Spellbound (14 page)

Suddenly, Greyden slumped,
unconscious. Tristan released him, his breath coming in short gasps
as his lungs tried to draw in chilled February air.

Then, he blinked. Grey was
gone. The duke had only a split second to draw in a great gulp of
air before the icy water closed over his head.

Never in her life had Raven
screamed as she did in that moment.

Weary, discouraged, and
just plain depressed, Raven slumped in a chair by the duke’s bed as
his body was again wracked with shivers. She drew yet another
blanket over his body, wondering what else she could possibly
do.

They had already tried
everything. Nothing seemed to be working. He still shook, muttered
incoherently, and tried to throw off his coverings. If Raven hadn’t
known better, she’d have thought he was feverish.

But he wasn’t. His body was
cool to the touch but not alarmingly so. He should have been back
on his feet by now, nearly a day later.

Crossing to the window,
Raven stared out as pale streaks of dawn lit the early morning sky.
She folded her arms in front of her, hugging herself and the chill
she felt deep inside.

What was she to do? In the
back of her mind was a remedy she was sure would work for Tristan,
but her own sense of self-preservation prevented her from doing
it.

But she loved him. Wasn’t
her own life worth that of his?

With a decisive nod, Raven
moved to lock all the bedroom doors. If Tristan was anywhere near
his right mind, she knew where her next actions would
lead.

She quickly shed all her
clothes until she was naked. Then, climbing onto the high bed, she
snuggled under the covers with him.

He stilled, the only
movement in his large frame the shaking he could not control. As if
sensing what she was doing, he turned towards her, opening his
green eyes to stare at her blankly.

“Rae?”

The former actress sighed.
It was no use, really. She’d do anything for this man.

Moving so she was flush
against him, Raven kissed him softly on the lips. “You are so cold,
my love.”

Her husky voice was
soothing, calming. She reached around him, smoothing her clever
fingers up over his shoulders and down his back almost to his
buttocks. She continued this motion until his shivers subsided,
then disappeared completely.

It had been panic, as she’d
suspected. The cold had dissipated several hours before; it was the
fear that had held him captive.

Tristan’s arms moved to
hold her close, nothing more. He shivered one last time, a great
wracking shudder that communicated his fear into his slender
companion. She shivered with him, nearly overcome with the extent
of what he’d been through.

“Grey?”

Raven frowned. “He is
alive,” she said. She hesitated, wanting very much to avoid telling
him the rest. “But he will not be the same, Tristan. Something
happened in the water. He struck his head or was under too long.
We’re not sure. The doctor is on his way but…”

The duke shuddered again, a
tear slipping down his face to soak Raven’s dark hair.

Placing her lips against
his collarbone, she whispered, “Tell me about it, Tristan.
Please.”

He didn’t want to talk
about it. It was too shameful a secret to reveal. His family didn’t
even know how he loathed that lake. And now, he had the added
burden of his brother’s injury on his conscience.

Shaking his head in denial,
Tristan drew her body up far enough to reach her lips, kissing her
deeply until she pressed into him, seeking greater
contact.

But then she pulled away.
“Please, Tris. You need to talk about this.”

He glared at her. “I don’t
want to.” His voice sounded petulant, like a spoiled
child.

She smiled affectionately.
“I know you don’t, dearest, but you have spent nearly a day shaking
with chills. You are not feverish, you are not even cold anymore.
Please talk to me.”

He grimaced. “How can you
ask me to talk when you are so wantonly plastered against me?” He
moved his lower body just enough to make her catch her breath. His
expression turned decidedly wicked. “Isn’t there something you’d
much rather do with me, my pet?”

She laughed a trifle
breathlessly. “You know there is.” A look of extreme concern
settled on her beautiful countenance. “Please, my love.”

He smoothed the fingers of
his free hand into her midnight tresses, drawing them away from her
face. “I cannot tell you no,” he murmured, “when you call me that.
But you know that, do you not?”

She said nothing, merely
waited for him to speak.

“I tell you this under
protest.”

She nodded, smiling
tenderly.

With a weary sigh, he
closed his eyes and confessed, “I fell in the lake as a child.” At
her lack of reaction, he glanced down at her. “Shocking, I know,”
he muttered dryly.

“It was winter, I was
five.” He received a gasp at that. “Yes, damn cold time to go for a
swim. I was in the water for five minutes before my mother was able
to get me out.”

Despite the horror of such
a thing happening to such a young child, Raven sensed it was not
the reason for his gut-wrenching terror.

It wasn’t. “Somehow, I
survived. My mother, who’d never been in the best of health, died
three weeks later. My father never let me forget it was my fault
and I should have died instead of her.”

Raven bit her lip to stifle
her distress. “Oh, my dear, how awful for you.” A new thought
occurred to her. “But if you were five, Greyden and Freya aren’t
your…”

“Oh, they are,” he
confirmed. “Father remarried an heiress one season, barely out of
the schoolroom, got two children on her and promptly killed himself
in a hunting accident. I was eighteen when he ‘shuffled off this
mortal coil.’ Freya was a babe in arms, her mother ill-equipped for
life as the Marchioness of Hastings. The fool woman took her own
life a month later.”

He paused, willing back the
automatic panic he felt when the series of events were brought to
mind. “And it was all my fault,” he finished in a dead
voice.

Raven’s body jerked. She
moved his head around to face her. Her angry look was not lost on
him and he wondered if she, too, would tell him what a worthless
human being he was.

“You were a child, Tristan.
It was not your fault and your father should be shot for making you
feel that way.”

His eyes widened with each
word that left her mouth. “I was five, Rae, not two. I was fully
aware that I was doing something I shouldn’t.”

She shook her head. “No,
you were but a child. You did not know your mother would risk her
life should something happen to you.. She should have alerted one
of the footmen to rescue you, one of the grooms, somebody who was
better equipped to do so. She should have—”

He kissed her. Tears
coursed down her cheeks, mingling with their kiss.

She was silent when the
duke finally pulled back. A watery chuckle emerged then. “That was
effective, was it not?”

He didn’t bother to reply.
He kissed her again, pouring his heart and soul into the kiss, his
gratitude, love, and longing. He gave her everything he had,
everything he was, and everything he would ever be.

“No more talk. Let me love
you.”

The words were nothing more
than a breath against her lips, but Raven felt the entreaty to the
depths of her heart and soul.

Refusing to examine the
consequences, she smiled, inviting his touch in the most elemental
way she knew how.

She kissed him.

Much later that morning
found Raven walking towards the lake.

She felt drawn to the
frozen body of water. It played such a large part in her love’s
history, she couldn’t help but be entranced by it.

And it was here that she
realized he loved her.

He had fought his own
brother, been enraged by the thought that he may have dared insult
her.

Sitting as still as stone,
Raven watched the absence of life. It was amazing to her, to see
what appeared a lifeless piece of landscape. But beneath the
surface, below the ice, the water positively teemed with life, even
now, in the freezing cold of winter.

She sat there contemplating
nature for hours. The cold finally began to penetrate her outer
garments, making her shiver.

Which served to remind her
of the events of that morning, just after dawn’s pale streaks
suffused the night sky. Tristan had controlled their encounter,
skillfully taking her beyond heaven with his clever hands and
mouth.

She should feel guilt, as
she had after every other union in which she’d
participated.

And she did, she thought
with a sigh. It was wrong. They were not married despite the
world’s belief to the contrary.

She should be married. She
wanted to be married. Marriage was always a dream of hers. But
after her life in the theater, that was all it was, a dream. So she
had taken what little happiness she could, first with Adam, then
with Levi, and now…

Now she had Tristan, the
Duke of Windhaven, in her bed and unfortunately, firmly implanted
in her heart.

The only problem was…she
wasn’t happy.

She was miserable. She had
been raised in a strictly moral household. Her father and mother
had instilled a sense of upright morality in their daughters that
was a little out of place in the social echelon in which she’d
grown up. In fact, it was a little out of place in any echelon of
the world as she knew it.

It was, therefore, a very
difficult decision that led her to the theater for work. She knew
she was endangering her future when she signed on as a lesser
character in the Theatre Royal’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You
Like It. At the time, it seemed her only option.

She’d had no illusions then
of her talent. She had no false modesty; she was good and she knew
it. She also knew she had the kind of talent that could get her by
without having to fall back on the age-old true profession of
actresses.

Then Adam had come along,
radiating virility and masculine appeal and she’d felt lust for the
first time. And she’d been powerless to hold on to her closely
guarded virtue.

When he ended their
liaison, she’d felt her world shift just a little. But she was the
Ebony Swan, renowned for her poise and devotion to the stage. She
had had no time for heartbreak.

But Levi, Lord Greville,
had proven far more addictive than she’d suspected. Her base
desires had taken over again, accepting his offer of
protection.

Raven shuddered at her
memories of the dark months after Levi had let her go. She had
become so obsessed with him that her head was not in control when
she’d approached Aurora Glendenning, intent on mischief.

Deadly mischief.

A single tear slipped down
her pale, chilled skin. The worst to happen in that situation was
Levi’s willing forgiveness and Aurora’s offer of
friendship.

Biting her lip, Raven
firmly held back the sob threatening to escape. It was hard
reliving the past, but in light of her newest dilemma, she thought
it might be best to remind herself just why she could not go on in
this way.

“Rae?”

It was fatalistic sigh that
escaped then, followed by a choked sob. Tristan sat down next to
her, drawing her into the circle of his arms.

“Whatever is the matter?”
he asked, his voice gruff with concern.

She shook her head, as yet
unable to speak.

So he just held her
silently. Raven finally managed to stem the tears and looked up at
him.

“What brings you to the
lake?”

He shuddered imperceptibly.
“Inner demons,” he admitted, “and a dark siren. What brings you out
here?”

Raven shivered, feeling the
cold of several stationary hours. “The same,” she murmured. He
eased his cloak open, pulling the edges around them both in a
little cocoon of warmth.

Leaning back against his
chest, she asked, “Do you think I’ll ever learn to bury my
conscience so deep it never bothers to alert me to my
misdeeds?”

His frown was apparent in
his voice. “Why would you want to?”

“Because I want to be with
you.”

He stopped breathing. “And
your conscience objects to that?”

She didn’t reply. She just
stared off into the distance, soaking up the warmth of his body,
wishing for what could never be.

“Rae?”

“I have never told you of
my childhood, have I?”

“No.”

“Would you like to know a
few things about me, my lord?”

His reply was
instantaneous. “Of course.”

She laughed lowly. “You may
regret your eagerness when you learn a few of my
secrets.”