Indiscretion (19 page)

She spoke to him under her breath. "Stop giving yourself airs, Sutherland."

He ignored her. "I've also been meaning to talk to the masoner about an estimate for the garden wall. And I've sketched a plan for the stables which I would like executed by next spring if possible."

She stood there, flabbergasted and abandoned, while he began to lead the workmen around the room, indicating which outrageously expensive repairs he deemed essential.

A four-inch plasterwork thunderbolt fell at her feet. Patrick glanc
ed back at her, raising his eye
brow. "A sign from the gods?" he said wryly. Then he turned back to the workmen, gesturing expansively. "Also, a sideboard recess in the dining room so that the servants aren't impaled every time a guest pulls back his chair."

"He's going to land me in the poorhouse," she said to herself.

"And," Patrick added, flicking a bit of plaster from his cuff, "I should like the dressing-room doors to her ladyship's bedchamber removed so that the two rooms open onto each other. Her husband should have free access to her, night and day."

And that remark left her entirely speechless. She backed into the wall as he turned to appraise her.

The hammering intensified all around her, the dogs were barking in the kennels, the workmen shouting at one another. Patrick, in complete control, was warning the plasterer to be careful when a thunderbolt broke from the frieze and fell on his head.

He looked up in astonishment. "Hell, man, you're going to give someone a brain contusion if you don't watch what you're doing."

Then he said something to Anne but she didn't hear him because she was laughing too hard. He'd looked so ridiculous with a plaster thunderbolt protruding from his head, and she knew in that instant that it was useless to keep fighting him. She loved him, right or wrong, saint or scoundrel, and she always would, even if it had taken a sign from the
gods for her to admit it. But realizing the truth did not help the situation nor did it guarantee a happy ending. She was no longer a giddy young girl who did not think beyond tomorrow.

"It's hopeless," she said, shaking her head.

He looked over at her with a puzzled grin. Perhaps he had an inkling of what she had just realized. Perhaps the truth showed on her face because he took a tentative step toward her, and she could see the glimmer of hope in his eyes. Then all of a sudden someone behind him shouted, and his startled gaze lifted from her face to the wall.

"Move."
His grin faded, and a look of panic crossed his face. "Anne, get away from the wall."

He looked so frightened that she instinctively obeyed him, moving forward a second before she felt something hard glance off her shoulder, and heard a crash on the floor behind her. Half turning, she saw an enormous stag's head sitting in the exact spot she had occupied a momen
t earlier. A cloud of dust settl
ed in the air.

Patrick brushed around her, apparently more shaken than she was by the accident. If he'd lived here longer though, he would have gotten used
to the faulty plu
mbing and insecure fixtures. He was right—David had never paid much attention to maintenance.

"Well," she said. "This really is our stag this time."

"Do you know what would have happened if you hadn't moved at that precise moment?" he demanded, his face gray.

Anne didn't answer; it seemed unlikely that she would have suffered more than a mild concussion. Workmen were crowding around them. The carpenter shouted at the plasterer that he was an idiot. Everyone asked her ladyship if she wanted to sit down, and before she could protest, chairs were shoved at her from all directions. She and Patrick had to brave a covert escape onto the terrace to hold a private conversation.

"A battleground is safer than that ballroom," he said grimly, grasping her hand.

She bit her lip against a smile. "Patrick?"

He frowned, glancing down into her face. "What?"

She stood on tiptoe, extending her free hand. "You still have bits of that thunderbolt in your hair. Hold still."

He smiled into her eyes as she gently brushed a bit of plaster from his face. "It is verra dangerous for you to touch me like that, Lady Whitehaven."

She dropped her hand, deliberately pulling him down the stairs into the garden. "I wasn't thinking."

"Do you remember what Black Mag predicted would happen next?" he asked quietly. The wind was scattering leaves across the flagstones. Something was brewing in the air, although there wasn't a cloud in sight. "The body," he said. "If you believe in such things as bone readings and gypsy prophecies."

Anne looked up at him. "Do you?"

He watched the wind lift her dark curly hair from
her shoulders. "I think it might be a good idea if we acted as though we did."

She shivered. "Whose body do you think she meant?"

"I don't know," he said. "But I believe the time has come to go back and ask her."

30

A
utumn spread a brilliant blue sky over the Grampian Hills in the week that followed. Deer foraged for toadstools on the forest carpet, and the heather faded to brown. Fewer and fewer bats flew at night, and it was whispered that the storm witches were starting to collect them to put in their cauldrons for their
geasons,
spells they would cast on All Hallows' Eve.

Anne complained that putting on this party was straining her nerves and her finances. Patrick informed her that she didn't know what nervous strain was until she had been her butler for a week.

And even though neither of them would admit it, they practically lived on pins and needles as they waited for the next part of Black Mag's prediction to come true. The gypsy had vanished from the area by the time Patrick found her family's wagon, and her daughter said Mag had left Scotland days ago to make her annual pilgrimage to France; she didn't
have her mother's powers, but she could cure impetigo.

Patrick made himself obnoxious as Anne's personal bodyguard and protector. Every night she caught him creeping around her room, and, unconsciously, they both started to look for bodies in the oddest places, even though the gypsy had said there would be water involved.

Anne dreaded opening her wardrobe and looking in the mirror. She began to awaken with a pounding heart from weird dreams of corpses and ghosts with glowing red eyes. Patrick scoffed at her, but the truth was he thought of skeletons a few times himself when he went to the pantry late at night to take care of his butler's business.

Once he almost gave Mrs. Forbes a genuine heart attack when he found her on the floor with a knife at her side and thought she was dead. She wasn't dead. She was looking for the onion she had dropped, but Patrick had given a shout of alarm that had been heard by the stags fighting in the hills.

Gra
ci
e suspected that Lady Whitehaven and her butler were under a strange bewitchment, and Sandy attributed their aberrant behavior to lovesickness, which could only come to a tragic end.

"The servants all think you're a pair of nincompoops," Nellwyn informed them. "Did I ever tell you Black Mag predicted Gracie would marry an Austrian prince and bear him six children?"

"So you're saying that she's a fraud and we shouldn't expect
to find a body?" Anne asked anx
iously as she walked across the ballroom to open
the new brocade draperies in what had become an obsessive daily ritual.

God only knew what she feared she would find outside the window. Perhaps someone impaled on the garden wall with a pair of stag's antlers, or a dead body in the
fountain. She did not turn a corn
er in this house anymore without holding her breath in anticipation of something awful appearing.

"I half hope we do find a body," Nellwyn said. "I'd hate to think I traveled all this way for nothing."

"That is morbid," Anne said. "A woman of your background should have better things to do than hope a murder has been committed."

"What exactly should a woman of my background do to entertain herself?" Nellwyn asked.
"I
cannot gamble. No one has made me an indecent proposal. You and Patrick, despite my best efforts, obviously haven't made a baby together to enliven the last years of my sad and lonely life and I have no offspring of my own."

Anne arched her brow. "Are you suggesting I bear Patrick's child to alleviate your boredom?"

"Either that or produce a dead body to appease her," Patrick said in a dry voice from the doorway.

Anne rubbed her forearms. "Black Mag said something about the body in water. It's so vague a warning, it could mean anything
…
a body in the rain."

"Or a bathtub," Nellwyn said. "My first husband drowned while drinking whiskey in the tub. It happens more often than you'd think."

"He drowned in his bath?" Patrick said in disbelief. "You never told me that."

"You never bothered to ask
,"
Nellwyn retorted. "Now stop trying to change the subject. We shall never solve this mystery if we don't put our brains together."

Anne moved away from the window. She could feel Patrick watching her
with that half-menacing,, half-
protective look that drew her toward him like a magnet even though she knew that, for her, he was the most dangerous man in the world. Oh yes, she could see why all the women in the neighborhood wanted his attention despite the fact they believed him to be a servant. A look like that from Patrick could give a woman wicked dreams for a month.

She paced in front of him. "A body in water. The millpond. A bath. The loch. A bu
rn
—"

"Perhaps the murderer is going to kill someone on the loch again this year," Nellwyn said. "Perhaps he hopes to make it an annual occurrence. The question is, who does he intend to rub out next?"

Anne stopped in her tracks. "Now I really shall not be able to sleep tonight."

"Why not?" Nellwyn said. "If my theory is correct, the next victim will be found in another boat, not a bed. Isn't that right, Sutherland?"

He stirred. "Isn't what right?"

"Were you listening to my theory?" Nellwyn said.

"About drinking whiskey in the bathtub?" he asked politely.

"You weren't listening," Nellwyn said.

"Yes, I was," he said, studying Anne through his lowered lids. "You have given me an idea, Auntie Nellwyn."

Anne looked up into his face, which she should have known would be a mistake. She felt a crackle of energy, a force go through her as if she had been sheared in half by lightning, and he obviously felt something too if she were to judge by the way he stiffened his shoulders in reaction and drew back against the door. Ever since that day in the ballroom, their antagonism had alchemized into an even more mysterious and unpredictable element. They stood on the verge of either making a permanent commitment or parting ways forever.

"Well, are you going to share your brilliant idea with us or not?" she asked, half afraid he would do just that.

"No." There was a chilling edge to his voice, and she felt faint for a moment, instinct warning her that if whatever he planned involved a dead body, she really didn't want to know the rest.

His smile never reached his eyes. "I am not telling you anything."

N
aturally, she and Nellwyn took his vow of secrecy as a challenge. Yet in the next few days, Patrick did not drop a single clue as to what plan he had devised, no matter how deeply the two women probed. In fact, Anne kept thinking that their quest was rather like digging up a grave. Sooner or later, she knew she was bound to find something and it wasn't going to be a pleasant discovery.

"What is he up to?" she and Nellwyn asked each other twenty times a day, intrigued by the way he
would disappear at the oddest times without an explanation.

"Patrick is a grown man," Nellwyn said. "He fought in the infantry, and he knows how to take care of himself."

But on the third night of his mysterious behavior, when he never slept in his bed, Anne felt sick to her stomach and couldn't eat the breakfast he served the next morning, studying the lines of fatigue around his mouth.

"Busy night?" she snapped, burning her tongue on a sip of scalding tea.

"Busy enough." His dark gaze moved over her, curious and amused. "Did you miss me?"

"Why would I miss you?"

"Oh, I don't know."

She wanted to pick a quarrel. She hadn't slept a wink worrying about where he was, who he was with. "What makes you think I missed you?"

He straightened his cravat, studying her through half-closed eyes. "You were in my room looking for me.
"

"Only because you didn't sleep in your bed all night," she retorted. "Just because I thought you might have been murdered doesn't mean I
missed
you."

"Aye. It does."

"You stayed out all night." Anne hadn't wanted him
to know she'd been checking on hi
m, to give him evidence that she cared, but she couldn't stop herself. "Where were you?"

He leaned over the sofa and kissed her on the
nose. "I can't tell you now, but you'll find out in due time. And don't expect me back tonight, either. I do, however, appreciate your concern."

If she had any hopes of following him, she soon found her efforts thwarted. Not only did he sneak out when she wasn't looking, but he had apparently commissioned the other servants to watch over her. Everywhere she went, she sensed a shadow; the staff seemed to have been given certain shifts of duty to cover for Patrick's mysterious comings and goings.

Mrs. Forbes pretended to go on a sewing binge whenever Anne settled in the drawing room
.
Curtains, tablecloth, napkins. The housekeeper stitched up invisible tears while keeping an eye on Anne all the while.

Sandy attached himself to Anne like a limpet when she attempted to take a brief morning ride. He brought along a fowling-piece "for protection" and made her so nervous that she returned to the house and locked herself in the library.

Even when she went to bed that night, Gracie stood guard at her door with her feather duster.

Anne sighed. "What are you doing, Gracie?"

"Obeying orders, ma'am."

"Obeying orders. May I ask what those orders might be?"

Gracie lowered her voice. "I'm to keep all suspicious persons ou
t of your room while Mr. Suther
land is away. Fergus takes the next shift."

"I see." She paused. "What are you supposed to do if they try to force their way inside, dust them to death?"

Graci
e gave a shiver. "I'm to shout for help, ma'am."

"Go about your regular duties, Gracie. The guests will be arriving in three days, and the east wing is still in shambles."

"But Mr. Sutherland said—"

"Am I in charge of this household, Gracie, or is Mr. Sutherland?"

"Well, you are, my lady. Surely you dinna need to ask."

Despite this reassurance, it did not escape Anne's notice how unsure of her answer the girl sounded, and for that matter, Anne wasn't convinced herself that when it came to anything in her life, from her servants to her heart, she wielded more than a superficial control at all.