Chapter Eleven
Some miracles were beyond human understanding. That was Jonathan’s thought as he held a sleeping Giselle in his arms. The girl of his memories had become the woman of his dreams. Her. Now. Without asking more of him than to let her be with him.
He asked so much more of himself on her behalf.
When he had taken her virginity, he had done so with the intention of marrying her. He looked back on the boy he’d been and now recognized how rash that belief had been.
Time and his father had intervened, and that pure intention as a teenager had been thwarted.
He’d been shipped back to school, she and her entire family had been sent away, and his father had forbidden anyone from speaking of them again.
And when Jonathan continued to fight his father’s dictates, he was summarily sent off to Scotland.
Back then, he’d been too stupid and too afraid to risk it all for her. Especially since he’d be risking her life, too. After all, his father had threatened that.
So Jonathan had taken the coward’s way out. He finished his schooling, bided his time in Scotland, and eventually found his way to well-reasoned decisions. And he never, ever trusted his father again. Not his father’s words nor the man’s beliefs.
And so he’d been well prepared to chart his own course when his father died.
But now that he had found Giselle again, what did he want? He knew that marriage was so much more than simple love, especially an aristocratic one. There were as many requirements on his countess as there were on him. And not every woman leapt into a society marriage.
Did she want that? Did she want him as much as he wanted her?
He needed to talk plainly with her. Everything had happened so fast. He’d just found her again, and though it was well after midnight now, he wanted to—
A bolt of pain seared through his temple.
Agony wrenched through him the likes of which he’d never felt before.
He’d been rubbing her shoulder, soothing himself with her skin as he thought through their possible future together.
But as the ice pick of pain slammed through him, his hand spasmed.
He kept from crying out—barely—but Giselle had no such restraint.
She cried out, a soft mew of distress that quickly changed to alarm.
“Jonathan!” she cried as she straightened up in bed. Her eyes narrowed and she stared into the air above him.
“Stop it!” she snapped. “You’re mad at me, not him. I seduced him. I brought him into my bed. Speak to me and cease hurting your own son!”
Her voice was clear, her body strong. And though he saw nothing in the air above them, the pain in his temple eased enough that he could face his dead father.
“That’s not true,” he ground out. “I came here of my own free will.” He looked at her. “I chose you. I choose you still.”
He saw her gaze soften as she looked at him. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He reached out to hold her hand and she grasped it. But the moment they connected, pain shot through him again. His shoulders hunched, his head felt like it was splitting apart, but he would not release her.
At least, not until she twisted out of his grip.
“We need to talk clearly to him,” she said.
“Agreed,” he said. The pain lessened the moment she broke contact with him, but he would not let it dictate his actions. And he would not give her up. Not for a ghost who needed to move on and leave him the hell alone. “Give over, Father. I will choose my countess, not you!”
Her breath caught at that, but she shook her head. “One issue at a time.”
“Yes. But we will—”
“Get some clothes on,” she interrupted. “This might take a while.”
What? Oh. Of course. Always better to face the ghost of his dead father with some pants on.
The two of them scrambled to put on their attire. Enough, at least, to feel decent. Fortunately, his sister had left Giselle a robe to wear over her chemise. She drew it on, and he thought she looked incredibly sexy with her hair unbound and her expression fierce.
She stood straight, as she hadn’t done as a teen. She radiated a confidence that few women possessed. Clearly, this was her area of skill, whereas he felt completely at sea. And though he lit the candelabra with shaking hands, she stared hard into the shadows.
“How’s your head?” she asked gently.
He frowned as he rubbed his temple. The pain was gone. “Good. Has he gone?”
“Not at all. But he’s facing us now instead of wrapped around your head.”
“Where?”
She pointed to a place at the base of the bed.
“What do we do?”
She sighed, squaring off with the unseen ghost. Her arms were crossed and her chin lifted as she looked into the shadows. “We try to figure out what he wants.”
“What he wants?” Wasn’t it obvious? “He doesn’t like us together.”
She shook her head. “He’s been haunting you for a long while now. Long before you and I found each other again.”
He nodded but still felt completely stupid. “What does he want then?”
She huffed out a breath. “This is why I usually do this with Gwenivere. She can hear them. I just get—” She winced. He did the same because pain had spiked through his temple.
“What?”
“Wails,” she said. “That’s all I hear. Wails.”
“So how do we talk to him?”
She shrugged. “We guess. He’ll respond.”
“And you see this? You see him?”
She nodded. But then she looked straight at him, not into the shadows. “What do you think he wants?”
He snorted. “He hates how I’m running things. He hates the school I’ve built. He hates how I’m spending money on the tenants rather than on the manor house. He hates how I’m voting in the House of Lords. It could be any one of those. Or all of them.”
Her expression softened. “I thought I couldn’t love you any more,” she whispered.
What? Had he heard that correctly? He opened his mouth to ask, but she turned back to the shadows.
“Well? Is that it? You hate his politics?”
Pain lanced through his temples again. And when it faded, Jonathan looked to her.
“Does he hate me so much?” Some small part of him had hoped that his father might be proud. After all, his father had often said that taking care of the tenants was important, as was the school. But his father had never actually done it, and Jonathan had.
“No,” she said, her expression quizzical. “I think when he screams like that it’s a denial. Like we’re completely off base.” She focused on the shadows. “Is that it?” she asked.
They both waited, and Jonathan’s shoulders were hunched in preparation for a stab of pain. But nothing happened.
“So…that’s a yes?” Jonathan asked. “He doesn’t hate what I’ve done with the estate?”
She nodded. “Apparently not.”
Relief shot through him. His father wasn’t rejecting the choices he’d made. Which, in turn, made him feel like his father hadn’t rejected him.
“But then what does he want?”
Giselle shook her head. “You have no idea?”
“None.”
“When he passed,” she asked. “Were you fighting?”
“No. We’d stopped speaking about anything meaningful a few years ago. He knew I had different ideas than he did, but neither of us wanted an argument. So we didn’t discuss anything of merit.”
She looked back to the shadows. “Is that it? Is there something you want to tell him?”
Pain flashed between his eyes, but nothing like before.
Jonathan made a guess. “So…that’s half right? There is something he wants to say to me?”
No pain. Which meant…
“Yes,” she said. “I think he wants to say he loves you. That’s usually it, isn’t it? He loves you and wishes you could have been on better terms.”
His father? The cold, stern disciplinarian wanted that?
He supposed it was possible. Especially since there was no pain through his temples to indicate the negative. If anything, there was kind of a cooling relief between his brows. But try as he might, he couldn’t quite believe that of his stern father.
“He’s done all this—thrown books at me, scared my horse, broke the carriage—just to say he wishes we’d been closer?”
Giselle shrugged. “The dead don’t have the same priorities as we do. Or perhaps all the little stuff is stripped away. Jonathan, what was between you two? What stopped all the communication?”
He thought back. He rolled through his memories to the first moment when he’d stopped trying with his father.
“You did,” he finally said. “It was when I wanted to marry you and he…”
“He sent us both to different parts of England.”
And Scotland. “Yes.”
They shared a look of wonder at finding each other again. And then anger surged through him at his father for keeping them apart.
But even as the fury shot through him, another answer came into his thoughts.
“He was just trying to protect me. Giselle, what he did was wrong, but we were sixteen.”
“So young,” she echoed.
“I was determined to wed you,” he said. “He shouldn’t have sent your family away, but I’m not sure anything else would have stopped me.”
Her eyes misted as she looked at him. “I thought you’d forgotten me.”
“Never! He punished anyone for speaking of you or your family. I might have been able to find you anyway, but…”
“He threatened to hurt me if you did.”
“Yes.”
She gritted her teeth. “What a horrible, horrible man,” she said as she glared into the shadows.
True. Very true, and yet, the man was his father. And he’d been trying to protect his son and heir.
“He thought you would make me spend all my money on the poor.” She’d been zealous in that opinion, thanks to her father.
“He wasn’t entirely wrong,” she admitted.
“But the poor are endless. My family has spent their entire lives trying to help, and it’s nearly beggared us.
” She looked at her hands. “Several times I’ve cursed my father for feeding others while we’ve gone hungry.
If it weren’t for my mother’s work, we would have. ”
“But back then…”
She snorted. “I was still too idealistic to see how extreme my father is. And that it wasn’t fair of him to demand such sacrifice of us.”
He smiled at her. “You’ve changed.”
“Grown more moderate, I should say. I still believe in my father’s work, but…” She shook her head. “There must be a compromise. I will not put my children through what he has done to us.”
Music to his ears. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d worried about that before. But now he saw that they could work together for what they both wanted.
But that was for tomorrow. They couldn’t discuss any of that as long as his father kept giving him headaches that threatened to split his head in two. But how to end this?
He looked to Giselle, trying to sort through the possibilities.
“Giselle—”
“I know,” she said. “We have to figure this out. We have to take the next step.”
“What?”
She grimaced. “I have to let him possess me.”