Bane Beresford

He snapped his fingers for Ranger and headed down the corridor, hoping like hell he could find the way back through the maze of passages to his assigned chamber.

While the family members hovered and wept around the body of the old earl, Mary made good her escape. Her brain whirled. Her stomach cramped. And she ran like a cowardly rabbit.

When she’d been invited to meet her benefactor, the man she’d recently learned had paid for her schooling, her every meal, for most of her life, she had wondered—no, truly, she had dreamed that at last some family member, some distant relative, had decided to claim her as their own. A childhood fantasy finally fulfilled.

She’d certainly had no idea that the man was at death’s door until the butler guided her into that room earlier this evening. And when she’d asked her question with breathless hope and seen the surprise in those watery blue eyes and the wry twist to his lips, she’d felt utterly foolish.

Was she a member of his family? The answer had been a flat no.

Sally Ladbrook had been right. The man had viewed her as a good work, a charitable impulse, and was looking for recognition before he met his end. Unless he intended to impose the obligation on his heir.

She shivered. Just the thought of the new earl’s overwhelmingly menacing presence in that room made her heart race and her knees tremble. She’d been transfixed by the sheer male strength of him, while he had stood in the shadows as still as death.

She halted at the end of the corridor and glanced back. A sliver of light spilling on to the runner revealed the location of that horrid room. Never in her life had she witnessed anything so morbid. She rubbed at her jaw, trying to erase the sensation of cold papery fingers on her skin and shuddered.

To make it worse, once the heir had stepped out of the shadows, the hatred in the room had been palpable. Like hot oil on metal, hissing and spitting first from one direction and then another, scalding wherever it landed.

And the man. The new earl. So dark. So unexpectedly large, even handsome in a brutal way. A powerful man who had overshadowed his dying grandfather like some avenging devil.

He didn’t walk, he prowled. He didn’t speak, he made utterances in a voice composed of velvet and sandpaper. And his eyes. His eyes were as deep as an abyss when he had stared directly at her. That look owed nothing to the gloom in the room, for it was the same when he stood within the light of the torches. Worse. Because she could see the pinpoints of flickering light reflected in his gaze and still make out nothing in their shadowed depths.

She—who prided herself on being able to stand in front of a class of spoiled daughters and hold her own, at least on the surface, and who, as a charity boarder, had suffered pity and sly comments about her poverty all those years—had managed to stand up to the gloating way the old man had looked at her and crushed any hope that she might have found her place in the world.

But when that piercing gaze looking out from the shadows in the doorway had tangled with hers, it had sapped her courage dry. She’d scuttled ignominiously back to her place without a shred of dignity remaining.

The sooner she left this place, this house with its dark undercurrents, the better. She’d done her duty. Offered her thanks. Surely she was free to go? She would leave first thing in the morning.

She glanced left and right. Which way? The maid who had brought her to the dying man’s room had found her way with unerring ease, but Mary no longer had a clue which way they had come, there had been so many twists and turns on their journey from her chamber. Not to mention the odd staircase.

Part-dissolved abbey, part-Tudor mansion, part-renaissance estate, it sprawled and rambled inside and out. She’d glimpsed the house at dusk, perched high on a Cornish cliff, crenulated towers and chimney pots rising to the sky. A complete muddle of a house.

Her room was in one of those square towers. At the north end, the butler had told her when he escorted her there upon her arrival. The tower nearest the abbey ruins. She could see them through her small window. She had also heard the muffled rumble of the ocean somewhere deep below the house, in its very foundations. A very ominous sound. She shuddered as she imagined the house undermined by the force of the sea.

She eyed her two choices and selected the one that seemed to amble north. Picking up her skirts for speed, she hurried on, wishing there was more light, or a servant to show her the way.

Another corridor branched off to her right, going south? Or had that last corner she had turned set her off course? The maid had turned off the main corridor, hadn’t she? More than once. She plunged into the new hallway. It looked no more familiar than the last.

She needed help.

She tried the first door she came to. A bedroom, its furniture huddled beneath holland covers. If there ever had been a bell rope, it had been removed.

Blast. She returned to the corridor, heading for another room further along.

Footsteps. Behind her. Thank God. Help at last.

She turned around.

A light flickered and stopped. Whoever held the candle remained masked in shadow.

The wind howled through a nearby crevice, lifting the hair at her nape. Her heart picked up speed. The girls at school had told late-night stories of ghosts and hauntings that started like this. Deliciously wicked in their frightening aspects and heroic deeds. Figments of imagination. She did not believe in ghosts. People like her, practical people, did not have the luxury of such flights of fancy, yet she could not quite quell the fear gripping her chest. ‘Who is there?’ She was shocked at the tremble in her voice.

The light drew closer. A candle held in a square-fingered hand joined to a brawny figure still in the darkness. Him. The new earl.

How she knew, she wasn’t sure, but her skin prickled with the knowledge. Heat flushed up from her belly. ‘My lord?’ she said. Her voice quavering just a little more than she would have liked. ‘Lord Beresford?’

The candle went upwards, lighting his harsh face.

‘Great goliaths,’ she said, letting go of her breath. ‘Do you always creep around hallways in such a fashion?’ Oops. That sounded a bit too much like the schoolteacher taking a pupil to task.

The eyes staring down at her were not dark as she had thought in the old earl’s bedroom. They were as grey as storm clouds. And watchful.

‘Are you lost?’ he drawled in that deep mocking voice with its hint of roughness.

‘Certainly not,’ she replied, discomposed by his obvious indifference. Heat rushed to her cheeks and she was glad the dim light would not reveal her embarrassment. She let her gaze fall away.

‘Liar,’ he said softly.

She bristled.

‘That’s better.’

A snuffling sound drew her gaze down. The dog. It sank to its haunches and watched her with its head cocked on one side. It was enormous. ‘What is better?’ she asked, keeping a wary eye on the dog.

‘It is better when you stand up straight, instead of hunching over like a scared schoolgirl.’

As a schoolgirl, she had tried to disguise her ungainly height. It spoke to her discomfort that she had fallen back into that old habit.

She looked up past the wide chest and broad shoulders, past the snowy cravat and strong column of throat, his full mobile mouth at eye level, then up to meet his gaze. Most men were either her height or shorter. This one was taller than her by half a head—he must be inches above six foot tall—and he reeked of danger.

What snatches of conversation she’d heard between him and the dying earl had been positively menacing. And, unless she was badly mistaken, some of the venom shifting back and forth between them had been directed at her.

‘If you will excuse me, I must be on my way.’

‘On your way where?’

‘To my room.’

He shot her a wolfish smile. ‘So that was not your room. The one you just left.’

‘No,’ she muttered, making to step past him.

‘What were you doing in that chamber?’

Did he think she was trying to steal? She stiffened her spine, meeting his gaze full on. Such directness usually sent men running for the hills. On this one it apparently had no effect. Or none visible, though she did sense a sharpening of interest in those wintery eyes.

She huffed out a breath of defeat. ‘I will admit I am a little turned about. My chamber is in the tower at the north end of the house. I thought I would ring for a servant to guide me, but there was no bell pull in the first room I tried.’

‘A clever thought.’