Pounding…pounding…pounding.
The stink of blood beckoned him. Fear fluttered in his knees. He held on to his sanity by a thread. Something was wrong. He needed to protect her. Emma. Mama. He needed to save her.
Use the knife.
A red-tinged mist clouded his mind. Past, present, future, swirling together in the haze inside his head.
Pain throbbed. Pounded. Dair glanced toward the stone fireplace to see the dark-haired woman lying prone on the floor, her blue eyes wide and sightless, a spreading pool of blood beneath her.
Pounding…pounding…pounding.
“Dair! I need you. Dair!”
Emma.
He lifted a bloodstained finger to his temple, traced the faint scar. The knife. Not a knife. A dirk. This dirk. This same Highlander’s dagger buried in his mother’s heart.
Pressure…building…building…building…
“Dair! Please! Help me!”
Emma. He fought his way through the pain. Back. Back to Emma.
He moved on sluggish feet away from the image in his mind and back to reality in the room across the breezeway. Emma no longer stood beside her wounded father. He jerked his head around, ignoring the crush of pain. Trace, his eyes closed, his body still on the bed.
Emma, her back against the man who restrained her with one arm around her waist and the jeweled dirk to her throat. Gray hair…but that was wrong. Black. It should be black like his. Eyes. Gray eyes.
Mine?
His.
Pain and pressure. Pounding…pounding…pounding.
The Scottish burr flew like an arrow out of Dair’s past. “Hold still, m’dear, or I’ll gut you like a mackerel.”
Burst.
Like water through a broken dam, memories gushed into Dair’s consciousness. Past and present slipped into their proper places as the mist cleared. The pain disappeared as though it had never been. The memories…the horrible, terrible memories…remained.
Dair met Hamish Campbell’s gray-eyed gaze and said, “Hamish Campbell, I presume?”
“Why don’t you use the more appropriate term? You should call me Father.”
E
MMA GASPED
.
H
IS FATHER
?
Dair entered the room slowly, his expression cold and distant. His gaze, however, was razor-sharp, and Emma felt a rush of relief. His headache must be gone. Good. Although, that changed her plan. She’d followed Campbell’s instructions and called him because if this headache had followed the path of the others, he wouldn’t have responded. She’d figured Campbell would drag her toward the doorway and thus closer to the rocking chair where Logan had left her father’s gun. She’d hoped to distract him with a scream, then lunge for the weapon.
Instead, he was standing tall and strong and stable, not sparing her a glance as he shrugged casually and said, “You may be the sonofabitch who raped my mother, but you are not my father.”
Oh, Dair,
Emma thought.
Campbell’s silver eyes went warm. “You’re wrong. It wasn’t rape. Roslin wanted me, she always did. Not that brawny farmer she’d agreed to marry. David Gordon had nothing to offer her. Nothing! I did her a favor when I arranged for his accident.”
“So you did kill him. My mother wondered about that.”
“I loved her, and she’d have loved me, too, if not for him.”
“You’re insane.”
“No. My beautiful Roslin…she’s the one who couldn’t see clearly. Because of the Prize. Because she was the guardian. She thought I wanted the treasure, but I didn’t even know it existed then. It was her I wanted. It was always Roslin. I never quit looking for her after she disappeared from Scotland. I didn’t even know about the Prize until I happened across a painting of that unique dagger of hers in a book and asked Robbie Potter to translate the text for me. I was thrilled when I traced her to Texas. I loved her!”
“She hated you.”
“No! She didn’t understand we were meant to be together. Besides, you can’t know how your mother felt. You were a young child.”
“I’ve read the letters she wrote to a friend back in Scotland.”
Bess, Emma thought. His mother must have written to Bess.
“I know exactly how she felt about you and about my father.”
Emma darted her gaze toward her father. He wasn’t moving. Oh, God. She had to get to him fast!
Dair came a step closer and Campbell shifted his hand, angling the knife so that the point rested just above her heart, ready to plunge. “Tell me where the treasure is, MacRae, or she’s dead. I’ve earned it. You know I’ll not hesitate to kill.”
“Let her go, Campbell. She needs to tend to her father. You and I can discuss this outside.”
The villain’s hold upon her remained tight. “No, I think we’ll do it here.” The knife tip poked through her dress, into her skin.
“I don’t know where the treasure is,” Dair snapped, moving two steps to the right.
“Yes, you do.” Hamish shifted also, turning to keep Emma in place as his shield. “Don’t play this game, son. It’s making me angry. You more than anyone should know what a fearsome thing my anger can be. Roslin would be alive today if she hadn’t sparked my anger by throwing that dagger at me, using it against me again, just like she had the night I made love to her.”
“The night you raped her. And I am not your son!”
“Yes, you are.” The Scotsman smiled and said softly, “She told me so as she lay dying. She also told me you knew how to find the Prize. I suspect she thought the news would prevent me from killing you. She didn’t realize I thought I already had. I knocked you hard into the fireplace. Your head hit the stone with a thunk.”
Emma’s pulse pounded. She glanced significantly toward her father’s gun, hoping Dair would get her message and distract him enough so that she could dive for the weapon.
“It was quite a surprise when you sat down at my card table in Edinburgh,” Campbell continued. “It was like looking at myself in a mirror thirty years ago. Then when you said your name, mentioned Texas, I knew. You look just like me.”
“David Gordon was your cousin. I look like him.”
Did Dair see Papa’s gun on the chair? She stared at him hard, willing him to see it.
“You lost the town house to me on purpose, didn’t you?” Dair asked coldly, taking another step right. “You had me followed.”
“Don’t move another inch!” The arm holding Emma tightened its grip. “Tell me where the treasure is!”
“Let Emma go.” For the first time since entering the room, Dair gazed directly at her. He had a message in his eyes, but what was it?
“That would be a foolish move on my part. You love her, don’t you, son? You’ll give me the Sisters’ Prize to save her. A man will do anything to protect his lover.”
“As will fathers,” came a pain-wracked voice from behind them.
Papa, Emma thought just as a deafening blast ripped through the air.
Force propelled Emma forward, knocking her to the floor. A silent scream welled up inside her when blood and bits of matter spattered against her like dirty rain. Dazed, trapped by a heavy weight, she couldn’t move. What…?
Then the weight was ripped off her, and she was swept up into Dair’s arms. His voice shaking, desperate, he demanded, “Emma, are you hurt? Emma? Are you shot?”
Unable to force a word past her throat, she shook her head.
“Oh, God. Thank God.” Nevertheless, his frantic fingers searched her. Then the tension he’d held at bay shuddered out of him as he clutched her hard against him. He cursed and groaned and muttered, “I thought you’d been hit…I thought…you went down…oh, God. I love you, Emma.”
“Love you.” Though it felt like forever, mere seconds passed before panic lifted the fog from Emma’s mind and she cried, “Papa.”
She and Dair turned simultaneously to her father. Dair spat a curse and Emma’s heart dropped to her feet. Her father lay on his back, his eyes closed, his complexion ashen. Blood ran steadily from the wound across his shoulder, turning the bedsheet red beneath him. They flew to help him, working together quickly to staunch the flow of blood. She didn’t have time to think or to acknowledge her terror.
She lost track of how long they waited with her father. She blocked out everything but the desperate effort to keep him alive. At some point—whether minutes or hours she couldn’t say—Emma vaguely noted the pound of horses’ hooves, the thunder of boots on the dogtrot, her mother’s frightened cry at her first sight of Trace. When the doctor stepped up to the bedside, Dair gently pulled Emma away. “C’mon, Texas. Let the doctor do his job.”
He escorted her toward the door where her sisters hovered, their expressions anxious. Mari took a handkerchief from her pocket and tears spilled from her eyes as she cleaned Emma’s face. Then the three sisters fell into one another’s arms, crying, questioning and keeping vigil for the first man all of them had loved.
D
AIR NODDED TO
L
OGAN
. “Help me drag the carcass out of the way, would you?”
The two men dragged Hamish Campbell’s corpse from the room and dumped it on the ground behind the cabin. Logan nodded toward a golden chain that had fallen from the dead man’s shirt pocket. “Look at that.”
Dair picked up Emma’s ruby pendant. The chain was dirty and dulled with blood, and he spared the corpse not a glance as he carried the necklace toward the shallow, clear creek that flowed behind the house. He knelt on one knee and dipped the jewelry into the water, then used a handkerchief from his pocket to clean it with a careful hand.
Jake Kimball spoke from behind him. “You ready to talk about it?”
No.
“How is the old man?”
“He’s a mess,” Luke Garrett said. “Lost a lot of blood. The doctor’s stitching him up now.”
“He’ll make it?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Too damned ornery not to. But he’s weak as a sick kitten, and he’ll need to keep his ass in bed. The doctor says y’all saved his life by keeping pressure on the shoulder.”
“What happened in there, MacRae?” Luke asked.
For a long moment, Dair didn’t speak, but instead focused on the task of cleaning the necklace. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. Didn’t want to think about it. Yet he could think of nothing else.
“He put a knife to Emma’s throat,” he confessed in a low tone. “Demanded I tell him where to find the treasure or he’d kill her.”
Luke, Jake and Logan all muttered foul curses.
“Trace played possum on the bed, thank God, and he had a pistol stashed in his boot. Soon as he had a clear shot, he took it.”
“As a father-in-law, Trace McBride might be a pain in the ass, but he’ll damn sure go to the wall for his loved ones,” Jake said.
Luke nodded, then asked, “So who was this piece of vermin? Emma babbled something to her sisters about a family connection?”
“He goddamned wasn’t my father!” Dair snapped. “My mother was already pregnant when he attacked her.” He told the other men an abbreviated version of the story, completing the puzzle in his own mind as he talked. “I’m not positive how he found us in Texas, but I suspect he tracked us through my mother’s family. We lived with her uncle the first couple years, I recall. Then he died and his widow returned to Scotland.”
Luke asked about the necklace. “He was able to steal Emma’s necklace because he knew the house,” Dair replied, rubbing his thumb over the engravings on the stone.
Damned voyeur.
“He admitted to having me watched, which must be how he learned about the Highland Riever. I think he set the law on us because he didn’t want us getting to the treasure before him.”
“How do you know all of this?”
Dair glanced up at the sound of the voice to see that Logan had joined the other two men in the conversation. He carried a shovel propped over one shoulder and held two others in his left hand. Dair met his gaze and slowly shook his head. “I remembered it, Lucky. Believe it or not, I remembered everything.”
“Everything?” the men asked simultaneously.
“Almost everything.” Dair nodded slowly. “I need to see that watercolor again.”
E
MMA SAT ON THE FRONT PORCH
steps of the cabin, a sister on either side, eavesdropping on the conversation between their parents as it drifted through the cabin’s open window. Now that was a love that was powerful, vigilant and true, she thought as she heard her mother’s soft laughter in response to one of her father’s silly comments. Theirs was the kind of love she’d always dreamed of having herself.
Concentrating on her parents, she startled when she heard Dair ask, “Will you walk with me, Emma?”
Glancing toward the sound, she saw the other men round the corner of the cabin behind Dair. They must have finished burying the body.
“Walk?” she repeated, her dismay evident. She was exhausted. All she wanted to do was go back to the hotel and take a bath and crawl into bed and pull the covers up over her head.
He offered her a tender smile. “A short walk. It isn’t far.”
“What isn’t far?”
He moved to stand in front of her, then he held out his hand. “Please?”
Still, she hesitated. He had a purposeful look about him, as if he had something of import to discuss. Emma simply didn’t think she had the energy for import. “I’m tired, Dair.”
“All right, then. I’ll carry you.” Before she quite knew what had happened, he’d lifted her up into his arms and strode away from the cabin.
Emma had no more energy to struggle than she did for an important discussion, so she decided she might as well settle back and enjoy the moment. After all, how many such opportunities might she have left?
Dair didn’t speak as he carried her through the forest. Emma closed her eyes and rested her head against his shoulder. The anger that had simmered in her heart since their visit to Dr. Daggett had evaporated sometime between the knife and the gunshot. Now she was…empty. No more anger. No frustration. No hope.
“Here we are.” He set her down on a patch of green grass no larger than five steps across. It was a curious spot, surrounded by trees but sunny and lush. Patches of wildflowers encircled the circumference of the plot, but other than nature’s beauty, Emma saw nothing to distinguish the spot from any other in the forest.