“He was as of a month ago,” she said. She glanced at him. “I had my solicitor make inquiries.”
“You knew this day might come.”
“I was more concerned that my father would exile my mother to Scotland. I wasn’t sure where we would go, so I wanted to ensure that my grandfather would take us in.”
“Does he know you’re coming?”
She shook her head. “No, I never communicated with him, and I asked that my solicitor not inform him of my interest. But from what he was able to understand, my grandfather is alive and the head of the family.”
She fell silent. Was she wishing that Morna Herridge had been as long-lived as her father?
“But you don’t know anything else about him, or about Kilmarin?”
She shook her head again. “Do you?”
“Kilmarin is probably to the inhabitants of Perth what Buckingham Palace is to a Londoner. Parts of it are spectacularly ugly, and other parts are beautiful, a monument to what man can create.”
“My mother never said. In all those years, she rarely mentioned Scotland at all. It’s as if a door simply closed on that part of her life.”
He didn’t respond. What could he say? Sometimes, for the sake of survival, an individual had to wall off certain parts of his—or her—past.
“Is there no one you wished to see in Perth?”
“If there had been, I would have come home a long time ago.”
“There’s no one you would wish to see again?”
“Are you fishing for information, Lady Sarah?” he asked with a smile. “I was too young when I left Scotland to have broken many hearts.”
“But you have broken some,” she said. It wasn’t a question as much as it was a comment.
“Should I pretend to have been celibate since birth?”
She looked intrigued at the question, enough that he began to shake his head.
“I have your bottle of scent,” he said, and watched, delighted, as her face began to bloom with color. “Shall I return it to you? Or keep it in case we are forced to sleep apart again?”
Perhaps the key to winning Sarah’s heart was to keep her off-balance, long enough that she didn’t realize she was being wooed.
Chapter 19
Scotland had welcomed them with sunny skies for the past two days, but by afternoon, the scuttling clouds changed their nature, turning dark. Even the air felt different, heavy and filled with moisture.
“It looks like we’re in for a downpour,” Douglas said, studying the clouds. Through the hatch in the roof, he signaled for Tim to stop and pull the coach over to the side of the road.
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked, the first comment she’d directed to him since their meal.
He glanced at her. “We need to make arrangements. The loose gravel and dirt on the roads could easily turn to mud. In a few minutes, the carriage could become mired in it.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“It all depends on what nature has in store for us,” he said.
But beyond that cryptic remark, he didn’t explain.
She glanced at Florie. Her maid didn’t like storms, and her growing discomfort would have been evident even to a stranger.
Sarah reached over and patted her arm.
