Seduced by a Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page A

and backed from the chamber, leaving Catherine and Madeline alone. Madeline stared at the open doorway for a long while, saying nothing, her eyes burning in her pale face, her lips rolled inward and pressed tight together.
    “She does not like me,” she offered at last, her gaze darting to Catherine, then back to the empty doorway. “She has never liked me.” The assertion made Madeline sound both petulant and very young. “You were the only one, Catherine. They never liked me. Not any of them. You were my only friend.”
    Catherine offered no demur, for the assertion might well be rooted in truth. The girls at Browning had viewed Madeline askance. Even the teachers had regarded her with wary disdain. She was different, odd, unsettling. She asked troubling questions that had no easy answers.
    What does it feel like to die? Time and experience had offered Catherine at least part of the answer.
    It felt like pure terror. Icy fear. Desperation and horror that went on and on. Or it felt like escape, freedom, a shedding of pain and suffering. She supposed it depended on the person doing the dying. But that knowledge had come to her with time. She had offered no answers when Madeline had asked so many years ago, for she had had none to give.
    Now, she knew far too much of death and dying.
    She closed her eyes for a moment, seeking strength. She would not think of that now, would not allow brutal recollections to claw her. Resolutely, she pictured a little black box, pushed the horror and the memories inside, slammed the lid and turned the key.
    Opening her eyes, Catherine glanced about for somewhere to sit. There were books everywhere, stacks of them, covered in dust. They were piled on the floor, on the stiff brocade settee, on the round table in the corner. On the two chairs by the table. And everything was dark. The wood-paneled walls. The floor.
    In the end, she eased down on the edge of the bed, rubbing Madeline’s hand between her own, trying to warm her icy skin.
    “The girls at Browning…they feared me. Hated me,” Madeline whispered, her gaze darting again to the door.
    “Browning was long ago, Madeline.” Catherine smoothed Madeline’s lank hair back from her brow. “Things that happened so far in the past cannot hurt you now,” she lied.
     
     
    There were voices coming from his cousin’s chamber. One was a dreamy whisper, weak and soft. His cousin’s voice. But the mellifluous tone of the second speaker arrested Gabriel St. Aubyn in his path. The sound was modulated and pleasing to the ear, the voice of a woman confident of her words, the diction and enunciation clean and crisp. A decisive individual, if her tone was any indication.
    Gabriel paused in the shadowed hallway and simply listened as the woman continued to speak, reassuring Madeline and coaxing her into conversation. Something stirred inside him, a mild curiosity that was so foreign and rare it caught him off guard. He was interested in very little of late, save his own personal demons, and they had grown frightfully tedious.
    ‘Twas time for a change of venue, a trip to London, even for a short while. There were all manner of distractions and entertainments there.
    Stepping forward, he paused in the hallway outside the open door. He had an excellent view of the piles of books, the dark draperies, and the dying fire. But not the woman who spoke once more in that perfectly modulated voice.
    He shifted a little and saw her then. First, her boot and the pale blue-gray sweep of her skirt. Another small shift and he saw her hand, her arm, and then the whole of her.
    She was not at all what he had expected.
    From her voice, he had already formed a picture in his mind. A woman cool and fair, tall and thin, ramrod straight in her bearing. But her appearance did not match the image he had conjured.
    Tipping his head a bit to the side, he studied her from his shielded place. If she rose from where she sat at the edge of his cousin’s sickbed, she