Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (13 page)

She’d been right to come. To get away. To throw herself back into work again. Yes, the monuments on Malachai’s property were intriguing. But there was so much more potential here. It was like comparing a tiny department store perfume sample to a full bottle of juice.

Jac didn’t know how long she stood there before she became aware of the humming. Then the wind blew through the trees and she lost it. When the wind died down she heard other sounds. Crunching leaves. Breaking branches.

Then a pair of dark eyes glittered at her from out of the shadows and a dog barked a sharp warning.

Startled, Jac stepped toward the stones as if they could protect her.

The dog ran out into the clearing. She was a beautiful sleek creature with wavy and silky fur in a mixture of browns, blacks and creams. Sniffing and inspecting Jac, she seemed to be assessing her to see if she was a threat.

“Tasha, come back, girl. Tasha!” a male voice rang out.

The dog turned, looked back, but didn’t take off.

Through the trees, Jac saw a man approaching.

“Tasha!” he called again. The dog didn’t move. “Tasha, come!”

The man was close enough now for Jac to see that he was tall and lean with sandy-colored hair. His jeans were tucked into boots and he was wearing a worn brown hacking jacket.

He reached the clearing, looked at the dog, then followed Tasha’s gaze toward Jac. His face was in shadow.

“I’m sorry. I hope she didn’t frighten you. She’s really very friendly.” His accent was British. His voice was deep and seemed to pour out of him.

“No, she didn’t.”

“Or at least not too much?” he joked.

“No, not too much. She’s beautiful. I’ve seen paintings with dogs like her in them—but never seen one in person. What breed is she?”

“A Russian borzoi. And yes, very popular with artists in the 1920s. Their profile fit the times. Borzois are excellent athletes. She’s my great-aunt’s—but I offered to take her for a run so I could send her out looking for you. Asked her to find the prettiest girl in the forest.”

Jac was taken aback.

He noticed and frowned. “You are Jac L’Etoile, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

He stepped forward out of the shade. “I was pretty sure but then was worried I’d made a mistake. It’s me, Jac. Theo.”

“Theo?” She tried to match this grown-up man to the teenager she’d known. The dirty blond hair that fell into his face was darker than she recalled. He had laugh lines around his eyes now. His two- or three-day stubble made him look even older than he was. The deep hollows in his face aged him too. His eyes showed a raw unrelenting pain that unsettled her. Once, when they had been close, it had been all right for her to see those emotions. But now she felt as if she were intruding.

There was an awkward moment while she waited and wondered if she should shake his hand or if he was going to reach out for her. They’d lain in each other’s arms in the sun on the side of the mountains. Touched. Kissed. She knew the smell of his skin, of his hair. But so little about this man standing in front of her was familiar. When he was at Blixer Rath he’d been a young boy with so much before him. Troubled, yes. But there had still been the aura of possibility around him. Now he was thirty-three and seemed almost ruined. So much of their time at Blixer had been spent together, holding hands, breathing in each other’s breath. She’d forgotten all that physicality till now, and suddenly was shaken by the memory of it. So she didn’t move closer, didn’t respond, just waited awkwardly as if she were fourteen again and meeting him for the first time.

“I didn’t know it was you,” she said.

She half hoped he’d come forward and put his arms around her and fuse their long-ago bond, but he stayed where he was. Only his eyes embraced her.

“I could tell that.” He pushed his hair back off his forehead in a well-remembered gesture and offered a self-deprecating smile, and she could see the boy she’d known.

Finally she smiled back and felt as if she had arrived at her destination. The island suddenly seemed like a welcoming place. She took the step forward, not him, stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. His arms moved around her back. It was familiar and at the same time slightly awkward. They had lived complicated lives since Blixer Rath. So many years had passed. And then there were the recent tragedies. He’d lost his wife. She’d lost her way.

They separated and he started walking, leading her in a different direction from the one she’d thought led to his house.

“When I saw your picture in your book, I recognized you instantly,” he said. “You’re not fourteen anymore, but your face . . .” He looked at her frankly, assessing her, in a way that might have been rude if they hadn’t known each other so well so long ago. “You haven’t changed as much as most people do. I can still see the girl I knew.”

Jac had been attracted to Theo when she was a teenager, so she knew she shouldn’t be surprised to feel the stirrings of that attraction again. But she was. She knew this wasn’t real and of the moment; it was a memory response. She’d have to be careful to stay aware of that. The last thing she was ready for was a romantic liaison. She’d only said good-bye to Griffin two months ago. And from his letter she knew Theo was still deeply mourning his wife.

“How did you find me? How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, suddenly wanting or needing to fill the silence with banter that didn’t have any subtext.

“I went to the hotel to fetch you, and Mrs. O’Neil told me you’d taken off on foot. She said she’d warned you it can get dangerous out here in the dark; why didn’t you listen to her?”

“It’s not dark yet.”

“But it will be soon. Evening falls early and quickly here. I know these paths well, but it still can get dicey once the sun sets. Bad things can happen in these woods.”

“Dicey? As in ghosts?” she asked, surprised she’d asked such a jejune question and done it with so little panache.

But he wasn’t looking at her as if it were an odd juvenile query at all.

“Well, I meant dicey as in wolves,” he answered. Paused. “But yes, some say ghosts too. Does that frighten you?”

“Which, that there are wolves or that there are ghosts?”

“Either? Both?”

“Well, I’m not scared of ghosts,” she said. “I don’t believe in them.”

“That’s good.”

“But the wolves do give me pause.”

“That’s good too. One shouldn’t underestimate the power of nature’s creatures. They rarely attack humans unless they’re rabid, but then they can be very dangerous and entirely capable of killing. There’s a horrible local legend about a little girl stolen by a wolf from these woods.” His voice ended in a deeper register. He was frowning again. “Be careful; there are some thick roots under this foliage. Don’t trip.”

With the twilight descending, the forest was taking on a more sinister aspect. After a few minutes, they reached a fork in the path. Jac realized that she might have lost her way in these woods after all. The route Mrs. O’Neil had drawn on the map didn’t include this turning point.

“It’s this way,” Theo said. “I’m parked just on the other side of these trees.”

Once they’d reached the road, Theo opened the Range Rover’s back door for Tasha and then the passenger’s door for Jac.

Inside the car she was aware of Theo’s scent: eucalyptus, honey, cinnamon and oakmoss. The same he’d worn at Blixer. She’d asked him about it once and he’d told her the name, but she’d never heard of it.

With the memory, Jac suddenly remembered the feel of Theo’s skin when they lay in the grass, exploring each other. She looked at his hands on the steering wheel. The same long lean fingers that used to touch her.

As the scenery sped past, Jac watched the green turn to black as what was left of the day gave way to night. After a quarter mile on a narrow twisting road, Theo turned into a long driveway that cut through a forest of silver birch trees. The configurations on their white and black slender trunks looked like eyes. Thousands of eyes watching out from the woods. After a few hundred yards they reached tall stone pillars. On one was a simple bronze sign.

Wells in Wood House

Private

“How long has your family lived here?” Jac asked as the road curved through more woods. There was still no structure in sight.

“My grandfather used to say Gaspards have been in Jersey as long as the stones. But if you mean this house, since the mid-eighteen hundreds. It was a monastery first, built in the twelfth century. Then rebuilt in the fifteenth. In the last hundred and fifty years, the family had it renovated and made additions, but the original structure is still intact.”

At the next bend, in the sunset’s last light, a sweeping vista came into view. Tall hazels bordered this road. Many of them looked as if they’d been there for centuries too. Shaped by the constant wind coming off the water, they were slightly bent over like old men.

From a distance, it looked as if there were stones placed in between the trees, but as they passed the first and then the second, Jac realized they were almost life-size sculptures of hooded figures. Simple modernized forms of men in habits, their faces hidden in their cowls. Some faced the driveway. Others turned toward the house. An army of holy men protecting their fortress.

“Are the sculptures old or new?” she asked. “I know some ancient sculpture has a simplicity that makes it seem current. These could be either.”

“Old. We’ve done some research on them and they predate the foundation of the monastery. The stone they were carved from is prehistoric, so it’s difficult to date them precisely, but the experts think they were sculpted around one hundred
CE
.”

“During the Iron Age, then, when the Celts lived here.”

“Precisely.”

“They’re so evocative,” she said, unable to tear her gaze away from the monks.

“And quite scary when you’re a little kid.” His voice was full of shadows. “Especially when you look in their faces. Each one seems as if he is seeing right through you . . .”

He’d been alternating between melancholy and rebellion at Blixer Rath, Jac remembered. Either he stayed by himself in the library reading for hours, or he was challenging every rule, as if he needed to prove he could break them all.

Now that she was seeing where he grew up, she realized how much like this place he was. The unyielding monuments. The rugged cliffs. The haunted woods.

“Did you spend your whole childhood here?” she asked. “For some reason I thought you were from London.”

“We lived in London till I was eight and my dad died. Mum brought us back here. My aunts and uncles and cousins all lived on the grounds. It was a big family then, with my grandfather at its helm.”

“You said your mother brought
us
back?”

“My brother and I.”

His voice had shifted again. Now it was flat and without emotion. Despite not really knowing this adult Theo, Jac could hear his tension and was certain there were problems between the brothers.

“Younger? Older?”

“Younger. He’s followed in the family tradition and become a banker.” He said
banker
almost as if it were a dirty word. “And here we are,” Theo added as they approached the house, effectively ending conversation about his sibling. Jac realized he hadn’t even used his brother’s name.

The dimly lit estate loomed up out of the evening mist. There was just enough light to illuminate its presence but not enough to make it a beacon. It wasn’t welcoming but rather curiously inviting. Challenging almost. As if it were a puzzle daring you to try and solve it.

No stately country manor with grace and charm, this edifice was characterized by bewildering excess. The center two-story building must have been the monastery Theo had mentioned. Clearly it was the most ancient. Flanking it were two wings, three stories high, each slightly smaller than the one beneath it—like a stack of boxes—each topped with a round turret.

The windows on the additions didn’t match the mullioned windows on the original. In fact they seemed an almost deliberate assortment of different sized and shaped windows, starting with tall arches on the first floor, squares and ovals on the second and smaller rounds on the last.

There was a Juliet terrace on the second floor of each wing and a curious wraparound walkway winding around each turret.

The only things consistent across the main building and the extensions were the shale roofing tiles and gray stone. These must have been indigenous to the island because they matched the cliffs Jac had seen
on her walk. In fact the more she looked at it, the more she thought the house looked as if it had been carved out of the rocky landscape.

“It’s astonishing,” she said.

“It’s a monster.” He parked and then came around to open her door, but Jac had already gotten out. “Too big. Too costly to keep up. Too much history to tear down. It holds too many secrets and has seen too many sins.”

As they walked to the front door, Jac could hear the sea. “Are we on the ocean?”

“Almost everything in Jersey is. Come look.”

Theo detoured to show her how the house was indeed built on the edge of a high cliff.

Out over the Channel, the sky was washed with the purples, blues and grays of evening. The house’s stones were the same hue. In this light, the building blended into its background, almost as if Wells in Wood weren’t quite real.

As they reached the front door, Jac heard an owl’s distinct soft hooting and, as she crossed over the threshold, thought about Malachai. He’d be taken by this moody place and its history. She wished he’d given his blessing for this trip, but they’d argued up until she left. His parting words shouldn’t have disturbed her but did: “If you need me for anything, call. Make sure that you keep my phone number on your cell in case of an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency are you talking about?” she’d asked.

He shook his head. “Hopefully we won’t find out.”

Inside harp music played. A lush and ethereal accompaniment to the colors in the night sky, the twisting trees, the dour-faced figures and this house. The scents of frankincense and vanilla suffused the air. Her senses bombarded, Jac stood inside the front hall with its high ceiling and looked around.