“Where’s Margaret?” she asked, her voice breaking.
“They’ve got her.”
“‘They?’ You mean Dunncraigh?”
It had to be Dunncraigh. No one else would dare. “Aye. He couldnae get close enough to ye to convince ye to cooperate, so he found something else that would. They wore tartans so there wouldnae be any question over who did it.”
A tear ran down her face as she clutched at his arms. “What do we do, Callum?”
He shrugged out of her grip, moving for the servants’ door. “I go back to my first plan,” he snapped, pulling open the door and heading for the stable.
“You can’t,” she protested, running after him. “If you kill Dunncraigh, I’ll never see her again. And I’ll never see you again. I know it!”
He heard her. He understood her frantic tone, and her worry. To him, though, one thing mattered at that moment—getting Margaret back. He’d wagered everything that the target would be Rebecca, and he’d been wrong. And Mags had paid for his mistake. Waya and Andrew had paid for it, the wolf perhaps with her life.
“I will fetch her for ye,” he snarled.
A horse trotted toward him, but it wasn’t Jupiter, and it already had a rider. Narrowing his eyes, he noted the shovel leaning against the side of the stable as he lookedup. A young man, his expression a mix of haughtiness and nerves, danced a gray gelding toward him. He wore Maxwell plaid as well, Callum noted peripherally.
“I’ve a message, Geiry,” the lad called, keeping out of arm’s reach.
“Then deliver it.” Holding out his left hand, he flexed the right, ready to grab the shovel and swing.
“It’s nae in writing. We’re nae fools.”
“Ye took the bairn. Ye’re dead fools.”
The horse fidgeted beneath its rider before the young man brought it back under control. “We’ll give her back to ye. Bring the things ye took—all of ’em—and the lass to Maxwell Hall tonight at eight o’clock.” He pointed at Rebecca, close behind Callum. “And the lass has but to say one word. I’m to tell ye it’s ‘aye.’”
Dunncraigh’s home, Dunncraigh’s men. “Nae,” Callum countered. “I’ll meet ye out in the open, where ye willnae be able to put a ball through me and bury me in the garden. On the dock. Sanderson’s dock. If the wee lass has so much as a scratch on her, I’ll murder the lot of ye. Ye’ll nae see me coming. But I’ll start withye.” Callum gazed at the man levelly, daring him to retort.
Instead the lad nodded. “She’ll nae be harmed. But ye might want to put some more clothes on before ye meet with yer betters, Geiry.”
Callum didn’t move. “Eight o’clock. Sanderson’s dock. They’d best be there, boy.”
“They will be.” With that the lad wheeled the gray and galloped down the drive again.
The groom led Jupiter out of the stable. With every muscle and bone in his body Callum wanted to seize the stallion and ride Dunncraigh’s man down, beat him until he told them precisely where they’d taken Margaret. This lad would be a cousin at best, though, someone theduke didn’t value too highly. No one with any sense sent a potential hostage to negotiate a hostage exchange.
Even so, he took a long step forward, until a muffled sob behind him stopped him cold. “Rebecca,” he said, turning around and pulling her into his arms.
She sagged against him. “They took her. They took Margaret.”
Wrapping his arms close around her, he lowered his face to her long, loose hair. His anger he could manage. Hell, he’d been coiled with it for ten years. She’d lost a husband and a father over the last fourteen months. Now the same bastards had snatched her daughter. He couldn’t even imagine her pain. “They’ll nae harm her, lass. Without her, they’ve nae leverage against ye.”
“What do I do? I can’t—”
“Nae out here.” Callum swept her up into his arms and carried her back into the house. The last thing they needed was someone overhearing them and reporting the conversation to Dunncraigh or Stapp. He set her down on one of the chairs they’d dragged away from the kitchen table. Waya lifted her head to look at him woefully, then dropped it again.
Most of the servants had gathered in the large kitchen, and from the sniffling and hand-wringing and quiet cursing going on around him, each and every one of them had given young Mags a piece of his or her heart. He wasn’t the least bit surprised. She owned a good half of his.
The other half of his heart sat rocking in a hard wooden chair, refusing all offers of tea or water or a blanket or whatever else they could think to give her. He took a hard breath, pushing back at his fury. Fury didn’t allow him to think. And he needed to think.
Then he knelt at her feet, taking both her hands in his, becoming conscious again of the fact that he wasshirtless and barefoot, with nothing between him and the weather but a knotted kilt. “Lass, listen to me. I’ve a plan. But I need ye to help me with it. Can ye do that?”
“I don’t want a plan. I want my daughter back.”
With his mind still spinning through possible twists and turns and figuring the odds for their success—and by the devil, the odds needed to be a one hundred percent certainty—he nodded. “Margaret and ye safe is all I care about. I reckon ye know that. But I need ye to trust me.”
