He remembered the first time he’d seen Caroline in the window of the tower. The wind had made her cheeks pink, and her eyes glowed. Her glorious hair had floated around her like a battle flag. He could imagine the joy a warrior would feel coming home to such a sight. He looked across to the tower, but the window was empty. He clutched his fist around the imaginary sword in his hand and looked back at Sophie’s pinched face. He almost turned and fled back down the hill, but he forced himself to stop. It had to be done.
“Lady Sophie, will you do me the honor of becoming my—” he demanded more gruffly than he’d intended, but the wind spun around him, stealing his words away.
“What?” she screamed. “I can’t hear you!”
“Will you marry me?” he bellowed.
She looked relieved, if not pleased. “Yes. Can we go inside now?”
“I think that’s a good idea,” he murmured, though he knew she couldn’t hear him over the blast. He helped her to her feet and retrieved his coat. Should he thank her, say something about her beauty, or how happy he was? But she was already three paces ahead of him, running for the safety of the castle.
By the time they’d reached the terrace, and Sophie had run across the flagstones with tiny, clipped steps and ducked inside. The minute the door closed behind her, the wind died to a disconsolate sigh.
He saw Megan in the hall, and she paused to stare at him. “You’re all bloody and scratched!” she exclaimed. “What have you been doing?”
“Proposing,” he muttered darkly.
Angus paced across the width of Caroline’s room, and back again. She was quietly reading by the window, and couldn’t hear him. “They mean to wed him, bed him, and kill him. Then, Brodie will do whatever Devorguilla bids him to do.”
He paused in front of her, though she didn’t notice. “You know this means the end of Clan MacNabb, don’t you, lass? It’s a disaster. ’Twould be better if he wed you, penniless though you are!”
Caroline turned the page, and he smiled softly. “Ach, you look like your grandmother did, the summer I fell in love with her,” he said, and put out a hand to touch her cheek. She looked up, her gaze passing through him. He felt a jolt of surprise. “Did you feel that?” he whispered. He put his hand on hers, clasped it as hard as he could, and her fingers curled for a moment. He felt a flare of warmth.
He squeezed harder, but felt nothing more. “Lass, I need your help.Alecneeds your help,” he pleaded, and she blinked, and looked around her in surprise.
Georgiana appeared. “She can hear me!” Angus said, pointing at Caroline. “She knows I’m here!”
Georgiana looked at Caroline in surprise, but her granddaughter sat calmly reading a book, unaware of Angus, or Georgiana. Georgiana put her hands on her hips. “There’s no fool like an old fool! What the devil are you doing? I needed your help!”
Angus waved his hand between Caroline’s eyes and the book, but she didn’t even blink. Hope fizzled. He floated over the Georgiana. Caroline had her eyes, her straight, slim, elegant bearing. Even the way she pursed her lips while she read was like Georgiana. There was a pain in Angus’s chest where his heart had once been, beating just for her.
“Well, what is it?” he demanded.
Georgiana looked wistfully at Caroline. “I tried to stop him, but Alec proposed to Sophie.”
“When?” he demanded.
“Not a half hour ago.”
“Did she accept?”
Georgiana sighed, and Caroline looked up. “Of course she did,” Georgiana said.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SIX
Viscount Speed paced the floor of the comfortably appointed dining room he had hired—along with the innkeeper’s two best bedrooms—at the Great Glen Inn. As inns went—or glens, for that matter—he could find nothing great about this place at all. “By God, I shall make sausage from his entrails!”
Mandeville, who was gnawing on a sausage skewered on a fork, set it down. “We did not specifically ask him if he was Glenlorne, though he was in the man’s castle. Perhaps we should have guessed that MacNabb and Glenlorne were one and the same?”
“How could we have ascertained that?” Speed griped, as he made another turn around the threadbare rug. “He looked no different than he ever did in London.”
“Course he did.” Mandeville took another bite of sausage. “He was standing in a castle, and now that I think on it, two of England’s wealthiest heiresses were in that castle right along with him.”
“He can’t marry them both!”
Mandeville shrugged, chewing thoughtfully. “This is Scotland. Perhaps the laws here allow such things.”
Speed frowned. “The laws of chivalry make no such allowance! It should be one heiress per lord in all places. ’Tisn’t fair otherwise.” He crossed to the fly-blown mirror above the sideboard. “How does he do it, I wonder? I have always cut a certain dash with the ladies. My face is surely just as handsome.”
