Page 2

Berkshire

C assian Rourke pushed the coach’s door open and descended, though the driver had barely drawn to a stop in front of Hillcrest Manor, once his family’s home—now his brother’s estate.

The journey had been damnably long, the air inside the carriage stale, and his muscles screamed for movement.

Yet as he looked upon the all-too-familiar Palladian facade with its elegant symmetry, impressive columns, and imposing pediment, a ripple of unease had him clenching his jaw and balling his fists.

The tormentors he’d once feared no longer lived inside its honey-colored walls of Bath stone, yet ghosts seemed to linger. The memories came sharper than he’d expected.

Keeping away from the bloody place for nearly a decade had been no mistake. In fact, it had been the best decision of his life. And isolating himself in the north after a lifetime of naval service—and private indulgences that brought more regret than pleasure—had been precisely what he’d needed.

Yet he’d never refused to help his brother when Julian needed him, and Julian’s letter spoke of a dire need. A favor that he could not ask of another soul.

Still, as eager as he was to see his twin, he stood fighting the urge to climb back into the coach he’d just spent days in. Or better yet, to free one of the horses from its traces and make his escape as fast as the beast could carry him.

But the poor horses needed food and water and rest. He did too, though he couldn’t imagine managing a wink of rest in his old bedchamber.

The moment he’d resigned himself to facing Hillcrest’s ghosts, the front door yawned open, and he spotted Bartlett just beyond the threshold.

The aged butler had served the family from the days when his father was the earldom’s heir.

Lean and stoic, with a posture as straight as the manor’s columns, Bartlett preferred order in all things, yet he’d been kinder to Cassian and his brother than either their father or grandfather had ever been.

Cassian strode forward and reached out to shake Bartlett’s hand. The white-haired servant took Cassian’s hand in a firm hold, his gaze softening with warmth beyond the spotless lenses of his spectacles.

“It’s been a long while, Master Cassian.”

“Captain Rourke, if you please.”

Bartlett smiled, then released him and nodded. “Old habits, Captain. Seems yesterday when you and your brother ran riot through these halls. Do pardon the error.”

“No pardon necessary.” Cassian smiled, ignoring the reference to his childhood.

With a glance behind him, Bartlett silently commanded a young footman, who strode forward, then passed by to retrieve Cassian’s traveling trunk.

“Will the blue guest room suit?” Bartlett remained standing in his usual stiff, shoulders-squared posture, though his eyes held an understanding that gave Cassian his first moment of ease since stepping through the front door.

“Yes, it will suit very well. Thank you.”

Bartlett had known not to give him his prior bedchamber. Bless the man.

“Is he awake?” he asked as he passed over his hat and gloves to another footman.

“He is indeed, Captain, and his lordship is most eager for your arrival.”

Cassian took the steps of the wide staircase two at a time and then strode down the long hall to the suite that had once been his father’s and now housed the current Earl of Windham as he recovered from a nasty fall from his stallion.

His twin, Julian, as was his way, had put a favorable spin on the whole matter in the letter that had requested Cassian break his self-imposed exile in Scotland.

But though Julian had downplayed the seriousness of his injury, he’d emphasized the urgency of his need for Cassian’s presence, and that had convinced him to come.

He’d all but sensed his brother’s worry as he’d held the letter in his hand. That inexplicable sense of knowing and connection with his brother was one he’d accepted as an aspect of having come into the world within moments of each other.

Worry was rare in Julian, which had made Cassian even more curious.

Yet, even as he approached his brother’s room, he heard him laughing, though a bit ruefully.

“Never give me a bit of hope, do you, Coates?” Julian said.

“I give you honesty, my lord,” their longtime family doctor said in his usual bumptious way. “Is that not superior to hope?”

Without waiting for his brother’s reply, Cassian strode into the room.

Julian’s eyes creased as soon as he spotted his twin. With a beaming smile, Julian pointed at him from his massive four-poster bed, where his broken leg had been elevated upon pillows.

“There!” he shouted. “There’s the hope I’ve been seeking.”

Dr. Coates collected his bag and assessed Cassian as he strode toward the door.

“You look hardy, Captain Rourke, and as thoroughly wild as I recall.” The doctor glanced back at Julian.

“’Twasn’t so many moons ago when I was setting your brother’s broken bones.

Never expected to be called to do the same for you, my lord. ”

“With Cassian gone, someone had to take up his wildness,” Julian put in merrily.

“I bid you both good day.” Dr. Coates shot Cassian a stern look. “He must allow time for healing and not return to his duties too soon. See that he does not.”

When the doctor departed, Julian stared at Cassian a moment, taking him in after years apart and only letters between them.

“You do look wild,” he said with a smile. “That beard. Those well-worn boots. And when was the last time you cut your hair? You truly are Rourke the Rogue.”

“Not anymore.” Good God, to think he’d actually reveled in the silly moniker once upon a time.

If anything, it indicated how much he’d altered.

Hearing it now made him wince. “That’s the beauty of living in a hunting lodge in the Highlands.

I need not fuss over my appearance to please any society but my own. ”

Julian had given him the lodge after he’d left the navy, though Cassian never had a bit of interest in hunting. He’d experienced too much destruction and felt too much sympathy for foxes and beasts of the forest to take any pleasure in chasing and killing them.

But he had needed quiet and seclusion to heal the wounds he’d sustained and to quiet the sound of cannon fire in his head.

He’d built a makeshift greenhouse at the lodge and found solace in the botanical specimens he’d collected during his naval service.

Cultivating and growing his collection calmed his mind, and watching new life sprout from a cutting gave him a unique satisfaction.

He suspected most of the men he’d known during his naval service and his years of wild carousing would find the quiet life he’d carved out for himself to be a shocking contrast.

“It’s been far too long,” Julian said quietly.

“Almost three years.” Cassian assessed his twin as he approached his bedside.

They’d once looked quite alike. Enough to fool servants and even their parents.

Yet they’d always been unalike in personality and inclinations.

Julian thrived in society and enjoyed nothing more than a party and garbing himself in the most elegant fashions of the day.

Cassian had never given a damn about balls and soirees or gatherings of more than a few close friends.

Though he’d adhered to neatness and taken care with his uniform while in Her Majesty’s Navy, the years in Scotland had allowed him to have done with suits and thrive by engaging in the quiet, simple pleasures he truly craved.

A well-stocked library. Thriving specimens in his conservatory. Walks in the forest.

“You’re pale,” Cassian told his elder brother, then pointed to his injured leg. “And that must hurt like hell.”

Though the usual merriment danced in Julian’s green eyes, his skin held a shocking pallor, and the stiffening in his jaw revealed his pain.

Cassian had broken bones as a boy, been injured as a man, and still occasionally ached from injuries he’d sustained in service.

He knew how pain wore on one’s body and mind, and he knew bones took their time to knit and heal.

A collection of medicine bottles sat on Julian’s bedside table.

“I won’t take laudanum,” Julian insisted. “It saps my spirit, as I’ve told Coates a hundred times. Morphine just makes me sleep.” He notched up his chin. “I can endure the pain.”

Cassian let that claim pass without comment. “But you wished for companionship in your convalescence? Is that why I’m here?”

“Not exactly.” Julian gestured toward a chair, then toward a cut-crystal decanter. “Have a drink and sit with me a while. I must ask something of you. Something of great importance.”

Cassian hesitated. He’d avoided liquor in the last few years, having leaned on it too heavily in the months after his departure from naval service. He’d seen what it could do to men’s inhibitions, knew what it could do to his own hold on control.

Still, he poured a finger of brandy into a snifter and pulled the chair up to his brother’s bedside. “What is it that you wish to ask?”

Julian frowned. “Will you not tell me how you’ve been first?”

“I’ve been…peaceful.” In the last three years, there’d been no violence in his life, no brawling, no recklessness.

“But lonely,” Julian said softly. “You must be.”

Cassian shrugged, turning the snifter in his hand. “It is necessary.”

He was lonely because he was beastly company nowadays.

He’d been volatile company in the past. His roguish reputation had been earned by carousing, behaving like a reckless fool, and bedding women he barely knew.

He’d even broken a lady’s heart once because he’d given her reason to hope, even though he’d known he wasn’t the sort of man to ever settle into domestic bliss.

He was too haunted. Too unsociable. Too lost in his own regrets. Too bent by his father’s cruelty. Loneliness seemed a small price to pay for peace and the certainty that his surliness would harm no one else.

“My request may quell some of your loneliness.”