The Heir of the Castle (Harlequin Romance) (13 page)

‘You know I work as a lawyer in London.’

He nodded.

‘When you told me that you worked in computers instead of mathematics I was surprised.’

‘Why?’ His voice was quiet. ‘Lots of people do degrees in one field and take jobs in another.’

She hesitated. This was hard. She was trying so hard not to say anything she would regret. ‘It’s a bit more difficult when you’ve studied law. It’s not such a generic field. Once you’ve done a law degree there’s really only one way you can go.’

‘I get it. Like why would you study medicine if you don’t want to be a doctor? But why would you do a law degree if you didn’t want to be a lawyer?’

It made so much more sense when he said it out loud. It also made her feel foolish. Foolish for taking so long to put this into words.

She lowered her head, blinking back the tears that had automatically formed in her eyes. There was a lump in her throat. She felt his warm hand sweep back the hair that had covered her face, pulling it back to the nape of her neck where his gentle figures rested. ‘Laurie?’

The tears started to flow. ‘I knew right from the minute I got there that I didn’t want to do a law degree. I’d done well at school. My guidance teacher persuaded me to apply for the best possible degrees for my results. It seemed natural. It seemed the sensible thing to do.’

‘You were thinking with your head instead of your heart?’

He whispered the words as if he understood.

She nodded desperately. ‘My dad—he was just so happy, so proud when he knew I’d been accepted to Cambridge. He’d never imagined his daughter would do so well. And neither did I. It all seemed like a dream at first.’ She shook her head, fixating on the flickering lights outside. ‘Then my dad just worked so hard, such long hours to make the dream a reality and all of a sudden I felt as if I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t say anything. How could I disappoint him when he was working so hard? What kind of a daughter would that make me? It was like being on a train ride I couldn’t get off.’

His hand cradled the side of her cheek and his fingers brushed away one of her tears. ‘You felt like you couldn’t tell him?’

She nodded again as the tears just seemed to flow from her eyes like a tumbling river’s stream. ‘I didn’t want to do anything to disappoint him. I didn’t want to do anything to make him sad.’ She could hear the desperation in her own voice. ‘But when you said that Angus had no expectation of you beyond finishing your own degree...’ Her voice tailed off. ‘It just seemed unfair. You make it sound so easy.’

Her hands were resting on his shoulders now and one of his hands drifted along the length of her arm, settling back to her waist where he pulled her closer.

The temperature had dropped around them. Or maybe it was just the atmosphere that was making her breath send little clouds in the air around them. The hairs on her arms were standing on end. Or maybe it was being here with Callan, the man who had no expectations of her and only a steady admiration in his eyes.

‘I know you lost your dad a few years ago, Laurie. So what now? You’re an adult. There’s no one to disappoint. You can decide what happens next. You can decide what steps you take. Where do you want to go, Laurie? Where do you want to end up?’

The words were measured. His other hand had reached her waist and both were pulling her even closer to him. She could almost hear music in the air between them. And it was as if they weren’t talking about her career choice any more. It was so much more than that.

Where do you want to end up?
The million-dollar question. It was everything that sparked in the air between them. Every impulse that fired in her skin whenever he touched her. Every dream that featured him in high-definition detail.

A smile came across his face. The air in the room was closing in on them. Pressing around every inch. His grip on her waist tightened and he lifted her in the air, as if it were something he did every day, making her breath catch in her throat as he took a few steps and stood her on the thin bench that ran around the inside of the gazebo.

‘Maybe it’s time to forget, Laurie. Let’s pretend you don’t need to think about any of these things.’ He waited, then reached and wiped another tear from her cheek before adding, ‘And neither do I. You told me earlier what you wanted to do. Why don’t you just let me give you your dreams tonight?’ She heard his voice break and it squeezed at her heart.

Tomorrow everything changed for both of them.

Tomorrow the person who would inherit Annick Castle would be announced. She doubted it would be her. And in a way, she didn’t want it to be. She had no idea what to do with a place like Annick Castle, even though it had wound its way into her heart.

Right now, she was more concerned about what it might do to Callan. What it might do to the small boy who had found a haven—a safe place in Annick Castle. It didn’t matter what she thought of Angus. It didn’t matter to her at all.

All that mattered to her was what Callan thought of him. How Callan McGregor would feel. Because Callan McGregor was a keeper. She knew that in her heart.

She would never do anything to hurt him. Never do anything to keep him from his dream.

The realisation was startling. Two, in one night.

And even though she couldn’t think about it right now they were probably interconnected. The decision about walking away from her job felt freeing. Like spreading her wings and flying high in the air.

She didn’t feel guilty about it. She didn’t feel irresponsible. It was time to start living her life for herself. Not for anyone else.

Her legs were trembling. She looked around her. It was beautiful. It was the perfect setting. And Callan was the perfect man to share it with.

‘Are you going to be my prince tonight, Callan?’ She held out her shaking hand towards him.

He gave a little smile. ‘Aren’t I supposed to be your Rolfe?’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘He turned out to be a traitor. I’d rather go with the prince theme.’

He took her hand in his. ‘Does this mean I have to dance and sing? Because, I warn you. This might not work out the way you imagined it.’

Her voice was low and husky. ‘You’ve no idea what I’ve imagined, Callan.’ His eyes widened as his smile spread across his face. He gave a mock bow.

‘Ms Jenkins, can I have this dance?’

She gave a little curtsey as he took her hand and her steps quickened around the circular bench. Callan laughed, keeping pace with her as she started to run, letting the rainbow-coloured reflections of light dance across the pale chiffon of her dress. Her gold shoes sparkled in the dim lights but the one thing that stood out for her was the green of Callan’s eyes. They didn’t leave her. Not for a second.

‘You’re planning on making me dizzy, aren’t you?’ he quipped as she started around the circle for the fourth time.

‘I might never get to do this again,’ came her instant response.

He stopped dead. As if the realisation had just hit him.

Her breath caught in her throat, her heart beating rapidly against her chest. Did she really want this to be the last time for her and Callan?

She could see his quick breaths, see the glimmer of uncertainty across his eyes followed by a look of firm decision.

His hands swept around her waist, lifting her up and spinning her around as if she were as light as a feather. Her arms caught around his neck and she laughed as he continued to spin her round, her dress billowing out around them. He stopped slowly, holding her in place for a few seconds before gradually beginning to lower her down. Her face was just inches above his. She didn’t want him to stop touching her; she didn’t want him to stop holding her.

‘Are you going to kiss me again, Callan?’ she whispered. ‘Do I get a little warning this time?’

‘How much warning do you need?’

‘About this much.’

She started to kiss him before he’d completely lowered her to the floor. This time she was ready. This time she initiated it. This time there were no spectators.

There was just her and Callan. A perfect combination.

It wasn’t a light kiss. She wasn’t gentle. She knew exactly what she was doing. This was happening because she wanted it to happen. This wasn’t about her job. This wasn’t about Angus McLean. This wasn’t about Annick Castle.

This was just about her and Callan.

And it felt so right.

Their kiss was intensifying; the stubble on his chin scraped her skin. His hands ran through her curls, locking into place at the back of her head as he tried to pull her even closer.

The chiffon material on her dress was so thin, all she could feel was the compressed heat from his body against hers.

Her hands ran across the expanse of his back; she could feel his muscles rippling under his shirt. One of these days she’d ask him how he got those.

Or maybe he could show her...

He pulled his head back from hers, still holding her head in place. With slow sensuous movement he slid his hands down her back, around her hips, and stroked upwards with his palms towards her breasts.

She wasn’t in a fairy tale any more. She was in a positively adult dream. One where she only dared imagine the outcome.

‘Laurie,’ he murmured as he rested his forehead against hers.

‘Yes.’ She could hardly breathe. She would scream if he stopped touching her. This was meant to happen. They were meant to be together.

She’d never felt a connection like this. Her one-track mind knew exactly where this would go. And she couldn’t think of a single reason to stop it happening.

She didn’t want to have regrets in life. She had too many of those already. And Callan could never be regret. Not when he made her feel like this.

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his nose. She ran her fingers through his dark hair as she looked into his eyes. He didn’t need to ask the question out loud.

She already knew her answer. Her hands cupped either side of his face. ‘Yes, Callan,’ she breathed.

And he took her hand in his and led her back to the castle.

CHAPTER TEN

H
E
DIDN
’
T
WANT
to wake up. He didn’t want this day to begin.

This was the day where two things he loved could slip through his fingertips.

All of a sudden he was instantly awake, his eyes fixating on the rain battering on the windowpane. Love. Where had that come from?

With the exception of Angus, Callan couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever had a thought like this. Callan ‘cared’ about people. He didn’t love them.

He’d ‘cared’ about some women in the past. He’d worried about them. He hadn’t wanted to hurt their feelings. He’d wanted to take care of them.

None of these things applied to Laurie. He’d have to multiply everything by a thousand to get even close.

From the first second he’d glanced her through the steam on the train platform she’d started to burrow her way under his skin and into his heart.

Her reactions had been totally different from everyone else who could inherit the castle. She’d walked the estate, she’d asked questions, she’d shown an interest that was above and beyond the monetary value. She’d seemed invested in the place.

Her connection with Marion had taken him by surprise. He suspected it had taken Marion by surprise too. She wasn’t known for sharing her domain. But apparently Laurie had sneaked under her radar too. She’d done nothing but sing Laurie’s praises to him—all with a twinkle in her eyes.

What sat heaviest on his chest was his loyalty to Angus. He knew instantly that if Angus had met Laurie he would have loved her. He would have loved her spark, her inquisitiveness, her cheek and her ability to run rings around Callan.

He just couldn’t understand why Angus hadn’t met his children. Hadn’t loved his children the way he’d loved him. Nothing about it seemed right. And until he could sort that out in his head he would never be able to move forward.

And today was a day for moving forward.

He turned on his side. Laurie currently had her back to him, the cotton sheet had slipped from her shoulders and his eyes carried along the curves of her skin. She was sleeping peacefully and his hands were itching to touch her again.

He wanted to ask her to stay. He wanted to ask her to stay here with him. To stay anywhere with him.

But what could he offer her?

Her words had almost broken his heart last night when she’d told him how she hated her job. It would be so easy for him to tell her just to pack it all in, forget about everything and move up to Edinburgh with him. Money wasn’t an object for Callan.

But he knew in his heart that Laurie wasn’t that kind of girl.

And the outcome of Annick Castle was still hanging over his head like a black thunder cloud. Until that was resolved his stomach would constantly churn.

He slid his feet to the floor as something flickered into his brain. Laurie had told him she knew who the murderer was. How on earth could she know? He was embarrassed to say that he hadn’t been paying enough attention to even hazard a guess.

Was there even a tiny chance that Laurie could inherit the castle?

A shiver crept down his spine. How would that make him feel? He didn’t even want to consider that for a second. What was developing between him and Laurie could be destroyed by something like that.

He took a deep breath as he watched her sleeping form. She had a one in twelve chance of inheriting the castle. He watched her gentle breathing, in and out, in and out, her hair framing her face and her tongue running along her rose-pink lips.

He didn’t want anything to mess this up. Nothing at all.

He stood up. The boxes. He still hadn’t had a chance to go through Angus’s boxes. He had to do it now. Time was running out. He might have access to these things now, but in a matter of days he would have to walk away from Annick Castle and leave everything behind. He had to use the opportunity to find out what he could now.

He pulled a shirt over his head and some trousers on. He would do it now while Laurie slept. There was no point disturbing his sleeping Cinderella.

* * *

Her eyes flickered open and for a second she was startled. For the last few days she’d woken in a room with a peaceful yellow colour scheme. The pale themes of blue unsettled her. Her reactions were instantaneous. She pulled the sheet over her naked body and flipped over onto her back.

Nothing. No one.

Callan wasn’t there.

She was instantly caught by the pain in her chest. The expanse of the bed seemed huge. The dip where he should be lying seemed like a giant chasm. Where was he? Was he embarrassed? Was he ashamed of what had happened last night? Why wasn’t he still lying here next to her?

Her beautiful pale pink chiffon dress was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Robin would have a fit. Her gold glitter sandals were strewn across the floor, obviously left exactly where they’d fallen. She cringed as she looked around the rest of the room. Even though this was obviously Callan’s room, there was no visible sign of him.

It made her stomach churn. She pulled the sheet around her like a toga as she stood up and her eyes swept the room. There was nothing else for her to wear except the clothes she’d discarded last night. And who knew where her underwear was?

She rummaged around the floor eventually finding her bra and pants and pulling them on. Her Liesl dress was a crumpled wreck. It seemed to echo exactly how she felt. Talk about doing the next-day walk of shame.

Thankfully the corridor was empty. She fled down the staircase as quickly as possible and slammed her door closed behind her.

Her half-empty rucksack lay on the floor. Going home. After the announcement today she would be going home.

Her eyes filled with tears. Everything last night with Callan had been perfect. But deep down both of them had known they were saying goodbye.

How could there be a happy ever after for them? What on earth did she expect to happen?

She pulled out some clothes. A pair of Capri pants and a slightly wrinkled shirt that she’d already worn. If she’d thought about it a bit more she could have asked Marion where she could launder her clothes. But there was no point now. No point because she wasn’t staying.

There was something pushed under the doorway. She’d completely missed it. She tore the envelope open. Was it from Callan?

Of course it wasn’t. He’d left her sleeping alone in his room; why would he push a note under her door? It was from Robin. Asking her to write the name of the person she suspected as the murderer and return it to him before eleven that morning.

That was easy. She grabbed a pen and scribbled the name. She didn’t even have to think about it.

Part of her wanted to hide away in her room.
Her
room. It wasn’t her room. It was part of the castle. After today she would probably never see this place again and it was about time she accepted that.

She’d probably never see Callan again. But that thought made her legs buckle and left her sitting on the window seat looking out at the crashing sea.

The rain was battering down outside. It was the first day of bad weather she’d experienced here and all of a sudden she felt very sorry for the bygone smugglers. It must be terrifying down at the caves in weather like this. She could feel the wind whistle through the panes of glass. The temperature was distinctly lower. Or maybe it was just her mood.

It was time to step away from Annick Castle and Callan McGregor. It was time to go back to London and sort her life out.

One thing hadn’t changed. She didn’t want to be a lawyer any more and she needed to take steps to make a change. She could do that. She could do that now.

Annick Castle had changed her. It had given her some perspective on life. Meeting some of her unknown relatives had been enlightening.

She would have preferred it if some of them had remained unknown. But there was a few she had felt some kind of affinity towards. She would love to go and visit her auntie Mary in Ireland some time. She would love to show her some more pictures of her father so she could see the family resemblance between the two of them.

As for Angus McLean? She’d grown tired of wondering why he’d abandoned his children. She’d grown tired of wondering why he’d been able to show love to some unknown child, then split his heart in two with the contents of his will.

She’d grown tired of it all.

* * *

There was a thin layer of dust over the boxes. No one had touched them in years.

He’d found them in the back of a cupboard in Angus’s room, hidden amongst shoes and old smoking jackets. He’d been curious at first, wondering if they would reveal something about Angus’s unacknowledged children.

But they were something else entirely.

Medical files. And lots of them.

It took Callan a few minutes to work out what he was looking at. At first they seemed totally random. Patients allocated numbers instead of names. They were ancient—some more than seventy years old. And the initial sense of unease he’d felt at looking at someone’s medical files rapidly diminished.

The files all seemed to have one thing in common. A big red stamp with deceased across the front.

But there was more than that. All of these people seemed to have died within a very short period of time. A window of six months back in the 1940s just after the Second World War had ended.

It took him a little longer to work out entirely what they were telling him.

Angus’s father had owned a pharmaceutical company. These were all records of drug trials. Nowadays clinical drug trials were scrutinised, monitored and regulated beyond all recognition. Seventy-five years ago—not so much.

And whatever drug these people had been trialling seemed to have had an extreme adverse effect. All the patients taking it had died within six months.

All except one. Patient X115. Otherwise known as Angus McLean.

It was a horrible moment of realisation. Scribbled notes were all over the file that was obviously Angus’s.

Scribbled notes that revealed that as one drug trial patient after another died, Angus McLean had fully expected to die himself within a few months.

He’d had no idea what was wrong with the medication, but all the other patients—twenty of them—had died within a short space of time.

Callan leaned back against the desk. He’d been sitting on the floor, the files scattered all around him. People had been paid a fee all those years ago to take part in drug trials. Things weren’t so carefully monitored. And although the medical files were full of things he didn’t understand, there were a few things that he did understand.

According to the post-mortem results most of the patients had died of some kind of accelerated blood disorder. Angus McLean had thought he was living on borrowed time. He’d fully expected to die along with the rest of the group.

Except he hadn’t. He’d outlived them all by almost seventy years.

Was this the reason? The reason why he hadn’t had contact with his children, but had instead made some kind of financial recompense?

From the dates he could see, at least three of his children had been born during wartime. Communications were limited. It wasn’t like today where a ping of an email signified the arrival of a message from halfway round the globe. He’d moved around a lot during, and directly after, the war. It was entirely possible that Angus hadn’t found out about some of his children until after the war—right around the time he’d just taken part in the disastrous drug trial.

Callan’s head was spinning. He couldn’t really draw any conclusions from this. He was guessing.

But Angus had been a gentle-natured man. Callan didn’t really want to believe he’d deliberately left his children without a father. But how would Angus have coped, forming a relationship with these children, whilst he was living in fear he would die at any moment? Leave them to suffer the bereavement of losing their dad? Maybe, if Angus had died quickly, it would have been better not to meet them. And although he didn’t agree with it, he could maybe understand it a little better.

* * *

But Angus would never have left his children unsupported. That did seem like something he would do. Provide for them. And if this was the only explanation Callan could find, then he’d take it.

Maybe he’d thought leaving them Annick Castle would make up for the fact they hadn’t had a father figure in their lives. How had he felt as one year after another had passed? Had he realised he’d managed to run the gauntlet that the others in the drug trial had failed?

Callan leaned forward. There was a collection of black-and-white photos at the bottom of the box. Some of women. Some of children. One, a picture of Angus with his arm around a woman.

This was it. This was the only sign that Angus McLean actually had family. No letters. No gushy cards. No sentimental keepsakes.

Callan felt a rush of unease at the similarities between himself and Angus.

If someone searched his personal belongings what would they find? No pictures or memorabilia about his father. No trace of the man at all. One slightly crumpled picture of his mother, along with an album of family snaps of him as a baby or a young boy accompanied by an unknown arm holding him, or a set of unidentified legs.

He opened the lid of the other box, fully expecting to find similar contents. But this was different. This held a leather-bound photo album.

He opened the first page. It was some old pictures of Angus as a young boy with his mother and father. Family snaps had obviously been few and far between then.

He flipped the pages. Angus as he was growing up. In school uniform. In hunting gear. In his army uniform. In a dinner suit.

And then there was Callan. As a small child sitting at the kitchen table that still existed, laughing heartily with Angus laughing next to him. Callan had no recollection of the picture ever being taken, but that tiny snapshot in time struck him like a bullet through his heart.

He flicked again. Him and Angus on every page. Fishing. Horse-riding. Sitting in the grounds. Digging the gardens with Bert. Standing on the cannons in the castle grounds. Sailing across the swan pond in the most rickety paddle boat that ever existed. It had subsequently sunk to the bottom of the pond never to be seen again.