“And is it undisputed, Quentin?” Braden crossed the room to stand beside his brother, threateningly close. “Do you wish to challenge me?”
Quentin laughed around a mouthful of brandy. “Challenge you? Whatever put such an absurd idea into your head, elder brother? You know I haven’t the skill, the courage, or the desire to take on your burdens. Even if I thought I were likely to survive such an unpleasant and thoroughly disagreeable contest. I know my limitations.”
“Remember that, Quentin,” Braden said, very softly. “Don’t try me again.”
“I shan’t, I promise you. Arguments are so tedious.” He reached for the decanter again, and Braden pulled it from his hand.
“No more of this. I want you sober and focused on your duty.”
“Ah. I knew I couldn’t escape my punishment.” Quentin dropped into the chair positioned before Braden’s desk. “Speaking of my duty—have you told Cassidy just what you have in mind for her? The destiny you’ve undoubtedly planned down to the last detail, as you have for the rest of us?”
Braden sat stiffly at his desk, and stared toward his brother. “I have not told her. There’s time enough for that when we reach Greyburn.”
“A mere few weeks before the Convocation,” Quentin remarked. “Do you think she’ll be ready to face all those strangers?”
“She will be. You’ll help see to it, Quentin. But you will not speak other future. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly.” Quentin yawned with more drama than authenticity. “And now I’m really quite fatigued. If I may be excused—”
“Have your valet pack your things. We’re leaving tomorrow.”
“So soon? I’d thought—”
“What the servants haven’t finished by tomorrow they will send up later. I want us home.”
Home. Braden closed his eyes, as if memory and imagination were somehow more vivid behind the veil of sleep and dreams. Every moment in London had been a kind of torture, an unnatural severance from the land he loved, burns and fells and lonely moors as much as part of him as the wolf he could not become in this endless cage of walls and machinery and civilization.
Would Cassidy feel the same? Would she love the north as he did? Or would she simply walk, unsuspecting, into yet another kind of cage?
Such mawkish thoughts were pointless. He dismissed Quentin with a lift of his hand, but Quentin couldn’t leave without a final quip.
“I’m beginning to believe,” he said, “that marrying little Cassidy Holt might be the making of me.”
Braden laid his hands flat on the desk, concentrating on the velvet smoothness of the polished surface as if he could become as unfeeling and functional as the wood under his fingertips. “If she teaches you to care for something other than your own amusements,” he said, “then I’ll have much to thank her for.”
“I suspect you’ll have more to thank her for than that,” Quentin murmured. “I wonder how long it’ll take you to realize it?”
He slipped out the door before Braden could reply. Let Quentin play his verbal games; they were only words in the end.
Yet those words came back to haunt him as he summoned the servants one by one to give them their orders and arranged for the tickets to be purchased for tomorrow’s journey. Yes, he had reason to be grateful for recovering Cassidy Holt. But when she was Quentin’s mate, his only concern with her would be the loup-garou children she brought into the world.
Quentin’s children.
He clenched his hands and sat immersed in his own private darkness deep into the night.
Six
It was Cassidy’s second time on an English train, her second journey into the unknown. She didn’t know where she would end up or what her future held. No one seemed to want to talk about the days ahead—not Isabelle, lost in thoughts of her own, nor Rowena, beside Quentin in the opposite seat of the private compartment. Braden and his valet had a compartment to themselves, nearby but out of reach, and the .remaining servants were in another part of the train entirely.
Yet as Cassidy watched the English landscape roll by, she was happier than she’d been since those dim, lost days with her parents and brother.