Addicted. Charlotte Featherstone

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      The wind howled through the forest and down the mountains, only to whirl around the lumbering conveyance. The chill air somehow found a way through the tight seams of the carriage frame, plummeting the temperature inside so that the interior felt like an icebox. Burying his chin into the folded depths of his greatcoat, Lindsay felt another chill race down his spine.

      “Damn cold,” he grunted, burrowing deeper into the warm Yorkshire wool of his coat. What bloody timing to arrive back in England during a snowstorm.

      As the rhythmic rocking of the carriage continued, Lindsay fought to stay awake, but soon his eyes grew heavy until it was impossible to hold them open. Within minutes he was dreaming. Dreaming of dry, arid heat and the scent of Arabian spices that sifted through the waving branches of cypress trees.

      In his dream he was back in Constantinople, where the saffron-colored sun hung heavy on the azure horizon, illuminating the cobalt and gilt tiles of the Islamic columns of the Kapali Çarsi. The sun burned hot on his cheeks. The scarf he used to protect his head from the heat rippled in the breeze as the salt-scented air rolled in from the Sea of Marmara. That salty, spicy breeze was the only reprieve from the scorching heat of the midday sun and the sea of humanity that swarmed inside the covered bazaar.

      Inside the Kapali Çarsi, viziers and pashas smoked their hookahs while their slaves and attendants bartered for goods for their richly furnished homes. It had been there, in Constantinople’s covered bazaar, that Lindsay and his traveling companion, Lord Wallingford, found themselves meandering through the hundreds of stalls that sold everything from spices and nuts to hashish and beautiful women who were bought by rich men as new acquisitions for their harems.

      Constantinople’s voluptuous exoticness was so different from his genteel England. He was so very far removed from the glittering ton and the fancy town houses in Mayfair. Far away from his responsibilities to his family and the estates in Worcestershire. Yet Constantinople had not been far enough away from the reaches of his past. He still remembered how Anais had fled from him the night she’d discovered him in the hall with her best friend. No physical distance could make him forget that strangled cry of shock and hurt, nor the distraught look in her eyes.

      Now semiawake, he struggled to find his way back to his dream—to a time where nothing had mattered but the warm, lazy days spent in decadence. To the days when the hookah and a beautiful concubine had been all he needed to wile away the hours and deaden the pain of his failure.

      But damn him, the dream would not return. It remained elusive and he was faced once more with remembering how Anais had seemed to vanish into thin air after she left the Torrington masquerade. He had looked everywhere for her, but she had evaded his pursuit, denying him the chance to explain that he had not set out to seduce her friend or to destroy her faith in him.

      After searching throughout England he’d traveled across the channel to France. He had learned from Anais’s mother that she had gone abroad with her aunt—a trip, Lady Darnby had told him, that had been planned for some time. But he knew better. She’d gone to France in order to be free of him.

      He had immediately set out for the continent, but hadn’t been able to locate her in Paris. It was then that Wallingford grew frustrated with him and his obsession with finding Anais. After weeks of fruitlessly searching Paris, Lindsay had allowed Wallingford to persuade him into accompanying him to Constantinople where Lindsay had been seduced, not by beautiful women, but by the allure of opium. Opium, that heavenly demon.

      The carriage swayed sharply, pitching to the right. Lindsay found himself fully awakened, and he shook his head free of the memory of his time in Constantinople, as well as the bitter memories of Anais.

      “You were dreaming,” Wallingford said, tossing him a fur for his lap.

      The temperature had dropped again and the carriage, despite its cushioned silk and thick blinds, could not keep out the chill from the violent winds.

      “I was remembering how warm the breeze was when it blew in from the Bosphorus. Perhaps we should not have left the warmth of Constantinople,” Lindsay muttered, lifting up the blind and seeing nothing but the blinding whirl of snow outside the window. “I had almost forgotten how damn cold England gets in December. Although, this amount of snow is quite rare so early in the season.”

      Wallingford nodded as he puffed on his cheroot. “It is bloody cold. But three months ago we were not thinking of winter when we left Turkey. We were thinking of other things—like the beauty of the woods in the fall. The sound of the wind howling through the forest as it blows from atop the Malvern Hills. We had had enough of traveling, had we not? We were anxious to see England again.”

      “Indeed.” But had he not experienced that dream of Anais all those months ago, he might still be in Constantinople, wasting away his days in lavish Eastern decadence. He had been lost for days at a time, the opium his only companion in a world of silk veils and velvet pillows. Where he had only had a taste for opium before, he now had a consuming hunger.

      “Sir,” one of the footmen called, rapping his fist against the back of the carriage. “We need to stop, milord.”

      With a tap of his walking stick against the trap door, Lindsay signaled for СКАЧАТЬ