Chapter 10

10

T he kiss was drugging, deep, and full of heat. His hands wandered and hers explored as she let him steal the kiss. He made it so easy to forget the world and just surrender to sensations. She wasn't sure how long they stayed like that, making out like teenagers desperate to get as much out of it as possible before one of them had the good sense to end it.

Cold little pricks stung her face and hands. Startled, she and Bastian broke apart as rain started to fall heavily around them. The clouds had rushed inland and opened up overhead. He grasped her hand and tugged her across the field.

"Come on, there's shelter ahead."

The rain-slicked grass made it difficult to run, and soon they were stumbling and laughing as they raced through the gardens. He led her down the path bordered by tall hedges, then took an abrupt right turn. Lightning laced the skies around them, and the only shelter nearby emerged in front of them. A dovecote. It was an octagonal building covered with ivy and roses. The thatched roof was solid and well kept despite its age. Thunder snarled around them like a pack of hungry wolves as they sprinted toward the structure. He grasped a wrought- iron handle and wrenched the door open. They stumbled into the darkness, and he closed the door behind them. The room was musty and smelled faintly of decaying roses. Tiny splinters of light came through the dove nesting holes at the top of the cupola.

She shivered, her wet hair plastered to her face. Bastian slicked his own hair back before reaching for her and enfolding her in his arms. With one hand, he tucked her head beneath his chin and just cradled her in his arms. God, it felt good. When was the last time she'd just been held? Tim hadn't been much of a holder. She'd missed this though, the intimacy of a man with his arms around her. The last six months had been so cold and lonely, but she'd been safe from heartache. She burrowed closer to Bastian, relishing his heat and how wonderful he made such intimacy feel but dreading knowing it would have to end. They couldn't keep doing this. One of them would break and give in and get hurt, and she would have bet her life that it would be her.

"Bastian?"

"Hmm?" He smoothed his hands over her back, and his cheek rubbed the top of her head.

"This looks like the place in my dream from last night." Worry knotted inside her stomach as she waited for his reaction.

"When you mentioned the dovecote, I wondered if it was here. You must have seen it in a picture."

She shook her head, breathing in his woodsy scent mixed with fresh rain. An addictive smell.

"No. I would have remembered. There aren't any pictures of the gardens in any of the books, because the estate has been sealed off to visitors since your grandparents left."

The storm raged outside but the stone walls of the dovecote held fast, and they clung to each other, quiet with their own thoughts. The dream flashed before her eyes again. Isabelle running through the gardens, her white nightgown fluttering behind her like a dove in flight. And the birds, so many white doves lying dead at her feet, their hearts ripped out. The image was burned in her mind, and fear exploded inside of her.

"Bastian, make me forget. Just for a while. Please." She tilted her face up to his and kissed his chin, desperate to connect with him and lose herself in him. Even if it could only be temporary. When they kissed, he could help her escape the suffocating sense of fear.

"Jane," he whispered helplessly, and then he took her mouth.

He backed her against the wall and rocked his hips against hers. His erection pressed into her stomach. It wasn't enough. She needed him to be closer, to feel skin to skin. The sharp ache in her womb demanded he be inside her, filling her until they were fused together, wanting nothing more than that simple, primal connection. His lips trailed hot kisses down her neck, and he nipped her shoulder. She clawed at his jacket, and he started to shrug it off when a pale blue light filled the dovecote. The light blossomed, and the temperature around them dropped causing their breaths to emerge as thick white clouds.

"Oh my God!" she gasped, her heart slamming against her ribs, and then it was too late. White light flashed all around them, and then all went dark.

She blinked, trying to see. Pale light started to fade in around the edges, and she recognized where she was. Inside Stormclyffe Hall, in a room on the second floor, overlooking the dovecote and the gardens. Isabelle stood next to her with haunted eyes. She touched Jane's hand and started to speak, her voice barely a whisper at first.

"Jane…Jane you must see… Why can't you see? She's here. She's still here." Isabelle raised a hand, pointing to the dovecote. Next to it, a spot of blackened earth stretched long enough to cover a body. The roses nearest the earth had withered and died.

"Who's still here?" she asked, eyes locked on that abnormally dark soil.

"She is. The one who pushed me. You know, Jane. I chose you because you would know what happened to me. Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, you must stop her. You have to rid my home of her before—" Isabelle spun and faced the door to the room they were in and a bloodcurdling scream tore from her lips.

"Isabelle!" Jane turned to see what scared the other woman, and her heart stopped. There in front of her was a woman in a red cloak, her face decayed as though a flesh-eating disease had ravaged her beautiful features. She reached a clawed hand out toward Jane, and black eyes held red pinpricks which gleamed at their centers.

"You…" The raspy whisper felt like ice picks racking her eardrums. "You will die…as she did. The earl is mine…"

A black wind rose up around them, filling the room until only Isabelle's screams and that awful rasping were mixed with the violent roaring.

"Who are you?" Jane screamed as claws raked her face and hands, drawing blood and scouring bone.

The woman in the red cloak laughed, and it sounded like the cackle of thousand demons from the darkest pits of hell. Jane reached for her necklace, and the second her fingers curled around it, it burned her, but she didn't let it go.

"Jane!" A masculine voice broke through the roaring wind and abruptly the nightmare faded. She was back in the dovecote with Bastian, and her body trembled so hard, her bones felt like they were knocking together.

"Jane, what the bloody hell just happened? You were having a seizure, and you screamed. God, it was awful, and your face…" Bastian stroked his fingertips over her cheeks. Pain followed his touch.

"What do you mean, my face?" she asked, touching her skin. Raised marks met her fingertips.

"It looks like something clawed your face. But I was holding you the entire time, nothing touched you. The marks don't appear to be bleeding, just welts."

She could barely see his face in the dim light, but she could see enough to tell he was pale, and his brows were knitted together. She couldn't tell him what she'd just seen. It was too insane. Dreams, nightmares, those were normal, excusable products of her imagination. This…this had been something else entirely. She'd feared the other dreams had been evidence of insanity, but this was proof. She wasn't going crazy.

He cupped the sides of her neck with his palms and touched his forehead to hers, their warm breath shared. Gone was the icy chill and the cloudy breaths. Whatever had been here with them a few seconds ago had vanished.

"Jane, love, talk to me. What happened?" The way he said "love" with his British accent, melted her on the inside. She shut her eyes.

"You wouldn't believe me. You'd probably think I was crazy."

"Try me." He kissed her closed eyelids, then the tip of her nose, and finally her lips. "Have a little faith in me, bookworm." He smiled against her mouth, and she couldn't help but smile back.

"You have to stop calling me that," she replied, trying to chastise him, but it came out more teasing than anything else.

"Absolutely not."

"Why?" Her body heated with desire.

"I need to remind myself who you are, that you are off-limits for me. But damned if I can't keep my hands off you, even though I shouldn't want you." He sucked her bottom lip into his mouth.

"I shouldn't want you either," she replied before he distracted her completely. "Mmm…" She moaned in sheer pleasure, the frightening memories of minutes ago fading when he touched her. She was safe with him, well, all except her heart.

"Now," he said between nibbling kisses. "Tell me what happened."

With a shaky sigh, she gave in. "I saw Isabelle. She and I were in the castle looking down at the dovecote, and then this woman attacked us. She looked…horrible. Flesh was decaying and falling off her, and she clawed my face."

He didn't say anything for several seconds. "All right… There was no way you could have made those scratches to yourself. Who was the woman who did this?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure who. Isabelle just told me to protect her home, and that this woman was still here. She said I was blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. I don't know what that means. And there was something weird about the dovecote. There was this blackened spot of earth, and all the grass and plants near it had died. Isabelle was pointing at it."

"If you did see Isabelle, then that means the curse—" He brushed a hand over his suddenly pale face as he struggled for words. Outside the storm's ferocity lessened.

"Blood of her blood? That implies kinship, family. Do you know anything of your ancestry?"

"A little. My family has always lived in Charleston on both sides of my parents' lines. I know that one of my ancestors on my mother's side was from England. Joseph Brax. He was the first to come over to America in my mother's family, around 1820 or so."

"Brax?" Bastian tensed.

"Yes." She bit her lip and studied him.

"Jane, Isabelle had a younger brother. Joseph Braxton. He was often called Brax as a nickname according to letters we have from Richard and Isabelle."

What he said took a moment to sink in. "Wait…you're saying that I'm…related to you?" She covered her mouth, horrified.

He gripped her shoulders. "Jane, we're several generations apart, from a distantly connected bloodline. But yes, we're family. You are blood of Isabelle's blood."

For a second Jane just started at him. She and Bastian were related. Related . If it hadn't been so many generations apart, she would have been freaked out. But then again, being related was…amazing. She was connected to Isabelle's line.

"Okay, so we're connected by a common ancestry."

"Yes," Bastian said. "What else did Isabelle mention? You said something about a dovecote and blackened earth?"

A bone-deep chill burned through her as an awful idea surfaced.

"Bastian, you don't think that…" She gulped, unable for a moment to voice the horrifying thought. "That maybe there's a body buried there?"

He had been stroking her hair, but his hand stilled, and his fingers tightened in the strands.

"What makes you think it's a body?" he asked.

She tensed. "Isabelle said I had to get ‘her' out, and I saw this woman with a decaying face and blond hair. She was…horrifying. It seemed like Isabelle was frightened of her and wanted me to get her out of Stormclyffe. How would we know if there's a body there?"

"There's only one way to find out." He gently set her aside and headed for the dovecote's door.

The storm had melted into a heavy rain. He went outside and disappeared around the side of the building, soon returning to the doorway with an ancient shovel in his hand. She drank in the sight of him with his rain-slicked, golden hair. He glanced about on the ground and then looked back at her.

"Where did you see the spot?" he asked.

She moved into the doorway and pointed at the particular area she remembered all too vividly from the dream. With a heavy nod, he slammed the shovel's tip deep into the earth and pressed his foot on the metal, using his weight to plunge it even deeper. Rain sluiced over his body and the cold earth as he dug. For the next hour, she watched in fear and silence as he continued to dig his shovel into the soil. When the hole was three feet deep and three feet long, he suddenly dropped the shovel and stumbled back a step with a guttural shout.

"What is it?" She crept out of the building and placed her hands on his shoulder.

He pointed toward the hole. Apprehension dug its venom-tipped nails into her spine as she crept to the edge and peered down. She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream.

Pale bones. Human remains jutted out of the blackened soil. Remnants of a red velvet cloak tangled with the dirt and white fragments.

"There are bones in my gardens," he declared slowly. "Bones. Christ, what the bloody hell am I supposed to do? Call the police?"

She gripped his arm hard as she felt something foreign move through her, whispering to her. "Destroy them. Cast them into the sea. She must not stay here any longer."

"We have to get rid of them. Throw them over the cliff," she urged.

"What?" He glanced down at her, startled. "No, Jane, we have to call the police." He grasped her shoulders and shook her.

She cast the strange compulsion aside, ignoring the need to obey command to destroy the bones.

"You're right. Of course, you're right. They'll need to process the scene." She knew from the look of the cloak that the body wasn't from this century.

"Come on." He took her hand, lacing their fingers together and leading her away from the shallow grave.

Bastian was worried, more than he cared to admit. Jane was shaking so violently that her teeth were chattering, and he feared she might get ill if she stayed outside any longer. He would have the cook make her hot soup, and then he'd get into bed and warm her up, with his body if he was lucky.

Guilt settled like stones upon his chest. He'd brought her out here, not knowing what would happen. She was sensitive to the castle and its history. He hadn't realized just how deep that sensitivity ran. Perhaps it was her genetic connection to Isabelle, but he couldn't be sure. More important though, he couldn't deny that what she was seeing and experiencing involved a history she would know nothing about. His family kept their secrets well, and the fact that she was finding out things even he didn't know meant something was going on. He didn't want to label it as paranormal or supernatural. He wasn't ready to do that yet. But Jane had witnessed a vision that led to him digging up a body.

Protecting Jane was paramount. The blank look on her face as her voice turned cold and hard as she demanded he get rid of the bones had chilled the blood in his veins. In that moment, he was reminded of his grandmother and her strange behavior in connection to Stormclyffe. His mother, too, had always behaved oddly whenever he mentioned the Hall. He glanced over his shoulder back at the hole near the dovecote and the bones.

Whose remains were they? And how had they ended up there? What did they have to do with Isabelle?

Randolph stood at the top of the stone steps near the south door, facing the gardens. A large black umbrella curved over his head like bat wings. When he noticed them, he jogged out to meet them, handing Bastian the umbrella to shield him and Jane.

"Thank you, Randolph." He nodded at his butler and wrapped an arm around Jane's shoulders as he took her inside.

"You're welcome, my lord. Is there anything else you need?" The older man shrugged out of his coat and reached for theirs.

"Yes, please phone the police and tell them to come at once. We've found human remains on the property, old ones."

Randolph stilled, his gray brows lowering over his dark eyes. "Remains?"

Bastian pressed a kiss to Jane's forehead, drawing strength from her closeness before he answered.

"They are by the dovecote."

"How did you find them?"

It was Jane who replied to Randolph this time, and Bastian wished she hadn't. "I saw it in a vision."

Bastian's body absorbed the shudder that racked her, as he stroked her hair back from her face. She was so damned strong, but still, she roused every protective instinct inside him and drew out every gentle and sweet need in him to care for her and reassure her. He'd never felt this way with any woman he'd been with in the past. Sex was all he'd ever sought. He wondered if some part of his subconscious avoided romantic entanglements that might put any woman he started to care about in danger from his family's tragic curse. But Jane was proving impossible to avoid.

She was the exception to every rule he'd made in his life. She was a snag in the grand design, a twist of unexpected thread in the dull tapestry destiny was weaving. It was all coming undone, and the loose threads were spiraling around him in tantalizing patterns and colors. She was saving him from the slow slip down a dark, lonely path. She dragged him back, forced him to live, breath after painful breath, until he started to become the man his father would have been proud of.

"My lord, before you call the police, I must speak with you." Randolph's eyes were wide and sorrowful. "Both of you."

Bastian gave a curt nod. "Let's go to the Egyptian room. The fire should be lit, and it's a good place to talk."

Randolph led the way through the halls and they passed through the room of marble statues. More than once, Bastian's skin crawled, and he could have sworn that some of the heads of the marble men and women turned his way as he passed by.

The Egyptian room was one of his favorites. All of the furniture had lionlike paws on the legs and several of the couches had sphinx bodies holding up the armrests. Gilded palm fronds extended up from the base of the walls and a rich red paint covered the top part of the entire room and turned purple toward the ceiling, making it feel as though one were actually in Egypt watching the sun set over the banks of the Nile. The ceiling itself was dark blue with dozens of constellations made from diamonds embedded in the plaster. They glittered sharp and clear as any stars in the night sky.

He took a seat on one of the couches, pulling Jane down beside him while keeping his arm firmly around her shoulders. Randolph paced over to the fire, peering into the flames.

"I know you do not believe in spirits, my lord, but I must speak of them tonight." He turned to face them. Outside, twilight was creeping along the horizon, her mauve tendrils slithering through the clouds as she slowly devoured the day.

Randolph had never spoken of ghosts, never seemed to give credence to the ghost stories told by the townspeople. So to hear him even say the word was…chilling.

"Many years ago, when I was a young man, I spent my first summer here as a lad working for your grandfather. He was a good man. When he fell in love with your grandmother though…ahh how he loved her," Randolph paused. "That was when the trouble began. She started having nightmares, ones that made her scream."

Jane flinched and burrowed closer to Bastian. "Like me."

"Shh…it's all right," he murmured in her ear.

"She began to walk in her sleep, roaming the halls, talking of shadows and a woman in red. An evil woman who we had to get out of the house. And then…Nessy, your grandmother's maid, died. The police ruled it as a suicide, but I knew her; she was a friend. She would never have killed herself." His voice broke a little. "Rumors flew around town blaming your grandfather. But none of it was true. That…that evil thing was what killed her." Randolph uttered the last few words so harshly that both Bastian and Jane clutched each other tight.

"What evil thing?" Jane asked, although she feared she knew the answer.

The butler smoothed a hand over his balding head. "A ghost, a spirit, a demonic presence? Whatever it is that dwells in this house, it is jealous. Any woman who dares to love a man of Carlisle blood has met a bloody end. It was the reason your grandfather took your grandmother and fled this place. He saved her." Randolph sank down onto the couch opposite them, his eyes deeply focused on something long years past. "I thought the cycle was broken, but your father…came back. And it took him like it did all of the others who've tried to live happy lives. I didn't want you to come here either, but you were so stubborn, so drawn to this place." He smiled. "Like father, like son. Now that evil has its hooks in Miss Seyton. She's in danger, my lord. You must acknowledge that, even if you choose not to believe in spirits." He stood again, as though any period of immobility disturbed him.

"Whatever you have uncovered by the dovecote, it must be removed. Have the police take it away tonight if possible. We might rid ourselves of the evil at last." He walked to the door and looked back. "I will have Mrs. Beechum make soup for you, and I will call for you when it's ready."

Bastian's throat was so tight he could barely breathe. The butler was always taking care of him, just as he cared for the two previous earls of Stormclyffe, and it had cost him nearly as much as it had cost Bastian.

"Thank you, Randolph." He hoped the elderly man would know his words went beyond a simple thanks.

"It is my duty." Randolph bowed and disappeared.

"Do you believe me now?" Jane's voice was quiet and she looked up at him, her lovely lashes framing those eyes he adored.

"Against every logical bone in my body, I'm starting to." He slid his hand in his pocket, retrieved his phone. It was time to put an end to the vicious cycle that was hurting his family and those he cared about.

A female operator answered the phone. "999, what's your emergency?"

He cleared his throat. "I need to report a body."