Chapter Three
The Merrivale townhouse
London, several weeks later…
“The lass ye seek be in the cloakroom.”
Angus Lucian Duncan Forbes MacRae, now styled the Black Lyon and Laird of Lyongate Hall in Scotland, peered at the tiny old woman who’d spoken.
He blinked once, then again.
He couldn’t help himself for she looked as out of place in a posh London townhouse as he felt in his full Highland regalia. Proud accoutrements he’d insisted upon wearing. Secretly, he hoped his kilt unsettled the fops, dandies, and other swell-heads who populated the night’s rout.
It took a real man to swagger about in a kilt.
As such, he wasn’t pleased to have his path blocked by a wizened female.
Garbed in black except for the red plaid laces adorning her boots, she could’ve been a cailleach in the wild, heather-kissed glens he missed so much.
She also had a wicked gleam in her bright blue eyes. The way she stood before him, her knotty hands on her hips and her grizzled chin lifted, proved she possessed enough spirit to be such a crone.
Biddies who loved to meddle.
A shame no one told the Black Lyon what to do. He wasn’t his uncle, and, for sure, he wasn’t his father. He walked his own path in life and recognized he’d erred in leaving his Highland home to seek answers in London. Sure, he’d tended some business matters.
New buyers contracted for good Lyongate wool.
Still…
Scottish matters were best managed on Scottish soil. And Lyongate called to him so strongly, his heart ached on every bluidy beat.
“She be waiting for ye, laddie.” The crone jabbed him with a crooked finger. “There, where I said. In the cloakroom.”
Lucian frowned. “I am no’ after finding a lassie.”
He wasn’t.
His reason for attending this crush was to announce his return to Lyongate Hall in northern Scotland. It was a journey he’d make alone, without a title-grasping, blow-away-at-the-first-rush-of-Highland-wind English wife. He was weary of London and even more tired of its residents.
Just now, he’d wanted to escape into the garden. He needed air that wasn’t tainted by stale perfume and smoke that, regrettably, didn’t hold an earthy-sweet tinge of peat.
Annoyed that the crone had waylaid him, he glanced at the cloakroom door. No scheming miss hidden within was going to use a cheeky Highland cailleach to trap him.
Turning back to the crone, he started to tell her so only to discover she’d vanished.
Lucian frowned, sure he hadn’t heard her scuttle away.
Yet the corridor loomed empty. All that stirred was the glimmer of candlelight in the wall sconces and the silvery moon glow spilling through a few tall, narrow windows.
Lucian glanced again at the cloakroom, his nape prickling when he saw that the door stood ajar.
A moment before, it’d been closed.
Eerie silence leaked from the room’s shadows and – he could scarce believe it – along with the quiet came the blessed scent of peat.
Sure the cailleach was up to mischief, he pushed open the door and entered the dimly lit, plaid-draped expanse that could never be the cloakroom of a townhouse belonging to a London merchant.
Tartan reigned, decking the walls, hanging at windows, covering tables, and gracing every chair. The colors were a clever blend of light and dark purples mixed with silver and black, so that he’d almost felt whisked home to his much-missed hills at gloaming.
