Page 34 of Wolfhaven

“Gareth, I’m sorry, I didn’t think before I spoke⁠—”

“I was in the hospital for over a month. It was touch and go for a long time. When I was finally released, my father and Marion had already been buried. The servants had abandoned the house, except for the Cogswells. It took nearly a year for me to recover fully,” he interrupted. He didn’t want her apologies. He wanted to kiss her, to devour her, but a beautiful woman such as she would never allow a hideous monster like him to take such liberties. Now he had the shape of her imprinted against his body.

It was an endless torment to desire and never be able to possess, he thought darkly.

Miss Ballard’s slim, pale hand had come to her trembling red lips. “Gareth…I shouldn’t have pried.”

“This place raises painful memories for me. I will thank you to stay out of it in the future. I said it before. I’ll say it again. I don’t want you exploring any part of this house without me at your side. Do you understand me, Miss Ballard?”

He was angry because he was afraid for her safety. If his sire’s ghost were wandering this mansion, then she was in grave danger. They both were.

Evaine’s lips thinned. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Back to titles. He sighed inwardly. Maybe if he weren’t such an ogre he’d have some hope of gaining her prickly affections. She didn’t trust him not to cheat her out of money he owed for her work. Forcing her to work at his side wasn’t going to change that perception.

“Good. If I catch you again, I will be forced to evict you and your grandmother. For your own safety, you understand,” he said.

She nodded tersely. “I won’t do it again.”

Somehow, he doubted that very much.

“Gareth,” she said, after a moment of tense silence where she examined the ledger page. “These are records of stock certificate sales, aren’t they?”

“That’s what it appears to be, yes.”

“Why was your father selling them? Why was this torn out of a ledger book?” Her brow had furrowed thoughtfully. Already moving on from the clock incident. He had to hand it to Miss Ballard. She did not scare easily.

“I suspect that is my father’s record of the inheritance he stole from Marina. She came from a wealthy family. The agreement allowed him to sell some of her investments to support her until she was married. He appears to have sold all of them.”

Evaine sighed. “There is something you need to see, Gareth.”

Down in the kitchen, Gareth flipped the damp, ink-stained pages of Marina’s journal with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Where did you find this?” he asked.

“It was sitting on the console table on the landing of the main stairway,” Evaine answered.

“When?” He had been up and down those stairs many times since his arrival and that dratted journal hadn’t been there. He would have noticed it, concussion or no. “What were you doing there?”

“I was on my knees inspecting the underside of the table for maker’s marks when I heard footsteps and a woman’s giggle. When I stood up, the book was there and whomever—or whatever—left it, ran away.”

A tight knot in his chest eased. He wasn’t going mad. She had heard strange voices and people walking around the house, too. There was a powerful kinship in knowing that you weren’t alone in your delusions.

“Did you read it?”

Evaine hesitated a moment, then dipped her chin. Affirmative. The knot in Gareth’s chest tightened viciously. How dare she—a near-stranger—pry into his family’s dreadful personal lives?

Moreover, if Marina’s ghost had left the book for someone to find, why had she left it for an outsider instead of him?

You never deserved her trust. You failed to protect her. You cost Marina her life.

These thoughts tumbled through his mind in his father’s supercilious snarl.

Marina wouldn’t have been forced to kill his father if he had protected her better. He had failed both of them. The filial duty his father had drilled into him as a boy had never quite left him.

“Marina genuinely looked up to you as her hero,” Evaine said gently. Her posture bent toward him like a sapling reaching for sunlight. Pliant. Searching. “I know the ink is smeared especially toward the end, but I think you should read the parts that are still legible. I’m sorry it got wet. I dropped it into the bath this morning when you…startled me.”

Her cheeks were pink again. Such a charming shade of embarrassment on a pretty woman. Heat flushed his body, a rushing wave that coursed down his neck and up his spine, swirling inside him and surging into his cock. He couldn’t breathe.