The Temptation of Your Touch by Teresa Medeiros

beautiful woman. It was as if he were standing on the edge of a storm that could break at any minute, sweeping away everything in its path and making all things new.
    Off to the left, he could see a shallow cove cut into the cliffs, where the rocks grudgingly gave way to a half circle of sandy beach. When he was a boy, such a sight would have sent his imagination soaring with dreams of smugglers and the shuttered glow of lanterns dancing along the beach beneath amoonless sky, of secret passageways winding their way deep into the stony recesses of the cliffs, and heaps of shimmering treasure buried in long-forgotten caves. But those dreams had long ago been replaced with ledgers full of endless columns of figures and long, dull board meetings where he presided over a bunch of gouty old men more interested in fattening their own coffers than in steering their company—and their country—toward the future.
    The back of Max’s neck prickled. Even with his gaze fixed on the sea, he could feel the inescapable shadow of the manor behind him, its windows gazing down upon him like watchful eyes. He wondered if other eyes were watching him as well—mercurial eyes with a maddening tendency to shift when a man least expected it from the glossy green of leaves in deep summer to the rich brown of burled walnut.
    He hadn’t lingered long enough to see if his curt rebuke had made those eyes darken with hurt.
    Seized by a fresh restlessness, Max turned away from the sea and began to stalk along the edge of the cliffs. As he studiously banished his housekeeper from his thoughts, another woman intruded. And not the woman he had expected—the woman who was now happily wed to his brother.
    No, this was a mocking little minx, her lustrous brown hair piled carelessly atop her head, her lightly blushed cheek poised on the verge of dimpling. Maxslowed his steps as he picked his way over the rocks, wondering just how many times Angelica Cadgwyck’s dainty feet might have trod this very path.
    And at precisely which spot she had chosen to end her life.
    As he reached the very tip of the rugged promontory that jutted out over the sea, his question was answered as surely as if he’d spoken it aloud. Here, the wind was even more relentless. Nearly staggering against its force, Max drew close enough to the edge of the cliff to watch the roiling sea break over the jagged, glistening blades of the rocks below.
    Had moonlight glinted off those same rocks on the night Angelica died? Or had clouds shrouded the moon and tricked her into believing that if she took flight off the bluff, she would drift gently down into the arms of the sea?
    Max lifted his eyes to the distant horizon. He could almost see her standing there—a young woman blinded by tears, about to be cast out of the only home she had ever known. The ruthless wind would have stripped the pins from her hair like the fingers of a jealous lover until it danced in a cloud around her beautiful, tearstained face.
    Her lover was dead, her brother carted off to prison, then banished from these shores, never to return, and her father driven mad by grief. Which one of them had she mourned the most in thatmoment? Had she given the brash young artist both her body and her heart or held one in reserve for some future love? A love she would never live long enough to meet.
    In the fraction of time before she had stepped off the edge of that promontory, had she been fleeing her destiny or rushing forward to embrace it with open arms?
    Without warning, the thin shelf of rock beneath Max’s feet began to crumble. He jumped backward just in time to watch what was left of the shelf tumble toward the sea in a dizzying spiral before shattering against the rocks below like so many grains of sand.

Chapter Nine
    A S M AX WATCHED THE swirling sea swallow the pulverized rocks just as it must have swallowed Angelica Cadgwyck’s broken body all those years ago, his chest heaved with delayed reaction. Despite the