When she reached the half-ajar door of her uncle’s study, she was surprised to hear the deep rumble of male voices.
She crept closer, wondering who would be thoughtless enough to intrude at such a delicate time. But before she could identify the unfamiliar baritone, her uncle’s voice rang out. “Is that you, Catriona? Do join us. The gentleman and I have concluded our private business.”
Catriona slipped into the study, startled to discover that the
gentleman
lounging in the brass-studded leather chair across from her uncle’s desk was none other than the Marquess of Eddingham himself. He looked far more composed than her cousin. His dark eyes were clear, his cool smile untainted. He revealed no overt signs of a broken heart, deepening Catriona’s suspicion that he had always possessed more affection for Alice’s ample dowry than for Alice herself.
With both his heavy jowls and the bags beneath his eyes drooping, her uncle looked more heartbroken than either Alice or the marquess. Catriona couldn’t really blame him.
Finding the scandal-prone Alice a husband had been no easy task.
Her uncle beckoned her into the room. “I believe you made my niece’s acquaintance at Lady Stippler’s soiree last month,” he said.
Eddingham rose, an artful arrangement of raven curls falling over his brow as he sketched her a flawless bow. “Always a pleasure, Miss Kincaid. Even under these trying circumstances.”
He was a handsome man, she supposed, if you fancied the dark, brooding sort. “I’m afraid my cousin can be rather rash and impetuous,” she said. “I assure you that it’s a reflection on her character, not yours.”
“Perhaps it was for the best.” He sighed, striking just the right note of tragic resignation.
“I’ve suspected for some time that our temperaments might not be suited.” As Catriona chose a brocaded stool to spread her skirts upon, he settled back into his chair. “Your uncle Ross and I were just discussing the many other interests we have in common. A fondness for fine horseflesh. A love of the land.” His hawkish gaze lingered on her face.
“The pleasure of a good challenge. Tell me, Miss Kincaid, are you and your uncle any relation to the Scottish Kincaids?”
“Why, yes!” Catriona blurted out, startled by the unexpected question.
“I should say not,” her uncle rumbled at the precise same moment, drowning out her reply. “Our branch of the family has been sturdy English stock for decades.”
Barely one decade in her case, Catriona thought, helping herself to a crumpet from the tea tray in the hopes that its buttery sweetness would take the edge off of the bitter taste in her mouth.
Eddingham took a genteel sip of his tea. “I was curious because I’ve just purchased a large tract of land in the Highlands near Balquhidder. My financial advisers tell me there’s a fortune to be made there in Cheviot sheep.”
Her uncle ran a thumb along the edge of his leather desk blotter, suddenly having great difficulty meeting Eddingham’s eyes. “So I’ve heard.”
“I was able to purchase the land from the Crown for little more than a song because for years it’s been plagued by a pesky band of outlaws led by a man calling himself the Kincaid.”
Catriona tried to swallow, but the crumpet had crumbled to sawdust in her throat.
The marquess favored her with an indulgent smile. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to learn that this rogue and his kin are no relation to such a lovely young lady.”
“Has anyone ever seen this notorious outlaw?” she asked lightly, pouring herself a cup of tea to hide the sudden trembling of her hands.
The marquess didn’t look nearly so handsome with his thin upper lip curled into a sneer.
“I’m afraid not. He prefers to skulk in the shadows like the bullying coward he is. In the past year he’s vanished completely, as men of his ilk so often do. If he’s not already dead, we’ll flush him and his men out when the spring thaw begins. I’ve English troops at my disposal only too eager for the task.”
Thundering feet. Red-coated figures looming out of the darkness. A blaze of light, then choking
blindness. Staccato gunfire. A man’s bellow of anguish as he threw himself across his wife’s
limp body. Then nothing but the ghostly creaking of a rope as it swung in stark relief against
the moonlit sky. Burying her tear-streaked face in her brother’s shirt, trying to blot out a sight
forever etched in both their memories.
Catriona’s own voice seemed to come from very far away. From that misty Highland night when her parents had died at the ruthless hands of the English soldiers. “Would you care for some more tea, my lord?”
Eddingham held out his cup to her. “Why, I’d be delighted.”
Her lips frozen in a numb smile, Catriona tipped the spout of the silver teapot an inch past his cup, pouring a stream of lukewarm tea into his lap.
Biting off an oath, Eddingham shot to his feet.
“Catriona!” her uncle barked, pounding on the desk. “What in the devil has got into you, girl? I would have expected that from Georgina, but it’s not like you to be so ham-handed!”
Catriona’s gracious smile didn’t waver as she gently rested the teapot back on the tray and handed the marquess a linen serviette. “Forgive me, my lord,” she said smoothly. “I promise to take greater care in the future.”
“That would be well advised, Miss Kincaid,” Eddingham said through clenched teeth, dabbing at the unsightly stain spreading across the front placket of his buff trousers.
Tossing the towel back on the tray, he forced his grimace into a smile and sketched her uncle a curt bow. “If you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, my lord, I’d best retire to my town house to make the necessary repairs.”
While her uncle escorted Eddingham to the door, Catriona remained on the ottoman, her hands folded serenely on her lap—the very portrait of a dutiful niece. But the minute the door closed behind their guest she surged to her feet to face her uncle, the study becoming a smoldering trench in a battle of long standing.
She rested her hands on her hips, glaring at him. “I can’t believe you’re still denying your own kin! Didn’t you hear the man? He plans to hunt down what’s left of them like wild game as soon as the mountain snows thaw. What if this ‘Kincaid’ he speaks of is my brother and your very own nephew?”
“All the more reason to deny him! Didn’t you hear Eddingham?” Her uncle sought refuge behind his desk, putting it between them like a shield. “This fellow is an outlaw, a thief, a highwayman who robs innocent folk for his own gain. He’s naught but a common criminal whose only possible destiny is to end up dangling from a hangman’s noose.”
Catriona stiffened. “Just like your brother?”
Her uncle shuffled through a thick sheaf of papers, his face still hard but his eyes softened by an old grief. “Your father chose his own fate.”
“As did yours,” she said, reminding him of the devil’s bargain her grandfather had struck with the English. A bargain that had saved his life but cost him his clan’s land and soul.
“But because I’m a woman I’m not free to choose mine.”
He tossed the papers back down on the desk. “And just what fate would you choose, Catriona?”
She stepped closer to the desk, leaning over to brace both palms upon its gleaming mahogany top. “I want to return to Scotland to search for my brother.”
Her uncle simply gazed at her for a long moment before saying softly, “If Connor was this outlaw…if he was still alive, don’t you think he would have tried to contact you by now? He was fifteen years old when he sent you to me and he’s had ten long years to practice his penmanship.”
Catriona had expected her uncle to counter her demand with fury and bluster or perhaps even mocking laughter. Logic was the one weapon she was not prepared to parry.
“Perhaps he thought I’d be better off if I forgot our life in Scotland. Forgot him.”
“Then he was right. But the one thing you should never forget is that he sent you to me so you could have a better life.”
“He sent me to you because he believed it was the only way to
save
my life after the redcoats shot our mother and hanged our father.”
“And you expect me to send you back so they can murder you as well? I think not.” He snorted. “Your father’s head was full of clouds and dreams too. He stood right where you’re standing today, his eyes blazing with righteous indignation, and demanded that my father allow him to travel to Scotland and try to reunite the Kincaid clan. When he was refused, he defied my father’s wishes and snuck away in the dead of night. He abandoned the wealthy fiancée my father had chosen for him and ended up wedding some penniless Highland chit. We never saw him again.” Her uncle shook his head.
“Davey threw away everything to chase some ridiculous dream. I won’t allow you to make the same mistake.”
Catriona straightened. “I’ll be twenty-one in three months and can go wherever I choose.” She allowed the faintest hint of a lilt to creep into her speech, knowing it would gall her uncle more than any words she could utter. “Aye, Uncle Roscommon,” she said, calling him by the name no one else in the family dared to use. “I’ll be free to pursue my own destiny then and I’ll walk all the way to the Highlands to find Connor and my clan if need be!”
Catriona realized too late that her open rebellion had been a mistake. Her uncle’s broad face went ruddy, betraying his Scots heritage more effectively than any burr. He wagged a sturdy finger at her. “That you won’t,
lass
. Because I’m doubling your dowry and I’m going to wed you to the next man who walks through that door and asks for your hand.
He’ll bed you, get you with child and then you’ll be too busy practicing your scales on the pianoforte and pasting pretty seashells on colored paper to pursue this idiotic notion of yours!”
To her horror, Catriona felt tears sting her eyes. “I’ve always been grateful for your charity, Uncle, and I can understand why you might wish to be rid of such a cumbersome burden. But I never dreamed that you could despise me so much.”
Although she wanted nothing more than to burst into tears and storm out of the room just as Alice would have done, she forced herself to turn and walk calmly out the door, her head held high.
As the door closed behind his niece, Ross Kincaid sank heavily into his chair. After his younger brother had defied their father’s wishes and run off to Scotland, their father had ordered that every likeness of him be taken down and burned. But Ross needed no sketches or portraits to remember his brother. Catriona—with her unruly strawberry blond curls, obstinate chin, and misty gray eyes—was Davey’s living, breathing image.
He would never forget the day the mail coach from Edinburgh had dumped her on his doorstep—a thin, bedraggled creature with enormous gray eyes and a thick thatch of curls falling in her face. Her only possessions had been the clothes she wore on her back and the ragged plaid wrapped around her shoulders. Despite the hungry gleam in her eyes and the dirt smudging her fair cheeks, she had alighted from the back of the mail coach as if she were arriving at Buckingham Palace to take tea with the King.
His lips curved in a reluctant smile at the memory. In truth, he didn’t despise his niece.
He loved her. Loved her enough to marry her to a man she did not love if it would keep her safe in England. Keep her from making the same fatal mistakes her father had made.
Ross drew a small gold key from his waistcoat pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. He reached inside, his normally steady hand trembling faintly as he drew out a yellowing bundle of letters tied with a ragged bit of string, all addressed in an awkward masculine scrawl to a Miss Catriona Kincaid. He turned them over in his hands, studying the unbroken wax seals through troubled eyes.
He hadn’t lied to his niece, Ross told himself, ignoring the acid burn of guilt in his gut.
The letters from her brother had stopped arriving over three years before. The boy must surely be dead.
He tucked the bundle of letters back into the drawer, slid the drawer shut and turned the key, locking his secrets away along with all of his regrets.
When Catriona emerged from her uncle’s study, her eyes still burning with unshed tears, the last sight she expected to see was the Marquess of Eddingham leaning lazily against the opposite wall.
He held up his ornately carved cane in a white-gloved hand. “I forgot my walking stick.”
The glitter of amusement in his eyes warned her that he had overheard the entire conversation, including her uncle’s threat to double her dowry and marry her off to the first man who asked for her hand.
She dashed a stray tear from her cheek, sensing that it wouldn’t be wise to betray any trace of weakness in front of this man. “Have you forgotten your way to the front door as well? Shall I ring for one of the footmen to show you out?” she asked pointedly.
He straightened, looming over her in the shadowy corridor. “That won’t be necessary.
However, you might want to inform your uncle that I’ll be away on business for the next few days but that I have every intention of calling on you as soon as I return on Monday afternoon. You might also wish to tell him that I’d like a word with him then. In private.”
Catriona remained frozen in place as Eddingham reached to drag his gloved thumb over the curve of her cheek, the motion no more a caress than the warning flicker of a cobra’s tongue.
He leaned closer, the warmth of his breath an unwelcome intimacy against her ear.