Once and Always (Sequels 1)

“Captain Farrell, I didn’t drown,” Victoria said, taken aback by the man’s wide-eyed stare. “Wolf, stop!”

Captain Farrell came to his feet as disbelief slowly gave way to joy and then to fury. “Is this your idea of a joke!” he bit out. “Jason is insane with grief—”

“Captain Farrell!” the duchess said in ringing tones of authority, drawing herself up to her full diminutive height. “I will thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing my great-granddaughter. She did not know until this moment that Wakefield believed her to be anywhere but here, where she specifically said she would be.”

“But the cloak—”

“I was being chased by someone—I think one of the bandits you mentioned—and I tossed the cloak over my horse’s saddle and sent him off down the path along the river, thinking that would divert the bandit off my trail.”

The anger drained from the captain’s face and he shook his head. “The ‘someone’ chasing you was O’Malley, who nearly drowned trying to find and rescue you from the river where he spotted your cloak.”

Victoria’s head fell back and she closed her eyes in remorse; then her long lashes flew open and she became a sudden flurry of motion. She hugged her great-grandmother, her words tumbling out in her haste. “Grandmama, thank you for everything. I must leave. I’m going home—”

“Not without me, you’re not!” the duchess replied with a gruff smile. “In the first place, I wouldn’t miss this homecoming for the world. I haven’t had this much excitement since—well, never mind.”

“You can follow me in the carriage,” Victoria specified, “but I’ll ride—a horse will be faster.”

“You will come in the carriage with me,” her grace replied imperiously. “It has not yet occurred to you, I gather, that after your husband recovers from his joy, he is likely to react exactly as his shockingly ill-mannered emissary has just done.” She cast a quelling eye upon poor Captain Farrell before continuing. “Only with considerably more violence. In short, my dear child, after he kisses you, which I have every faith he will do, he is likely to want to murder you for what he will surely perceive as being a monstrous trick on your part. Therefore, I shall be at hand to rush to your aid and support your explanation. And that,” she said, banging her cane on the floor in an imperious summons to her butler, “is that. Norton,” she called. “Have my horses put to at once!”

She turned to Captain Farrell and, in an apparent reversal of her earlier condemnation, regally proclaimed, “You may ride in the carriage with us—” Then she promptly ruined the illusion of having graciously forgiven his earlier rudeness by adding, “—so that I may keep my eye on you. I won’t risk having Wakefield forewarned of our arrival and awaiting us on his doorstep with murder in his eye.”

Victoria’s heart was pounding like a maddened thing by the time the carriage drew up before Wakefield, shortly after dusk. No footmen appeared from the house to let down the steps of the carriage and help the new arrivals alight, and only a few lights were burning in the myriad windows that looked out upon the park. The whole place seemed eerily deserted, Victoria thought—and then, to her horror, she saw that the lower windows were hung with black and a black wreath was upon the door. “Jason hates anything to do with mourning—” she burst out, frantically shoving on the carriage door, trying to open it. “Tell Northrup to get those things off the windows!”

Breaking his resentful silence for the first time, Captain Farrell laid a restraining hand on her arm and said gently, “Jason ordered it done, Victoria. He’s half-insane with grief. Your great-grandmother is partially right—I have no idea how he’ll react when he first sees you.”

Victoria didn’t care what Jason did, so long as he knew she was alive. She jumped down from the carriage, leaving Captain Farrell to look after her great-grandmother, and raced to the front door. Finding it locked, she lifted the knocker and used it with a vengeance. It seemed to take forever before the door slowly opened.

“Northrup!” Victoria burst out. “Where is Jason?”

The butler blinked at her in the dim light, then blinked again.

“Please don’t stare at me as if I’m a ghost. This has all been a misunderstanding! Northrup,” she said desperately, laying her warm hand upon his cold cheek. “I am not dead!”

“He’s—he’s—” A broad grin suddenly burst across Northrup’s taut features. “He’s in his study, my lady, and may I say how very happy I—”

Too frantic to listen, Victoria ran down the hall toward Jason’s study, combing her fingers through her hair on the way.

“Victoria?” Charles burst out from the balcony above. “Victoria!”

“Grandmama will explain everything, Uncle Charles,” Victoria called, and kept running.

At Jason’s study, she put her shaking hand on the door handle, momentarily paralyzed by the enormity of the disaster she had caused; then she drew a shivering breath and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

Jason was sitting in a chair near the window, his elbows upon his parted knees, his head in his hands. On the table beside him were two empty bottles of whiskey and the onyx panther she had given him.

Victoria swallowed past the lump of remorse in her throat and started forward. “Jason—” she said softly.

His head lifted slowly and he gazed at her, his face a ravaged mask, his haunted eyes looking right through her as if she were an apparition. “Tory,” he groaned in anguish.

Victoria stopped short, watching in horror as he leaned his head against the back of his chair and squeezed his eyes closed.

“Jason,” she burst out frantically. “Look at me.”

“I see you, darling,” he whispered without opening his eyes. His hand went to the panther on the table beside him, lovingly stroking its back. “Talk to me,” he pleaded in an agonized voice. “Don’t ever stop talking to me, Tory. I don’t mind being insane, as long as I can hear your voice—”

“Jason!” Victoria screamed, racing forward and frantically clutching his broad shoulders. “Open your eyes. I am not dead. I did not drown! Do you hear me, I didn’t!”

His glazed eyes opened, but he continued speaking to her as if she were a beloved apparition to whom he needed desperately to explain something. “I didn’t know about your Andrew’s letter,” he whispered brokenly. “You know that now, don’t you, darling? You do know it—” Suddenly he raised his tormented gaze to the ceiling and began to pray, his body arching as if he was in pain. “Oh, please!” he groaned horribly, “please tell her I didn’t know about the letter. Damn you!” he raged at God, “tell her I didn’t know!”