The Secret Gift (4 page)

Just as she reached the top of the hill, a scattering of cottages appeared in the distance, and a modest black-and-white sign came into view.

WRATH VILLAGE—3 MILES.

She had made it. Somehow, remarkably, unbelievably, she had found it.

As she rolled along the sleeping street, past a post office with its red-and-yellow
ROYAL MAIL
sign, Libby began to look ahead, envisioning the soft bed she would collapse into, imagining the warmth of the toasty fire that awaited at the quaint B and B she’d found when she’d begun researching the village on the Internet.

She nearly shouted out loud a “hallelujah” when a short while later she saw the second, smaller sign, which directed her off the main road and onto what amounted to little more than a pathway, so obscure that it didn’t merit an A, a B, or, for that matter, even a Z.

Just a few minutes more, she told herself, and she would be at her mother’s childhood home.

But twenty minutes and two dead-end turns later, Libby was still driving.

It took everything she had just to keep from falling over the steering wheel and weeping.

“This ... is ... ridiculous,” she grumbled aloud to the windshield wipers that were intermittently sweeping away the faint drizzle that had begun to fall. She backtracked yet again and yanked the steering wheel to the right, encouraged when the isolated road passed a stone cottage, its windows as dark as the moonless sky. It was the first dwelling she’d seen since the post office earlier. No one seemed to be at home, but a cottage was still a good sign. Surely the village must be just ahead.

Libby pressed on, slowing the car slightly when the road entered a thicket. Suddenly there were trees where moments before there had been nothing but open, empty moorland, with huge limbs gnarled from decades, even centuries, of growth. They weighed in on either side of the car, bringing to mind the apple orchard in
The Wizard of Oz.
Any moment now she expected to hear one of them grumble, “She was hungry!” before reaching out its twisted branches to whack her.

Okay, now she really was beginning to lose it.

That was it. She was just going to turn around, head back the way she’d come, and spend the night in the post office parking lot if she had to. Libby slowed the car to a halt, yanked the gearshift into reverse. And then ...

What was that?

She squinted through the drizzle dotting the windshield. Was that a light she saw ahead?

Shifting into first gear, she inched forward. She could hear the wheels crunching on gravel, and the rain pelleting the windshield. She scanned the gloom before her. It was so unbelievably dark. She was just beginning to believe she had imagined it when, suddenly, she saw it again.

A flash of light.

Libby slowed the car, stopped, and flicked the headlights to high beam, then back to low, once, twice, hoping to draw the attention of whoever it was lurking ahead.

Success!

A light flashed in the distance, pointing in her direction and holding steady. Stifling the urge to giggle like a lunatic, Libby rolled forward to meet her rescuer.

Twenty seconds later, she was slamming the brake pedal to the floor.

She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Not even a gasp.

Standing before her was a man. She didn’t notice his face, his hair color, or even his height. She couldn’t have said with any certainty later whether he’d been wearing jeans, a kilt, or, for that matter, a taffeta ball gown.

There was only one thing she could describe in clear detail.

And that was the gun he had pointed at her windshield.

Dear God,
she thought fleetingly as she waited for her life to begin flashing before her eyes,
I’ve just driven into some horrible reality television show ...

She realized then that she could do one of three things. She could floor the gas pedal and run him down, although given the fact that he was about twenty feet from her and aiming a shotgun right at her nose, his first reflex might be to fire. That wouldn’t be very good.

She could jam the car into reverse, but without any light and the glut of trees she’s just crawled through, she would no doubt ram herself straight into a tree trunk.

So she did the only other thing she could think of. She put both hands on the steering wheel and blasted the horn.

The sudden blare, however, didn’t send him fleeing into the night as she’d hoped. Instead he walked straight for her and yanked open the car door. Libby was still leaning on the horn, leaning on it for dear life, staring at him in the way a hapless Transylvanian held up the sign of the cross before an advancing Dracula in the old black-and-white films.

Very calmly, and without saying a word, the man wrapped his fingers around both her hands and lifted them off the steering wheel.

The horn went silent.

He simply stood there, holding her hands and staring at her.

Libby was too paralyzed to speak. She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come. She stared back at him, at the hardest pair of eyes she’d ever seen, and waited for him to do whatever he intended to do to her.

And since she had no one left in the world, her absence would scarcely be noticed.

He let go of her hands. “Get out.”

Libby jumped at the sound of his voice and fumbled with the seat belt. She tried to unhitch it, but her hands were shaking, trembling, and she couldn’t work the button.

“I said get out.”

His voice was deep, terrifyingly calm, and his face was without expression.

“I’m trying to get out, but I can’t—”

“I mean get out of here. Turn the car around. And leave. Now.”

“I—” she stammered, “I was just looking for—”

“I know bloody well what you were looking for. You’re not the first, and I’m reasonably certain you won’t be the last. So let me save you the trouble. I’m not interested.”

“I beg your—not interested—in what?”

“I’m not interested in
you.”

“But I’m not—”

“You’re right, miss. You’re not. You’re not going to get what you came here for, so why don’t you save us both a lot of trouble. Turn your car around, drive back the way you came, and never come back again.”

Libby just stared at him, blinking, trying to think of something to say. A moment later, everything, the exhaustion and stress of the past few hours, the emotion, the grief, the confusion, the terrible loneliness she had been buried beneath the past weeks, all of it came bursting out in a sudden shower of sheer, utter hysterics.

“But that’s what I’m trying to do! I have been driving for three hours, and now I don’t know where in the world I even am. I mean, what is wrong with your roads? None of them have names, only numbers, and some of them don’t even have that. There are no street signs anywhere. The roads just turn and twist till I have no idea what direction I’m going. I don’t even know where I am. There aren’t any houses. Where do people live? Where do you buy food to eat? The sign said three miles! Are miles longer in Scotland than everywhere else in the world? Or do you just make up fake villages and distances to confound drivers for your own personal entertainment?”

By the time she finished her tirade, she was crying.
Damn it!
And what was worse, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Her shoulders were hitching, and her breathing was coming in strangled little sobs. Then she started to hiccup. She couldn’t imagine how pathetic she must look, strapped in her little Vauxhall Astra with its worthless
NAV
button, exhausted, flight-haggard, bawling her eyes out and hiccuping like a drunkard. She half expected the dashboard voice to suddenly scold, “You—are—making—an—idiot—of—yourself—tears—flowing—freely.”

Libby put her head in her hands and just let it go. She cried for her mother, for the loss of her, for the horrible guilt she felt over not having been there for her in her last days. She cried for the sheep that had stood in the middle of the road, refusing to budge. She cried for the fact that while she lived and worked in one of the largest, most complicated cities in the world, she couldn’t follow a simple road map to a Scottish village. She cried for the disaster of that April day. But mostly she cried for the fact that at that very moment, this lunatic with the gun could kill her and no one, not a single soul on the face of the earth, would ever even realize it, because there was no one. No one in her life anymore, no one but her.

It had to have been several minutes later when Libby finally managed to collect herself. He was still standing there, next to the open car door, saying nothing, just looking at her with that same bland expression that wasn’t even an expression at all. Libby turned her head, peered up at him. She could barely see him through the smear of tears that clouded the lenses of her eyeglasses.

He said nothing, but he reached into his pocket and took out a handkerchief. He offered it to her. Libby took it, cleaned her glasses, dried her tears, wiped her sniffly nose.

“Thank you.”

“Keep it.”

Then he said, very quietly, “If you are looking for the village, it is just down the drive, past the gatehouse, and to the right. You’ll have to go down a steep hill and across the stone bridge. It may seem like you’re driving straight into the sea, but it is the right way, I assure you.”

Libby simply nodded. She knew exactly where he had directed her. She had already gone that way twice before and had indeed assumed she was driving straight into the sea. So she had stopped, and turned around, and on the third try, had ended up there instead, with his gun pointed at her face.

“There’s a turnaround just some ten feet ahead.” He pointed down the drive into the uncompromising darkness.

“Thank you,” she said again, hanging her head in embarrassment as she reached for the door to close it. She just wanted to get away, and she prayed she would never see him again.

Libby pulled the car forward and swung into the turning place, switching into reverse so quickly that she didn’t even notice the hulking towers that loomed in the glow of her headlights. She didn’t see the gate with its emblem of two thistles intertwined. Nor did she see the sign, nearly obscured by ivy on the pillar beside it.

A sign that read,
CASTLE WRATH.

Graeme Mackenzie stood watching as the Vauxhall Astra and its weepy American occupant vanished into the night.

It wasn’t until the red of the car’s taillights had faded into the night that he turned and headed back down the drive. His black-and-white collie, Murphy, blinked at him with his one blue eye and one brown eye, then walked quietly along beside him.

It was a dark night, unfathomably, impenetrably dark, and so he’d mounted a light onto the sight of his shotgun to help him find his way. He’d been out doing a little target shooting and had just been heading back to the house for the night when the unexpected beam of a headlamp had blinked from up the drive.

Of course he’d immediately assumed she was just another one of
them.
Why the hell wouldn’t she be? So he’d turned his light onto the figure of the car, lifting the shotgun as if to scare her, to teach her a lesson for all the others who had come before her—and all those who would no doubt come after her, too.

What he hadn’t counted on was finding that she was some wayward American tourist lost in the Highlands, and a wayward American who had burst out crying the moment she’d seen him.

Graeme didn’t know what to believe. If she was just another one of
them,
it certainly wouldn’t be the most inventive excuse he’d come across in the past eight months. That distinction would have to go to the lass who had hidden herself away in his shower stall, complete with a big red bow tied around her—

—package.

He’d come across virtually every ruse there could be since he, Graeme Arthur Frederick Mackenzie, had been endowed with, in a tragic twist of fate, on the very same day, the titles of Viscount Kintail and the Marquess of Waltham. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, he’d become the unanticipated heir to both his mother, a countess in her own right, and his uncle, the very illustrious Duke of Gransborough.

It should never have happened. For the first thirty-five years of his life, Graeme had been perfectly content filling the role of the youngest son’s youngest son. As such, he’d had it pretty easy. He was connected to one of the most highly regarded families in the United Kingdom without really having to face any of the obligation of it, save the odd appearance at the Chelsea Flower Show or the Queen’s Regatta whenever his mother asked him to attend with her. Otherwise, he had been virtually overlooked.
The spare.
Not considered worthy of the rest of the world’s attention, which had suited him just fine.

Until February 12 of that year.

Before that date, there had been three reasons why Graeme had never dreamed he would find himself in the position he was now in. They were his cousin, Winston, his father, Maxwell, and his older brother, Thaddeus.

Fate had snatched two of them, Teddy and Wins, in a tragic bit of skiing high jinks at the Klosters in Switzerland. Three weeks later, on February 12, Fate saw fit to take his father, too, by the delivery of an aortic aneurysm in his sleep.

“You’ll be the heir now,” Graeme’s mother, Gemma, the Countess of Abermuir, had said to him. They had been walking together from the family burial ground at Gransborough House, the ducal estate in Durham. Until she’d said it, Graeme hadn’t really considered it. He could have no inkling of the consequences this chain of events would bring him almost immediately later.

It had begun with only a small item in the tabloids announcing his assumption of the hereditary lesser titles of viscount and marquess. Soon after, there appeared a snapshot of him buying a latté at the Starbucks in Leicester Square. Unfortunately, it had attracted the attention of a more notorious London talk show host, who had proclaimed him across the BBC television waves as “rather dishy.”

Very soon, he couldn’t stop for a copy of
The Times
at the corner newsstand without a camera lens pointing and clicking his way. Next, one of the other city publications came out with its annual “Most Eligible Bachelor” feature. Topping the list had been Graeme’s name, with a description of his family connections, his occupation and place of work, even his favorite city haunts. A veritable fortune hunter’s shopping list.