Page 26

“M uch to my surprise, Lord Ballantyne, it seems you aren’t utterly useless, after all.”

Sorcha MacLeod was lounging comfortably in a window seat as if terrorizing smugglers with the pretend ghost of her dead father was an everyday occurrence like brushing her hair or lacing her boots.

At Castle Cairncross, perhaps it was .

Hamish shed Rory’s hat and coat and wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead.

What was he meant to do after masquerading as a dead smuggler?

Haunting a castle wasn’t an everyday occurrence for him, and with the way his legs were wobbling, it was a miracle he hadn’t tumbled off that ledge and . . .

How had Freya MacLeod put it? Oh, yes. Smashed his skull to bits.

Grisly chit.

“Those birds.” He dropped down onto one of the stools by Catriona’s workbench. “Where did they come from? I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Artemis and Athena? They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” Sorcha swung the leg dangling from the edge of the window seat back and forth. “I trained them that attack maneuver myself.”

“Of course you did.” What else was there to say to such a declaration? “Er, well done?”

She gave him a toothy smile. “ I think so.”

He knew about the birds—Dougal and Clyde had babbled incessantly about them, in fact, although in their telling, there’d been dozens of them, and they’d been monstrous things, with a call so deafening it scrambled a man’s brains in his head and razor-like claws that could tear flesh from his body.

Even now, the hideous attack birds were a feature of the story they told down at the Lamb and Fig every night.

He might have known the horde of birds would turn out to be two small sparrowhawks.

Still, the wild stories did have a grain of truth to them. A single grain of truth, a drop in the ocean amidst the dozens of lies that had been told about the MacLeod sisters since their father died and the first lugger appeared on the shores of Castle Cairncross.

The lugger he’d sent.

There was no sorcery at work here. Just falconry.

It was the nature of rumors to exaggerate the truth, of course, but he’d never seen quite so egregious an example of it as what had befallen the MacLeod sisters.

There were no witches at Castle Cairncross. Just three young ladies defending their home. Three clever young ladies, with remarkable, but not mythical abilities.

Although none of this explained the sudden storm Dougal and Clyde had described on the night they’d approached the castle. “What about the storm, the night the first lugger came?”

“You mean the storm with the torrential rains and thunder so powerful it nearly tore a gash in the sky? The one with the unholy lightning strikes that could only be the work of the devil himself?” Sorcha snorted. “I suppose someone in the village told you about that. They do love their stories.”

He glanced at Catriona, who’d taken the place beside Sorcha on the window seat.

She hadn’t said a word since they’d all returned to the workroom, and she didn’t say a word now, but kept her face turned toward the window, the moonlight caressing the curve of her cheek and the stubborn edge of her jaw.

She looked terribly small, huddled in the corner of the window seat. Small and lonely, her slender shoulders sagging under her burdens. Everything about her, from those white cheeks to her slumped posture, spoke of exhaustion and defeat.

An odd sensation rippled through him as he gazed at her—not fear, precisely, but something akin to it.

How little she weighed, and how small she’d felt that day in the woods, when he’d caught her in his arms as she was falling, how thin and delicate the bones in her back.

If those scoundrels who’d tried to attack the castle tonight had gotten inside, they would have broken her, snapped those fragile bones in their brutal grip.

He gazed at her face, at the long, dark lashes brushing her cheekbones, the tender curve of her lower lip, and the strange feeling intensified, his thoughts bouncing from one side of his skull to the other, as if they were puppets dangling from a string.

Damn it, what were she and her sisters doing in this castle still, without so much as a servant to protect them? They should have left months ago after the first boat came.

Before he could voice that thought into words, another arrived on its heels.

Why hadn’t he noticed before how pale and fine her skin was? And why couldn’t he stop wondering what it would be like to take her into his arms and bury his face in the tempting curve between her shoulder and neck?

Without thinking, he began to rise to his feet, to go to her, but Sorcha’s voice broke the silence and brought him to his senses.

“Didn’t you know, my lord? Freya here can conjure storms from a clear blue sky!

It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Sorcha gave a short bark of laughter, but there was no amusement in it.

It was a cold, hard sound, like a fist slamming onto a table.

“So remarkable as to be impossible, but that hasn’t stopped the waggling tongues.

Why let common sense get in the way of a good rumor? ”

“It was a coincidence, nothing more.” Freya was gazing out the window, her legs drawn up underneath her and her arms hugging her knees, her cheeks as pale as the moonlight shining on the waters of Loch Dunvegan below.

“Coincidence? My dearest girl, why explain it as a coincidence, when sorcery is so much more titillating?”

Freya, who seemed to lack her younger sister’s sangfroid, said nothing in reply to this but went on in a dull, flat tone.

“The lugger happened to come into the loch just as a squall was breaking over Skye. Such squalls are not at all unusual, particularly in the summer months. I’ve seen dozens of storms just like the one that night.

There’s nothing magical or mythical about them. ”

That was it then. A sudden storm and a few trained sparrowhawks had spawned dozens of rumors that would likely follow the MacLeod sisters for years.

If they didn’t see them sent to jail first. Not for being witches, as the Crown no longer credited accounts of wicked men and women consorting with the devil. Indeed, it was a crime for a British citizen to accuse another of having magical powers or practicing witchcraft.

It was not, however, a crime to accuse another citizen of pretending to be a witch.

A fine distinction, yes, but it applied here. The sisters couldn’t legally be hunted and executed for practicing witchcraft, since the Crown’s official position was that witches didn’t exist, but it remained a crime to claim to have such powers.

The MacLeod sisters could be taken up as charlatans. It was no small matter, either. Such a crime could see them locked up in Bridewell for up to a year.

“You see, Lord Ballantyne, the damage a few gossiping tongues have caused.”

Hamish had been staring at Rory’s hat, which was sitting on the table in front of him, but his head jerked up at the sound of Catriona’s soft voice. She’d turned away from the window and seemed to be trying to rouse herself.

“I can’t regret that storm. It was exceedingly fortunate for us that it came up right when it did. If it hadn’t . . .” she trailed off with a shudder, but there was no need for her to say another word.

They could all finish the thought in their own heads.

If that storm hadn’t come up right when it did, the boat would have landed on the shoreline just beneath the castle. From there, it would have been only a matter of moments before the smugglers were inside.

The MacLeod sisters would have been obliged to shoot them then, or else find themselves at the smugglers’ mercy.

Of course, the smugglers in question had been Dougal and Clyde who, for all their boasting about their piratical adventures, would never have laid as much as a finger on any of the sisters.

But Catriona, Sorcha, and Freya couldn’t have known that.

Smugglers weren’t upon the whole, celebrated for their compassionate nature, and for all that Dougal and Clyde weren’t murderers, there was no question whatsoever that they would have taken Castle Cairncross apart stone by stone in search of the treasure.

He’d threatened to do the same thing, just this morning. Was it any wonder she hadn’t wanted him in her castle? To her and her sisters, there was no difference between him and the smugglers. Given the circumstances, it was a bloody miracle Catriona hadn’t left him in the woods to die.

“We can’t keep going on like this.” Freya didn’t turn to face them but continued to stare out the window. “I didn’t think we’d succeed in frightening them away this time. It took ages for them to go.”

“But they did go, Freya,” Sorcha said. “That’s the thing to remember.”

“This time, yes, but what about next time, Sorcha?” Catriona shook her head. “Freya is right. It will only become more difficult as the rumors continue to spread. We owe our escape this time to Lord Ballantyne, but it’s mere chance he happened to be here, and that he fit into Rory’s coat.”

“Smugglers are an arrogant lot.” Sorcha leapt down from the window seat and began pacing from one end of the workroom to the other.

“Soon enough it will become a competition to see which of them is man enough to capture Rory MacLeod’s treasure.

It won’t be long before every smuggler in Britain is floating about in Loch Dunvegan, waiting for the chance to storm the castle. ”

“But where are we meant to go from here?” Freya’s stricken glance moved from Sorcha to Catriona. “We’ve just orchestrated a haunting, for pity’s sake! What is there left for us to do? Explode something? Set the castle on fire?”

Sorcha stopped pacing. “Not a fire, but an explosion could be rather amusing.”

“Stop it, Sorcha!” Freya rose to her feet, her hands clenched into fists. “There’s nothing amusing about any of this. Stop behaving as if none of it matters.”