“And feels like. Aye. Here ye may have less use fer yer saber, though in the Highlands ye cannae be—”
He pulled her forward and kissed her. Tangling her hands into his thin shirt, she lifted on her toes to meet him more squarely. Heat speared through her, his touch flavored with both desperation and hope. Hope that she’d given him.
Finally he lifted his head again. “Your own clan chief wants me to sell Lattimer to him. Do you truly not want me to do that?” Gray eyes seemed to gaze all the way into her soul, making her wonder what he saw there. “Do you want me to stay?”
And now it was all back on her shoulders again. She had only eleven days now by which to measure him, put against a lifetime of seeing how the leaders of her own clan regarded this castle with two names. How they regarded the cotters who lived on this land. “Aye,” she said softly. “If ye mean to make a fight of it, then I want ye to stay.” God help her, but it was an excuse, to say she wanted him there for the sake of the tenants. Because she couldn’t say the other part, that she wanted him there for her.
***
Despite its name, Lattimer Castle didn’t have turrets. What it did have was a widow’s walk running around the perimeter of the main hall’s roof, presumably so the MacKittrick females could keep watch for their men to return from battle. Like the rest of the nonessential parts of the house it was flimsy and rusting, ready to fall into the garden or the front drive at any moment.
Gabriel climbed up from the small door in the attic and made his way along the iron railing, then hiked up the peak of the roof at the center to stand at the highest point of Lattimer. Over his head a scattering of clouds raced to join their fellows, trapped against the white peaks to the west.
All around him in every direction lay his land. The loch, the forest, the glens and valleys and ravines and foothills, the thin trails of smoke above the trees that marked the chimneys of Strouth—chance, luck, or some persistent clerk in some minister’s cabinet who’d refused to let Lattimer revert to the Crown had decreed that it all belonged to him. If he wanted it.
Until the Duke of Dunncraigh had made him an offer for it, he’d never considered that he could be rid of Lattimer. The idea of being a titled landlord was so new to him, he’d just assumed that all the properties came with the title and were inseparable from it.
He turned a slow circle. The Maxwell had described a morass of never-ending trouble and despair, while Fiona wanted him to see happy, smiling tenants who came out to shake his hand every morning. The truth, of course, was somewhere in the middle. What it turned out to be, however, wasn’t precisely the point.
“Am I to climb up there after you?” Kelgrove called from the walkway below. “I’m not dressed for mountaineering.”
“Stay down there. It’s safer. Marginally.” Gabriel sat, resting his arse on the peak of the roof and bracing his feet against the sloped shingles. “I have a quandary, and I require your unfailing honesty.”
“You don’t want to serve at the Horse Guards,” his aide commented, starting to lean against the railing and then settling for bracing his hands against it. “That’s it, isn’t it? I know you don’t like the politics of it. And in my thinking, the first general you flattened would see your military career ended, anyway.”
“You’re counting on my flattening someone, then.”
“I’ve been your aide for seven years, Your Grace,” he returned, as if that explained everything. “Perhaps Wellington would give you a division. You’ve certainly earned one.”
Brief hope touched him, but he shoved it away again. That was a part of his life he needed to give up. He already knew that. The question had become what to do next. “I’m a scrapper, Adam. I couldn’t lead from some hilltop, sending notes to my regimental commanders about how to counter enemy movements. I would be miserable at it, and that would cost lives.”
“You’re a bloody fine strategist, sir,” the sergeant said stoutly.
“Thank you, but two different people—three, counting you—have pointed something out to me today. I likely should have seen it weeks ago, but I don’t think I wanted to.” He kept his gaze on the loch, on the splinters of sunlight it reflected back into the sky. “I’m a duke, whether I want to be one or not. My duty here isn’t to examine the ledgers and hire someone to give me accurate reports while I spend my time riding about Spain with Frenchies shooting at me.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. It isn’t. My duty is missing sheep, sheep that are accounted for, broken fences, bare fields, sick tenants, churchyard luncheons, and a great many things I know I can’t imagine. It’s clearing boulders, chasing poachers, counting cattle, harvesting crops, and hosting bloody boring Society dinners, however the devil one does that.”
“Begging your pardon, but that’s what your steward is doing.”
“That’s what a steward has had to do for twenty years, because the Duke of Lattimer has been elsewhere and utterly uninterested. These people are protected by virtue of my life. It’s… irresponsible of me to risk leaving them to fate because I have a gift for battle.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Adam returned, “though I will point out that you have three properties and three stewards. Why is your duty these sheep and these boulders, in particular?”
That was why he valued Adam Kelgrove’s aid. If nothing else, the sergeant made him think things through, develop his argument and his strategy to fill whatever holes Kelgrove found in his line of thought. “You saw the reports on Hawthorne and Langley Park,” he said aloud, naming his two more southerly estates. “In your opinion, do either of them require a change of course? Or my attention at all, for that matter?”
“In my opinion? No, they do not. They are old, stable properties, both being managed by men who have decades of experience. Which you do not.” Kelgrove paused. “If you’re asking whether you could take up residence at one or the other of them, of course you could, but you… wouldn’t find it terribly challenging.”
“I’d be bored out of my damned skull, you mean.” In his nightmares he could imagine a softer life, sitting behind a desk and looking at figures someone else had written out, agreeing to everything his steward suggested because the man knew far more about the mechanics of the estate than he ever would. He would go riding and hunting and fishing, spend his nights drinking, and slowly go mad.
Here, though, it was different. Lattimer needed help. And it was already cursed and half ruined, which minimized the odds of him making things worse. Here had Fiona Blackstock. However much that one fact should have been weighted, to him it seemed… everything. It could measure against every other choice before him and still be the thing that mattered the most. But he’d never led with his heart before. Ordering men into battle, riding into cannonfire required hard resolve and logic. Why couldn’t he make himself see this, see her, that same way?
“At this moment I have several reasons for wanting to remain here,” he admitted, navigating through what he wanted to say as carefully as he knew how. “I have no idea if they’re the right reasons.”
His aide squinted one eye against the sunlight. “Miss Blackstock being one of them, I presume.”
Well, he hadn’t expectedthat. And if Kelgrove had figured out his obsession with his steward, others had, as well.Fuck. “What makes you say that?”
