Dark Angel

‘If you take my advice, you won’t follow this enquiry up.’

Curiosity heightened even more, Kerry removed a single sheet of headed notepaper from the second envelope. It was an enquiry from a London solicitors’ firm, asking if the Linwood family had any connection to a Caroline or Carrie Linwood, who was also believed to have gone by the surnames of Carlton and Sutton. Kerry’s tummy lurched. Was that her mother that was being referred to? Who else? Prior to marrying Kerry’s father, Carrie had been calling herself Carlton. In fact, Carrie had preferred to use any name, it seemed, other than O’Brien, the one she had been born with.

She knew what the letter meant. Carrie was dead. What else could it mean? Over four years ago, some solicitor had been trying to locate Carrie’s relatives. She scrunched up the letter, pushed it aside with a trembling hand and wished that she had not noticed that the original envelope had been intended for her. Her shaken eyes gritted up with tears. Why had she never tried to trace Carrie? Why had she been so hard and unforgiving? Or was it simply that she been too scared of receiving yet another rejection from the woman who had walked away when she was four years old and never looked back?

As Kerry tried to stifle the sudden gasping sobs that overcame her with her hands, the kitchen door opened.

Luciano strode in, lean, dark features sardonic. ‘I can’t find an electric socket in the bedroom,’ he delivered before he realised that she was in floods of tears.

Kerry dragged in a shuddering breath and dropped her head, hoping that he hadn’t noticed. ‘There isn’t any…there’s no electricity upstairs.’

No electricity upstairs. Consumed by total disbelief at that declaration but appreciating that further questioning on that score would seem inappropriate at that moment, Luciano hovered in rare indecision. Obviously, he had really upset her. She had always been maddeningly over-sensitive to his habit of straight talking. Did you really need to tell her she was useless? the uneasy voice of conscience asked him. His lithe, powerful frame emanating fierce tension, he approached the table much as if it had been an executioners’ block.

‘I was in a rough mood…I didn’t intend to hurt you,’ he stated with a graceful shrug of dismissal, knowing that he was lying, knowing that there was something in him that just wanted to lash out at her every time she came near him.

But that was entirely her fault, not his, Luciano assured himself. Any normal woman who had just looked at him with that amount of sheer physical longing would have hit the bed sheets with alacrity, for he had never subscribed to the belief that women were any less sexual beings than men. It had taken Kerry to make a drama out of his natural male reaction to that unspoken but obvious invitation of hers. And to ignore his proposition. And to duck the challenge of denying that, in spite of her prudish principles and prejudice, she did want him. As Luciano spoke, Kerry was frozen in her seat. He actually thought that she was weeping her head off over what he had said to her? Flattening her palms to the table, she leapt upright to settle scornful blue eyes on him. ‘You don’t have the power to hurt me any more!’ she slammed back at him. ‘I was upset about something private that has nothing to do with you.’

Luciano’s furious golden gaze fell on the letter crunched into a telling ball. Without even thinking about it, he reached for it to satisfy his need to know what could possibly be more important than him.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Throwing him an angry look of astonishment, Kerry snatched up the letter and dug it into the back pocket of her skirt.

At that point Luciano recognised the smell of charring food and he strode over to the range to look down without surprise at the casserole that had boiled dry and burned into the bargain. It was petty but the discovery that she was still as utterly hopeless at cooking as she had always been gave him a warm sense of consolation and continuity.

As she took in the same view Kerry’s soft pink mouth wobbled and then thinned into a tight line of restraint. ‘I’ll make something else—’

‘No, I wouldn’t dream of putting you to so much trouble,’ Luciano purred.

To her horror, she discovered she just wanted to hit him again. To hit him so hard she knocked him into the middle of next week and closed that smart mouth of his. She had been looking forward to his shock when she presented him with a perfectly cooked meal. Really, she had been very well rid of him, she told herself feverishly. Being married to a guy who could whip up fantastic dishes with the galling, flamboyant expertise of a seasoned chef but who very rarely had the time to do so would have been an endless nerve-racking ordeal.

‘I’ll eat out,’ Luciano continued.

Unable to make even a stab at faking the concern of a housekeeper keen to feed her employer, Kerry jerked a thin shoulder. Had he still to appreciate how remote from civilisation Ballybawn was? There wasn’t a restaurant within miles, but he could find that out the way he found out most things: the hard way.

‘But before I do that, I’d like to see round the castle,’ Luciano concluded.

‘It’ll be getting dark in an hour—’

‘Then we’ll use torches…or doesn’t Ballybawn have those either?’ Luciano countered silkily.

Ten minutes later Luciano was treated to a detailed display of the workings of the Ballybawn water-powered electrical system, which was housed in a lean-to below the trees. Kerry became quite animated as she described her great-grandfather’s inventive expertise, while not seeming to notice that he remained distinctly underwhelmed. ‘That we produce our own electricity is a very special part of living at Ballybawn,’ she completed, patting the ancient, rusting turbine with a fond hand.

‘I won’t live without electricity,’ Luciano said with gentle irony.

‘We’ve got electricity…just not upstairs.’ Kerry angled a reproving glance at him as if electricity at any other level was an outrageous luxury he should be ashamed to even mention. ‘And why would you need electricity in a bedroom? Oil lamps have been used at the castle without the slightest inconvenience for well over a hundred years.’

‘I have a sneaking fondness for those little switches that magically give light in darkness. I also like to plug in lots of consumer products…cellphone charger, PC, satellite TV, music, digital phone—’

‘You can use all those things downstairs. You can use the library as an office,’ Kerry told him stubbornly. ‘Or even one of the units in the stable yard. Grandpa allowed the yard to be connected to the mains because some of the tenants have to use equipment that consumes a lot of power.’

‘Oil lamps are dangerous. I’m very surprised that you haven’t had a fire.’ Luciano wondered how he had ever convinced himself that she bore not the slightest resemblance to her scatty grandparents. Only a fanatic would ask him to start using an oil lamp.

Fires littered the history of the castle, and as soon as her grandmother had become a little unsteady on her feet Kerry had persuaded the older woman to move into a downstairs bedroom. However, nothing would have made her admit that to Luciano. He had owned Ballybawn for less than a day and already it seemed he was thinking about making sweeping changes that filled her with dismay and an urgent need to protect the castle’s historic heritage.

As the inspection of Ballybawn continued, Luciano just sank deeper and deeper into shock. On his arrival, he had been too preoccupied to pay proper heed to what he was seeing of the castle. Throughout his imprisonment, however, he had confidently pictured Kerry living it up at his expense in some grand aristocratic home. For that reason, discovering the harsh reality of her lifestyle truly shattered him. Contemporary living standards had passed Ballybawn by. The O’Briens had existed with the primitive conditions of their ancestors but without the many servants who would have eased the privations of a household that had no labour-saving devices. The only means of heating the huge, cold rooms came from monster fireplaces, and what few electrical fitments he saw ought to have been given museum status and indeed, in his opinion, constituted a serious safety hazard.

Damp and decay were in full control of the wing once inhabited by Great-Uncle Ivor and the door had simply been shut on that part of the castle. While though in a more acceptable condition, the Georgian wing had become the showroom for what he could only have described as the trompe l’oeil artist from hell. Grandiose decorating themes that would have been more at home in a Roman villa, or, in one case, the dank tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, had turned the gracious rooms into the equivalent of a tacky theme park.

‘These rooms are hired out for wedding receptions and private parties. I do the catering for some of the functions.’ Kerry was frustrated