Her gaze flitted to those beautiful lips of his, where that caressing breath hailed from. She found herself suddenly relieved that one hand was likely sprained and the other was frozen solid, for she felt a sudden and unsettling urge to gently touch his mouth, her fingertips longing to brush across the rough stubble to see if the friction could warm her faster.
“You will keep your distance,” he repeated.
She gave a small nod. After all, what choice did she have—die in the snow of stubbornness, or spend an uncomfortable day or two in the shelter of a grand castle? It was no choice at all, not now that she had actually tried to make it back to the carriage.
“Youwillobey that rule this time, and youwillstay far away from me, where we shall not cross paths,” he continued darkly. “No doubt you have heard that they call me cursed, a beast, a devil. If you ever get too close to me, you will find out why.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“I… think you can set me down now,” Valerie said, despite the frost-melting safety of the duke’s strength.
They were inside the castle once more, a relieved Mr. Jarvis wielding a lantern and a nervy smile as he welcomed their return. But the duke ignored Valerie, saying nothing. Silent, he continued on with her in his arms.
“I am perfectly… capable of walking,” she tried to insist, her words stilted, for her mouth still had not thawed and the full-body shivers had not abated at all. “It is my wrist… that hurts, not my… ankle.”
“Your wrist?” the butler interjected with a wincing gasp, like he was the one who had injured himself.
Valerie nodded. “I… stumbled in the… s-snow.”
“Heavens, how awful.” Mr. Jarvis shook his head. “What a relief that His Grace went after you. I couldn’t have rested if I had known you were out there by yourself.”
The duke flashed the butler a discreet, warning look that Valerie just managed to catch. In an instant, Mr. Jarvis clamped his lips shut and hurried ahead with his lantern. Evidently, while she had been wading through the snow, they had already discussed where to put her; the butler seemed to be following instructions that she had not been around to hear.
Can he really be as bad as all that, when he came out into the snow to make sure I was safe?Valerie wondered, peering up at the duke’s handsome profile: his jaw sharp, the shape of his lips just as compelling from the side, his cheekbones so defined that she wanted to rest her thumb in the hollow. A peculiar impulse, but then she had never quite been normal. Growing up at Gramfield, no one stood a chance of being normal.
Is he truly a beast? A… oh goodness, what are they called?
She could only remember the French term of ‘loup-garou.’ Her brother, Cecil, was the one who had first introduced her to the word. Obsessed with grisly stories, the more terrifying the better, he had heard the tale of the Beast of Gévaudan from a schoolfriend with the same taste for the dark and mysterious: a story of a creature, supposedly man by day and wolf by night, that had terrorized the mountains of that French province some fifty years ago, killing over a hundred people.
Is that where you gained your scars? Are you the Beast of Cumbria?
In the reasonable light of the entrance hall, she noted more of those scars. One sliced through his left eyebrow, just missing the corner of his eye in its diagonal trajectory toward his earlobe; another formed a curve, as if he had been wearing spectacles too long, on the bridge of his nose; a vertical scar marked those beautiful lips, cutting from his nostril to his chin, partially hidden by that shadowed stubble. The rest were smaller: short, thin slashes across his skin.
“I really think I can walk now,” she said. “You have done more than enough for me.”
The duke’s eyes narrowed.
Making no attempt to set her down, he carried her up the left-hand stairwell that branched off from the entrance hall. Mr. Jarvis was still ahead, lighting the way, and though there were now endless stairs to contend with, the duke was not the least bit out of breath.
After what seemed like an hour of ascent, they passed through an arched door into an unlit hallway. Even without any windows to see out, Valerie could tell they were high up; she could feel it, somehow, like a pressure in her skull.
“Here,” the duke said.
The butler opened a door, though he did not cross the threshold. Instead, he stood there like a guard while the duke walked into the room with Valerie.
“You will not roam this castle without an escort,” the duke said, carrying her over to the shadow of a bed, illuminated by a sliver of moonlight.
He dropped her unceremoniously onto a surprisingly soft mattress. “You can wander this floor, but no further without someone accompanying you,” he ordered. “That being said, it would be for the best if you just stayed in these chambers. You came here to rest, after all.”
“But… it is just my wrist,” she tried to protest, a little breathless at the sight of him standing at the end of the bed. A place no gentleman should have been.
She caught the shine of his eyes in the dim light of the room as he replied, “Goodnight, Miss Wightman.”
With that, he left, giving instructions to Mr. Jarvis to light a fire before vanishing back into the darkness of the hallway. This time, the butler tended to his duties without a word, no pleasantries exchanged as he lit the fire and hastily departed.
Apparently, there was to be no soup or unnecessary hospitality.
Even with the fire beginning to warm the room, a chill lingered in Valerie’s bones that she sensed had nothing to do with the cold at all.
