord.”

  As he straightened, tense silence descended. Alicia shifted to try and warm up her icy feet, fulminating against the bad luck that threw her in Kinvarra’s way tonight.

  “Well, this is awkward,” Kinvarra said flatly, although she saw in his taut, dark face that his anger hadn’t abated one whit.

  “I don’t see why,” Alicia snapped.

  It wasn’t just her husband who tried her patience. There was her lily-livered lover and the perishing cold. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees in the last five minutes. She shivered, then silently cursed that Kinvarra noticed and Harold didn’t. Harold was too busy staring at her husband the way a mouse stared at an adder.

  “Do you imagine I’m so sophisticated that I’ll ignore discovering you in the arms of another man? My dear, you do me too much credit.”

  She stifled the urge to consign Kinvarra to perdition. Just as she stifled the poignant memory that once he’d called her his dear and his love and he’d meant it. Once, briefly, long ago. “If you’ll set aside your bruised vanity for the moment, you’ll understand that we merely require you to ride to the nearest habitation and request help. Then you and I can return to acting like mere acquaintances, my lord.”