His gaze immediately focused on the last window on the right side of the house. A gentle glow from a lone candle flickered lazily. He could almost imagine Anais sitting on her window bench staring out at the sky with her chin propped in her hand. She adored winter. They had sat side by side so many times watching the snow falling gently to the ground. No, that wasn’t entirely the truth. She had watched the snow, he had watched her; and he had fallen more in love with her than he had ever thought possible.
He slid his gaze from her window and allowed it to roam over the land where the verdant green fields were now covered in a thick white blanket that shimmered like crystals in the silver moonlight; where the hawthorn and holly hedgerows that marked each farm were weighted with snow. Only the occasional red bunch of holly berries could be seen peeking out beneath its white winter blanket.
Again the wind began its low moan through the branches of the forest behind them, and Lindsay brought the collar of his greatcoat around his chin, staving off the cold and the chilling wail of the wind. It was a melancholy sound that somehow resonated deep within him.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Wallingford asked, reigning in his mount to stand beside his. “The wilds of nature are unparalleled here, are they not? Nowhere can you appreciate her more than in the Wyre Forest. I shall have to paint this view when I get home,” he said, scanning the grounds below them. “I’ve never seen the vale looking so desolate and untamed, yet so hauntingly beautiful.”
“Spoken like a true artist,” Lindsay drawled, unable to keep his eye on the hedgerows. Unfortunately, he kept stealing glances at the lone candle in the window, wishing Anais would appear; hoping the dreams he had of her were not the omen his soul believed them to be.
“When shall you call upon her?” Wallingford asked quietly after noting the direction of Lindsay’s gaze.
“I don’t know.”
“When we left Constantinople you were hell-bent on finding her. For the three months it’s taken us to arrive in England you’ve been having nightmares about her. You’ve feared the worst. Now you lack the conviction to see for yourself if your vision was real or merely a deception of the sultan’s hookah?”
Lindsay recalled the crippling fear that had lanced through him as he awoke from his startling dream. “It was real.”
“The hookah is a magical thing,” Wallingford said, watching him curiously. “It makes us see ghosts in the vapors. It makes us feel things that are not there and the things that are there no longer matter. It is so easy to run from our ghosts with the hookah as I think you discovered.”
“It is never easy to run. I shall never outrun this ghost.”
Wallingford pursed his lips tightly together and studied him, his expression growing somber. “This particular ghost has an otherworldly hold on you, Raeburn. I’m afraid she always will. She is going to destroy you.”
“I already am. I brought about my own demise when I foolishly allowed myself to be weak. I should have resisted the lure that bitch Rebecca offered me. Had I resisted temptation instead of pursuing it, Anais would have been my wife by now. I would not be standing here on Christmas Eve, longing for her, wishing I could find a way to magically erase the past.”
“What did you see?” Wallingford asked. “What was so terrible that you had to race back here to the woman who would not even allow you to defend yourself? A woman whose love is so fleeting that she cannot allow you an ounce of forgiveness?”
In the vision, Anais arose amidst a veil of gossamer smoke, her beauty unveiled amidst curling tendrils that cloaked the air. Her softly rounded body and her rose, taut nipples were clearly visible beneath the pale pink gown that hugged her body. Her long blond curls were unbound and her arms outstretched, beckoning him to come to her, and like a slavish disciple he had gone to her. In that moment, she had taken him in her arms, whispering absolution.
He had lowered her onto the silk pillows that were scattered about the floor of his room. He could smell her—the scent of her petal-soft skin—despite the heavy and sensual cloud of incense that hung like a haze above the divan.
She had felt warm and alive in his arms until suddenly she grew stiff and cold. Her beautiful, sparkling, cornflower-blue eyes grew dim and distant as she stared unseeing at him. And then he saw the crimson liquid that slowly began to engulf them. It glistened in the candlelight from the lanterns that hung above them as it began to cover her pale skin. And she kept looking at him with those cold, lifeless eyes. He could not bear it, could not stand to watch her taken from him. As he pushed himself away from her, her lips parted and she softly said the words that haunted him for months. “You did this to me, Lindsay, you have killed me.”
He had awakened, shaken by the vision, terrified that it had been a sign that something was wrong—a sign that he had to come back to her and make amends. A sign he could not ignore.
“Raeburn, look,” Wallingford commanded, drawing him from the horror of his mind. “There are flames coming from the side of the house.”
Snapping to attention, Lindsay focused his gaze on the level below Anais’s window. From his position above the house he saw the brilliant orange flicker that was reflected by the glass.
“That is Darnby’s study,” he said, setting the stallion into motion. “And the hearth is next to that window. Come, Wallingford,” he yelled, racing down the path that led to the vale.
Lindsay wondered, as he blinked back the snow from his eyes, if this was not the reason he had felt compelled to come back home.
Jumping off his horse, Lindsay ran up the manor stairs and threw open the doors. The house was in a state of chaos with servants rushing here and there, screaming and running wild and frightened with buckets of water. He watched as two burly footmen emerged from a thick cloud of smoke, dragging a coughing and sputtering Lord Darnby from his study.
“Oh, Lord Raeburn,” Anais’s lady’s maid gasped when she saw him through the smoke. “You’ve come back.”
“Where is your mistress, Louisa?”
“Trapped upstairs. Roger and William have gone to fetch her, but they canna see or breathe for the smoke.”
“See to Darnby,” Lindsay ordered Wallingford who had followed him inside. “Bring him to Eden Park. I shall meet back up with you there.”
Lindsay could see the blood running in rivulets down Darnby’s balding head. “He’s injured,” Wallingford called. “He’ll need a physician.”
“Then do it, man,” he barked, shrugging out of his greatcoat. “I shall find Anais.”
“What the bloody hell is going on?”
Lindsay whirled around and came face-to-face with Broughton. The last time he had looked into his friend’s face, he had been standing before him with a brace of dueling pistols in his hands.
Broughton had called him out the next day, after the debacle with Rebecca. The duel had not been about avenging Rebecca’s honor, or Garrett’s. No, Broughton had called him out to defend Anais, and Lindsay had agreed to it, hoping to gain some measure of his own honor back. Only they had not been able to go through with it. Putting a bullet in each other would never satisfy, could never wash away the pain that Lindsay had brought to everyone he had ever cared about.
They had both fired their shots in the air, then turned their backs on each other.
“What the devil are you doing in here?”
Lindsay did not miss how Broughton’s face went white as his gaze furiously raced back and forth between the burning staircase and him.
“Anais is trapped up there. I’m going to get her.”
Garrett glared at him, “You cannot possibly manage the task on those stairs, Raeburn. It’s