Spanish Aristocrat, Forced Bride. India Grey

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      ‘You’re right.’

      Lily gave a small, startled gasp, wondering how he’d managed to read her mind, but then he raised one hand, gesturing to a recess in the wall beside her.

      ‘The injured dove,’ he said tonelessly. ‘There it is.’

      ‘Oh…’ She frowned, stooping down and letting her hair fall across her face as she felt heat spread upwards. The bird was huddled in the back of the nesting recess, its wing held up awkwardly. The white feathers were stained with crimson at the place where the wing joined the body. ‘Poor thing…’ Lily crooned gently. ‘Poor, poor thing…’

      Tristan felt his throat tighten inexplicably. Her voice was filled with a tenderness that seemed to slip right past his iron defences and go straight into the battered, shell-shocked heart of him.

      Usually he slipped between lives with the insouciant agility of an alley cat, letting the doors between the two halves of his world swing tightly shut behind him. But tonight—Dios—tonight he was finding it hard to leave it all behind. The raucous revelry of the party had grated on his frayed nerves like salt in an open wound, which was why he’d had to get away. But this…

      This gentle compassion was almost worse. Because it was harder to withstand.

      ‘I think its wing is broken,’ Lily said softly. ‘What can we do?’

      He looked out over the lawn to the glittering lights of the party. ‘Nothing,’ he said, hearing the harshness in his voice. ‘If that’s the case it would be best to end its suffering quickly and kill it now.’

      ‘No!’ Her response was instantaneous and fierce. She stood up, placing herself between him and the bird, almost as if she were afraid he was going to grab it and wring its neck in front of her.

      ‘You couldn’t. You wouldn’t…’

      ‘Why not?’ he said brutally as images of the place he had been earlier flashed into his head with jagged, strobe-lit insistence. This was just a bird, for God’s sake. An injured bird; a pity, not a tragedy. ‘Why not end its suffering?’

      ‘Because you don’t have the right to play God like that,’ she said quietly. ‘None of us do.’

      Standing in the last light of the fading day, she looked remote and almost mystically beautiful. Not of this world. What did she know about suffering? He could feel the pulse beating loudly in his ears, but her words cut through it, exploding inside his head. No? he wanted to say. Then who will? It’s not power that makes men behave like God, but desperation.

      He turned away abruptly, walking back towards the door to the stairs. ‘It’s not about having the right,’ he said bleakly. ‘It’s about having the guts.’

      ‘Wait!’

      He heard her come down after him, and the blue twilight darkened as she shut the door at the top of the stairs again. Tristan stopped on the landing, his shoulders against the closed door, and watched her come down the stairs, melting out of the shadows like something from a dream.

      Slowly she came down the last couple of steps and stood in front of him, shaking her head. ‘I don’t,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I don’t have the guts to kill it. What shall I do?’

      He shrugged. ‘Sometimes you just have to accept that there’s nothing you can do.’

      ‘But that’s—’

      ‘Life,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s—’

      But he didn’t finish, because at that moment the dusk was shattered by two loud explosions that detonated a chain of night-marish images and sent an instant tide of adrenaline crashing through him. He saw her start violently, her head snapping round to the window, her eyes wide with shock. Pure instinct took over. Without thinking he reached for her, pulling her into his body, against his crashing heart as he shouldered open the door behind him and dragged her into the room beyond.

      The next moment the sky beyond the two tall, arched Gothic windows was lit up with showers of glittering stars.

      Fireworks. It was fireworks. Not bombs and mortars. Relief hit him, followed a heartbeat later by another sensation; less welcome, but every bit as powerful as he became aware of the feel of her breasts beneath the silk of her dress, crushed against his chest. As another volley of blasts split the sky she pulled away from him, laughing shakily.

      And then she looked around her at the hexagonal room, with its pale grey walls and its arched windows and the bed with the carved wooden posts at its centre, and suddenly she wasn’t laughing any more.

      ‘Yours?’ she whispered.

      He nodded briefly. Over the years he’d lent Tom more money than either of them bothered to keep track of. The tower was a token return for his investment. ‘It’s where I come when I want to be alone.’

      Their gazes locked. Time hitched, hanging suspended. Her full lips were parted, her breathing was rapid and her grey eyes shone with shimmering colour from the fireworks that exploded above them. Then she blinked and looked away.

      ‘Oh. I see, I’m sorry—I’ll go.’

      She moved towards the door, but he got there first, slamming it shut and standing with his shoulders against it.

      ‘Tonight I don’t want to be alone.’

      CHAPTER THREE

      ADRENALINE was pulsing through Tristan, making the beat of his heart hard and painful. It vibrated through his whole body as the explosions continued outside—audacious reminders of the things he had travelled around half the world to forget.

      In the grainy, blurred light Lily’s luminous beauty had an ethereal quality. Her eyes were still fixed on his, and as he gazed into them he felt the panic recede a little, washed away by the warm, anaesthetising tide of desire. Rationality slipped away, like sand through his fingers. For a moment he battled to hold onto it, to anchor himself back in the world of reason, but then she moved forward so she was standing right in front of him and he could see the spiked shadows cast by her lashes on the high arc of her cheekbone and feel the whispering sigh of her breath on his skin as she exhaled shakily.

      ‘I don’t want to be alone, either,’ she said in a low voice. ‘But I don’t want to go back to the party.’

      Slowly, almost reluctantly, he reached out and touched the gleaming curve of her bare shoulder with his fingertip. He felt her jerk slightly beneath his touch, as if it had burned her, and an answering jolt of sharp, clenching desire shot through him.

      With deliberate slowness he bent his head, inhaling her scent as he brought his lips down to her shoulder. ‘You don’t like parties?’

      ‘I don’t like crowds. I prefer…’ she breathed, then gave a soft, shivering gasp as his mouth brushed her skin ‘…privacy. I don’t like being looked at.’

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