Claimed by the Laird. Nicola Cornick
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He is heir to the title and full of self-importance. I believe they have their daughter, Allegra, with them.”
Lucas grimaced. “And I’m supposed to wait on these people?”
“Your choice,” Jack said unsympathetically.
“Hmm. Who else?”
“Lachlan.” Jack grinned. “The younger brother. He is an utter waste of space. His wife left him some months ago and he has taken to drink for comfort.”
Lucas gave a soundless whistle. “Never a good solution.” He raised his glass in ironic toast. “Is there anyone else?”
“No,” Jack said. “Yes.” He corrected himself quickly. “There’s Christina, the eldest daughter.” He frowned slightly. “We always forget Christina.”
“Why?” Lucas said.
“Because...” Jack paused. “She’s easy to overlook,” he said after a moment. He sounded slightly shamefaced. “Christina’s self-effacing, the old spinsterish sister. No one notices her.”
Lucas found that hard to believe when both Lucy and her sister Mairi MacMorlan, Jack’s wife, were stunningly pretty, diamonds of the first order. He felt an odd, protective pang of pity for the colorless Lady Christina, living in their shadow, the duke’s unmarried daughter.
He let the playing card slip from between his fingers and it glided down to rest on the carpet.
There was a discreet knock at the door, and Lucas’s manager, Duncan Liddell, stuck his head around.
“Table four,” Duncan said. “Lord Ainsley. Can’t pay his debts. Or won’t pay. Not sure which.” He was a man of few words.
Lucas nodded and got to his feet. It happened occasionally when sprigs of the nobility had a little too much to drink and felt they were entitled to play for free. A few discreet words in the gentleman’s ear usually sorted the matter out.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Jack said. He stood up, too, and shook Lucas’s hand. “Best of luck. I hope you find out the truth.” He hesitated. “I don’t care what happens to the rest of them,” he said, “but don’t hurt Christina, or Mairi will have my balls for helping you.”
Lucas grinned. “I know your wife is a crack shot. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.” He sobered. “You have my word, Jack. I’ve no quarrel with any of Forres clan. I doubt I will have much to do with them. All I want is to infiltrate the whisky gang and find out what really happened to Peter.”
As he followed Duncan into the salon, Lucas caught sight of the playing card resting under the table. He bent to pick it up. It was the jack of diamonds. He laid it on top of the pack. It seemed appropriate for the bastard son of a laird and a princess who had made his own fortune and was as hard as the diamonds themselves.
Ardnamurchan, Scottish Highlands, May 1817
IT WAS NOT the way Lucas was meant to die, blindfolded, tied up, on his knees in a smugglers’ cave, with the pungent smell of rotting fish in his nose and the roar of the sea in his ears as it crashed onto the rocks several hundred feet below.
One minute he had been strolling along the cliffs in the evening twilight to stretch his legs after an interminable journey from Edinburgh, the next this nightmare of ambush and capture. He had heard that the Highlands in May were very pleasant, but he had been mistaken in that. The Highlands in May was no place to be if there was a knife at your throat.
He had been careless. The thought made him angry. Lord Sidmouth would be so proud of him, he thought savagely. His spy caught by the very men he had come to investigate. But he had been tired and the last thing he had been expecting was to stumble on the whisky smugglers moving their cargo. He wondered if this was why Peter had died. He wondered if his brother, too, had seen something he should not, had stumbled disastrously into a situation he could not control. The irony would be if he discovered the truth so quickly, so easily, and then did not live to prove it.
The smugglers were arguing. Their Scots accents were so thick Lucas found it hard to understand some of them, but the general thrust of the conversation was not in the least difficult to follow.
“I say we throw him over the cliff, no questions asked.”
“I say we let him go. He’s seen nothing—”
“It’s too dangerous. He could be a spy. I say he dies.”
“And I say we wait for the lady. She will know what to do.”
There was a short, angry pause.
“I told you not to send for her.” The first man swore. “Damn it to hell, you know what she will say.”
“She doesn’t like unnecessary bloodshed.” The second man sounded as though he was quoting. Lucas could not help but wonder if the shedding of his blood would nevertheless be deemed necessary.
Lucas kept silent. He was cold, wet, tired to his bones and starving hungry.
Who was the lady? Some ruffian as brutal as her trade?
Sidmouth had briefed him on the illegal Highland whisky trade. The government in London demanded that every Highlander who distilled whisky should pay tax on it. The Highlanders declined. The government sent excise officers to hunt the smugglers down, which was no doubt why this gang suspected him of being a spy. Which he was. A very incompetent one.
Damnation.
Lucas remembered the whisky he had tasted on the back streets of Edinburgh. They called it the Uisge Beatha in Gaelic, the water of life, but he had thought it was rougher than a badger’s backside.
A faint drift of a salt-laden breeze stirred the noisome press of air in the cave, and the smugglers fell silent. It was a wary silence. Lucas felt the hair on the back of his neck rise and his skin prickle. He found he was holding his breath.
The air shifted as someone walked past him. The lady. She had arrived. Lucas had heard no footsteps. Nor could he see anything from behind the blindfold. The material was thick and coarse. He was wrapped in darkness. Yet he could feel her presence. She was close.
He tried to rise to his feet and immediately one of the smugglers placed an ungentle hand on his shoulder and forced him back down on his knees.
“Evening, ma’am.” The tone of the men’s voices had changed. There was respect in their muttered greeting and a note of caution. Lucas realized that they were on their guard. They could not predict her reactions. And in their uncertainty lay his hope. Suddenly the moment was on a knife’s edge between life and death.
“Gentlemen.”
Lucas’s heart was beating violently against his ribs. All his senses were straining. One word from her and he would be dead. A knife between the ribs, quick, lethal. He fought back the suffocating fear that beat down on his mind. He had nothing in particular to live for, but no particular wish to die, either.
He sensed the lady was very close to him now. He could hear the shift and slip of a material that sounded rich and fine, like silk or velvet, and then he caught the most elusive of scents, a fragrance of bluebells—very sweet, very innocent. The incongruity of it almost made him smile. The infamous leader of a band of criminal renegades and she smelled of spring flowers.
Someone kicked him hard in the ribs, and the thought disintegrated in a blaze of pain. Lucas toppled onto his side under the force of the blow. They were crowding in on him now like a pack of wolves. He could sense their malevolence. There was another blow, and then another. He twisted and rolled in a vain attempt to avoid them, hampered by his bound wrists, blinded, utterly at their mercy. He was too proud to beg a pack of ruffians to spare his life. Perhaps that was a weakness that would kill him but he did not care.
“Stop.”