My Only Love by Katherine Sutcliffe Read Free Book Online

wound up to two more levels of rooms that had once housed
kings and queens during their visits to Yorkshire. These very walls had been
constructed from the stones of Middleham Casde, where knights in shining armor
had wooed the damsels of their choice.
    Braithwaite.
    It
was everything she had imagined, and more. Yet, as her childhood's imagination
and fantasies subsided, and reality reared its bleak head, the images took
sharper focus about her. She looked around in surprise. Upon these expansive
and impressive wainscoted walls one might have expected to find priceless works
of art, at the least a family portrait or two. There was nothing but emptiness
and shadows that shivered as a draft whipped in from some open doorway and
flirted with the only illumination in the foyer, that being a pair of branched
candlesticks that were dripping wax on the table where they rested.
    "Do
ya make a habit of trespassin' in other people's homes?" the servant's low
voice said behind her.
    "Not
normally," Olivia replied absently, her eyes still searching out each
detail of the house. "Where is he?"
    "Ya
act as if ya got some right to be here ..."
    A
thin thread of dim light shone beneath a door down the hall. Olivia moved
toward it, ignoring the servant's ever-increasing agitation.
    She
nudged the door open, just a little, enough to allow her eyes to scan the room
in a swift glance. A nice fire roared in the fireplace. A high-backed chair sat
before it. Near the hearth, and to one side of the chair, had been placed a
heap of wood. On closer inspection, she realized that the scraps were the legs
and arms from a table and chair. The upholstered seat and back had been
discarded near the door.
    A
movement from behind the chair startled her; his arm came down then and he grasped
the smoothly finished and delicately scrolled chair leg and tossed it into the
fire, sending a flurry of crackling sparks up the chimney.
    She
moved cautiously into the room, her gaze fixed on the back of the chair, her
step hesitating as the top of his head came into view at last, then his
shoulders. With his elbows on his knees and his head down, he loosely held a
whisky bottle in one hand. His clothes were sodden and muddied. The once fine
linen shirt he wore clung almost transparently against his skin.
    He
looked up.
    Her
heart quit.
    He
showed no sign of surprise over her unannounced entry. His face appeared more
haggard and sunken than it had that afternoon. Those wonderful eyes of
changeable hazel that had earlier seemed so terrifying now seemed confused.
    "Are
you ill?" she asked. "Or just foxed?"
    He
looked back at the fire, and let go a groan. Without a moment's thought or
hesitation, Olivia grabbed a chipped and cracked vase from the mantel and held
it beneath his chin.
    A
moment later, she turned back to the round-eyed servant hovering near the door.
"I suggest that you bring your master a blanket—he's obviously chilled—
and some dry clothes as well, I suppose. Have you any bread?"
    'That's
about all we got," came the surly reply. "Good. Bring Mr. Warwick a
cup of boiling water and a plate of bread. Promptly, if you please," she
stressed. Still, the servant dallied at the threshold a long minute before
complying.
    When
the woman had departed, Olivia plucked the whisky bottle from Warwick's hand.
She placed it and the vase on a table some distance away, where she remained as
Warwick continued to hold his head in his hands.
    Minutes
trudged by. She began to wonder if he had forgotten her presence, or perhaps
fallen asleep with his eyes open. He neither spoke nor moved, just continued to
stare down at the floor between his booted feet while the room seemed to grow
colder and the silence more strained.
    Where
was that bloody maid?
    At
last, his dark head came up and he regarded her once again. He studied her hard
and dispassionately; she felt her face warm.
    He
appeared to be on the verge of speaking when the servant reentered the room,
her arms loaded with