She should have been insulted, she supposed, that he treated a servant with the same deference he offered her, but that just seemed petty. She’d heard that Americans treated everyone equally, with no use for kings or lords, so perhaps he’d simply become accustomed to this greater familiarity. It suited him, actually. This new version of him, anyway.
“My lady?” he prompted, wiggling his fingers.
Shaking herself free of the thought of him in one of those raccoonskin hats and wearing a bear’s coat over his shoulders, she took his hand and allowed him to help her to the crushed-oyster drive. “Please see my things moved to the south corner room, Duffy,” she instructed, to save herself from being ordered to remove from yet another master bedchamber.
“Aye, my lady. I’ll have it aired oot at once.” Gesturing, the butler took his new master’s bags himself while more footmen scrambled out of the house to collect her luggage and Margaret’s small trunk, and to aid the second coach, which carried Mary, her lady’s maid, and Agnes, the nanny. Callum didn’t have a valet, and shewondered if she should recommend Wallace, Ian’s former man.
“… introduce Waya to my Daffodil, so I can go riding with you,” Margaret was saying, as she took hold of Callum’s big hand and began tugging him toward the house.
“Daffodil is yer pony, then?”
“Yes, of course. Mama doesn’t let me ride her in town, because Daffodil is very little and would be frightened.”
Callum glanced over his shoulder at Rebecca. “That seems wise,” he offered, a slight, attractive grin touching his mouth.
She remembered that he could be charming, but in this instance she knew he’d only brought Margaret along so he could keep an eye on his ward. As for herself, at least she’d been invited along instead of having to chase the coach down the road.
Reginald leaped down from the second coach and ran to the front door, the wolf loping up a moment later. She’d trotted beside them for a good two hours as they traveled south from Inverness, and from the look of her she could have carried on for another hour or more.
“Do ye mean to stand on the drive all day?” Callum asked, appearing beside her.
Rebecca started. “I’m merely taking a last look,” she improvised. “Geiry Hall is yours now, after all.”
“Aye.” He looked up at the pretty gray-stoned mansion and its wide, well-windowed front. “Dunncraigh ran across me this morning,” he went on conversationally. “He invited me to luncheon and pointed out that he and I are partners.”
“Goodness. And you didn’t throw him through a window?”
“Nae. There werenae any handy. When I left he’dagreed to rent his pier to yer da’. I wouldnae call that a partnership.”
“The business kept growing,” she said, wondering why she was attempting to word her explanation diplomatically. Of course she didn’t want a fight erupting between Callum and the Maxwell simply because of a ten-year-old disagreement. Neither, though, did she want to say something unintentionally suspicious to the man looking everywhere for conspiracies. Whatever he found, he would have to look for on his own. Because what he suggested about Ian’s death was ridiculous in light of what she knew of Donnach and his father, and she had no intention of feeding his… fury. “Larger investments meant larger returns. It was sound reasoning.”
“And I wager in the past few months Dunncraigh’s been kindly taking on more than his share of the work, aye?”
“There hasn’t been anyone else to see to it,” she stated. “I’ve been attempting to learn the nuances of my father’s investments, but without His Grace I would have given up by now.”
Callum nodded, setting off back toward the front door. “Well, I imagine he’ll have it in fine shape by the time ye wed Donnach and they take over ownership,” he commented.
“At least Donnach was here,” she returned, clenching her jaw.
His shoulders squared, but he didn’t stop his retreat. “We’ll stay here at Geiry for a few days, I reckon. And to avoid any misunderstandings later, dear Donnach’s nae welcome in this house, either. Neither is Dunncraigh.”
And there he went, making declarations again just to remind her that he had control of… of everything. Rebecca stomped her foot. “I hope you realize that ifthere was a conspiracy and that if I was a part of it, or being urged to be a part of it, your high-handedness would not be encouraging me to take your side.”
At that hedidturn around. “And I hopeyerealize that ye flayed me alive once, and that I’m nae likely to trust ye again until I ken exactly what’s afoot. I warned Ian, and came back to find that exactly what I feared came to pass. So mayhap it’s ye,” he went on, pointing a finger at her, “who needs to earnmytrust.”
If she hadn’t been a lady, if she’d been fourteen or fifteen years old again, Rebecca would have yelled back at him something about how he was not allowed to stomp back into her life after ten years and upturn every applecart in the countryside.Damnation!She had things figured out again, finally. She had her future—and Margaret’s—figured out. Some cousin of Ian’s would inherit the Geiry title and properties, she would marry Donnach Maxwell, and he and clan Maxwell would see that she and Margaret were comfortable and safe and that Margaret would have a fine future as a stepgranddaughter of the Duke of Dunncraigh.
With a barely stifled growl Rebecca gathered her skirts and tromped around the house to the vast garden at its rear. She’d spent a great deal of time amid the roses and lavender, beneath the haphazard shade of the tall birch trees. Today she didn’t seek solace as much as she did a solution to the turmoil caused by Callum MacCreath. Because while her first thought might have been simply to press for a swift engagement and wedding with Donnach—which would at least see her away from the house and somewhere safe and protected—that would also mean leaving Margaret behind. And that, she couldn’t do.
Even before Callum’s return she’d had the nagging thought that, among the trio of businessmen with whomshe’d found herself over the past ten years, two of them were dead. And the son of the one who remained would control two-thirds of the enterprise if she married into his family.
She’d heard other things about the Duke of Dunncraigh over the past two or three years, completely aside from the venom Callum spewed at him. Things about people who disappeared if they displeased him, and threats to his own clansmen if they disagreed with his policies.
Two years ago he’d turned his back on a thousand cotters of his own clan, giving their care over to the English Duke of Lattimer for no other reason than that the folk had declined to side against Lattimer, their own landlord, when Dunncraigh had demanded they do so. It had been in the newspapers, but Donnach had only commented about it to tell Ian not to ever mention Lattimer in the duke’s presence.
Last year, within a few weeks of Ian’s death, she’d heard some rumors about a near kidnapping of an English duke’s sister because Dunncraigh disliked her brother. Not much news had penetrated the fog around her then, and she’d absorbed even less of what she actually heard, but she remembered thinking that the brother, the English duke, had more than likely been Lattimer, as well. She wondered if Callum knew any of these things. If not, she certainly didn’t want to be the one to tell him. He didn’t need more firewood for his conspiracies.
And then there was Callum, himself. He’d been such an attractive young man, constantly tempting her into the sin of showing off her ankles, swimming in his company while wearing nothing but a shift, and he’d made her feel as wild and exhilarated by life as he seemed to be. Angry as he’d been prone to get, that Callum had been her friend and confidant until his brother hadapproached her with an offer of marriage that she couldn’t—and didn’t wish to—refuse.
