Hero in the Highlands (10 page)

As for the ghost of MacKittrick and his curse, he had a feeling that at least one of those things had more to do with Miss Blackstock than a dead Jacobite after revenge. And if any Highlander tried to slip in and kill him tonight, they would serve as a warning against anyone else attempting it again.

Blowing out his breath, he finished toweling off and then pulled a clean shirt over his head. At least Kelgrove had stuffed an extra shirt into his travel bag. Once he'd blown out the candles and banked the sputtering fire, he climbed the trio of wooden steps pushed up against the side of the bed and rolled beneath the heavy, soft covers. With every movement he seemed to sink farther into the plump mattress beneath him, until he began to feel as if he were about to drown in satin and feathers. Despite the chill in the air and the wind whistling down the fireplace, the heat from his own body surrounded him, closing him in a baking, goose-down coffin.

“Damnation,” he swore, sitting upright and flinging sheets and quilts and pillows off the side of the bed. He tried lying back again, but immediately began to sink into the mattress once more. “Bloody hell.”

After ten minutes of hot, wallowing torture he sat up again, swam his way to the edge of the behemoth, and slid to the floor. Christ. He'd fought Frenchmen who put up less of a fight than that damned bed. Breathing hard, he lay down on the pile of blankets he'd shoved onto the stone floor. “You can take the bed, MacKittrick,” he muttered aloud.

So this was his first night as a duke in his own castle. As he contemplated his situation, he couldn't deny one thing—parts of it felt familiar. A foreign land, surrounded by hostile forces who wanted him either gone or dead and didn't much care which one it was, and him with the assignment to bring order out of chaos. And the fact that the opposing forces were led by a supremely desirable black-eyed female with dusky hair? He would manage her just as he'd managed every other obstacle in his path before now. This was about sex and it was about war, and he was a damned expert in both.

 

Chapter Four

“Did he piss himself, Miss Fiona?” Fleming the butler asked in a hushed whisper, his hands brushing lovingly across a half-dozen of the strings that traveled through the usually hidden passageway in which he stood, through the wall, and out to the backs of a trio of paintings—among other things—in the bedchamber beyond.

“I tied off one of those dusty old books on the top shelf, too,” the young footman just beyond him breathed. “They sent half the bookshelf onto the floor, I reckon.”

“Aye. Has he run yet?” the butler took up again.

That had been the plan, of course. Her father and Uncle Hamish had run the original strings themselves, some twenty years ago. Their experiment marked the last night the old duke had laid his head at Lattimer, as a matter of fact, and no one believed that had been a coincidence. And what worked for one duke would work just as well on another. Or it should have.

But this duke was young—younger by some fifteen years than Lattimer had been at the time of his last visit, she reckoned. And this duke bore scars, not just of an unlucky brawl or a fall from a horse, but of war. A war he'd fought, rather than standing at the back and ordering other men to die. And he'd kissed her like he was drowning and she was air. She'd protested, of course; an arrogant, invading Sassenach had no right to lay a finger on her, much less his mouth. She hadn't noticed the heat and the solid strength of him, and she certainly hadn't appreciated any of those things. Yes, he looked like the personification of Ares, and yes, that and his self-confidence might be attractive to some English lass, but she wasn't English.

“Did he run, Miss Fiona?” Fleming repeated.

She blinked. “Nae,” she said absently.

“Nae? But we put him in there especially,” Hugh, one of Lattimer's two dozen footmen, protested, as he sent a longing look at the additional strings in his hands. “And I tested it during dinner. It should've worked.”

“It did,” Fiona conceded. “He'd just picked up the books when I knocked. He said the living frighten him more than the dead.” Well, that hadn't been precisely what he'd said, and she had the feeling that nothing much did frighten him.

“This should've turned his hair white,” Hugh protested. “It would've done that fer me.”

“Well, it didnae trouble him a whit,” she snapped back, still trying to dispel the image of that hard-muscled chest. For God's sake, he'd been shot at least thrice, and it looked like someone had gone after him with a saber on more than one occasion. Oscar had mentioned cannonfire, as well. And he'd made it clear what he wanted of her. Had she convinced him that she wanted nothing to do with him?
Damnation.
She hadn't even convinced herself.

“Nae a whit?”

“He's got the wind crying through those holes in the chimney, too, but that didnae seem to bother him, either.” At the disappointed looks on the servants' faces, she relented a little. “Tell the rest of the staff to go on with spreading the ghostly tales, but dunnae be so obvious aboot it that he catches onto the idea we're trying to drive him off. The only way he'll stay gone is if he doesnae
want
to come back.”

“We'll see to it, Miss Fiona.”

As the butler slipped out of the dark passageway and back into the storage room where she stood, she caught his arm. “Did Ian come by fer supper?”

Fleming nodded. “Aye. He's got only half a dozen men watching the road tonight, because of the weather.”

“He should've kept them all oot. We dunnae need more troubles right now to add to the ones we already have.”

“Seems to me it's the other way round. It's
him
we dunnae need adding to
our
troubles.” The butler jabbed a finger toward the passageway and the master bedchamber beyond.

Oh, she agreed with that. “Either way, one calamity at a time is more than enough fer me. Send Ian to see me when he gets back in the morning. And keep him clear of His Grace.”

After the two men had gone, she shut and locked the storage room door behind her and the hidden passageway beyond that. The last thing she needed was for someone to decide to take matters into his or her own hands and spoil the game entirely. Of course, if one of the castle's actual old ghosties went for a walk about the master bedchamber, she had no objection at all. It was a popular room for the spooks, after all. As she'd told the duke, there were several old Maxwells who had no reason to want a Sassenach back in the castle and claiming it for himself.

For the past twenty years Uncle Hamish, as both a clan chieftain and a local aristocrat, had been the closest they had to someone of the new Lattimer's rank—though Gabriel Forrester seemed closer to a groom than a duke, truth be told. Never in her wildest imaginings had she thought the major who'd jumped into the mudhole to rescue her, whether she'd required assistance or not, would be the new Duke of Lattimer. If he hadn't been in a uniform, she would even have enjoyed his attention. If he hadn't been wearing anything at all, she would have appreciated him even more.

Fiona clenched her jaw.
That was enough of that, damn it all
. She didn't appreciate him. She wanted him gone. Getting rid of him now wouldn't be as simple as misdirecting him or even convincing him that his presence was both unnecessary and unwise. The man had a piece of paper proving that he had the right to be at Lattimer and to claim it for himself. Further, he had the right to see all of them—those who'd been living and working on this land for generations—gone, if he chose to do so.

An English soldier, for God's sake. His ilk had been hated and feared in the Highlands for better than four hundred years before the battle at Culloden. While he was far too young to have fought on that field, he hadn't come to Scotland simply to view the scenery. He'd come because he had questions about the property's finances. Questions she'd stupidly refused to answer. She might have lied and kept him away for a time, if she'd known they'd found an heir for the property, if she'd known that heir was Major Gabriel Forrester. But now he was here, and he no doubt wanted to know how much money he could shake out of Lattimer. Nor would he be the only Sassenach ever to bleed the Highlands to pay for a luxurious life in the soft south.

For a moment she considered going back into the storage room and pulling some more of the strings, after all. Something was bound to frighten him. She'd like nothing better than to see him fleeing shirtless into the night—and only because shirtless meant he'd panicked. Not because he looked fit and muscular and she hadn't minded at all taking a gander at him, scars and all. No, that would be ridiculous. Her, thinking carnal thoughts about a Sassenach simply because he thought them about her.

As she'd said, they needed to make certain that this duke would leave of his own accord and, just as importantly, never wish to return. His arrival had set the household—and the countryside—on its ear, and yes, that seemed to be her fault. She'd decided not to let a nose-in-the-air solicitor order her about, and apparently that had consequences. She should have known better, but no one had bothered to be concerned about Lattimer until the old duke's death had revealed that his own solicitors hadn't done their jobs. Her lack of cooperation, though, meant that no one had felt it necessary to inform her either that a new duke had been found, or that he was heading north for a visit.

First thing in the morning she needed to go speak with Oscar Ritchie. The head groom at least knew of Major Forrester, which was more than she or anyone else she'd encountered could claim. The more information she had, the easier it would be to form a strategy to be rid of the new duke before he could make things worse than they already were. Before he could kiss her again and she forgot how much she was supposed to dislike him.

Finally she shut herself inside her own bedchamber and sank into the chair set before the fireplace. The room sat only four doors down from Lattimer's, and while she would have preferred to be farther away, this room had been hers since her second birthday—which had coincided with old Lattimer's exit. Aside from that, she wanted to be close enough to hear if any trouble should raise its head.

Her mind centered on how to best be rid of this large, troublesome Englishman, and her drifting thoughts swirled about a fresh bullet scar on a muscular arm, an assessing pair of light gray eyes, and a mouth that seemed almost cruel until he grinned. And when he kissed her … Now she didn't know whether to fall asleep and dream about him, or stay awake to think about him all night.
Blast it all.

*   *   *

Gabriel pushed aside the heavy curtains, then stilled with his hands gripping the green, linen-lined silk. “Good God,” he breathed, his bare feet, the chill in the air, the rumbling hunger in his stomach all forgotten.

Before him, stretching out over perhaps half a hundred miles, lay the Scottish Highlands. The land directly beyond Lattimer's formal gardens sloped off gently to the shore of a vast blue lake that curved to the east out of sight beyond a cluster of tumbled ruins on the rocky bank. Trees edged down to the western shore and up the hill beyond, with patches of purple heather and thistle carpeting open meadows. Beyond the lake, rough, rock-tumbled hills lifted into craggy white mountains that stood starkly silhouetted by the rising sun.

Of all the places he'd been in the world, of all the things he'd seen, this … humbled him. Belatedly two things occurred to him: he didn't know the name of the lake, and most of what he could see belonged to him.

He'd known since he'd first donned a uniform that he was made for war. The idea of people trying to kill him, the violence, the cold and the heat, the long days of battle and the longer nights of waiting for the battle to come—he relished the things that broke other men. He was accustomed to responsibility and command, but owning land, being responsible for people who carried rakes and hoes rather than muskets and rifles, fell so far out of his realm of expertise he couldn't even sight it over the horizon.

Gabriel took a slow breath. He knew battle. And Lattimer had just become his battleground. If he looked at it that way, the castle was his command tent. The Highlands was his battlefield, and the Highlanders were either his troops, or the enemy's. In the next few days he would have to decide which, and then act based on that fact.

As he turned to finish dressing, he caught sight of a lone figure strolling through the garden in the direction of the stables. Even with a heavy coat and a sturdy hat jammed low on her dusky hair, he recognized Fiona Blackstock. From that attire she was either dressed to go riding, or to rob a mail coach. Though the latter would certainly be an interesting twist, he had to assume she meant to trot off somewhere out of his reach.

Every good victory came with a prize, and she would be his. That didn't mean, however, that he was going to let her make more trouble while she was here. If she thought riding out early would keep her clear of him or give her the opportunity to gather reinforcements, she didn't know him at all. In addition, somewhere between the mudhole and the drawing room she'd learned his name, and before he'd given it to her. Someone here knew him, and he needed to figure out who that was. Not because he had anything to hide, but because this campaign looked to be about strategy and leverage. He needed to know who stood on the field of battle.

Swiftly he finished buttoning his donated trousers, but that still left him without boots or a coat or jacket. He checked outside his door, but either Kelgrove hadn't yet risen, or the sergeant hadn't been able to chisel the mud off his Hessians.

Pulling the bell seemed too regal, but as far as he knew people didn't walk about half naked in proper houses. Scowling, he grabbed hold of the thing and yanked it down a half-dozen times, then went digging through the chest and wardrobe to find them empty of everything but an old, yellowed cravat.