“You will live for the Cause, as I have.” If Braden had ever been in any danger of forgetting that lesson, he was reminded of it the moment he walked through these doors. He could have taken this suite, the largest in Grey-burn, for his own. He hadn’t even considered it.
As long as these rooms remained sacrosanct, the Cause would survive. Grandfather would see to it, even from the grave.
“Let nothing touch you, boy. Nothing and no one but the Cause. If you do, you will fail. ”
The voice was as real to Braden as the walls of Greyburn. It never entirely left him. Once he had allowed others to touch his heart, believing that sentiment could coexist with duty. Believing his own heirs could be born of love to carry on the Cause. He had learned three years ago that Grandfather was right.
But another voice intruded on his memories—soft and husky and fervent, as different from Grandfather’s as day from night. Tiberius Forsters image was clear in his mind after all these years, but he had no picture of Cassidy Holt.
How was it possible, then, that she could trespass even here?
He’d told himself that all difficulties raised by Cassidy Holt would be solved at Greyburn, but he had been foolishly optimistic. “When he’d heard her with the Roddam girl on the platform in Ulfington, he knew how easily she’d befriend anyone who offered her the slightest kindness. She was too open-hearted—still a child with no idea of what was appropriate, what her true nature required other.
Grandfather would have taught her in a way she couldn’t forget. But when Braden imagined her suffering under Tiberius Forster’s harsh tutelage…
His mind refused the picture. Instead, it insisted upon conjuring up a face to go with that earnest young voice. Not a child’s face, in spite of his assessment other character, but one with a girls artlessness and a woman’s allure. And why did he envision a mature female’s softly curved form hidden by a man’s trousers and a hoyden’s heedless conduct? Why did Cassidy’s easy, ingenuous laugh seem to him more potent than a sophisticates most practiced flirtation?
Why, when he was near to her, did he find it so difficult to remember the only reason she was here?
These rooms reminded him. It was all to the good if Cassidy was as he imagined. Quentin had called her lovely, and that would make it easier for him to assume his role as her mate. A strong, richly female body would serve Cassidy well in bearing children. Her open nature would make her a good mother for the next generation of Forsters—the generation that would inherit Greyburn when he and Quentin were gone.
All that remained was to tell her. He had tried to make her understand there in the Great Hall, but he’d failed. He had lost the ability to explain what he took for granted.
“You need me.” He remembered how her words had shocked him—as if she saw a lack in him she thought she could mend. Not merely his blindness, but something deeper.
As if she wanted him to need her. When she had babes of her own, her unformed yearnings would be satisfied. The longer he kept her in ignorance, the more chance for misunderstanding. And yet he was reluctant to destroy even a part other innocence, the very innocence that made her what she was.
So be it. He had become dangerously soft where Cassidy Holt was concerned; mercy was fatal to the Cause. Like the wolves in his grandfather’s carving, he would surmount every barrier, defeat every enemy, conquer every weakness…
Every weakness but one.
“You failed,” Grandfather said. “You failed in the one simple duty that the least of our kind could achieve. You have but one purpose left. Do not fail me again. ”
Without so much as touching a carved wooden bedpost or the razor still neatly laid out beside the washstand, Braden backed out of the room. He walked to his own suite just down the corridor. At the rear of the dressing room he discarded his clothes and slipped through the hidden passageway.