Page 90 of The Duke of Kisses
Just before he reached the clearing where the lodge was nestled, he found two horses, one of which he recognized as his uncle’s. His gut tightened, and he rode straight for the lodge.
His horse barely came to a stop before he slid from its back. Fear pulsed through him as he tore into the lodge. “Fanny!” He raced for the kitchen and stopped at the sight of blood covering the floor just over the threshold.
But it wasn’t her, thank God. His uncle lay facedown in a crimson pool. David didn’t have to check to see if he was dead. No one could survive losing that much blood. Sadness and horror raced up his spine but couldn’t overcome the fear he still had for Fanny. If Uncle Walter was dead, what might have happened to her?
“Fanny!” He dashed into the storeroom, but it was empty. Retracing his steps, he rushed back to the front room just as West came in the door.
“Is she here?”
“Not that I can see. My uncle is in the kitchen. He’s dead.” David said this without emotion as he ran up the stairs. He quickly looked through the two bedrooms and washroom. Each chamber was just as empty as the one before, and David shouted in frustration.
He started back down the stairs, his legs shaking.
West stood near the door to the kitchen, his features somber. “His throat was cut with a broken bottle.”
David stared at him, feeling utterly hopeless. “Where is she?” His voice was a thready croak as a knot of tears and anguish gathered in his throat.
“What’s going on?” David’s mother walked in the front door and looked between David and West. “What are you doing here?”
“What areyoudoing here?” David couldn’t have kept the menace from his voice if he tried, which he didn’t.
“I came to see Walter.”
West turned, positioning himself as a barrier in front of the doorway to the kitchen.
The movement drew her attention, and she craned her neck to see around him. She squinted, and when David heard her inhale, he knew she saw the blood.
“What’s that in there?” Her voice had risen to an unnaturally high pitch, indicating she’d probably caught at least a glimpse of the scene in the kitchen.
“Uncle Walter is dead,” David said flatly. He was past caring how anyone felt when he was going mad with fear.
She lifted her hand to her mouth as tears flooded her eyes and tracked down her cheeks. Dashing forward, she tried to get past West, who initially blocked her path.
“Let her go,” David said.
His mother went into the kitchen, and David followed her, with West on her heels. David watched, feeling strangely detached, as she fell to her knees in the puddle of blood and touched Walter’s gray face.
West had turned him over, and now David saw the jagged hole in his neck as well as the broken glass beside him. After seeing him lying there, David hadn’t really looked at anything else. Now he saw the canvas.
It was a woman, prone and bloody, and while her features were indistinguishable, she was clearly Fanny. Because of the hair.
Walter had been an avid painter, using the lodge as a studio as well as having one at the dower house. Ice pricked along David’s spine as he turned to his mother. “What did he do?” His tone was low and lethal.
She looked up at him and wiped the back of her hand across her wet cheek. “What do you mean? He’s the one who’s dead.”
“And why do you care so much?” David suddenly saw something very clearly. She often came here with Walter when he painted. “How long have you and Walter been carrying on? Was it before Father died?”
Her face lost all color, and David already had his answer. “I loved your father,” she whispered.
David wasn’t sure he believed her, but now he saw guilt in so many things she did and said, namely her insistence thathekeephispromise to her father. How easy for her when she’d broken her promise to be faithful to him. “Did you love Walter too?”
She turned her head away from David, and he saw her shoulders shake.
“St. Ives? Fanny?” The sound of Snowden’s voice carried from the front of the house.
West turned and left the kitchen.
Fanny.
