Douglas drew back. She looked at him carefully. He glared at her. “Dammit, do you really believe that’s why I’m asking?”
Her face went pale. “I don’t know! I’m sorry. I’m a wee bit distracted right now. Please get dressed. Then we can talk some more.”
He shook her lightly. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you upset?”
“Because you won’t do me the simple favor of covering your handsome behind and coming to sit by the fire! Is that too much to ask?”
She was trembling now. He stared hard into her golden eyes, and a terrible sense of foreboding swept over him. “Elgiva?” he said slowly, demanding explanations.
“Oh, Douglas, my dearest—” Her voice broke. Shaking her head, she raised both hands and stroked his face gently. “You’ve been so wonderful tonight. I wish it could go on forever.”
“It can, El, it can.”
Sam leapt up and ran to the outer room, growling. Elgiva gasped and began tugging at Douglas’s hands. “Get dressed! Oh, please, get dressed!”
Douglas stared at her in horrified understanding. “Someone’s here,” he accused numbly. “You set me up.”
“No, I swear, I didn’t mean it to be that way! I forgot to use the radio—you and I, we were busy, you remember, and then we fell asleep! And when I woke up, I remembered to call my people, but it was too late! They think something’s gone wrong!”
Sam was barking ferociously now. Bitter with betrayal, Douglas pushed Elgiva aside and grabbed his clothes. “I’m getting out of here and taking you with me, doll, and I’m going to make you wish you’d never played me for a fool.”
“I wasn’t trying to trap you again!”
“Save the lies for your fairy tales.”
There was a crash as the door burst open in the other room. Elgiva started from the bed. Douglas snatched her to him, then pinned her around the waist with one arm. Sam backed into the room, snarling.
A half-dozen men burst in, carrying guns and walking sticks. They wore dark clothes and ski masks, but from the variety of old weapons and far-from-athletic bodies Douglas surmised that they weren’t professionals at this kind of adventure.
“No, no, no!” Elgiva screamed as they surrounded the bed, guns pointing at Douglas’s head. “Calm down!”
A tall, muscular man, apparently the leader and certainly the only one who looked both athletic and deadly, made a throaty sound of rage. “Let her go,” he snarled at Douglas.
Douglas considered the fact that he was sitting in Elgiva’s bed naked and that, quite possibly, the tall man was a close relative of Elgiva’s. “I think she’s all that stands between me and certain death,” he observed. Douglas tightened his arm around Elgiva’s middle. “I’m not going to hurt her. Back off.”
“Please,” Elgiva begged. “He’s not going anywhere. Don’t start a fight. Just make him go back to the cell.”
“What has he done to you?” the leader asked in a thick Scottish burr. “If he’s harmed you in any way, tell me.”
“No, no, he hasn’t done anything but escaped.”
A man who looked like a fat, hooded wrestler brandished an old shotgun. “He escaped right to your bed, I see! And he looks to be at home there!”
“Is that true?” the tall man asked Elgiva, sounding distraught. “You didn’t let the bastard out on purpose, did you?”
“No!”
“She did, she did!” the shorter man insisted. “I can see the guilty look on her face! She’s betrayed us all!”
“Don’t be a fool!” the other man retorted. “She’s been forced into something, can’t you see? And she knew we’d come when she didn’t use the radio!”
“He escaped, but he stayed for my sake!” Elgiva cried. “I could have told him to run when I realized that you were on your way, but I didn’t do it!”
Disappointment made a hard, unyielding fist in Douglas’s chest. Loyalty and honesty were the two things he cherished most about his family, about anyone who became important to him. In a cutthroat world, he had to have that haven of trust, if only among a few people. Deep down he respected Elgiva’s motivations, but her betrayal hurt.
“So you did trap me,” Douglas said between gritted teeth.
He felt her shivering inside the circle of his arm. She turned her face toward him and a single tear slid down her cheek. “A wee bit,” she admitted. “But only … later. What happened between us wasn’t a cold-blooded calculation. I swear.”
Douglas looked at the men grimly. “Hell, yes, she let me out,” he told them. “She’s seen how pointless your deal is, so she’s changed sides. And we’ve spent the past few hours playing hopscotch in bed together. So if you’re going to lock me up again, you better put Mata MacHari in the slammer with me.”
Elgiva shrieked in distress. “He’s twisting the truth! He’s just trying to cause trouble!”
The tall man thrust his rifle into the hands of a companion. He advanced on the bed with both massive fists raised. “Pull on your pants, Kincaid, and get out of bed. I’m about to beat you senseless.”
Douglas grinned slowly. Elgiva twisted to look at him with eyes full of desperation. “No! I won’t have you two kill each other! Please, Douglas, get back in the cell! I’ll get in there with you! Just stop this! Stop it!”
“Stop it. My sentiments exactly,” a new voice said with calm authority. Everyone jumped. Douglas looked toward the door to the outer room. There stood T. S. Audubon, dressed like a commando in a spy movie. Audubon’s love for drama was in full swing. He scowled grandly and waved an automatic assault rifle that made all the combined weaponry in the room look puny.
The window next to the hearth shattered as two of Audubon’s assistants poked their rifles inside. “If all you gentlemen will drop your weapons and go over to the cell, I’ll be very happy,” Audubon ordered. “You really don’t have any choice.”
“Nice timing,” Douglas commented.
“Thank you. Nice hostage you’ve got there.”
“I might let her go if she’ll tell her cronies to cooperate. I’m sure she doesn’t want any of their plaid blood on her conscience.”
“Especially since one of them is her brother,” Audubon added.
Douglas felt Elgiva stiffen. “Go, please,” she told her accomplices, looking directly at their tall leader. “We don’t want anybody hurt because of my mistake.”
The defeat in her voice made Douglas angrier. It tore at his resolve not to feel any sympathy for her. She’d deliberately kept him busy in bed, knowing that the others would arrive to trap him again. He wasn’t going to let himself forget that.
“I can’t believe you betrayed us,” Elgiva’s brother accused bitterly. He removed his mask, exposing hair the same reddish-brown shade as hers and a face no less proud.
“I didn’t do that,” she murmured in a broken voice. “But maybe I made a mistake or two in judgment.”
“Deceiving someone who wanted to treat you fairly is a damned bad mistake in judgment,” Douglas told her.
“This is fair?” She looked down at his binding arm. “You didn’t hesitate to think the worst of me and try to make my own people turn on me.”
“Aye, ’tis an odd brand of fairness!” her brother shouted. “I’m thinking that my sister is innocent of all but trusting a man who knows how to charm people into heading for hell with him!”
“I’m sure that hell is a very profitable place,” Douglas returned smoothly. “Why don’t you go there and report back to me?”
Everyone tensed even more. Elgiva’s brother lurched forward, but his companions grabbed his arms. The short, chubby man jerked his mask off also, revealing a florid face, red hair, and a calculated smile. “We don’t want any trouble here, lads.” Where he had been a troublemaker seconds earlier, he was now a diplomat. “Do as Mr. Audubon says. Let’s put our guns down and move back.”
“Nice change of heart, Mayor MacRoth,” Audubon observed.
“Please, Rob,” Elgiva begged, staring at he
r brother. “Do as they ask.” His expression furious, he slowly complied, and the others followed. The room filled with Audubon’s men, and they surrounded the kidnappers.
Audubon sighed with relief and pulled a dark knit cap off his head, then ran a hand through white hair that flowed to his shoulders. He stepped to the foot of Elgiva’s bed.
Douglas was in too bad a mood to appreciate the way his friend smiled at the compromising scene there. “Well, Douglas, it looks as if you didn’t need rescuing at all,” Audubon noted dryly.
Douglas felt the rigid resistance in Elgiva’s trapped body. “I needed all the help I could get,” he answered.
And this was just the beginning.
Seven
Elgiva sat in her chair by the fireplace, staring stubbornly into space while self-rebuke and sorrow made a cold knot inside her stomach. Douglas and his henchmen had allowed her to pull on a pair of brown trousers and tuck her nightgown into them; because they wouldn’t give her the privacy to change into other clothes, she looked ridiculous. She tossed her robe onto the floor and drew a black wool sweater over her bulging, clumsy gown.
Douglas, who was already dressed in his gray trousers and sweater, threw her walking shoes near the hearth. “Put them on,” he said curtly.
Shom went to the shoes, took both into his mouth, and carried them the last bit of distance to her. Tears choked Elgiva’s throat. She stroked Shom’s head and wished humans could keep trust alive so faithfully.
Elgiva felt everyone in the room watching her as she stuffed her feet into the shoes. Rob, Duncan, Andrew, and the village physician, Dr. Graham, were locked in Douglas’s cell along with the new men they’d brought with them. John Callum and Richard Maxwell were farmers—their families had lived on the MacRoth land for hundreds of years, passing their parcels down as if they owned them. John, Richard, and the other farmers on the estate stood to lose as much of their heritage as the MacRoths did, if Douglas refused to change his plans.
Mr. Audubon and his men lounged around the cottage, looking glad to be out of the cold highland night. Douglas did not look glad about anything. He stood across the room with his legs braced and his arms crossed over his chest, eyeing Elgiva with unwavering dismay.
She raised her equally grim gaze to his. “I’ll be going to the cell with my kin and my neighbors now. I’d like to be kept with them, if that’s not too much to ask.”
“I want information,” Douglas retorted. “Who planned this kidnapping?”
“I did,” Elgiva and Rob said in unison.
Elgiva pressed her hands to her throat. “Don’t steal my thunder, Robbie! This was all my idea, and you know it!”
“No,” Dr. Graham said sternly, his shaggy gray head shaking slowly. “The whole bunch of us planned it. And a dozen more besides. You reivers will have to prosecute the whole community or none at all!”
“Aye,” Andrew said. He was a thin, wiry man who had never lost his military posture from a career in the British air force. Now he drew himself up proudly, as if he were about to be executed. “I flew everyone back and forth to America in my plane, and I flew the helicopter that stole you from your rooftop, Mr. Kincaid.”
“And I fixed a cell in this place to hold you,” Duncan announced.
“And I helped!” John Callum added.
“Myself also!” Richard Maxwell said.
“And it was me who researched everything about you,” Rob told Douglas with smug victory. “You and your disgusting, self-indulgent lifestyle.”
Elgiva buried her head in her hands. “You promised it wouldn’t be this way, lads! We agreed that I’d be the one to take the blame! I don’t have children to leave behind! Or a mate! Do you not see how you’ve hurt your families, you proud fools?”
“Ellie, I haven’t got children or a mate, either,” Rob reminded her. She heard the apology in his voice and knew that he was sorry for accusing her of betrayal earlier.
“But you would have had them eventually,” she told him, lifting her head to offer him a gaze of tormented affection. “You had more of a future to lose than I did. All I had was my shop—”
“Enough!” Douglas said loudly. Elgiva looked at him and found his expression darker than ever. Was there also a hint of surprise and distress in it? Perhaps remorse? She was too wounded to trust her hopes right now.
He slashed the air with one hand. “I want the truth. What did you people expect to get from me? Why didn’t you try to bargain?”
“With the man who never bargains unless it serves him best? The man who tried to copyright his own name so that no other could use it in business? The man who once evicted all the old people from a nursing home so that he could build a parking lot for his office building?”
Douglas shook his head. “You don’t know the truth.”
Elgiva went on raggedly, her hands digging into the arms of her chair. “We had naught to bargain with, Douglas! Just our traditions! Just our legends! Just our love for our homes! What would that mean to a man such as yourself, who judges everything by its price in money?”
“Aye, ’tis a sad state, even for a Kincaid,” Rob taunted.
The others began nodding and talking all at once. “Aye, a Kincaid! Even for a Kincaid! You’d think he’d have a drop of his ancestors’ loyalty to hearth and kin! We didn’t want to have a Kincaid for our laird, but a loyal Kincaid would have been—”
“What is this?” Douglas yelled. “Are all of you going to push this bogus ‘clan of Kincaid’ story to save your hides? If so, forget it!”
Elgiva stood, her shoulders squared, and faced her fellow kidnappers resolutely. “He doesn’t believe,” she told them. “It’s useless to discuss what he won’t listen to. And if he did, what’s to say he’d change his mind about buying the MacRoth holdings? No, let’s talk to him in the only way he’ll consider. Let’s bargain using something that he really wants.”
“This ought to be interesting,” Audubon interjected.
Elgiva faced Douglas’s stern scrutiny. “My brother and I are the MacRoth heirs, but I’m the eldest, and I’m the one who kept you prisoner. Can’t you have me arrested and let the others go?”
Loud protests rose from the group in the cell, led by Rob’s shouts of disapproval. Douglas clasped his hands behind his back and waited with a taut look of patience on his face until everyone quieted. “I won’t have you arrested the way your martyred self would love,” he mocked lightly. “Instead I’ll take you with me.”
“You won’t do it!” Rob yelled.
Elgiva’s relief mingled with dread. “To where?” she asked numbly.
“To wherever I feel like,” he retorted.
“For what purpose?”
“For whatever I feel like.”
Rob shook the cell bars. “I say no! No!”
Her pulse racing, Elgiva studied Douglas’s eyes. She nodded toward her brother and the others. “And they’ll go free? And you promise not to take any other action against them? Or against anyone else but me?”
He nodded. “I swear it.”
“So be it, then. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“Elgiva,” Rob protested in helpless fury.
She gripped the back of the chair for support but kept unyielding eyes on the man who now held her future in his vengeful grasp. “He’s not a bad man, Rob,” she said, never taking her eyes from Douglas. “He only covets what he can’t possess easily. Now that he’s got me, he’ll let me go soon. You’ll see.”
“I’ll let you go when it suits me,” Douglas said with a thin, cool smile. “And it won’t be until after I’ve bought the MacRoth estate.”
She forced a shrug. “Just keep to your word about not sending anyone else to jail.”
“Oh, I will.” Authoritative and brusque, he turned toward Audubon. “You witnessed all this. Elgiva MacRoth and I have an agreement.”
The enigmatic Audubon merely sighed. “It’s the strangest thing I’ve seen in years, but yes, consider me an official witness to the
deal.”
“Let’s get out of here, then.”
Elgiva’s nerves jumped. “I want my people turned loose first!”
“You’re in no position to give orders,” Douglas informed her.
“When we get to Druradeen, we’ll send someone back to open the cell door,” Audubon said. He turned to gaze drolly at Duncan. “I’ll speak to the mayor’s mother about it. I’m sure she’ll know who to send. I’m curious, mayor. What part did your mother play in the kidnapping? Was she the decoy in New York?”
“Aye. She distracted Kincaid’s security people so that Elgiva could sneak into his New Year’s Eve party,” Duncan said smugly. “She pretended to faint in the lobby of his skyscraper. Aye, not even the employees of the coldhearted Kincaid could resist a wee old lady with a dizzy spell.”
Elgiva met Douglas’s eyes again and found them dully amused. The humor died quickly and was replaced by determination. “Congratulations for your deception,” he told her. “Now you’re going to pay for it.”
“Stop threatening, Douglas, and get on with it. If we’re going, let’s go.”
“Ellie,” Rob called. She hurried to the cell, her vision suddenly blinded by tears. He took her hands, and they shared a long, intense gaze. They put their heads together, and she spoke to him in Gaelic. “He’s a good man, Robbie. I’ll be safe with him.”
“How can you say that, sister?”
She gazed up at Rob with absolute conviction. “Because I love him, and I know his heart.”
Rob’s eyes widened with amazement. “Does he love you?”
She shook her head, thinking of petite blondes with all sorts of worldly business and social skills; blondes with blue eyes suited to sapphires; blondes who could bear children. Then she drew Rob’s hands through the bars and kissed the back of each.
She looked at him calmly. “But he won’t harm me. The only way Douglas could harm me would be if he said that he loved me, too, and it was a lie. I’m sure he’ll let me go soon. Perhaps I can soften him toward our inheritance. Who knows? But you can rest your mind about my safety. I’ll call you if he lets me. Take care now. I love you, brother.”
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