He donned his boots at the bottom of the stairs then walked quietly along the flagstones to the kitchen. He found the shotgun Mahindar had hidden in the butler’s pantry, and shells in a drawer high in a kitchen cupboard.
Mahindar was nowhere in sight, the family taking a well-deserved sleep. The likeliest person Elliot would encounter was McGregor, who sometimes wandered the house at night, but even he remained upstairs and quiet.
A cool breeze met Elliot when he stepped out the back door, but he didn’t bother fetching a coat. He could wrap up in his kilt if need be.
A fox called in the distance, followed by the noise of small animals scurrying for cover. At the end of the garden, just outside the gate, Elliot stopped and loaded the gun, tucking spare shells into his sporran, along with the tin of biscuits he’d found in the cupboard next to the shells. He kept the gun open, slung over his arm.
He started along the path that would take him to the footbridge that led over the river to Rossmoran land. He and Juliana had used this route to return to the house that evening.
As Elliot walked, he relived the tactile sensations of being with Juliana—he inside her, she squeezing down without knowing she did it, the cushion of her br**sts against his chest. He also remembered the delicious feeling of her tongue on his cock. Her hesitant little licks and kisses, growing bolder by the second, had him nearly crazed with need.
She was too innocent yet for the things he wanted to do with her. Her well-meaning stepmother had taught her that a man bedded his wife using one position, did his business quickly, and disappeared back to his club and his mistresses. Elliot would have to teach her that this was not necessarily so. Besides, he had no intention of spending days at a stifling club with hidebound men, nor did he intend taking a mistress. What idiot would, when he had Juliana?
Elliot reached the footbridge and the path that led to the steep hill where he and Juliana had climbed from the tunnels. He picked his way along, the moonlight giving him no need for a lantern.
The hill curved around into the fold of the valley, another hill rising beyond it. Elliot knew there must be more entrances to the tunnels—the McGregors of old would not have allowed themselves to be bottled inside if their enemies found and blocked one. He walked to the next hill, where trees began to rise around him again.
The woods went quiet, the watcher back.
Elliot snapped the shotgun closed and cocked it. “Come on out and face me,” he said, voice loud in the still air. “If I like what you say, I might not shoot you.”
Chapter 15
Silence. An owl hooted far, far away.
Only one man in Elliot’s experience could track him in this way. But he was dead, gone, buried, forgotten by the world. Unfair that he was forgotten, because he’d been amazingly good at what he did, but the world was like that.
Stacy had to be dead. When Mahindar had told Elliot about the man’s death, Elliot had accepted the story as plausible, because Stacy had been volatile and tended to provoke people.
Equally plausible was that Stacy had provoked Elliot, and Elliot had throttled him. Mahindar could have invented the story of Stacy dying in Lahore to spare Elliot—Mahindar was forever trying to spare Elliot.
The fact that Elliot had no memory of murdering Stacy meant nothing. He had no memory of many things, and Elliot had learned so well to be an expert at killing.
The watcher displayed skills very familiar to Elliot—he’d taught Stacy most of them.
Elliot was being stalked by a dead man. Or a man who was supposed to be dead and was not. Elliot still lived some of his days sunk in confusion, but his instincts, honed by months of animal-like existence, told him truths that his reason could not grasp.
“If I’m right,” Elliot said to the night, “then tell your friends I didn’t kill you. Keep them the hell away from me and my wife.”
Wind sighed in the trees, last year’s leaves scuttling in the dirt. It was dry now, no rain for days.
Elliot spoke again, keeping his voice level, no shouting. “If you’re trying to take the child, I’m not letting her go to you. Priti is mine, and she’s staying with me.”
Silence. The watcher apparently did not intend to speak.
Elliot walked closer to the spot where he thought the next opening to the tunnels lay and set the tin of biscuits on a rock. “If you try to live off the land, someone will report you to the constable as a poacher. I’ll have my lad bring you some food.”
Still, nothing. The wind sighed again, and in the next instant, Elliot knew the watcher was gone.
He’d heard no branch moving, no twig breaking. Stacy was almost as good a tracker as Elliot. That had been the basis of the men’s friendship at first.
Elliot waited for a long time after that. The noises of the woods returned to normal again, but not until the moon had moved well behind the hills in the west did Elliot snap open the gun and tramp back the way he’d come.
The next morning, Juliana emerged from bathing and dressing in the bedchamber to find the lower hall filled with men wanting work.
Hamish had spread the word with a vengeance. Men of all ages, shapes, and sizes had come from Highforth village and the outlying farms, from sturdy lads who should have been in school all the way to a stooped elderly man who’d come to give his decided opinions on everything. They’d arrived to put McGregor’s house right.
Mahindar was a bit nonplussed about how he would feed them all, but Juliana had Hamish run to the village and see what he could find. Not only that, the farmers and crofters brought things with them—chickens, eggs, a nanny goat, cheese, bread, ale—gifts for the new laird and his lady.
Priti liked the goat, even though it immediately found and ate one of Channan’s pretty silk scarves. The animal looked quite innocent when the discovery was made, despite the bit of indigo silk sticking out the side of its mouth.
McGregor sat down outside with the elderly man to chat and smoke a pipe with him, while Mahindar and Channan ran about the kitchen, Nandita tried to hide from all the strange men, and Priti played with her new friend the goat.
The day before, Juliana had begun lists of what needed to be done, but her round of calls, followed by climbing through the tunnels with Elliot and making love all evening, had kept her from finishing them. Mahindar’s voice sounded down the passage as he tried to keep order, and Komal busied herself following people about and giving commands no one understood.
As Juliana tried to decide what they should do first, Elliot calmly walked in and took over.
He set men to repairing the roof, some to repairing windows, some to finding the wires and pulleys of the bell system, and some simply to cleaning. He gave orders clearly and without fuss, asking which would be the best men to do each job.