Then the phone went dead in his hand.
He lay stock-still as the unfamiliar and immensely uncomfortable sensation of dread chased through his body, this feeling fleeting, being replaced by anger.
He felt Sibyl’s head lift from his shoulder. “Colin?”
Her voice was husky with sleep and his arm, which was wrapped around her with his hand resting on her hip, tightened reflexively.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“Wrong number,” Colin lied as he replaced the phone, forcing his body to relax.
Then he remembered.
It’s the dark soul, Mrs. Byrne had said and Colin’s body went back to tight.
Sibyl’s hand moved from his chest to encircle his waist and she pressed her soft, warmth closer to his side.
“Are you cold?” Her voice was still husky and without waiting for an answer, her hand moved to pull the covers up over her shoulder and his chest. Then it returned to its place around his waist as her weight settled into him and he knew she was again sleeping.
She was already responding to him, he knew.
This was very good, he knew.
But if indeed he was Royce Morgan’s reincarnation, he was never meant to have her.
Though, he did have her in a way that Royce had never had Beatrice, there was something missing. Something that made Colin uncomfortable, something that he and Sibyl needed to find before the curse of star-crossed lovers was lifted if it even existed.
No one ever knew who killed Royce and Beatrice Morgan or why.
The theory was it was an enemy of Royce’s. He’d made many of them with his exploits and successes on a variety of bloody battlefields.
Myth said that the dark soul would follow them, would stop them through eternity from finding each other or finding whatever it was that would forever protect them and break the curse.
And Mrs. Byrne believed the dark soul was watching them.
Colin didn’t believe in lore, myth, magic and curses and he certainly didn’t believe in dark souls coasting through eternity on vengeance.
But he took middle-of-the-night threatening phone calls after an attack on a dog and a break-in deadly seriously.
What Colin knew was that he hadn’t lived a sainted life, as, apparently, the misguided angel who was lying pressed to his side had. Colin had made people angry, he’d made enemies; enemies who might use Sibyl to get to him.
All Colin knew was that Robert Fitzwilliam said what Mrs. Byrne had said – that someone was watching them. It now became apparent that someone had tried to run them down with a car. And now someone had shot Sibyl’s dog and ransacked her cottage. All of this, for what seemed like no apparent reason at the time, but now Colin thought it was to warn him.
Colin came to a decision.
Tomorrow, Colin would call Robert Fitzwilliam and task the man with watching Sibyl, protecting her and finding out who was behind these plots while Colin kept steady at his task of winning her.
Chapter Sixteen
Hope
“It’s rather nice of your young man to send a limousine,” Bertie Godwin told his eldest daughter.
Sibyl stared at her father and used every ounce of willpower not to scream at the top of her lungs.
Sibyl Jezebel Godwin was in a carefully controlled rage. This was unprecedented, considering that Sibyl’s rages were usually considerably uncontrolled.
However, yesterday while she was standing outside Customs in Terminal Four at Heathrow airport waiting for her parents to come through the doors, her mobile had rung.
It was Colin.
After she’d answered, without even so much as saying hello, he commanded, “I want you and your parents to come to Lacybourne for dinner tomorrow night.”
Sibyl felt her heart constrict painfully and she stared unseeing at the people marching tiredly through the doors of arrival dragging their luggage behind them as she listened to Colin’s inconceivable order.
“Please tell me you aren’t serious,” she breathed.
For the last week things had been different between them. Entirely different. So much so that part of her feared her magical powers were forcing Colin away and bringing Royce out of the dream world and into the real.
But this order was from the Old Colin.
Their relationship was temporary. She knew that. He knew that.
Why on the goddess’s green earth would he want to meet her parents?
It was cruel.
He interrupted her careening thoughts. “I’m very serious.”
“Is this an order?” she asked, her voice sharp.
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Her breath, and her sharpness, went out of her.
“Why?” she whispered, that one word, she hoped over the miles, expressed the many nuances of her question.
“Just be at Lacybourne at seven thirty,” he’d replied and if she could credit it (which she decided later she could not), he sounded gentle.
And therefore she didn’t even say good-bye; she simply flipped her mobile shut.
The very idea, the very thought of her parents meeting Colin tore her heart to pieces. They wouldn’t understand, they’d probably even like him (they always liked the men in her life). Her father, she knew, even though he never said, wanted her to find herself a mate, a partner, a husband partly so she wouldn’t be alone and party because her father wanted to know she was protected and safe. Her mother wanted her to be intellectually and sexually gratified (and often). Her mother already was hinting broadly, and sometimes asking straight out, at wanting to meet Colin every time she’d called in the last three weeks.
And this meant Sibyl was going to have to sit through dinner knowing what she was to Colin with her parents sitting right beside her.
She hadn’t been reminded of that, of what she really was to Colin, since he yelled at the minibus driver.
The situation became worse when her parents walked through the arrival doors; Mags saw her daughter and shouted, “Surprise!”
Behind her mother struggling with a fair amount of duty free shopping bags was Scarlett.
At the sight of her sister, Sibyl’s heart plummeted just as it sang with happiness.
Sibyl loved her sister, loved her to death. But her parents were one thing. Scarlett, being Scarlett, was going to be a problem. She read men like books, dissected them with her mind like a psychological biologist. She was good at it because she’d had a lot of practice. Sibyl would not be able to hide what she was to Colin from Scarlett.
There was plenty of room for them in the huge Mercedes sedan that Colin sent for her to use, a sedan that came complete with driver. Sibyl had, that morning at nine o’clock when she’d first clapped eyes on it, considered this an act of extreme thoughtfulness. Her parents could ride to Clevedon in complete luxury after a trying plane trip.