Chapter 8

8

B astian let the journal fall to his lap. His eyes burned, and his throat was tight. He almost felt he had been there, the sea breeze playing with his hair as he kissed the only woman he would ever love, never knowing he would lose her in just a short while. Barely a year later, Isabelle would be dead, and Richard would follow her to the grave a few months afterward.

Goose bumps covered his arms. He flipped the journal closed and set it on the nightstand. He didn't know what to think. The story of his ancestors' lives filled these pages. Details of Isabelle's death might be in here somewhere. No wonder Jane had ferreted the diary away. It was the perfect primary source for her dissertation. As a fellow historian, he knew its value and had to acknowledge the truth—that not letting her have this would hurt her research. The last thing he wished to do was hurt Jane.

But if he gave her this, it would open the door to his family's darkest secrets. Could he do that? Sacrifice the protection of his family in order to give Jane what she needed to finish her paper? If he didn't, she would lose the support of her committee chair on her topic and wouldn't get her PhD. He didn't want to be the person who stood in the way of her dreams.

She was a woman lost and doing her best to find a place that was hers. He understood that feeling all too well. Stormclyffe Hall was his refuge. Even though the place was shrouded in tragedy and its stones soaked with innocent blood, it was still the one place that was truly his. London had never felt the way the castle did. He loved the feel of the cold stone beneath his bare feet and the slightly salty taste to the air from the sea. This was his home. Perhaps it was Jane's, too.

A laugh escaped his lips at the rogue thought. Jane, living here. What a foolish idea. It didn't make any sense. She was a student at Cambridge, with a life there, and eventually she would return to America.

He eyed the journal ruefully and then got back out of bed. He took the book, went back out into the hall, slipping it back into Jane's briefcase. When he straightened, he heard a muffled voice on the other side of Jane's doors. Ears straining, he listened to the sounds.

"No! No don't leave me! Please, I cannot do this alone." The voice belonged to Jane, but it was so full of despair and fear that he didn't hesitate to act. He burst into her room. The meager light from the hall split a path in the darkness by the bed and revealed Jane thrashing wildly, her limbs tangled fretfully in her sheets.

"No!" she wailed sharply, and then her body seized violently.

"Jane." He dashed to the bed and grabbed hold of her, dragging her coiled body into his arms. She slackened in his hold almost instantly and didn't wake right away. He stroked the wild, dark waves of hair back so he could see her face. Her lashes fluttered like an injured hummingbird's wings, and then she finally looked at him.

"What happened?" Her voice was hoarse as though she had been screaming for hours.

"You were shouting in your sleep." He delivered the news gently, not wanting to frighten her further, but he hoped she would explain what had happened.

"I was?" She moved slightly, her body sliding against his. His groin tightened, and he held her closer as a wave of longing swept through him. He needed to let go of her. Any more of this and he'd give into his need to kiss her again. Distance. Must keep my distance .

One of her hands laid flat on his bare chest, the tips of her fingers were stiff and dug into his skin, like a kitten clinging to its mother. He couldn't easily disentangle himself from her now, so he surrendered to the desire to soothe her.

"Were you dreaming?" His hands traveled down her back, soothing her with slow massaging touches.

"I think so." She settled into him more, resting her cheek on his chest. That single point of skin-to-skin contact frayed his control.

He lightly pressed his palms into her lower back, and she stretched out on her bed and allowed herself to be tucked into his side. The position felt natural, as though he had done it a thousand times with Jane. It was so easy to be with her. He barely knew her, yet the press of her body to his eased the restlessness that always gripped him. In recent years, he had stalked from bed to bed of every beautiful woman he came across, refusing to linger with any one woman. Jane rooted him to the spot, like a sapling that had finally found a bed of earth deep and rich enough to support him. And he was going to lose her. She would leave at the end of the week, and he would never see her again. For my family's sake, I have to let you go. The mere thought of it made his stomach twist.

Mine. She belongs to me. She cannot leave. The voice that growled in the back of his head was not his own, but he had the urge to agree with it.

"Do you remember what you were dreaming about?" he asked, mentally pushing the strange voice aside.

He felt her give a little nod against his chest.

"I was following a woman in a white nightgown. She was running through the castle. There were shadows everywhere."

"Did you catch up to her?"

She licked her lips. "Yes. She stopped in front of an old dovecote. When I got to her, she pointed at the ground, and all around her there were doves. Dead doves . Their little hearts ripped from their snowy-white breasts. The woman turned to me and she?—"

"She what?" he prompted. His heartbeat pounded against his temples.

"She said, ‘By innocence bled beneath pale moonlight, the evil one has begun to fight. Touch not the heart of evil. Trust not the shadows. What once was broken must be mended.' Then she was gone."

Every bone in Bastian's body seemed to burn. He blinked as a violent pain tore through him and just as quickly it was gone. His grandmother's voice rang in his ears. It was her warning. The one Jane knew somehow and now had dreamed about.

"Jane—"

"I'm sorry I had a nightmare and woke you up." She attempted to extricate herself from his hold, her cheeks red as she suddenly seemed to realize they had been cuddled together in her bed. He wasn't ashamed of his near nakedness, but she was certainly aware of it. Her gaze traveled the length of his body, stilling on his bare chest for several seconds before she cleared her throat and turned her focus back to his face. A little grimace replaced her bashfulness. "You need rest. Your face…it looks like it hurts."

Instinctively, she moved her hands up to his face and brushed over the tender flesh.

He winced. "It doesn't matter. I'm fine. And you mustn't be frightened, it was just a bad dream."

She looked away from him. "What if I told you it was more than just a bad dream? That I've been having these sorts of nightmares for a few years?"

"I think they're just dreams, Jane. Try to relax."

She scowled at him, but there was hurt and betrayal in her eyes at his dismissal. It couldn't be helped though. Better that she be angry with him than if she started to care for him.

Bastian swept his hands back around her waist, trying to draw her back down. He needed to have her lying next to him.

She bit her lip and resisted. "I don't think this is a good idea. This is all too…" She waved a hand in the air in a helpless gesture.

He grasped her chin and angled it so she had to face him. "I've lived my life on bad ideas, and it hasn't failed me yet." He pulled her down and enfolded her in his arms. "Don't think about tomorrow, Jane, none of it. It's just you and me right now. Focus on that, and you will be fine." Her muscles relaxed and she ceased her resistance.

The fire still burned in the hearth, and Bastian lay awake, watching the logs turn to white ash before he sensed Jane's breathing lighten. She was sleeping at last.

Please, let her have no more nightmares .

The sound and sight of her fear had forced a primal, protective instinct forward in him. With each little harm she suffered, it felt as though he suffered, too. He slid one of his hands into her hair, threading his fingers through the dark, silky strands. A throaty little purr escaped Jane, and she cuddled closer. In that moment there was no place he wanted to be but here in bed with his charming little bookworm who jumped at shadows and dreamed of women dressed in white. He didn't know a thing about her, not anything he could claim by words alone, but he did know her somehow. Like a half-remembered dream that faded come dawn until it was only a memory of a sensation, a whisper of words, or a fleeting image from the corner of his eye.

"Who are you, Jane? I must know," he murmured as the last embers of the fire perished and darkness reigned.

Her body was heaven. Nothing existed beyond her wild cries of pleasure and the pulse of fire that leaped in his own veins. Lost in a crimson haze of hungry passion, he devoured the sweetness of her mouth and sank into the most secret part of her body and soul until their essences seemed to become one being, not two. Their hands met above their heads, and he twined his fingers through hers, even as he kept her trapped beneath him. She was forced to surrender the control of their lovemaking, but he would see to it that this moment was everything she had ever dreamed of.

"My heart," he growled against the soft skin of her neck and thrust hard into her. She quaked beneath him, her hips rising as she sought to get closer to his body.

"As you are mine." Her breathless reply stung his senses and tenderness flooded his chest in a warm wave of satisfied longing. There could never be heaven anywhere else but where she was. He would have captured the moon and stolen a constellation of stars to lay at her feet if it would make her smile even once. No man had ever been so blessed as he was.

The passion and desire built like a steady blaze between them until there was no stopping, no slowing down, only the rush to the glorious end.

"Isabelle!" His lips broke apart with his cry, and every bit of strength failed him as he released his soul into her. Her own stifled scream of joy was throaty and thick with sated pleasure. He laid his head upon her breasts, gasping for breath. Her hand smoothed his hair back from his face as she softly panted beneath him. The intimacy of it was so wondrous that he felt like a young boy riding a horse for the first time across the sloping hills. He was free, but not alone. Isabelle was with him. Always. Forever.

Bastian woke with a start, his head pounding, his throat tight as he fought off a shout of despair. His chest was empty as though a thief had slipped a hand between his ribs and stolen his heart. A desperate longing filled that void with leaden weights, and for a second, he couldn't breathe.

The dream. It was just that, a dream. He had dreamed of Isabelle and making love to her. A shudder racked him, and he cuddled Jane's warm body closer. Was he a mad man or a fool for wishing the dream had been reality and it had been Jane who was his, sharing her passion with him? A cold sense of dread trespassed along his spine. She was not his, could never be his, and yet holding her like this was sheer devastation to him.

After Richard and Isabelle, the women who fell in love with the men of Stormclyffe always died, which was what had led to the myth of the Weymouth curse. Except his mother. Her life had been spared, whereas his father had died. Witnesses had reported to the papers that a woman had been seen near the crash, a woman in white, wandering along the deserted road. It had led to a frenzy of ghost stories. Time and time again, people had whispered that his father had risked his own life by coming back to the deserted castle all those years ago in order to trade his life for his wife's to the dark fates that held the Carlisle family captive.

It was bad luck to have someone here purposely exposing his family history. And Jane, even with all her academic credentials, was still no better than a paparazzo with a pen rather than camera.

If Bastian had any sense, any real strength, he would slip out of this bed and leave her now before his feelings for her deepened beyond redemption. He was not his ancestor, and Jane was not Isabelle. He had no claim to the woman in his arms, and she had none to him, but Christ, he wanted it more than his next breath.

A sudden wellspring of hope roared through him with the force of a mighty gale. There was nothing to stop him from taking her and running to the ends of the earth to escape his family's reputation. He could seduce her blind, sweep her off her feet, and never let her go. A hundred faces of women he'd been with all faded whenever he thought of Jane. They had been empty entertainments, mere phantoms compared to his Jane.

Was this how it had been for Richard? The undeniable pull, like planets to the sun, to be with this one woman? A passion stronger than any of society's laws, a love deeper than the northern seas. There was no turning back, no walking away from emotions like that, once he set down that path. Did he love Jane? No, not yet, but?—

Jane stirred restlessly before settling back to sleep. Soon dawn would come, and he would show her his world. A world he wanted to share.

Soon .