Free The Mysterious Heir by Edith Layton Page A

smelled the cool spring scent of blossoms, nor noted the new green of his lands as the racing horse turned the forest to blur. Run, my friend, he urged soundlessly, as I cannot, and I will follow anywhere.
    It was only when he felt the tightly muscled body beneath him begin to blow with effort that he at last reined in and allowed Scimitar to pick his way aimlessly through the fields and meadows beyond sight of Lyonshall. But though the horse had worked out all its restless energy, Morgan Courtney felt locked and blocked within himself. He patted his mount absently. The animal could do no more, he thought, indeed no creature he could have ridden could run fast enough this morning to leave his thoughts behind.
    Bev had assisted him to bed last night, he remembered. He never could seem to drink enough to bring complete oblivion and had given up trying for that long ago. How many bottles had the surgeon primed him with, all that time ago, as he waited for unconsciousness to overtake his patient so that he could begin to remove the shell lodged in his leg? There had been other patients groaning, and new ones being brought from the battlefield by the moment, and still after each long swallow of bad spirits, he had kept smiling tightly up toward the harried surgeon. Till at last the surgeon had shaken his head and sighed. “You’re a sponge, lad. Sorry, but I’ll have to go ahead anyway.”
    And those days in London, in Scotland, and in Wales, all those glasses, those liters of fine aged liquors he had sought escape from Kitty in had no effect either. They were no more effective in sealing him off from the shrill pain of his life with her than the crude liquor had been in numbing him from the keen cutting of the surgeon’s knife. In neither case had it even brought him the release of tears. “You’re a brave lad,” the surgeon had said when he had finished. “You’re a strong man,” Kitty’s father had said when she was done. Neither was right, he thought as Scimitar now carried him even farther. It was only that he had never learned how to suffer correctly. For if he had, he thought, he would have wept and been done with it, gotten it out of his system. And then neither wound could still cause the pain that they did.
    The leg was one thing he had learned to live with by living with it. The memory of Kitty was a thing he evaded and seldom allowed himself to recall. But when those years were brought back, as they now were by this travesty of a sudden search for an heir that he was embarked upon, her memory came back as fresh in its cruelty as though no time had elapsed since he had last laid eyes upon her living form. It had been seven years since the world had held her breathing presence. And seven years later, on a spring morning that he should have been celebrating as busily as the birds were, she yet lay like a shadow over his sun.
    Scimitar paced his way slowly through a meadow as his master picked his way back through the thicket of years. Here, at Lyonshall, over a decade ago, there had been three male Courtneys. Each with a clear heritage to the title and a clear obligation to the land, not like the ill-assorted ragtag of males he had been forced by circumstances to invite to his home this year. His mama had died when he was an infant and his father, the sixth Earl, had been old since he had known him. But he was a capable and loving father to both his sons, Simon and Charles Morgan. Simon was the elder by twelve years and was to be the seventh in the long line of Earls that had held Lyonshall from time out of mind. But Simon was not a healthy man, for a fever as a child had damaged his heart. Father and elder son had both given young Morgan to understand that. Gently but firmly they had told him again and again that as his father was old and Simon not robust, there was every chance that he, the younger, would someday succeed to the title. But he had not wanted to hear it or know it. Simon was his loving brother