blooming Easter bride, In flow'r of youth and beauty's pride.
Happy, happy, happy pair! None but the brave deserves the fair.
Dryden's words came from nowhere, unbidden and unwanted. He swallowed them down and demanded that they recede into his mind, an effort that took every ounce of his concentration and prevented him from hearing the door open and the footsteps cross to the bed. He was quite unaware, in fact, of the presence in the room until a cool hand touched his cheek gently. His eyes flew open.
"I think you need an Odell's, Inspector," Stepha whispered.
Chapter 12
Nonplussed, hestared at her. He waited for his smooth persona to click into place, for the arrival of that illusory man who laughed and danced and had a quick-witted answer for everything. But nothing happened. Stepha's appearance in his room, materialising for all he knew out ofnowhere, seemed to have destroyed his only line of defence, and all that was left in his repertoire of engaging behaviours was the ability to meet, without wavering, her beautiful eyes.
He needed to give reality to the moment, to make her something he hadn't dreamt up from the mist of his dispirited memory, so he reached out and touched the fall of her hair.
Soft, he thought wonderingly.
She caught his hand and kissed the palm, the wrist. Her tongue lightly traced the length of his fingers. "Let me love you tonight. Let me drive away the shadows."
She spoke on the merest breath of a whisper, and he wondered if her voice were a part of the dream. But her smooth hands played across his cheeks and jaw and throat, and when she bent to him and he tasted the sweetness of her mouth, felt the caress of her tongue, he knew she was part of a searing reality, a present calmly laying siege to the castellated walls of his past.
He wanted to flee from the onslaught, to escape to that haven of bliss-charged remembrance that had kept him well armoured in the year that had passed, a year during which all desire had been absent, all longing dead, all life incomplete. But she allowed no evasion, and as she purposefully destroyed the ramparts that shielded him, he felt once again not a sweet liberation but that terrifying need to possess another person, body and soul.
He couldn't. He wouldn't allow it to happen. He desperately sought out last, shattered defences, uselessly willing back into being an insensate creature who no longer lived. In its place was reborn - quiet and vulnerable - the man who had been there, inside, all along.
"Tell me about Paul."
She raised herself on one elbow, touched her finger to his lips, traced their shape. The light struck her hair, her shoulders, her breasts. She was fire and cream, scented almost imperceptibly with the sweetness of Devon violets.
"Why?"
"Because I want to know about you. Because he was your brother. Because he died."
Her eyes moved from his. "What did Nigel say?"
"That Paul's death changed everyone."
"It did."
"Bridie said that he went away, that he never said goodbye."
Stepha lowered herself next to him, into his arms. "Paul killed himself, Thomas," she whispered. Her body trembled on the words. He held her closer. "Bridie's not been told. We say he died of Huntington's, and he did, in a way. It was Huntington's that killed him. Have you ever seen people with the disease? St. Vitus' dance. They've no control over their bodies. They twitch and stagger and leap and fall. And then their minds go at the last. But not Paul. By
God, not Paul." Her voice caught. She drew in a breath. His hand found its way to her hair and he pressed his lips to the top of her head.
"I'm sorry."
"He had just enough mind left to know that he no longer recognised his wife, no longer knew the name of his child, no longer had any control over his body. He had just enough mind left to decide it was time for him to die." She swallowed. "I helped him. I had to. He was my twin."
"I didn't know that."
"Nigel didn't tell you?"
"No. Nigel's in love with you, isn't he?"
"Yes." She answered without artifice.
"Did he come to Keldale to be near you?"
She nodded. "We were all at university together: Nigel, Paul, and I. I might have married Nigel at one time. He was less mad then, less angry. I'm the source of his madness, I'm afraid.
But I'll never marry now."
"Why not?"
"Because Huntington's is a hereditary disease. I'm a carrier. I