Page 48

As for the notes, those were indeed hopeless. There were some bits of paper with no more than one word on them. Rory had always been cagey about his secrets, and he’d written his notes as if he expected they’d be stolen one day.

He’d written them to confuse, not to elucidate.

The drawings, though. Those had been different.

There’d been a great many of them, and all of them were meticulously executed, far more so than his scribbled notes.

There’d been drawings of birds and roads, trees and caves, mountains and fishing cottages, and dozens upon dozens of cairns, as if he’d been drawing—

Landmarks.

She stilled, her gaze on the small cairn, lightning striking for the second time.

Why, of course! That was precisely what he’d been doing.

Drawing landmarks near where he’d buried his stolen contraband, so he might find it again when he returned.

Even among all the smugglers stealing goods along the Scottish coast—and there were a great many of them—Rory had been renowned for his endless number of hiding places.

He’d had goods stashed everywhere from Drummore to Thurso, and he’d constantly moved them from place to place, so they were impossible to track.

It was one of the reasons he’d never been caught.

His notes might look like nothing but a collection of chaotic scrawls, but there was a method to his madness. The drawing of the hand holding the dagger had turned out to mean something.

Clan Mackay’s crest.

None of the drawings had made any sense to her at first. Landmarks themselves weren’t much good without any context. A tree in Drummore looked much like a tree in Thurso, and there were thousands of fishing cottages in Scotland. One couldn’t distinguish one from another, especially in a drawing.

But she knew a great deal more about Rory’s final quest now than she had when she’d first inspected his drawings. Could it be that he’d drawn the cairn to mark where he’d buried the treasure? He’d drawn it repeatedly, much as he had Clan Mackay’s crest.

It couldn’t be that easy, could it? It seemed impossible she’d just stumbled upon it, but there was no mistaking that cairn. It had to be significant in some way.

What had Hamish told her about Castle Varrich? That it was Clan Mackay’s original country seat. The family had long since moved to Tongue House on the eastern shores of the Kyle of Tongue, but at some point, these ruins had been the home of the chief of Clan Mackay.

Would Rory and his three friends have been audacious enough to bury the gold they’d stolen from Clan Mackay in a cave right beneath the clan chief’s former country seat?

How needlessly risky that would be, even with the family no longer on the premises! It would have been the height of foolishness to take such a chance. It would have been an act of pure arrogance, to thumb their noses at—

Arrogance, yes. Risky, dangerous, and arrogant, and yet wasn’t that precisely the sort of thing Rory would have done? Buried the treasure he’d helped steal from Clan Mackay right underneath the ruins of their country seat?

It was . It was precisely what he would have done.

She glanced back up the hill, biting her lip. She should fetch Hamish, but the cairn wasn’t all that far removed from the pathway. It was at a steep pitch, yes, so she’d have to take care, but she’d never let a climb stop her before.

She’d just have a peek, then she’d scurry back up and fetch Hamish.

Carefully, she made her way from the pathway toward the cairn, clutching at the taller plants to keep her balance, her boot heels finding every rock and treacherous tangle of grass as she went, until at last she was near enough to the cairn to reach out and touch it.

What to do next? Was the treasure buried underneath the cairn?

Slowly, one stone at a time, she began to take the cairn apart.

It was easy enough at first, as the stones at the top were small enough that she had no trouble lifting them, but the two stones on the bottom were heavier, and the one resting on the ground was partially submerged in the dirt underneath it with what looked like decades of earth holding it firmly in place.

Had Rory never made it as far as Tongue five months ago, then? If he had been here, wouldn’t the stone be loose? She gave it another determined nudge, but it was no use.

It was too heavy.

Even if she’d brought something to dig with, it would still be nearly impossible to liberate it. There wasn’t enough room. To one side of the cairn there was another small outcropping of rock, and directly behind it was the mossy stone ledge.

She squeezed into the space between them to see if she might overturn the stone from that angle, but the bit of ground behind the outcropping was soft, and the space narrow, no more than the length of her foot. She couldn’t get any leverage.

“Dash it.” She braced a hand on the ledge and began to tug on her leg to free it, but now she was closer, she noticed a draft of cool air was creeping down the back of her dress.

Cool air, coming from a ledge of solid stone? No, that didn’t make sense.

She laid her hand flat against the top of the ledge, the layers of thick moss damp under her palm, and explored the contours of it, working her hand first from side to side before sliding it lower.

That was when she felt it. Or didn’t feel it, more accurately. Under the top edge of the ledge, instead of finding a sheer rock face, her hand met nothing but air.

There was a hole carved into the rock face!

It was impossible to tell how deep a hole it was, but it was large enough that her entire hand fit easily inside it. She shifted, pressing the front of her body as hard against the ledge as she could, and reached into the hole until her entire arm was submerged, all the way to her shoulder.

Dear God. It was either a very large hole or a very small cave.

What had Donigan said about caves? That there was nothing a smuggler appreciated more than a cave, because they were the ideal place to hide stolen contraband. Goodness knew Rory was fond of them. There’d been hundreds of caves among his drawings.

The treasure was inside the hole. She knew it, in the same way she always seemed to know what Sorcha and Freya were going to say before words even left their mouths.

But if Rory had hidden the treasure in the cave, what were the odds it was still here? He’d returned to Castle Cairncross with nothing to show for his journey but a festering wound in his leg.

The wound that had led to his death.

He’d come here to retrieve the treasure, and someone had shot him for his trouble. Didn’t it stand to reason that whoever had shot Rory had also taken the treasure?

It did, but what did reason matter in such a situation?

After all she and Hamish had been through, all this distance they’d come, was she really going to return to Dunvegan—to her sisters, who were depending on her—without searching inside this cave for the treasure?

The treasure her father had died for.

No. Whatever was hidden inside that hole was coming with her. If she could reach it, that is.

But that’s what rocks were for, wasn’t it?

She edged away from the face of the ledge, taking care not to unbalance herself, and topple down the hill.

The smaller rocks at the top of the cairn wouldn’t do her much good, and even if she could have lifted the larger ones, they were too big to fit into the narrow gap between the ledge and the rock outcropping.

So, after a bit of deliberation, she chose one of the stones that had made up the middle part of the cairn. It wouldn’t add much to her height—only another few inches at the most—but it was the largest one she could carry.

It would have to do.

Somehow, she was able to maneuver between the cairn and the ledge without dropping the stone, and managed to wedge it tightly between the bottom of the ledge and the outcropping of rock. She hopped on top of it and stuck her hand as deep into the hole as she could reach.

Nothing. She passed her hand from side to side, her fingers straining, but after a dozen tries with no success, her heart sank.

Perhaps she’d been mistaken, and Rory hadn’t hidden the treasure here at all, or it might be underneath the rock at the bottom of the cairn. Either that, or it was in the hole, and she simply couldn’t reach it.

She needed Hamish. She should have fetched him at once.

But first, just one more try.

This time, she jumped up and clung to the edge of the rock with one hand while searching with the other.

No. It was no use. There was nothing—

Wait . Just there. Her fingertips had brushed against something on the right.

Something slick and cool, like . . . leather? A leather bag?

The rock shifted under her feet as she crouched down low, and jumped once again, her fingers grasping, and . . . yes! She had it.

Now, if she could only bring it up without dropping it.

Slowly, carefully, like an angler with a reluctant fish dangling from the hook, she began to ease it upward, one tiny increment at a time. It was quite light—much lighter than a bag with hundreds of golden coins stuffed inside it should be, but it felt as if something were rolling around inside it.

A little more, a little more . . . no sudden movements, or jerking on the strap . . .

There! With one final tug, she freed it from its hiding place and had it in her hand. It was a worn leather bag, not very large, and for the most part limp. If there was any gold in it, it couldn’t be more than one or two coins—

“Well done, lass.” A thick arm wrapped around her neck, the muscled forearm pressing into her throat. “I thank ye kindly for finding that for me.”

Cat let out a strangled gasp and instinctively jerked the bag down, hiding it in the folds of her cloak, but it was too late. The man—for indeed it was a man, who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere—had already seen it.

“Hand it over, girl. Now, ye hear?”

He had a tight grip on her, but out of the corner of her eye, she managed to catch a glimpse of a big, rough-looking fellow with a limp hank of greasy hair falling into his eyes and a mean twist to his mouth.

He looked strangely familiar—

“Ye can either hand it over to me, or I’ll take it from you, and send you over the edge of the cliff for my trouble. Yer choice, but one way or another, I’m having that bag.”

“No.” Her fingers tightened around the bag’s strap. “It doesn’t belong to you.” It was a ridiculous argument, of course, as he wasn’t the sort of man who seemed troubled by thorny ethical questions.

Predictably, he sneered at that. “I been waiting months for one of ye MacLeods to come and finish what Rory started. Didn’t expect you , though.”

She went still, her head spinning. He knew Rory. Not only that, but he recognized her as a MacLeod. What did he mean, he’d been waiting for—

“It’s not safe, ye ken, a wee little bit of a thing like you wandering around out here all alone.

” He spat on the ground by her feet. “But mayhap yer not as clever as your father was. I followed ye here from The Golden Coin, and damned if you didn’t take me just where I hoped ye would. Straight to Rory’s treasure.”

Dear God. He must be one of the men who’d been sitting in the dining room at The Golden Coin when she and Hamish arrived yesterday evening . . . yes! He was the one who’d been staring at her so intently! He must have taken one look at her and known at once that she was a MacLeod.

It wasn’t the first time her red hair had given her away.

“Rory may have slipped through my fingers, but you won’t be so lucky.

I’m not a crack shot, ye ken, but I’m handy enough with a blade.

” He held his other hand in front of her face and tested the blade of the dirk clutched in his meaty fist with the pad of his thumb.

“Now then, lass, just hand over that bag, and you and I will get along just fine, ye hear?”

“No.” Her tone was as haughty as she could make it. “If you want the bag, you can take it yourself.”

“Do you think I won’t?”

She shrank back as he shifted the dirk to the hand wrapped around her throat and reached around her for the bag with the other.

There was nowhere for her to go, no way to flee. The rock ledge was directly in front of her, the steep hill to her right, and behind her . . .

Behind her, his blade pressed to her throat was the man who had almost certainly murdered her father.