Penmort Castle (Ghosts and Reincarnation #1)(51)
Author: Kristen Ashley

How two people who were kissing passionately in a car could appear to Fenella to be fighting, Cash had no idea.

Instead of commenting, he simply greeted, “Fenella,” and moved around her to open Abby’s door.

He bent in and took Abby’s elbow, guiding her out and firmly positioning her free of the door before he slammed it.

“You must be Abigail,” Fenella stated the obvious.

“Abby,” Abby replied, her soft voice warm and friendly and her hand came out to take Fenella’s as she leaned in to touch the other woman’s cheek with her own.

When Abby pulled away, Fenella exclaimed, “We’ve all been waiting with bated breath to meet you. Cash has never brought a woman to Penmort.”

Abby looked at him from under her lashes as she murmured, “Really?”

“Really!” Fenella nearly screeched and Cash winced at the shrill noise. “Mummy is in a dither. An… actual… dither,” Fenella declared.

“Um, is a dither a good thing?” Abby joked.

Fenella waved her hand in front of her face, Abby’s quip flying right by her. “Oh, Mummy’s always in a dither about something or other.”

In all of his memories of Nicola Beaumaris, Cash had never known her once to be in anything close to a “dither”.

Cash, finished with this ridiculous exchange, decided to intercede.

“Perhaps we can move this conversation out of the negative three degree weather and somewhere warmer?” he suggested drily.

“Oh yes! What was I thinking?” Fenella cried and then motioned to them to follow. “Come inside.”

Fenella led the way and Cash and Abby trailed, Cash’s fingers curling idly around hers, his thoughts on Abby as well as what that night would bring.

Outside of Nicola, who would give Abby a genuine warm welcome, Cash couldn’t begin to guess how his uncle, and Nicola’s two remaining daughters, Suzanne and Honor, would behave.

His thoughts were not positive.

He was taken out of them when he felt Abby’s step slow and his head turned to her.

She was looking up, her lips parted, her face registering wonder.

Cash’s gaze followed hers and he noted they’d entered the gate, climbed the steep path and up the steps into the common, turned left and were headed straight toward the castle.

Brilliant beams of light were shining from the ground up toward Penmort illuminating it brightly against the night sky.

The castle was a rambling “L” built around the side of a tor. It had thin bands of terraced gardens containing meandering paths running along its outer edge. It had a jagged roofline, some of its towers and turrets rising five imposing stories from the ground. There was another level built below into the face of the tor. It had a jutting rectangular entrance at the bend of the “L” and was built of a mellow red-brown stone.

The land had been occupied, and fortified, since the time of William the Conqueror when the sea, long since receded, had reached to the bottom of the tor. The castle that stood now was built during the Jacobean era, over four hundred years before. The entirety of its interior décor had been painstakingly, with no expense spared, refinished during the reign of Victoria.

Since the property was granted to its first Beaumaris master, Henry, by Richard, the Lionheart generations of men, men whose blood flowed in Cash’s veins, had built and rebuilt the manor and then fortified, defended and possessed it for over eight hundred years.

“It’s beautiful,” Abby whispered, her voice filled with awe.

He looked down at Abby and then up at his ancestral home.

She was correct. It was beautiful.

He took her hand and tucked it in the bend of his arm, effectively pulling her body closer to his side as he led her forward.

Moments later, with the smell of Abby’s musky, floral perfume in his nostrils, the feel of her against his side, Cash stepped through the enormous door and over the threshold of Penmort for the first time its owner, not only by birthright, but as the victor of a bloodless battle.

As his and Abby’s feet hit the stone floor of the entrance lobby, it wasn’t only Cash who felt the floor slant beneath him.

Abby swayed, her body twisting so her front was pressed into his side, her other hand coming around to clutch his shirt at his stomach.

In front of them, halfway up the short flight of stone steps, Cash saw Fenella’s frame pitch awkwardly and she threw her arms out to steady herself.

For a moment they all seemed suspended.

When the sensation ended, Fenella whirled toward them and cried, “What was that? Are we having an earthquake?”

Cash looked down to Abby and saw her face was pale. She was still grasping his shirt in her fist, her other hand gripping his bicep tightly.

“Are you okay?” Cash asked Abby.

Her head tipped back to look at him, her hazel eyes wide and frightened as she whispered, “Did you feel that?”

“I felt it,” Cash answered, pulling Abby closer to his body, his head turned to Fenella and he asked, “Has that happened before?”

“No!” Fenella cried and pressed her hand against her stomach. “That was weird.”

“Cash!” Nicola’s voice greeted from straight ahead and Cash lifted his eyes his aunt.

Arriving in the entrance lobby was Nicola Beaumaris and her youngest daughter, Honor.

Nicola was nearly sixty years old but she looked ten years younger. Tonight, as usual, her blonde hair was pulled back into an elegant bun at her nape, her clothing was understated yet stylish and her bearing was graceful but friendly.

Honor was the only one of Nicola’s daughters that Cash could remotely endure. She was not rail-thin like her sisters but curvy to the point of being plump. When she wasn’t being silent, sullen or superior, she could be quite clever and, on rare occasions, displayed a sense of humour.

“Did you feel that?” Fenella asked when her mother and sister entered the hall.

“Feel what?” Honor returned.

“I don’t know what,” Fenella replied, “it felt like an earthquake.”

Nicola came to a dead halt one step down and stared at her oldest daughter. “An earthquake?”

“Yes, the room pitched and –” Fenella started.

Honor interrupted her sister, her voice weary. “Fenella, don’t be dramatic.”

“I felt it!” Fenella cried and then spun toward Cash and Abby. “You felt it too!”

“We did,” Abby’s soft voice confirmed Fenella’s story.