By Request Collection April-June 2016. Оливия Гейтс
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been prepared to leave without her. She suspected the former.
And she couldn’t fault the argument he’d made. Or the bait he’d used. Offering the opportunity to put Patrick Lightman back behind bars had been the perfect lure. He had to have known she would jump at it. She suspected that he was very good at his job.
But if Duncan Sutherland thought he was going to have everything his way every time, he would be in for a surprise.
The rain was pouring down now, the thunder crashing overhead. The details of their exit from D.C., while pushing the speed limit through a series of small towns in Pennsylvania and New York, were coming back. Duncan had kept the music loud and tuned to a station that played and replayed the top twenty. The fact that only a few of the songs were familiar to her told her that she’d been working too hard. It had been after midnight when they’d reached the castle, but Aunt Vi had greeted them at the door and hustled them off to waiting beds.
She’d slept like a rock until now. Nearly 5:00 a.m. according to the illuminated dial on her watch. Throwing the covers off, she crossed to the sliding doors that led to one of the castle’s many balconies and opened them. The rain was growing softer already and the lightning had dimmed to erratic flickers in the slowly graying sky. Even as a child, she’d loved the storms that rushed in over the mountain lakes, unleashed their fury, and then blew away. They seldom lasted long.
But then, few things in life did. Everything was temporary. The important thing was to live in the present the best way you knew how. And Duncan had given her the opportunity to do that on a couple of levels. She enjoyed solving problems, the planning, the execution, even the point at which you claimed success and then could put them behind you. For years now, she’d structured her life around projects. Finish college, get into Georgetown Law, make law review. Since she’d worked for Abe, it had been one case after another.
This was the first break she’d had in a long time. Not that it was a break, really. She had two projects to work on. Find something that would put Patrick Lightman back in jail, and decide what to do about the intense, almost primitive attraction she and Duncan were feeling for each other.
She knew what she wanted to do about Duncan. And every time she got near him, she wanted to do it on the spot. No other man had ever tempted her that much or that urgently. But keeping her heart unentangled and fancy-free had been part of her game plan from the time she’d first noticed that boys weren’t so scruffy and annoying. During her college and law school years, she’d enjoyed a few relationships with men, but she’d never let them intrude on the rest of her life. If she and Duncan—what was the word he’d used? Explored—that was it. If they decided to explore what they were feeling, things were bound to get messy. Not only was there the family angle, but an attraction as consuming as the one she and Duncan were feeling might not be easily corked in a bottle.
Placing her palms on the balcony railing, she stared out over the garden as the sky slowly lightened. In the distance, she could see the dark gleam of the lake, quiet now and smooth, and she could see the stone arch. Two floodlights had been installed as part of the tightened security on the castle after a man going by the name of Nathan MacDonald had planted a bomb behind some stones in the arch.
Of course, she and her sisters had buried something very different there—a metal box that contained their goals and dreams. Piper grinned at the memory. It had been years since she’d even thought of the box that their mother had once kept her jewelry in.
When they were just kids, it had been Adair’s idea to write out their goals and dreams on slips of paper, put them in the box, and by burying it behind loose stones in the arch, tap into the power of the legend.
Piper’s addition to the scheme was that they each use different colored paper to ensure privacy. Then Nell had assigned the colors—yellow for Adair, blue for Piper and pink for Nell. For years they’d made a habit of sneaking out of the house late at night, digging up that box and slipping in new goals. The last time they’d done it had been on the night that their father had married Beth Sutherland.
Something stirred at the edges of her mind. If she hadn’t thought of the box in years, she certainly hadn’t thought of that night. But little flashes were coming back to her now. She and Nell and Adair had snuck out of the castle close to midnight with a bottle of champagne and pads of their appropriately colored paper. They’d raced a storm to the stones—and won. They’d toasted their success and their father’s wedding with the champagne, and then at Adair’s suggestion, they’d all agreed to write down an erotic encounter involving their ideal fantasy man.
That part she remembered. But with all the champagne she’d drunk that night and the fact that she’d buried the memory for so long, the details of her fantasy were fuzzy. She knew one thing. It had been the first and only time she’d ever written anything about a man and buried it in the stones. She felt a little stir of unease.
Hours earlier on that same day, she’d met Duncan’s eyes beneath those stones and she’d felt things she’d never experienced before. Had she been thinking of him when she’d written out her fantasy? Turning, she paced into her room. He’d certainly been on her mind that day. But she’d managed to avoid him. And he and his brothers had left to fly back to their respective colleges shortly after the ceremony. So she probably would have thought of anyone but him when she was composing her erotic fantasy.
Or she might have been thinking only of him. A mix of emotions moved through her—anticipation, excitement, panic. Lots of the other goals she’d tucked into that box had become a reality—starting with the medals she’d won in her elementary school’s yearly spelling bee and right up to and including her law degree at Georgetown.
Before she decided exactly what she and Duncan would explore, it would be good to know what she was dealing with. Discovery was essential before you built a case for trial. Gathering all the facts was equally important in making any intelligent decision. Ignorance could come back and bite you hard.
And there was no time like the present to find out exactly what her fantasy had been all those years ago. Turning back into her room, she found sweats and shoes in her suitcase and pulled them on. For a second, she thought of running down the stairs to the foyer and disarming the security system Vi had shown them.
But there was a quicker way to the stone arch. She wasn’t enamored of heights, especially if she had to climb down instead of up. But after the summer when the Sutherland boys had been focused on playing pirates on the cliffs and she’d discovered her fear, she’d worked on it by frequently climbing down to the garden from her balcony. Of course, her sisters had been with her then to silently cheer her on. And it had been a while since she’d practiced …
Her stomach took one, queasy roll as she threw her leg over the railing. Then she used the thick vines covering the stones to climb down. By the time she reached the ground, she was breathing hard and grinning in triumph. Then, in the growing morning light, she raced to the stone arch to find the metal box she and her sisters had buried their dreams and fantasies in.
AS PIPER REACHED THE CLEARING, the eastern sky was lightening and just the rim of a red sun could be seen peeking out over the tips of the pines across the lake. The stone arch that Angus—Eleanor Campbell MacPherson’s husband—had built lay at the far end of the garden. It was about ten feet long, eight feet or so wide and the ceiling arched to about ten feet. The fact that it had stood for more than two centuries testified to her several-times-great grandfather’s engineering and construction skills. It had even withstood a lightning strike about a month ago.
It didn’t take Piper long to find the box. The stones that concealed it in the niche were loose, as if they’d recently been replaced. By Adair, no doubt. Her older sister had been living here at the castle for more than six months. It was a good possibility she’d dug up the secret container they’d stored their fantasies and dreams in. It was about the size of a cigar box, made of metal, and it had a little padlock