His brothers laughed, but Logan, who was far more irritated by this comment than he had any right to be, scowled at him. “Never mind looking at her. She’s not here foryou, Dougal Robertson.”
“No,” Dougal agreed, mildly enough, but his eyes were glinting with mischief when they met Logan’s. “I ’spect she’s yours, innit she, Blair?”
Logan gritted his teeth. If the offer of her hand made herhis, then she was damn wellhis, all right.
Then again, Lady Juliana hadn’t offered her hand so much as demanded his. Not that it would make any difference to the Robertson boys. They’d consider any offering or demanding of hands a betrothal, and the last thing Logan needed was the entire clan gossiping about how he was going to marry an English lady.
“She won’t be anyone’s unless we find her, so stop your blathering, Dougal, and put your eyes to work instead of your mouth.”
Dougal chuckled, but he obeyed this command, and they searched along the edge of the tree line without speaking. For the first mile or so Logan was distracted by fantasies of tossing Lady Juliana onto her horse and riding her straight back to Castle Kinross, but as they continued on without any sign of her, his irritation began to give way to concern. It was only another hour until the sun set, and there was a chance a poacher was nearby.
Where could she have gotten to? Had she gone down the far side of a hill, and lost her way? It seemed unlikely she’d get so easily turned around. Lady Juliana’s mind was even sharper than her tongue.
Was it possible she’d lost patience with him and had returned to Castle Kinross on her own? Again, it didn’t seem likely, but he hadn’t been particularly kind to her today. He’d let his temper get the best of him this morning, and he’d been surly with her ever since.
Guilt stabbed at him as he recalled that she’d been trying to tell him something right before she disappeared. He hadn’t paid any more attention to her than he would a streak of dust on his boot.
What had she been saying? Something about a lamb bleating—
“Did ye hear that?” Callum pulled his horse up with a quick jerk and sat still for a moment, listening. “It sounds like—”
“Like a lamb bleating. Just before Lady Juliana disappeared she was trying to tell me something about a lamb. She must be nearby.” Logan called the words over his shoulder as he rode deeper into the woods.
By now he’d grown desperate to lay eyes on her and assure himself she was still in one piece, but as soon as they got into the woods their progress slowed to a crawl. There’d been a violent storm the previous week, and they were obliged to pick their way over fallen branches and downed trees.
Logan followed the sound of the lamb, whose frightened bleating had taken on a new sense of urgency. It was squealing and carrying on as if some wild animal were about to pounce on it, a circumstance that did nothing to ease Logan’s mind.
As they drew closer, Logan heard rushing water. He turned to Brice with a puzzled frown. “Is that Ruthven Burn? Jesus, it’s flowing fast.”
Brice nodded. “Aye. It’s like to have swollen past its banks from the storm.”
For the most part Ruthven Burn was wide and shallow—more a creek than a river—but some parts of it were deeper than others, and it was known to overflow its banks after a torrential rain.
“That could be where your sheep have got to, couldn’t it?” Logan was more concerned about Lady Juliana than the sheep, but he had a suspicion where they found one, they’d find the other.
“Mayhap they wandered here to drink from the burn.” Brice frowned. “Every now and then they come down this far, but not often, and they find their way back to the farm quick enough.”
“They may have come down and gotten trapped in the deeper water.” Logan’s tone was grim. Sheep weren’t the stupid creatures many people believed them to be, but their intellect wasn’t such that they could assess the depth or speed of the burn. And where one sheep went, others would follow.
Instinct told him they were about to find a half-dozen drowned sheep in the Ruthven Burn, but when they cleared the woods at last and emerged onto the bank, what he saw instead was far, far worse than drowned sheep.
He stared, the blood going cold in his veins.
The burn had indeed swollen past its banks, and an enormous tree had torn loose and fallen across the rushing water. Three or four sheep who’d gone down to the bank to drink had gotten trapped amongst the tree roots and drowned. The sight of their helpless, swollen bodies was enough to unnerve even stalwart farmers like the Robertson brothers, but it wasn’t the sheep that made Logan go numb with panic.
A tiny lamb was perched on the thick trunk of the fallen tree, halfway across the width of the burn. It was stranded there, bleating piteously, its fleece smeared with mud and its spindly legs shaking.
And there, her arms flung wide to balance herself was Lady Juliana, creeping along the trunk toward the lamb, one tiny step at a time.
“What thedevilis that lass about?” Callum Robertson was the last to make it to the edge of the bank. He took in the scene with one glance, and was startled into an ill-advised shout.
“Shut it.” Dougal slapped a hand over his brother’s mouth. “Ye’ll make ’er fall!”
Logan held his breath, his heart crowding into his throat. His body tensed to leap for Lady Juliana, but she didn’t fall, or even stumble. She only paused, and said in a steady voice,without turning to look at them, “Quiet, if you please. If the poor thing takes fright, she’ll tumble in and drown in an instant.”
“She’lldrown?” It took every bit of Logan’s control not to shout at her to return to the safety of the bank at once, but he managed to keep his voice calm. “You’llbothdrown if you fall in, lass. You should have thought of that before you crawled out there!”
This warning didn’t make any impression on Lady Juliana, who continued to make her way across the trunk with no more concern for her own safety than if she were moving through the figures of the quadrille. “Nonsense. I know how to swim.”
