The Scot and I (30 page)

He continued eating his soup, while Mahri stared at him with narrowed eyes. “Alex,” she whispered, “are you . . . are you a wizard?”

He used his napkin to dab his lips. “What do you think?”

Her narrow-eyed stare suddenly dissolved in laughter. He laughed along with her.

“Seriously,” she said, “what do you think the prophecy means?”

For the rest of the meal, they speculated. Neither was inclined to take the prophecy at face value. It seemed to Mahri that the fire referred to their present troubles, and they were going to come through them unscathed. It was what they both wanted to believe. Alex didn’t tell her that they shared the same prophecy, thinking that it would only make her suspect his motives. Her eyes were clear, her smiles were natural, and that was what he wanted for her.

The evening passed pleasantly. By tacit consent, they avoided any subject that might lead to disharmony between them. When they entered their chamber, they undressed slowly and slid into bed. There was no frantic haste to possess or be possessed. They touched, they stroked, they kissed. Everything was mellow. Their movements were fluid and languid. Time seemed to slow. Passion hovered, but they kept it at bay.

“I want this to go on forever,” she murmured. She was lost in the feel and taste of him.

He settled his lips on hers. “Don’t worry. It will.”

“You’re very sure of yourself.”

“I should be. I’m a wizard, remember?”

Her laugh turned into a moan. Magic, she thought, magic fingers, magic kisses. Maybe he was a wizard after all.

He took his mouth over the crest of one breast, then the other, and laved each distended nipple with tongue and lips. When he slipped his fingers between her thighs to find her hot and wet for him, his lips curved in a smile. The smile became a groan when her hands closed around his jutting sex and caressed him voluptuously.

Pleasure, he discovered, could not be delayed for long. It beat through his blood in an ever-quickening tempo. He swallowed the small sounds she made as the pleasure rose in her, too. Their breathing grew thicker, their movements erratic.

Even when he filled her, he would not yield to her pleas for haste. He teased and tormented and kept the pace slow, drawing out every nuance of sensation until she was shuddering beneath him.

“I thought you wanted this to go on forever,” he said.

Her nails scored his back and, just like the first time, he thrust and buried himself deep inside her. The pleasure was so intense, he had to grit his teeth to hang on to his control. There was no going back now.

“Little cheat,” he said on a strangled laugh.

He raised on his arms to make their joining as deep as he could. She gasped and clutched at his shoulders. She was as desperate as he and matched his fervor kiss for kiss, stroke for stroke. At the end, as he emptied himself into her, she muffled her cry of release against his throat.

When he could breathe again, he slipped from her body, raised on one elbow, and studied her face.

“What?” she asked. She was breathless.

“Are you going to leave me, Mahri? After this?” He palmed her breasts. “Well?”

“Have I said so?”

He might have pushed her. What stopped him was the look in her eyes: fragile, pleading, uncertain. She wanted his understanding. And he would give it to her, up to a point. All the same, he felt disappointment shimmer through him. They were back to playing games.

Twenty-one

They’d been following the Feugh, a tributary of the Dee, and were almost at the village of Banchory, when Alex changed direction. It seemed to Mahri that they were going south, but after an hour or so, when they came to a crossroads, she realized that he had changed direction again.

She reined in. “We’re going back the way we came,” she said, “only we’re taking a more convoluted route.”

He stopped as well, removed a gauntlet, and stroked his mount’s neck. “We’re not likely to meet any patrols on this road.” He glanced at her. “Besides, I’ve left a trail that should lead anyone following us to Banchory. Now we’re doubling back by a different route.”

“You left a trail? What does that mean?”

“I told them at the hotel that we were going to take the train from Banchory to Aberdeen.”

She made a scoffing sound. “Foster will know you’re too clever to do anything of the sort.”

He grinned. “Was that a compliment I heard?”

She scowled. “What name did you use?”

“Alexander. Mr. and Mrs. Alexander. Now what?”

“That’s your own name! You might as well have called yourself ‘Hepburn.’ Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would know that you’re trying to lay a false trail.”

“Lucky for us, Foster is as thick as a door.”

“And you think you’re being clever, going back into enemy territory? I call it madness.”

“You may be right, but in the heat of the moment, when someone tried to kill me on the train and you were going off with those thugs, it was the only rendezvous that came to mind. That’s where the others will meet up with us.”

Mahri made a harrumphing sound and touched her horse’s sides with her heels. “Feughside,” she said. “Is that the name of your house?”

“It is, though it’s more like a hunting lodge now. When we’re not using it, we rent it out to hunting parties.”

“Is that where Gavin was shot when he was captured by the soldiers?”

His tone was mild, untroubled. “There won’t be soldiers there now. Gavin was captured because he wasn’t expecting trouble. We’ll be more cautious, and at the first sign of trouble, we’ll take evasive action.”

There was no point arguing with him. If he’d told the others that they’d all meet up at his hunting lodge, then that was where they had to go.

She liked it even less when, some hours later, they passed the ruins of Birse Castle. Out of sight, across the river Dee, lay a back road to her grandparents’ house near Gairnshiel.

They were all too close for her comfort.

Enemy territory, she thought.

 

 

Feughside House made a favorable first impression on Mahri. It had three gables facing west to catch the setting sun, and was nestled in a grove of poplars. There was no flood damage here, because the house was on a rise, but the storm had brought down plenty of trees.

A young boy came running from the stable to take their horses. His face split into a huge grin when in answer to his spate of questions, Alex was able to reassure him that Mr. Gavin was fine and would soon be joining them.

As the boy led the horses away, she said, “I thought the house would be deserted, especially after the soldiers arrested Gavin.”

“No. Calley—that’s Gavin’s manservant—has been here for years. He has nowhere else to go, and Danny, whom you just met, is in much the same case. You’ll find my brother has a soft spot for strays.”

Calley opened the door to them. He was a compact, sturdy man, well turned out, with age lines on a long face but no laugh lines. There was only a hint of Scotland in his accent, indicating to Mahri that he had held a superior position in some gentleman’s service at one time.

While he and Alex talked in muted tones about the debacle at the queen’s reception and its aftermath, she wandered through the dark paneled hallway to what appeared to be the main reception room, and here her first impression quietly died. Someone had been using the room for target practice. The usual complement of stags’ heads on the walls looked as though the person who had hung the poor beasties was highly intoxicated at the time. There were bullet holes in the ceilings and bullet holes in the walls. Though there were no signs of bottles, the very air stank of stale beer and whiskey. She looked down at the floor. The Turkish carpet had been liberally christened with only God knew what.

Alex either sensed her distaste or saw something in her expression that made him join her. “You must remember,” he said, “that this is a bachelor establishment. Men like to throw off the trappings of civilization once in a while.”

“If I might point out, sir,” intoned Calley in his flawless accent, “most of the damage was done by the soldiers who took Mr. Gavin away. A few stayed on and, shall we say, decided to throw a party?”

Mahri was curious about Calley. He was one of Gavin’s strays? Why would such a superior servant bury himself in this isolated spot? She didn’t ask questions, because she knew only too well the awkwardness of trying to protect her own secrets. It could turn a person into a liar. Live and let live—that was her motto.

Alex was showing her the cellars where the stores were kept when a scuffling sound behind an ancient, broken-down boiler had her head whipping round. Her first thought was that a badger or a fox had got into the house, but a series of snuffles, barks, and whines made her brows climb.

“A dog?” she said, glancing at Alex.

In the next instant, what appeared to be a filthy, trussed-up rug came barreling out of the boiler and practically bowled Alex over.

“Down, Macduff!” he said sternly, then to Mahri, “This ugly brute is another of Gavin’s strays. His name is Macduff. Gavin will be glad to see him. He thought that the soldiers who arrested him had maimed or killed him.”

Mahri went down on her haunches and looked into the softest brown eyes she had ever beheld. His nose was scorched; the paw he offered her was badly lacerated, and the stench clinging to his coat would have turned the stomach of the most hardened tinker.

It was love at first sight.

She opened her arms, and Macduff fell into them as though he belonged there. “Oh, you beauty,” she breathed out. “What were you doing in the boiler?”

“The old boiler,” Alex said, “is the entrance to a secret underground passage that comes out at a stone cairn farther down the hill.”

He opened the door wide to let Mahri get a better view. She saw a trapdoor with stone steps leading down into a stygian darkness.

“And Macduff knows how to open the trapdoor?”

He shrugged. “You’d be surprised what Macduff can do. He likes to come and go as he pleases. But he would never have left Gavin if he had not been hurt really badly.”

“Yes, he looks as though he has come through the wars.” She scratched Macduff’s ears and was rewarded with a toothy grin. “I suppose the secret passage was an escape route for Jacobites during the rebellion?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, this is Deeside, isn’t it? It was a Jacobite strong-hold. There’s hardly a house here that doesn’t have a secret passage to hide Jacobites during the rebellion.”

“Nothing so romantic.” He was amazed at how docilely Macduff allowed Mahri to remove burrs and thorns from his matted coat. Only Gavin was ever allowed that privilege. “It was used to transport contraband whiskey from the illegal still that my great-great-grandfather set up in what is now the wine cellar.” He pointed to a door behind Mahri. “I’m afraid we Hepburns were an unsavory lot.”

“Don’t blame yourself. We can’t choose our relatives.” Thinking that she might have said too much, she went on quickly, “I’d like to see it.”

“I’ll show it to you tomorrow. Right now, I want to wash, change, and eat, in that order.”

She stopped petting Macduff and straightened. “You mean you’re going to give up your dandy outfit and become Mr. Sobersides again?”

“Hardly. I’ll be borrowing Gavin’s things.”

“And what am I going to wear?”

A memory came to mind of Mahri, sleek and loose-limbed, with not a stitch on her.

She glared at his foolish grin. “Come along, Macduff,” she said. “Let’s find you something to eat. Then we’ll see what those soldiers did to you.”

 

 

From then on, Macduff became Mahri’s slave. He tolerated Alex, but if he put his hands on Mahri, the dog insinuated himself between them and growled like a bear. Alex’s hopes of a romantic interlude before the others arrived dwindled to nothing.

The following morning, when he took her into the secret passage, Macduff nosed his way in, too. “If there’s any trouble,” Alex said, “this is the place to be. What I mean by that is, if soldiers come back, it’s a good place to hide. Don’t touch anything, though. It’s filthy down here. It hasn’t been cleaned out in years.”

With lantern in hand, he led the way.

She didn’t care about getting her gown dirty, because she was wearing the same gown she’d worn for the last three days. She was hoping that Juliet would arrive soon so that she could borrow some of her finery. There were bits and pieces of ladies’ clothing in the wardrobe in her bedchamber, but not what she considered suitable. Evidently, Gavin liked party girls. Or, she thought churlishly, maybe they were strays Gavin had taken in from the goodness of his heart.

She checked herself. She tried not to worry about the others, but she couldn’t control her fears. As Alex had pointed out, they had been separated for only four days. If they hadn’t turned up by the end of the week, they would go to Aberdeen and join them.