As she dusted sand over the fresh ink of her note, she caught sight of the half-dozen letters from Ian’s cousins. They hadn’t been quite as deferential, but then once the courts declared Callum unreachable or dead, James Sturgeon would take the Geiry title and the one-third ownership of Sanderson’s—and the entirety of this house—for himself and his family. Even so, they’d been mostly pleasant, suggesting they come visit, not so they could measure the curtains, but so she would have the familial support for which she no doubt yearned.
At the moment she mostly yearned not to be whispered about and stared at every time she ventured out of doors, for people to simply wish her good morning and chat about the weather or fashion as they used to do. She would undoubtedly find more anonymity in London, but Inverness had been her home for twenty years now. Her father’s business—her business, rather—had its headquarters here. She would garner suitors in both towns, but she knew the ones here.
She would have to leave MacCreath House sooner or later, but she liked the big, rambling house and the view from the front windows that overlooked a pretty stretch of the river Ness. Likewise her days of spending summers at Geiry Hall in the middle of the Highland countryside were numbered, as well. Thankfully her father had left her their old home closer by, but she preferred it here. She had since she’d set eyes on the house at age eight—but part of the attraction then might have been its two residents. Ian and Callum MacCreath, the two most handsome young men she’d ever seen, and they’d all become fast friends before she could even think that perhaps she should have been looking for companions of her own sex, that she should have been practicing her embroidery instead of learning to shoot a gun. The perils of being raised by an indulgent father, she supposed.
Well, she’d learned to embroider since then. She even played a fair pianoforte, if she said so herself. Ian had enjoyed culture, and so, she’d discovered, had she. Rebecca tucked the missives back into the rack where she kept them. Ian had wanted a proper, discerning, upward-reaching life for them, and he’d achieved it. She remained thankful for it every day.
As for his brother… She couldn’t even imagine her life if she’d allowed herself to be tied to that wild, ramshackle drunk of a boy. Disgraced, laughed at, pitied, poor—it would have been horrible. If once in a while she’d imagined it as anything else, well, that could be forgiven, she supposed. It was natural to be occasionally curious about the other paths of her life, the ones she hadn’t taken. The moment she began to wander too far down them, though, it meant she needed to find something else with which to occupy herself. Especially these days, when some of the paths had fallen out of sunlight’s reach.
Rebecca pushed to her feet as Pogue opened the front door to accept the day’s mail. “Pogue, hold the boy a moment,” she called. “I’ve a note to be delivered, if he’d care to make an extra shill…”
She rounded the door and stepped into the foyer. Thebutler stood there, but it wasn’t the mail boy at whom he stared. The man filling the entry stood a good three or four inches taller than Pogue, who was six feet himself. The brown caped greatcoat and black jacket beneath it with its wide lapel and silver buttons looked of fair quality but well-worn, as did the black leather calf-high boots and the buckskin breeches stuffed into them. The huge black dog standing at his heels, yellow, unblinking gaze on her, could have been some child’s nightmarish dream of a hellhound.
All that, though, she noted in passing, on the way up to the face she could only see in shadowed profile as he spoke to the butler. He wore his straight brown hair a little long but neatly trimmed, the windblown mahogany resting against a high cheekbone and a lean, tanned face with a faint scruff of beard, as if he hadn’t shaved today. Straight nose, a hard chin that set off his firm mouth, a handsome profile to be sure.
Then he turned his head, fixing her with his direct gaze. Beneath a double slash of dark eyebrows, his right eye was a cool blue, the left a grassy green. Rebecca’s fingers felt abruptly cold. Distantly she heard the tap and swoosh as the letter she’d held hit the floor and slid beneath the table beside her, noting the sound as the cold rushed from her hands and feet up her spine to her skull, freezing everything in between.
“Did ye think me dead as well, lass?” he asked in a low voice.
“Callum,” she said, and everything went white.
***
Callum snapped his mouth shut over the remainder of the cutting remark he’d been about to make. Instead he looked down at the twisted pile of pretty lavender silk and arms and legs and golden-blond hair that made up his sister-in-law. She’d never fainted in the entire tenyears he’d known her, but then she wouldn’t have expected to be confronted by the brother of the man she’d likely helped murder.
“My lady!” Pogue said, sinking to his knees beside her prone body. The butler took her hand and began patting it urgently. “Lady Geiry!”
“Leave be,” Callum ordered, and stepped over Rebecca. A vase of posies sat by the window in the morning room, and he picked it up, tossed the flowers into the waste basket, then returned to the foyer and dumped the water over his sister-in-law’s head.
She sputtered, waving her arms over her face, and jerked upright. The perfect coil of thick blond hair atop her head sank to one side, dripping past her ear, but she didn’t seem to notice it as she caught sight of him again. “What—”
“Ye fainted,” he supplied, handing the glass vase to the butler.
“I do not faint!” she protested, running a hand across her face and then belatedly pushing at the stack of her hair.
“I dunnae care what ye do,” he returned, facing her again. “Stand up. I’ll nae speak to ye while ye’re on the floor.”
For one thing, it made her look vulnerable, and he didn’t like that. And he didn’t like the twist he’d felt in his gut when he’d heard her voice, or that he’d had to take a breath before he looked at her. She’d had Ian in her life for nine years that he hadn’t, and she had the spleen to look… regal when she’d walked into the foyer. Regal. Not at all broken or torn by grief.
She reached up a hand, and with a sideways glance at him Pogue stepped in to take it when Callum didn’t move. Callum didn’t want to touch her. This woman had flayed him alive the last time they’d conversed. Andaside from everything else, he could blame the last ten years on her. He’dbeenblaming her for them, rather, and what he’d learned earlier today hadn’t given him any cause to change his mind.
A white mop with black ears tore around the corner of the morning room door in a frenzy of high-pitched yowling and barking, launching directly at him. In the same instant black flashed in front of him. Waya lifted the wee thing up in her jaws, and Rebecca shrieked as it began squealing.
“Release, Waya,” he ordered. “Put it down. It’s nae yers.”
Turning her yellow eyes on him, the wolf opened her jaws, and the now disheveled mop thudded to the floor. It rolled upright, then with another screech tore up the stairs and vanished.
Evidently the wee beast wasn’t alone, though, because as it fled another form hurtled down the stairs at him. Shrieking in some sort of childlike fury it jumped at him, and he reflexively caught it by the waist in midair. “You leave my mama and my dog alone!” it yelled, pummeling him with two wee fists.
It was female, judging from the dress and the long, dark-colored hair twisting out of a half-finished braid. Callum lifted it higher, to look it in the eyes—and his heart wrenched with a sensation he couldn’t even put to words. One green and one blue eye looked back at him, fierceness in every line of her scrunched-up, angry face. God, she looked like Ian, even down to the dimples in her cheeks.
“Who are ye?” he asked, surprised at the effort it took to keep his voice steady. He tilted his head, still holding her at eye level.
“I am Lady Margaret,” she stated in a very proper English tone as she abruptly stopped trying to hit him,though she continued gazing at him suspiciously. “Who are you, sir?”
Rebecca stirred. “Maggie, this is y—”
“I’m Callum,” he broke in. For God’s sake, he’d just found the one soul he knew to be innocent of… everything. No one else would do the introductions, put her own prejudices into the mix. “Yer uncle, I reckon.”
