Sinner's Heart

Epilogue

Sussex, 1765

The morning rain had burned off, leaving the ground glimmering in the afternoon sunlight as though someone had scattered handfuls of diamonds. After the initial downpour, the day itself had turned fair, a crisp spring sky arching overhead, dazzling in its clarity.

Six riders cantered across the fields. Three men, three women. With the weather so fine, they wanted to take advantage, and so an outing had been proposed. By tacit agreement, they knew precisely where they wanted to go. They had been to that particular spot before, and surely there were better, more picturesque views on the ancestral property, but this location held significance for everyone in the party, and so there they headed.

Their destination appeared no different from the rolling green fields surrounding them. Save for a small stand of elms, nothing distinguished this place. Anyone else would have passed it without further thought.

Yet the riders dismounted here. After hobbling their horses, they drifted around, picking their way through overgrown grasses and studying the ground as if it held long-kept secrets. Indeed, the ground did hold secrets.

“I still cannot fathom,” Leo said, “how a whole Roman temple and the hill it stood upon, vanished.”

Bram shrugged, looking out across the field. “Its purpose had been served.”

“The place is empty, yet we keep coming here,” noted Whit.

“We keep our memories close even as the land changes,” Zora said.

A shared, silent concurrence. This was where their transformation had begun. It was an ongoing process, every day revealing new truths, new discoveries.

One of Bram’s discoveries: love was not a finite thing. It could grow with each hour.

He watched Livia as she paced what had once been the perimeter of the temple. She had never grown acclimated to wearing stays, and in her gown of spice-hued sateen, her dark curls wind-tumbled, and golden light upon her skin, she looked both sensuously pagan and indisputably regal. No one moved like her, or carried herself as she did—confident, aware of her power, yet continually intrigued by her surroundings. Hers was an insatiable greed for knowledge, for experience, and he was at all times eager to gratify her.

As if feeling his gaze upon her, she turned and gave him one of her slow, heated smiles. They had been to this place on their own, many times. It was on his property after all. What the other Hellraisers did not know was that Bram and Livia had ridden out in the middle of the night and made love here, beneath the canopy of stars. A re-consecration of the site. Great evil had been done here. They reclaimed it, changed from a place of wickedness to a place of love.

He strode to her and took her hand. At all times he liked to touch her. A quick glance revealed that Leo and Anne walked together with their arms around each other’s waists. Whit and Zora strolled shoulder-to-shoulder, their fingers brushing in quick, eloquent meetings.

The marriage between a nobleman and a Gypsy had caused a scandal, but Whit cared naught for society’s opinion—after all that had been seen and done, the battles waged against true evil, gossip meant nothing. The temperate months were spent with Zora’s band, and when frost lay upon the ground, he and his wife found warmth at his estates. An unusual arrangement, but one that seemed to suit them.

He’d heard that Rosalind had been traveling the Continent, and that she was writing a philosophical discourse about the complex nature of love. Since being made a widow a second time, she’d taken lovers but refused all offers of marriage. Bram supposed that if any woman deserved her freedom, it would be she.

Now all of the remaining Hellraisers lingered at what had once been the site of the ruin, until the sun dipped and shadows lengthened. A chill threaded through the air and the new green leaves upon the tree branches shivered.

“Come, let us for home.” Livia’s voice was husky and low as she wrapped her arm around his.

He thought of the warmth of the fire, surrounded by friends, and the heat of the bed he and Livia shared. That he, who had sinned so grievously, could receive such gifts never ceased to astonish him. More proof that the world held mysteries he could never understand.

“Your humble servant, madam,” he murmured with a kiss.

“Never humble.” She cupped his face with her hands and returned the kiss. “Not my warrior.”

Once, Zora had spoken a Romani adage, and the words had embroidered themselves upon his mind. As he and Livia walked back to their horses, with the other Hellraisers trailing behind them, he recalled the proverb.

We are all wanderers on this earth. Our hearts are full of wonder, and our souls are deep with dreams.

Two years ago, he would have scoffed at such sentiment. Now, he held the words close, a man transformed.

With Livia beside him, he rode for home, and the brilliance of the sun upon the horizon could not match the light within his heart.