“Yes, I know, otherwise she wouldn’t be a ghost.” Noelle sent Lady Joan a reassuring Your son may not be too bright, but he’s sexy as hell smile.

“She’s not a ghost,” he answered, and was clearly about to go into one of his denial lectures, but Noelle decided that this was a time when bud-nipping was most definitely called for.

“Gray, darling, I’m not stupid. Yes, I’m a Guardian, and yes, most of my experience is with demons, but I know a ghost when I see one, and your mother”—she paused to wave a hand at Lady Joan, who was gazing at her son with an expression of yearning that was painful to see—“your mother is most definitely one.”

Gray froze, his eyes narrowed on her. “My mother is… here?”

“Yes.” She looked more closely at him. “You don’t see her, do you?”

He shook his head, pain and guilt gripping him with such strength that Noelle’s knees weakened. She grabbed his arm, gasping for breath. “My God, what is it? Why do you feel that way? Why can’t you see your mother’s spirit?”

An inarticulate sob came from Lady Joan. Noelle, sharing Gray’s pain, turned her head at the sound, the anguish on the woman’s face so horrible to see that she fell to her knees.

Instantly, Gray was there, pulling her into his arms, tamping down the horrible pain inside himself until she could breathe again, the scent and feel of him so warm and alive wrapped around her like a soft blanket.

Are you all right, Beloved? I’m sorry that my emotions got away from me. I should have better shielded them from you.

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Noelle said, pulling herself away from the safe haven of his body in order to search his eyes. “I don’t want to be protected from your emotions, Gray, not even the negative ones. What happened to you?” She took his face in her hands and gently kissed him. “What happened to your mother to leave her so devastated? Why can’t you see her?”

Fresh pain lanced through him at her words, and Noelle swore to herself, damning her verbal clumsiness.

He rose to his feet, pulling her up at the same time, his face shuttered, his emotions locked tightly away from her. “The past is in the past, where it should be. As for my mother…” He looked over her shoulder to the crumbling remains of the cottage. “If you can indeed see her and speak to her, tell her…” His voice cracked. It took him a few seconds to speak again. “Tell her that I am sorry.”

Tears burned in Noelle’s eyes as she glanced behind her to see Lady Joan, now seated on a fallen tree, weeping silently into her hands. Obviously, whatever happened to you and your mother was a profound tragedy. But I don’t get a sense of censure from her, Gray. I don’t think she wants an apology from you.

He stumbled away from her, pushing away her hands when she tried to grab his arm, his mind once again choked with so much guilt it almost strangled her.

Gray?

Leave me. Just… leave me. I bring nothing but sorrow to those close to me. You are better off without me, Noelle.

“Poor, deluded man,” she said softly, watching his shadow flicker for a moment before it disappeared into the gathering darkness. “He honestly thinks that we’d be better off apart.”

“He carries a great burden,” Lady Joan said in her soft, whisper-thin voice. “He seeks to protect you from the darkness within him.”

“But I can relieve him of that darkness, at least some of it. I can give him back his soul. Surely he must want that?” She turned to the ghost, who now bore an expression of hopelessness. “I’m going to be blunt, Lady Joan. Blunt and nosy. What happened between you that Gray feels such guilt?”

The ghost closed her eyes for a few moments. “He believes he is responsible for my death.”

“Goddess! That would certainly account for his emotions. Was he responsible?”

“No, Grayson was not responsible.” Lady Joan stood and brushed off her skirts before drifting toward the cottage, her visibility fading as she disappeared into the spirit realm. “It was his father who killed me.”

Chapter Six

How did she find out? How the hell did she find out that Mother was here?” I spun around and glared at the cat, who perched regally on the tall four-poster bed. “You told her, didn’t you?”

Johannes cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Oh, don’t give me that look. I know full well that if you put your mind to it, you could speak. You damned…” Words failed me. I swore under my breath and stomped over to the window, jerking back the curtain to stare furiously down to the veranda. “If it wasn’t you, it had to be that bastard Nostredame. I’ll murder the bloody fool. Dammit, he’s already dead. I’ll… I’ll… I’ll call in a Summoner and have him removed.”

Johannes got to his feet, stretched, then jumped off the bed and strolled to the door, giving me an imperious look over his shoulder.

“What, now I’m your personal servant?”

He just looked at me with half-closed wicked green eyes.

“One of these days, Johannes…” I flung open the door, yelling after him, “So help me God, if you say one more word to Noelle—don’t give me that look, you could talk if you weren’t so damned lazy. I swear to you by all that you hold dear, I’ll send you back to Amaymon if you even think of meddling with my Beloved!”

The cat disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, leaving me alone with the horrible knowledge that I’d lost even the brief glimpse of paradise that had descended so unexpectedly upon me.

I returned to the window, leaning my forehead against the chill of the glass, seriously considering drowning myself in the pond before I remembered that it had grown over decades ago. “You’ve made a bloody mess of everything,” I told my reflection in the window. “Not content to screw up your own life, you ruined your mother’s, destroyed any hope of a happy future, and now you’re tainting the best thing that ever happened to you. You make me sick.”

The face in the window stared back at me. I sighed at it. “Christ, I can’t even be pathetically maudlin without sounding ridiculous.”

A flicker from the veranda had me growling out oaths I hadn’t used in a very long time, and without further thought about the reason I wanted to pummel Nosty to a ghostly pulp when Noelle and I had no future, I found myself chasing after the blasted ghost. He didn’t stay on the veranda long, leaving it before I found him. It took another twenty minutes before I finally pinned him down in the housekeeper’s room in the basement of the east wing.

“There you are, you traitorous bastard!”

Nosty spun around at the sound of my voice, his gaze immediately flitting around the room, obviously in search of escape. “Er… Gray. Hello again. Long time no chitchat. I was just… uh… talking to Miles, here. Wasn’t I, Miles?”

The mortal was sitting on a worn wooden chair in the middle of the room, lit only by a single candle that listed to one side, stuck into a broken saucer. “Who the devil are you?” He squinted at me for a moment. “Oh, you’re that horrible actress’s boyfriend. Well, you can leave, along with this chatterbox.”

I ignored the ill-mannered man. Mortals, on the whole, were interesting. This one, however, I could quite happily never set eyes on again. I honed my glare on Nosty. “Don’t try to weasel your way out of this. You know full well that I’m here because you’ve been telling tales.”

“Hello! Am I suddenly mute? I just told you two to leave!” Miles sputtered.

Nosty edged away from me. “Tales? Me? I’d never do that, Gray, you know that. Especially not tales about you.”

Miles breathed heavily through his nose. “The spirits sent me to this room so that I might commune with the deceased housekeeper. I feel that she has things she wishes to tell me, and she can’t bloody well do that with you two standing there bollixing away.”

“You told Noelle about my mother.” I growled, stalking slowly toward the ghost.

Nosty gulped and backed up, his hands out in a placating gesture. “I didn’t tell her anything about Lady Joan. Other than where she lived. But nothing else, Gray, I swear.”

“I think I am being possessed.” Miles, now swaying in his chair, his eyes closed, started humming to himself. “Yes, I believe the spirit of the housekeeper is merging with my consciousness. What is it you want, dear lady? You want these people out of your room? Yes, yes, I completely understand. You wish for your privacy to be honored.”

“That was enough to send her running over to the cottage to speak with my mother, whose very presence you neglected to bother mentioning to me. Shall I tell you what I do to those who annoy me, Nosty?”

“You were never here!” the ghost shrieked, now backed up against the wall. He looked as if he was trying very hard to disappear into nothing, but I hadn’t spent my entire existence coping with ghosts without learning a trick or two. I made sure he was grounded and couldn’t dissipate his being. “How could I tell you if you never showed up at the Abbey?”

“You’re bloody ’ere now, both of you, and you can just leave so I can get on with me ’ousework,” Miles said in a strong Cockney accent as he glared at us. “I’ve got an entire ’ouse what to clean and feed.”

I shot him a look. “The only housekeeper who ever used this room was Czech, not British, and she spoke no English.”

Miles blinked for a second, then collapsed back onto the chair, slumped down, moaning. “The spirits, so many spirits here, they are fighting to speak through me…”

“If you so much as open your mouth to Noelle again—” I grabbed the ghost by the front of his robe and lifted him off the ground, shaking him as I did so.

“I won’t!” Nosty babbled, his expression suitably frightened by my unspoken threat. “I swear by the saints, I won’t say another thing to her! I won’t tell her about Johannes, or Amaymon, or that night when your mother died… I won’t tell her about any of that.”