Lacybourne Manor (3 page)

He considered himself lucky,
women were a banquet before him and he had a lusty appetite. Colin
took what he wanted, devoured it mercilessly and then left the
remains without a backward glance.

However, his mother was
complaining. Both his sister Claire and brother Tony had made good
marriages. Claire, nearly immediately after being wed, had two
children one after the other. Tony’s wife was now pregnant.

Colin’s mother wanted her
eldest son settled. She wanted him to provide her more
grandchildren to spoil, more opportunities for her to meddle and
dote and lastly, she was simply just too tired after thirty-six
years of worrying after Colin. She didn’t understand his
heartlessness and she was deeply concerned about his antipathy
towards women. She wanted proof that his heart was mended (from
whatever had rendered it broken) so that she could live out her old
(ish) age knowing he was happy.

Enter Tamara Adams.

Colin knew that Phoebe Morgan
didn’t much care for Tamara but then again, his mother didn’t have
to sleep with her.

Colin liked sleeping with
Tamara even if she wasn’t the best he’d had. What she lacked in
imagination or even sometimes passion, she made up for in sheer
will which worked very well to Colin’s benefit.

Shaking off these thoughts, he
moved through the house to his study, uncovered the sandwiches Mrs.
Manning left for him on his desk and smiled a small smile to
himself.

His housekeeper was perfect.
She was industrious, thorough and mostly unseen.

He settled behind his desk and
made several business calls while he ate then made several more
after he finished. Finally, late at night, he phoned Tamara,
finalising plans with her to spend the rest of the week and weekend
at Lacybourne.

“I can’t wait to see you,
darling,” she purred and he had to control his annoyance at the
endearment that didn’t even begin to sound genuine. He disliked it
when she slipped into the usual feminine tactics and made them
obvious. She was far more talented than that. “Are you in bed?” she
continued suggestively.

“No,” he replied tersely and
she immediately read his tone, not a stupid girl (which was one of
her attractions) and quickly rang off.

While preparing for bed, he was
unable to assuage his unease and wondered if he should scrape off
Tamara and find someone else. Although who that would be, he did
not know. After thirty-six years, he had long since given up on the
idea that Beatrice Godwin’s reincarnated soul would enter his life,
smiling magnificently at him and melting his modern day warrior’s
heart.

Tamara knew she was entering
the straightaway, heading for the chequered flag and the more she
seemed sure of her position, the more irritating she became.

Colin lay in bed, crossed his
hands behind his head and listened to the rain.

He did not relish the idea of
finding a replacement for Tamara, though it didn’t really matter
who it was. Although it did matter how she looked. Colin had a
definite type and Tamara was that type.

Tamara had jet black
hair, ice blue eyes and never allowed the sun to touch her
alabaster skin. She was petite and watched her diet like a hawk so
that she would not put an ounce of extra flesh on her slim body.
She dressed impeccably and had her own trust fund. Her parents were
friends with his parents and were also, most assuredly,
upper,
upper
middle class.

She was, for all intents
and purposes, perfect or at least as perfect as a woman could get
in Colin’s dire estimation.

The rain still falling, his
tired thoughts turned from Tamara to Beatrice Godwin.

He had no way of knowing if
Beatrice Godwin was petite, except she was suddenly there, right
beside him and she was not petite. She was long limbed and her body
was lush with curves.

And there she was, laying in
bed with him, completely naked, her skin glowing, her eyes heated
with passion.

His mouth was on her, his hands
were everywhere, she felt so damn good, she tasted so good, he
couldn’t get enough of her. He felt the blood singing through his
veins, burning through him with lust and… something else.

Colin was a man of many
passions and refined tastes. Only the best suited him and he only
accepted the best. He knew passion and desire; he liked sex,
enjoyed it immensely but it was always just that, sex, an
experience, a release. The act of intercourse was another skill to
acquire, hone and use with ruthless determination to meet his own
ends.

But he’d never felt a desire so
strong it was a need before, desire that was so insistent it was
nearly violent.

But he felt that with
Beatrice.

Colin lifted his mouth from her
nipple and looked at her face. He was surprised to see her lustrous
dark locks had turned gold. Her hazel eyes were warm, melting to a
liquid brown and when she opened her mouth and whispered, “Colin,”
her voice was husky with her own need.

He had to have her,
immediately, he could not,
would
not, wait a moment longer.
He pulled himself over her, opened her legs and her hands glided
into his hair.

He opened his mouth to say her
name but somehow “Beatrice” wasn’t right.

But he had no time to sort his
confusion because he was ripped viciously from her arms as they
were both hauled out of the bed.

At the side of the bed, strong
hands holding him back as he struggled, he watched as the faceless,
dark entities that kept him hostage tore her out of the bed the
other way.

He roared his fury, brutal
feelings he didn’t quite understand surging through him as he
watched her battle across the room. Colin came to the instant
realisation that she was life to him, she was breath. The world,
the entire world, his whole being, heart and soul, was wrapped up
in her.

He struggled fiercely but in
vain. He watched, his gut wrenching in despair, as the sharp,
shining blade swiftly, without delay, slid across her throat
causing hideous blood to splatter everywhere from the gaping wound
at her neck.

He woke, somehow, even though
it couldn’t be possible, to a high-pitched, blood-chilling, woman’s
scream.

Dream Man

Sibyl Godwin woke to the
thunderous, rage-filled roar of a man.

Her eyes flew open and Bran,
her cat, flew off the bed with an angry mew while Mallory, her dog
(who had been taking up most of her wide mattress) jumped awkwardly
off the other side and began barking.

The roar could not have come
from the throat of the man of her dream.

That throat, in her dream, had
just been slit.

She realised she was panting
and absolutely, utterly terrified.

The shutters were closed on the
windows and she threw back the heavy covers of her bed, running to
the windows and throwing them open to let in the moonlight.

There was no moonlight.

She ran back to the bed and
switched on her bedside lamp, wondering distractedly why she hadn’t
thought of that first.

“Be quiet, Mallory!” she
ordered and her mastiff immediately sat, his large tongue rolled
out and a glob of drool slid off the side of his lip and landed
with a plop on the carpet.

“That’s disgusting,” Sibyl told
the dog affectionately as she shakily sat at the edge of the
bed.

Her dog came forward, his whole
body moving in opposite tandem with his fiercely wagging tail. He
nudged her trembling hand and she sat there, petting her pup and
trying to get control of her panic.

Something, she knew from years
of experience with this type of thing, was terribly, horribly
wrong.

“I need to call Mom,” she
announced to Mallory and he just looked at her, all of his earlier
mood gone, currently in blissful dog world as she scratched behind
his ears.

She opened the drawer to her
bedside table, took out the calling card that was her lifeline to
home and grabbed the phone. She carefully dialled the numbers on
the card and then added the memorised numbers that she knew would
ring the phone in her parents’ house in Boulder, Colorado.

“Mom?” her voice was just as
shaky as Sibyl felt and even though thousand of miles separated
mother and daughter, Marguerite Godwin heard the tremulous
tone.

“
My g
oddess, Sibyl, what’s wrong?”

“Oh Mom, I just had the most
terrible dream.”

And then, Sibyl started
crying.

* * * * *

Sibyl Godwin had led a charmed
life.

She was born to Albert Godwin,
an Englishman, a professor of Medieval History and an amateur
archaeologist and Marguerite Den, a hippy, a follower of Wicca and
a hopeless romantic. Her parents loved each other with a love that
just made your toes curl with happy delight at the sight of it.

Bertie and Mags had two
daughters, Sibyl and Scarlett. Sibyl, named thus because Mags
thought it was appropriately witch-sounding. Scarlett, after Mags’s
idol and the best romantic heroine in the history of woman (which,
at worst, was only a few short days after the beginning of the
history of man, if one believed that sort of thing), Scarlett
O’Hara.

Mags and Bertie loved their
daughters with a love that was a shining testimony to all that was
good and right about parenthood.

Even if they were just a tad
bit weird and a much larger bit eccentric.

Mags, Sibyl and Scarlett
happily followed after Bertie from teaching post to teaching post,
at the University of Arizona, UNLV, UCLA, UC Berkeley (which
Mags
adored
) and, finally, he gained tenure at the University of
Colorado in Boulder.

Mags spent a lot of time
communing with Native Americans, opening sacred circles in the
mountains or the dessert depending on where they lived (often she
would simply resort to their backyard which frightened (or annoyed)
the neighbours because she would do this skyclad, or utterly
naked), doting on her small family and fretting after her two
daughters.

Not that there was a great deal
to fret over, Sibyl and Scarlett were both bright, vivacious,
thoughtful and had wonderful senses of humour.

Sibyl did have a bit of a
temper (or more than a bit on occasion and an explosive bit on
other occasions).

And Scarlett had a
penchant for collecting and discarding men (
not
on occasion but
all the time).

Sibyl, Mags was convinced, was
a clairvoyant, often having strange, vivid dreams of events that
came true. Mags was certain these were premonitions if only her
daughter would just learn to read them. Mags tried to help Sibyl
channel this extraordinary power but Sibyl didn’t have any interest
(much to Mags’s everlasting chagrin).

Further concerning Mags and
Bertie was that Sibyl, from a very early age, had the deep belief
that she would one day meet her one and only true love. A knight in
shining armour, kind, loyal and strong, her soulmate, heartmate and
helpmate. Sibyl knew to the depths of her very soul that one day
she would meet this man who would turn her world golden and provide
her with all the joy and happiness she could endure.

Scarlett was, luckily (in
Bertie and Mags’s opinion), a lot more down-to-earth.

Nevertheless, there were two
more worries for the Godwins.

Both of their girls’ hearts
were way too open (and easily broken).

Then there was the way the
girls looked.

And that was all Marguerite’s
fault.

There was a reason stodgy,
bookish Bertie Godwin fell for flamboyant Marguerite Den.

He’d told her straight out one
day, “You’re sex on legs, woman.”

If Mags had been any other kind
of woman, that might have been offensive. But considering the fact
that she adored her red-haired (then), tall, straight-backed, thin,
balding (now), brilliant, adorable husband, she found it the
highest of compliments.

Easy to feel complimented by
your very own husband, much harder to deal with when all the men
who looked at your daughters obviously felt the same way.

If Bertie had hair, he would
have lost it after years of tearing it out worrying about his
daughters. Even though he was a pacifist (he couldn’t have married
his hippy wife if he was not) and found all firearms distasteful,
that didn’t mean he didn’t eventually resort to resting a shotgun
by the side of his front door whenever one of his daughters was
picked up for a date (desperate times, desperate measures, as it
were).

Both girls were elegantly tall
but they were not slender.

They were curvy.

Very
curvy.

Sibyl had a tumble of
shining, golden, thick, waving hair, warm hazel eyes and peaches
and cream skin with freckles dancing across her nose. Scarlett had
a mass of curly, equally thick, auburn hair, flashing blue eyes and
freckles dancing
everywhere
.

Scarlett had poured her big
heart into medical school.

Sibyl had poured her big heart
into everything.

Bertie worried fiercely about
his first born. She seemed not to be able to find her calling and
the longer she waited for her true love, the more restless she
became.

She’d graduated from university
with a degree in languages, speaking three. She took this knowledge
and went straight to work for Customs and Immigration, trying to
help struggling, poverty stricken foreigners in their efforts to
get into the country. Red tape, small minds and politics frustrated
her out of that job.

She’d gone back to school to
become a social worker and quickly threw herself into a job helping
victims of domestic violence. That job nearly tore her apart,
literally, when she became personally involved in her caseload. She
parted ways with the charity, able to see that she was incapable of
establishing appropriate boundaries considering she wanted to fight
everyone’s battles.