She moved quickly to gather it up. Carrying out the bustle as well made it awkward. I almost laughed when she looked back. The moment she stepped out, I closed the door.

What was it Garland had said? “You want to leave your childhood friends behind”? They had nothing in common with me now?

Well, maybe that’s true.

I will be the mistress of Foxworth Hall. I will especially surprise my mother.

I lay down on the bed to get some rest, with defiance embracing me.

But when I closed my eyes, I didn’t see myself strutting like a peacock through the halls of the manor house.

I saw myself embracing my soft, oversized pillow and, as a little girl, falling to sleep with a smile on my face in my bedroom at home.

I drifted off, driving down the thought that I would see that warm comfort again only in my dreams.

Chapter 12

Garland woke me, not by shaking or touching me but simply with his overbearing presence, a shadow moving over me. I had the feeling he had been standing there beside the bed staring down at me for a while. Was I always to awaken with him looming?

The impishness in his eyes that had teased and drawn me to him was smothered by the dark intensity of a man who looked like he had no memory of me. Who was this girl sleeping in one of his beds?

I ground the sleep out of my eyes and sat up.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “Have I overslept?”

He stepped back, his arms folded across his chest. The expression on his face was so firm that it looked chiseled out of granite, the face of one of the statues in the halls. It drew away all the warmth in his eyes, turning them into cold glass. His silence was the most disturbing thing of all. Did I imagine myself speaking? Hadn’t he heard me?

“What is it, Garland? Why are you just staring at me?”

“Is this your way of getting some subtle revenge?” he replied in a voice I didn’t recognize, a voice that seemed to echo from a darkness deep inside of him. He resembled one of his austere, grim ancestors frozen in a portrait hung high enough in the hallway to glare down with disapproval at anyone who dared enter Foxworth Hall. It was as though his family’s ancient anger and madness had been passed down from generation to generation wrapped in a ball of fire and was now emerging in him.

“What?” I asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “Why do you ask such a thing?”

“You chased Dora out with my mother’s dress, my mother’s dress, balled and crushed in her arms!”

“I didn’t chase her.”