Hero in the Highlands (28 page)

For a hard beat of her heart she thought he might strike her. And that would alter everything. His light gray eyes were ice and fury, and his right hand coiled into a fist. Abruptly he grabbed a pot off the small table and hurled it into the wall so hard it chipped the stone.

“‘Petulant?'” he snapped. “Tell me honestly that you would be laughing if someone walked up to you and informed you that you had to leave Lattimer and would only be allowed to bake bread for the rest of your life.”

“That's precisely what I thought ye meant to do when ye arrived here.” She lifted her chin as he took a step toward her. Aye, he was a violent man, but one with fierce control. If he lost those reins, though, they would all be in for it. Beginning with her.

Gabriel drew in a hard breath, his jaw clenched so hard she could practically hear his teeth grinding. Then with an audible growl he began stripping out of his red coat. “I have a shirt. I need trousers.”

Letting out the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, Fiona hurried over to the small chest beside Tormod's bed and began digging through it. She found a neatly folded full kilt, but set it aside. Even if Gabriel agreed to wear one, which she didn't think he would, having him walk outside in Maxwell colors where Dunncraigh and his men could stumble across them would be a very poor idea, indeed.

“Here,” she finally said, freeing an old, patched pair of brown trousers from the bottom corner of a drawer. “His winter clothes, I reckon.”

Keeping his gaze squarely on her, he stripped out of his boots and trousers, the plain white shirt he'd worn beneath his coat hanging past his hips and just barely hiding his privates from her view. She swallowed. Neither of them was in the mood for sex, but that didn't stop her from thinking about it, or him, and the way he'd looked lying beside her in the bed. The way he'd felt inside her. And how much she wanted to repeat the experience.

He shrugged into the borrowed trousers and buttoned the front. “Tormod has more girth than I do,” he commented, his voice easier but still too cold and precise for her to relax in his presence. Digging into the back of the waist, he tightened the gusset ties. “It'll do, as long as there's no running and jumping.”

There. A bit of humor. “No running and jumping,” she agreed. As he tucked in his shirt and stomped back into his boots she found an old turnip sack. Leaving his uniform there for Tormod MacDorry to find would never do, so she stuffed the red jacket and white trousers inside the sack and tucked the bundle under her arm. “Let's go, then.”

Gabriel followed her, at least, but she'd already begun to worry. What he wanted, the opportunity to continue as he had been in the army, didn't exist. If she didn't know him as well as she felt like she'd begun to, she could well end up failing not just him, but herself—and thereby everyone for fifteen square miles. But he'd asked for help, and so she would try to give him an answer. He'd asked
her,
and that meant more than she felt comfortable even dwelling on today.

Outside Ailios Eylar's cottage she knocked, then pulled the rope latch and stepped inside. Behind her, Gabriel stopped halfway through the door.

“Madainn mhath, Fiona,”
Ailios greeted her, giving a slight nod from the mound of pillows propping her up in her new wooden bed. Well, not new, because it had come from one of Lattimer's myriad closed-up bedchambers, but it was clean and sturdy, and certainly new to Ailios.

“Good morning, Miss Ailios,” she returned in English, for Gabriel's benefit. “Where's Eppie?”

The old woman's sharp eyes went from her to Gabriel and back again. “My daughter's oot picking fresh flowers,” she said, changing to English as well. “Now that we have windows, she says they pretty up the cottage.” She set aside her knitting. “Is this him, then? The English?”

“I mean no offense,” Gabriel said gruffly. “Fiona suggested I visit you.”

“She's been telling me aboot ye, lad. How ye held me in yer arms, and how ye ordered me to be taken to the grand hoose fer air and medicine. And how when she said I'd nae set foot in the castle while it bore the name Lattimer, ye made workmen come and cut me windows for real glass that opens, bring me a new bed, and fix my chimney to stop it smoking.”

“I'm glad to see you so much improved, ma'am.” He walked to the side wall of the tiny house and tapped a knuckle against the glass of the half-open window. “I'd like to put down a wood floor as well, if you'll allow it. I think that would keep you warmer in the winter than dirt or even stone.”

“And then what?” the old woman asked.

Fiona frowned. Ailios's conversation could be biting, but this was not the blasted time for it. “If ye—”

“I mean to say,” the invalid interrupted, “my neighbor, Mrs. Dinwoddie, says ye're only making improvements so ye can clear us oot and bring in English tenants. Or it's because ye pity us poor Scots, which is near as bad.”

He shook his head. “This is your home, ma'am. And your daughter's. You know things about this land that I could never hope to learn on my own. If you'll allow me to ask you a question from time to time, I would consider myself more than repaid for some windows and a floor.”

Ailios sat in silence for a moment. “Well, isn't that a surprise,” she finally muttered almost to herself. “I suppose I'll wait to see what questions ye choose to ask, or if ye come calling to ask any at all.”

With a relieved smile Fiona went to kiss the old woman on her paper-thin cheek. “Dunncraigh's aboot, so we must get back to Lattimer. I'll be back to call on ye on Thursday.”

Outside, Fiona headed back toward the church where she'd left Brèaghad to graze among the tombstones. Gabriel walked behind her, but she didn't try to engage him in conversation. Whether she'd shown him anything useful or not, he had a decision to make—and it was one that would for better or worse impact her life nearly to the degree that it would his. Had she done the right thing? Her uncle wouldn't think so. Dunncraigh would likely banish her from the clan if he ever learned anything about it.

Then again, she hadn't precisely
said
anything. And even if for God knew what reason Gabriel decided to keep Lattimer, that didn't mean he would be a better landlord than the old duke had been. She supposed if he went about interfering in the wrong way, he could be a worse one. Or he could merely be absent. And she didn't think she would like that, either.

“Did ye ride here?” she asked belatedly, ducking under a tree branch to collect her mare.

“No. I walked.” His palms settled on her shoulders, and he turned her to face him. “I didn't do those things for Ailios Eylar. That was you.”

She shook her head. “It'd been a fortnight since she fell over that blasted hoe and cut her leg. I'd been going to see her daily. I knew she'd nae live with that infection, but I thought to make her comfortable. Ye were the one who bellowed that she should be at the castle, and that she needed fresh air and clean bedding.” Fiona tapped her forefinger against his breastbone beneath his plain white shirt. “Ye made me mad, accusing me of being a half-wit, or so I told myself ye had, and so I had those things done to prove that it wouldnae have made any difference. And then she started to get better.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

Did he understand, then? Or was he still so occupied with looking for a way to change the impossible that he hadn't seen it? Fiona tilted her head, regarding him. At least he
looked
calmer. “Ye said when ye have a battle to fight, ye look at it as an obstacle and find a way past it. And when ye've done that, ye move on to the next battle.”

“I'm not a complete idiot, Fiona,” he returned, exasperation touching his voice. “You're suggesting there are battles here that I can win. And then stay on to see what victory looks like.”

“And feels like. Aye. Here ye may have less use fer yer saber, though in the Highlands ye cannae be—”

He pulled her forward and kissed her. Tangling her hands into his thin shirt, she lifted on her toes to meet him more squarely. Heat speared through her, his touch flavored with both desperation and hope. Hope that she'd given him.

Finally he lifted his head again. “Your own clan chief wants me to sell Lattimer to him. Do you truly not want me to do that?” Gray eyes seemed to gaze all the way into her soul, making her wonder what he saw there. “Do you want me to stay?”

And now it was all back on her shoulders again. She had only eleven days now by which to measure him, put against a lifetime of seeing how the leaders of her own clan regarded this castle with two names. How they regarded the cotters who lived on this land. “Aye,” she said softly. “If ye mean to make a fight of it, then I want ye to stay.” God help her, but it was an excuse, to say she wanted him there for the sake of the tenants. Because she couldn't say the other part, that she wanted him there for her.

*   *   *

Despite its name, Lattimer Castle didn't have turrets. What it did have was a widow's walk running around the perimeter of the main hall's roof, presumably so the MacKittrick females could keep watch for their men to return from battle. Like the rest of the nonessential parts of the house it was flimsy and rusting, ready to fall into the garden or the front drive at any moment.

Gabriel climbed up from the small door in the attic and made his way along the iron railing, then hiked up the peak of the roof at the center to stand at the highest point of Lattimer. Over his head a scattering of clouds raced to join their fellows, trapped against the white peaks to the west.

All around him in every direction lay his land. The loch, the forest, the glens and valleys and ravines and foothills, the thin trails of smoke above the trees that marked the chimneys of Strouth—chance, luck, or some persistent clerk in some minister's cabinet who'd refused to let Lattimer revert to the Crown had decreed that it all belonged to him. If he wanted it.

Until the Duke of Dunncraigh had made him an offer for it, he'd never considered that he could be rid of Lattimer. The idea of being a titled landlord was so new to him, he'd just assumed that all the properties came with the title and were inseparable from it.

He turned a slow circle. The Maxwell had described a morass of never-ending trouble and despair, while Fiona wanted him to see happy, smiling tenants who came out to shake his hand every morning. The truth, of course, was somewhere in the middle. What it turned out to be, however, wasn't precisely the point.

“Am I to climb up there after you?” Kelgrove called from the walkway below. “I'm not dressed for mountaineering.”

“Stay down there. It's safer. Marginally.” Gabriel sat, resting his arse on the peak of the roof and bracing his feet against the sloped shingles. “I have a quandary, and I require your unfailing honesty.”

“You don't want to serve at the Horse Guards,” his aide commented, starting to lean against the railing and then settling for bracing his hands against it. “That's it, isn't it? I know you don't like the politics of it. And in my thinking, the first general you flattened would see your military career ended, anyway.”

“You're counting on my flattening someone, then.”

“I've been your aide for seven years, Your Grace,” he returned, as if that explained everything. “Perhaps Wellington would give you a division. You've certainly earned one.”

Brief hope touched him, but he shoved it away again. That was a part of his life he needed to give up. He already knew that. The question had become what to do next. “I'm a scrapper, Adam. I couldn't lead from some hilltop, sending notes to my regimental commanders about how to counter enemy movements. I would be miserable at it, and that would cost lives.”

“You're a bloody fine strategist, sir,” the sergeant said stoutly.

“Thank you, but two different people—three, counting you—have pointed something out to me today. I likely should have seen it weeks ago, but I don't think I wanted to.” He kept his gaze on the loch, on the splinters of sunlight it reflected back into the sky. “I'm a duke, whether I want to be one or not. My duty here isn't to examine the ledgers and hire someone to give me accurate reports while I spend my time riding about Spain with Frenchies shooting at me.”

“It isn't?”

“No. It isn't. My duty is missing sheep, sheep that are accounted for, broken fences, bare fields, sick tenants, churchyard luncheons, and a great many things I know I can't imagine. It's clearing boulders, chasing poachers, counting cattle, harvesting crops, and hosting bloody boring Society dinners, however the devil one does that.”

“Begging your pardon, but that's what your steward is doing.”

“That's what a steward has had to do for twenty years, because the Duke of Lattimer has been elsewhere and utterly uninterested. These people are protected by virtue of my life. It's … irresponsible of me to risk leaving them to fate because I have a gift for battle.”

“I can't argue with that,” Adam returned, “though I will point out that you have three properties and three stewards. Why is your duty these sheep and these boulders, in particular?”

That was why he valued Adam Kelgrove's aid. If nothing else, the sergeant made him think things through, develop his argument and his strategy to fill whatever holes Kelgrove found in his line of thought. “You saw the reports on Hawthorne and Langley Park,” he said aloud, naming his two more southerly estates. “In your opinion, do either of them require a change of course? Or my attention at all, for that matter?”

“In my opinion? No, they do not. They are old, stable properties, both being managed by men who have decades of experience. Which you do not.” Kelgrove paused. “If you're asking whether you could take up residence at one or the other of them, of course you could, but you … wouldn't find it terribly challenging.”