Echoes in the Darkness (18 page)

* * *

Daylight was just streaking the sky when I cautiously opened one eye. I feared it might all have been another helpless, hopeless dream. But it was real. Cad was propped on one elbow, watching my face. I blushed as I recalled the events of the last few hours, and his smile deepened.

“You are so beautiful,
bouche,
” he murmured, tracing the contours of my body with adoring hands. I leaned back against the pillows, watching his expression from beneath half-closed eyelids as he stroked my neck and then moved his hand lower to tease my breasts. Softly, delicately, he ran his fingertips over my nipples, igniting simultaneous flames of lust that ran down my spine to tug sharply at my clitoris. When he bent his head to gently suckle the puckered flesh, I dug my fingers into his hair to keep him there. He flicked the point of his tongue backward and forward slowly over each nipple in turn, and the answering throb between my legs made me squirm.

“My God, Cad,” I gasped, and he lifted his head to smile into my eyes.

“It isn’t yet light. You are still in charge. Tell me what you want from me,
bouche.
” His fingers returned to my nipple. He rolled the pebbled bud hard between his thumb and forefinger, and I threw my head back in exquisite agony.

“More,” I whispered. Rational thought was rapidly deserting me. All that mattered was his touch.

“More what?” Deliberately, he loosened his grip, making me groan in frustration. I slid my hand down to his groin, my eyes widening with pleasure as my fingertips encountered the rigid column of his flesh. I bent my head to kiss his lips long and hard, straddling him and gasping as the movement brought the head of his cock in contact with the slick wetness of my sex. I moved pleadingly against him, but he shook his head stubbornly. “You have to tell me.”

“Please, Cad,” I murmured against his lips.

“You are in charge,” he repeated. He lifted me so that his cock just entered my moist flesh. His hands on my hips held me there and refused to let me grind myself down onto him. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to put it inside me,” I whispered.

A silent laugh shook him. “What exactly do you want me to put inside you? My finger? My tongue? Be specific.”

“Your cock,” I muttered impatiently. With a shudder that echoed through us both, he obediently lowered me on to him. Powerful, thick and throbbing. I cried out in triumph and joy.

“What do you want me to do next?” he asked, still not moving or allowing me to do so.

Modesty had no place in this scenario, I decided. I tried out the word I had heard him use. “I want you to fuck me.” Encouraged by the expression on his face, which told me that he liked hearing that word on my lips, I continued. “And I want you to do it very hard and very fast.” Thankfully, he obliged. He lifted my hips so that the glorious, iron-hard length of his cock slid in and out, stretching and filling me. Nothing that had gone before, or would come after, could match the feeling of Cad’s body inside mine. Champagne bubbles of pleasure burst in my nerve endings so that I was achingly aware of him in every part of me, not just where we touched.

He lifted his hips, pumping harder and faster. “Feel what you do to me, Dita. How hard you make me. Know that every time I look at you I’m thinking of fucking you.” His voice was hoarse.

Those words inflamed me further and made my heart swell. With a will of their own, my muscles clenched around him, drawing him deeper, and holding him there. I rocked desperately backward and forward on him, pleading with him to never, ever stop. And, when at last I came, it was like nothing I had ever felt before. But, of course, it was different now. Because I knew beyond doubt how much I loved him, and that I could never return to a time before this night.

“Are you sorry I chose you tonight?” he asked me later.

I shook my head. “Never,” I told him vehemently. “Are you?”

In answer, he drew me into his arms and kissed me so long and hard and tenderly that there was no more room left for misunderstandings.

“There can be no going back now,
bouche,
” he said at last. But he didn’t need to say it. I already knew he was right.

* * *

Cad left my room early, explaining that he wanted to see how much damage the Montol celebrations had caused. Since the servants were unlikely to be in any fit state to perform their daily tasks, he wanted to do as much as he could to set the house to rights before his parents returned.

“You have to speak to Eddie,
bouche,
” he said, leaning over the bed to kiss me. “Today.”

“It’s not that simple.” Sandor’s face loomed in my mind’s eye.

“If you want me—and we both know you do—it is that simple,” he replied.

I surprised myself by falling asleep and not waking for several hours. When I descended the stairs, the house seemed restored to peace and normality.

“His lordship would like you to join him in the study, miss,” Porter held the door to that room open and bowed as I walked through it. I paused on the doorstep. Tynan, Eddie and Cad were all waiting for me in the study. I glanced quickly at each of them. All three faces, so alike and yet so different, were grave.

“My solicitor was one of the house guests at the party yesterday. I had asked him to make enquiries for me about the murders that took place when you were in Paris. There
are
indeed striking similarities between those killings, and the ones that have taken place here,” Tynan said, and I felt my heart plummet. “All of the murdered women were repeatedly stabbed, and the killer seemed driven to frenziedly mutilate their breasts, vaginas and reproductive organs.”

“But this is nonsense,” Eddie blustered weakly. “I could go to any large city in the world and find you a dozen similar stories of violent murder.”

“But Athal is not a large city,” Tynan said. “And the murders in Paris ceased when Dita left, and these began when she arrived here.” He threw me an apologetic glance.

I sat down abruptly, feeling the colour drain from my face. “Do the French police have
any
idea who might have been responsible?”

Tynan shook his head. “Until I began to make enquiries, no one had linked the two cases,” he explained. “Now, however, I am informed that the police are going to seriously consider the possibility that they
are
related. Indeed, it appears that there may actually be a link because—”

“The girls all look alike,” Cad interrupted his father before he could finish his sentence.

“How could you possibly know that?” Tynan’s words rang out like rapid gunfire. Eddie remained silent, his face ashen, his endlessly blue eyes fixed painfully on his brother’s face. I closed my own eyes. How could anyone, other than the killer, know that? But there must be a simple explanation. Surely there must. I could not have given my heart to Cad so completely only to find that he was—what? My mind stubbornly refused to say the word.

“It is obvious,” Cad replied. Before he could say anything more, a blood-curdling scream reached our ears. Eddie and Cad dashed together out of the room. I followed with Tynan, whose pace was slower. The noise, now a low, keening wail, was coming from the rose garden, and against my will, I was drawn by the agony it conveyed. One of the maids, a young girl of about fifteen, staggered toward us, a hand over her mouth, her eyes bulging in horror. With a shaking finger, she pointed to the abomination that had once been Miss Victoria Cadwallader.

The snow beneath Vicky’s brutalised body was black with blood. Long, bright tendrils fanned out around her like crimson embroidery on a white petticoat. Her dress had been hauled up to her neck and her naked body was scarcely recognisable as human. The gaping wounds on her sad, white flesh seemed even harsher in the bright winter sunlight. She had, quite simply, been ripped apart. I felt my knees begin to buckle and was grateful for the strong hands that caught me under my arms and hauled me upright.

“Take this serving girl back to the house and get some brandy down both of you,” Cad said to me, turning me resolutely away from the scene. “Keep my mother and Eleanor there and tell Porter to send for the police.” I hesitated. I wanted to go to Vicky, to hide her from the eyes that would pry into the intimate secrets of her body. To say something that might somehow comfort her, even though she was long gone. To be able to tell her mother the last touch on her hand was from someone who cared instead of from a monster. “Go,” Cad insisted, reading my thoughts and giving me a little push toward the house. “There is nothing you can do for her now,
bouche.
”

Chapter Twelve

Eleanor, drawn from her room by the sounds of distress from the girl who had discovered Vicky, came into the parlour wrapped in a pink dressing gown. Her thick, fair hair hung loose about her shoulders. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and she looked like a little girl who had spent the night crying. When Tynan gravely told her what had happened to her friend, she sank down into a chair and covered her face with her hands. Tynan sat next to her and drew her into the circle of his arms.

“Cad,” I murmured, and drew him apart from the others so that I could speak to him in a quiet undertone. “I understand now what you meant about how the murdered girls look. Can it be true? Is he killing
Eleanor
each time?”

As if drawn by my thoughts, Lucy appeared in the doorway. The thick, lustrous length of her own hair was drawn back into a neat chignon. It was almost impossible to judge her age. From a distance, she could easily have been a young girl.

“Perhaps not,” Cad said, and I think I knew it all in that instant. My mind just refused to accept a truth too awful to be reality. I was distracted when Eddie, who had been sitting with his head in his hands, suddenly rushed from the room with a shaking hand raised to his mouth. His face was drained of all colour and his eyes were dark and ghastly. We heard the sounds of him retching, just outside the door.

“Come to the library, I can’t talk to you here.” Cad left the room and, a few minutes later, I followed him into the library. I walked straight into his arms. He held me close, and his touch caused some of the day’s horrors to recede.

“I can’t tell Eddie about us. Not now, not yet. You have just seen how Vicky’s murder has—
broken
him.”

“I know.” His tone was calm. I think I loved him even more for accepting the delay without demur. He understood that to tell Eddie now, when he was even more fragile than usual, that I was in love with the brother he hated and mistrusted would not only cause him immeasurable hurt; it would destroy him. “But you are mine, Dita. Just as I am yours. I knew it in the first instant I saw you, and I know you felt it, too. It’s not something we can fight. It just is.”

I drew in a ragged breath. “I have no right to feel happy when…” I stopped. The memory of Vicky’s body, flung down on the snow like a discarded doll, was fresh in my mind.

“It’s a damnable situation, I know.” Cad’s lips twisted. “Particularly as Inspector Miller still has me at the top of his list of murder suspects.” For the first time, I saw in his face how much he was hurt by that fact. “But I didn’t do it,
bouche.
”

“I know.” And I really believed, in that instant, that what he was telling me was the truth. I held a comforting hand to his cheek, and he turned his head to kiss the inside of my wrist.

“If legend is allowed to prevail, however, the world will always believe that, in a past life, I
was
Uther Jago. A murderer for whom no deed was too evil. Because that is, after all, what my own parents thought when I was a child. Perhaps they occasionally still think it. Although they would strenuously deny it, of course. I have lost count of the times I have cursed this face,
bouche.
And cursed Uther Jago for bequeathing it to me. But I’m not him. He has not touched or tainted me. You, of all people, have to believe me.”

“I do believe it.” When I was in his arms, it was easy to do so. “I know you better than anyone knows you. Better, I think, than I know myself.” I held him closer and felt some of the tension leave his strong frame.

“None of the horrors of the past, or the present, can change the fact that you and I are meant to be together. I can’t pretend I don’t want you to come away with me now, right this minute, Dita. Patience has never been one of my character traits, but I am content to know it will happen for us. I can wait.”

“Am I a wild grain?” I asked, thinking of Tynan’s words.

“Well, you certainly drive me wild,” he laughed, nuzzling my throat. “I suspect you may have been talking to my father,
bouche.
I confess, I have sown my fair share of wild
oats.
I may even have sown a few other men’s shares, but every one of them has led me to you. You are everything I want and need.”

“Do you love me, Cad?” I gazed into the golden depths of those incredible eyes. He still had not said it, and I badly needed to hear those words.

“You know I do. I love you more than life itself. What we shared, in Paris and last night, is more love than most people have in a lifetime. One day with you would be worth dying for,” he said harshly, and the amber lights deepened and blazed with unearthly intensity. A thought, something someone had said about a laughing devil in his eyes, tried to surface. I grasped eagerly at it, sensing an answer there. The memory playfully eluded me. “But I don’t want to die for you, Dita. I want to live for you. I want to live
with
you.”

“Then there is something you need to know about me,” I said quietly.

“About Sandor Karol?” I jerked my head up in surprise. “I know you have been on the run since your father died,
bouche.
I assume Karol is the reason?” He laughed at my expression. “I may not be Uther Jago, but I can be quite perceptive and inquisitive when necessary. I found out who your father was, and I know all about Sandor Karol. When my father sets me a task of finding information, I am generally very good at it. When you were the subject of my enquiries, I had another, more personal motive to succeed. Then, when Karol turned up here, I turned my investigations toward him. It wasn’t difficult to discover a link between the two of you in the form of your father.”