At his odd reply, Samantha paused.
It took the length of the Rook’s quick, calculating scan of the carnage for Callum to surge into the solarium behind him. “I was wrong about the tracks I found in the woods,” he panted. “It wasn’t the Americans. But agents of the crown.”
Gavin snarled a string of Gaelic curses that even turned poor Calybrid’s ears red. “How do ye know this?”
“After searching more thoroughly, I found more than two sets of boot prints, they don’t belong to cowboys. They’re military issue, Gavin. And they’re looking for something.”
“Agents of the crown?” Eammon echoed, and then addressed Callum and Gavin as though they were still witless young lads. “Just what the hell is going on, you two? Why is the most notorious pirate of modern history standing in the middle of our castle?”
Pirate? Samantha stepped forward, keeping her gun carefully trained at the Rook’s substantial chest. The man was thick as a ship’s mast and almost as tall.
His eyes snapped to her, and Samantha had the sense of staring into the abyss, and having it stare back. It chilled her to her very bones.
“Much as I love well-armed women, we haven’t time to deal with … whatever this is.” The Rook waved toward the dead Masters brothers as though they were as insubstantial as a pile of dirty laundry. “I’d a spy on my ship, and the matter has been summarily dealt with, but not before he’d spilled information about our … transaction to the authorities.”
“We need to move everything,” Callum hissed. “Now.”
Eammon’s face mottled beneath his beard, and if he hadn’t been holding Eleanor, Samantha was certain he might have meted out a dire punishment to both the men he obviously considered his sons. “Tell me you’re not smugglers!” he bellowed.
Gavin worked his jaw over a powerful emotion, one she’d never seen before and couldn’t even begin to identify. “How do ye think I acquired the money to offer for Erradale?”
“Gavin,” Eleanor whimpered. “No…”
“I suggest we hurry.” The Rook turned and shouldered past Callum, who gaped rather dumbly at the gruesome tableau.
“We’ll handle this,” Gavin vowed, casting Samantha a disgusted look before starting toward the door. “One disaster at a time.”
Lowering her gun, Samantha reached out for him, catching at his sleeve. Her husband was a smuggler. Another outlaw. Lord, but it figured. “Let me come with you. Give me a chance to make amends.” At least this was familiar ground. “Please, if I am anything to you.”
He shrugged her off, whirling to tower over her, his eyes glinting with a verdant wrath. “Does Erradale rightfully belong to me?”
“No, but—”
“Does the child in yer belly belong to me?”
“You already know it doesn’t.”
“Are we even legally married, Samantha Masters?” He said her name as if it had turned to ashes in his mouth.
“I don’t think so.” By this time, her reply had become a broken whisper.
“Then ye are nothing to me.”
“Gavin—” A punch to the stomach would have caused less devastation.
“If ye’re not gone by the time I return, I’ll arrest ye myself.”
Perhaps she’d been right when she’d assumed she couldn’t be broken by another man. Something broken could be fixed. The sight of Gavin St. James’s wide, straight back walking away forever didn’t merely break her.
It destroyed her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Gavin had known many days of darkness in his lifetime, but the black hole in which he now found himself was unequaled.
And not even wide enough to pace back and forth in.
Inveraray Jail wasn’t as dismal a place as the infamous Barlinnie Prison, or even Newgate, but a Mackenzie earl and magistrate charged with smuggling and treason put the gaolers in an especially cruel mood.
He’d not seen the sun for what seemed like days, locked behind a steel door with only a small port though which he’d been fed five times. Whether that meant he’d been there two days or five, he couldn’t tell.
Felt like an eternity, at least.
He slept some, and only in his dreams did he find light.
The light he’d begun to tease each morn from behind his bonny’s blue eyes. Her thin arms would circle him, and she’d gift him with one of those brash, unrepentant smiles before pressing that foul, perfect mouth of hers against his own.
He’d loved her smile, the artless innocence with which she gave it. She never practiced it or posed in the fashion of coy or splendid ladies. It appeared as a smile did on a child, the genuine expression of joy. Of pleasure. And, at times, of victory over him.
A torment so excruciating would wrench him from his dream, as if even his subconscious violently rejected the memory of her.
Ye gods, had she been a good enough actress to counterfeit those almost ridiculously real smiles?
The thought made him sick. With rage. With loss.
With love.
Lovesickness. It was an affliction he’d never quite understood, until the moment he realized the constant lead weight in his stomach, the ache in his muscles—particularly his heart—had nothing to do with the meager food.
And everything to do with Samantha Masters.
Gavin brooded into the darkness of his cell. He slumped on the hard wood plank that was his bed and watched the ghosts of his past dance in the shadows.
Hellish, twisted things they were.
Hell. Surely his next destination. This place was a purgatory of sorts, a consign of reckoning before the swift and retributive justice of the crown was meted out.
Before another one of Hamish Mackenzie’s sons swung from a rope for treason.
A bitter smile crooked across his lips. Even this distinction wasn’t unprecedented. He didn’t own it. He wasn’t the most treasonous of the Mackenzie lads. That had been Hamish the Younger, who’d been hanged some years ago for war crimes against the Duke of Trenwyth and high treason against the crown.
Gavin wasn’t the most monstrous Mackenzie son, either, he realized. As Liam, the Demon Highlander, himself, laid claim to that title with twenty years of unparalleled bloodshed in service to Her Majesty.
In fact, he wasn’t even the most criminal, as Dorian Blackwell, the Black Heart of Ben More, his father’s youngest bastard, had ruled the London Underworld for the better part of fifteen years.
So where did that leave him? Nay, what did that make him?
He’d thought himself the clever one. The resilient one. And, aye, the handsome one.
What a fool he’d been. He was nothing more than a second-rate smuggler cursed by the fates with appalling taste in women.
Well, if he was going to die alone, at least it would be sooner than later.
His mother had Eammon, and Liam’s son, Andrew, would inherit Inverthorne. He was a good lad, at least.
His hand pressed above his breastbone, at the place that seemed to seize with a very knifelike pain every time he thought of progeny. Of an heir.
Alison Ross, the real Alison Ross, had won the day after all. Erradale would remain her birthright. Empty. Unclaimed. Forever soiled by her father’s death.
The world would go on. Perhaps it was best that he didn’t …
The scrape of his door and a shaft of light brought him to his feet, the chains at his wrists—rather more redundant than necessary, in his opinion—dragging across the stones as Callum was shoved into the cell with him.
The Mac Tíre looked a bit worse for wear, even for him. His beard had grown out of control, his shrewd eyes wild, and his teeth bared as it took three gaolers to chain him to the wooden bed across from Gavin.
“Now stay still,” the guard ordered them both. “We’ll deal with ye soon enough.”
He left the steel door ajar, confident the chains would keep the men in place, and Gavin was grateful for what little fresh air circulated into the dank cell.
“Are y
e hurt?” Gavin asked his friend, unable to see the particulars of Callum’s swarthy features now that he was no longer illuminated in the doorway.
“Nay,” Callum answered shortly.
“Are ye … well?”
“Nay.” The question seemed superfluous, but they both knew it was not. Callum wasn’t able to abide small spaces for long, and judging by the growth of his beard, it had been closer to five days than two.
With a tight sigh, Gavin rested his head against the cold stones. “I suppose I should have seen this coming.”
“You mean the sudden disappearance and abandonment of the world’s most elusive and notorious pirate once the military showed up to seize the shipload of goods and weapons we smuggled for him?” Callum’s voice could have turned the bogs into a desert. “Aye, we should have seen it coming.”
“I mean all of it,” Gavin ruminated. “For a moment there, everything was perfect … I should have known it wasna real.”
“If they’re coming to take us in front of the judge, Thorne, this might be the last time we see each other.” A measured note returned to Callum’s voice. “An Irish ex-patriot like me isn’t like to be sent to the same place as an earl.”
Sitting forward, Gavin swallowed a million regrets. “I’m sorry, brother. I’ll do what I can for ye.”
“Nay.” Callum said the word so low, Gavin had to strain to hear it. “It is I who am sorry.”
“Ye’ve done nothing. I asked ye if ye knew of black market work that would bring us a quick fortune. The Rook has never been caught out before and—”
“I knew Sam was not Alison Ross when you married her.”
The moment carried that expectant silence between lightning and thunder.
Gavin exploded forward, meaning to drive his fists into the man who’d been his closest friend for decades.
His shackles brought him up short, and still he surged against them, violence pouring through him like a biblical flood.
“And ye said nothing? All this fucking time!” Were there no true souls left on this earth? No one to trust? “Ye let me marry her? Ye let me fall in—” He couldn’t say the word. “Why?”
“Because I was hoping the wedding would bring Alison back!” Callum’s snarl was just as vehement, stunning Gavin into stillness.
“What?” he breathed.
“Ye remember Alison was born not long after ye took up residence at Inverthorne. Mrs. Ross was never well after the birth, and Alison spent most of her childhood chasing me about the moors like a wild puppy.”
“I remember,” Gavin said warily. “Ye used to take refuge from her at Inverthorne, complaining of her being a pest.”
“Aye. I did…”
“But?”
“She was still but a girl of thirteen by the time she left, and I was not only hiding from her at that point, but from tender feelings a lad should not have for a girl nine years his junior.”
“Callum.” Gavin reclaimed his seat, their past coming into sharp focus.
“I went to seek my fortune, and years later, when I thought I’d enough to win her, I went to America to find her.” A bleakness crept into the hermit’s voice.
“I presume ye succeeded.”
“Aye.”
“And?”
“And I’ve been living in a cave ever since,” the man said darkly. “Trying to forget…”
“To forget what?
“Never you mind what.”
It had been a mystery to Gavin, why a man as famous and well traveled an explorer as Callum Monahan had retreated from the world. He’d asked his friend a few times, but had always received the same answer.
Never you mind.
He’d not in a million lifetimes imagined it had anything to do with a woman.
“I am sorry that I kept Sam’s secret from you,” Callum continued drolly. “But when I read Alison’s letter to Sam … I—”
Gavin leaned forward again. “Letter? What letter?”
“I’d know her writing anywhere … and I couldn’t stop from steaming the letter open, if only to see the words written by her hand.”
A commotion from out toward the sergeant’s desk drew his attention. The authorities had probably come for them. They were running out of time.
“What did she say, Callum?” he demanded tersely.
“Alison sent documents from America along with a letter admonishing Sam to take up Erradale’s claim against yours on her behalf. She thanked Sam for saving her life, and told her that she could take sanctuary on Erradale indefinitely, so long as she kept it out of Mackenzie hands.”
The exhale Gavin expelled contained all the regret his body could summon.
She’d told the truth … about that, at least. “And when she broke her word to Alison and married me … ye still didna say anything?”
“I supported Alison’s claim to Erradale all this time.” Callum shifted in the darkness, his sinewy form still graceful in the shadows. “Like I said … I was hoping it would bring Alison back. That she’d fight for her homeland instead of marry that bastard, Grant … And then, when it seemed apparent that she would not return, I saw how happy you were with Sam. How happy she was with you. And I thought that if at least one of us could find love, it would all be worth it.”
So many emotions eddied about in Gavin’s body, they momentarily paralyzed him.
“Were we not about to hang, I’d not be so bold as to seek yer forgiveness,” Callum confessed.
“Were we not about to hang, I’d not be so quick to give it to ye.”
They exchanged smiles that neither of them saw, but both of them felt.
“Ye’ve been a like brother to me since—”
The door flung wide, and Gavin couldn’t have been more shocked to find the towering, kilted form of his actual brother, the Demon Highlander, holding the chains imprisoning the absolute last person he’d expected to see again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“You fucking son of a whore!” Gavin was on his feet again, surging toward the Rook, who somehow managed to look self-satisfied even with manacles securing his wrists in front of him.
“Careful, Gavin.” Liam stepped out of the doorway to allow in the guards to unchain them. “The man permitted himself to be caught. Though ye’ll forgive me for how many days it took me to track this one down. As it turns out, he’s a hard man to find.”
“Most wanted men are,” the Rook stated blithely.
It occurred to Gavin that committing murder in a jail wasn’t the cleverest path to freedom and so he waited with barely concealed impatience for the guards to finish with Callum’s chains before they liberated him.
He turned to Liam. “I thought the next time I saw ye, ye’d be stretching my neck at the end of a rope, not saving it.”
A look he’d never identified on the Demon Highlander’s brutal features unsettled him enough to look away, even as the iron weights disappeared from his wrists. He’d have identified the expression as wounded, if he’d thought Liam capable of it.
“Ye are a Mackenzie, Gavin. And my brother. I’d not let ye hang.”
“Didna stop ye before, when the Duke of Trenwyth hanged Hamish.”
“Hamish was beyond saving, and ye knew it.”
“So much blood on your hands, on your heads, on your name,” the Rook remarked with only mild amusement. “And they say I’m the criminal.”
As if sensing the tension between Gavin, Callum, and the Rook, three guards escorted the two men out of the cell, creating a line between Gavin and the pirate in the small, white hallway. They didn’t move until the Rook had been pushed into the cell, the door shut, and the heavy key turned.
“I doona understand,” Gavin marveled, rubbing at the places the manacles had chapped his skin. “By what miracle are we being released?”
“Due to a crisis of conscience, I confessed everything,” the Rook stated through the port.
Gavin’s eyes narrowed on his brother, then at the door separating him from the most d
angerous criminal the seas had known since the days of Blackbeard and Sir Francis Drake. “‘A crisis of conscience’?” he repeated dubiously. “What exactly did ye confess to?”
“Only the truth.” The Rook’s unaffected features were somehow more chilling from the confines of the dark room. “That I smuggled the goods and weapons onto your land without your knowledge, thereby victimizing a peer of the realm, and a magistrate besides. Look how contrite I am; do you think the High Court will have mercy upon me?” To say his voice was cheeky wouldn’t be wrong, if someone could be both cheeky and menacing at the same time.
Gavin couldn’t have been more stymied. “How?”
Liam addressed the guards. “If ye’d be so kind as to escort Mr. Monahan out, the magistrate and I would like a word with the criminal.”
“Aye, Laird,” they chorused, allowing a very relieved-looking Callum to lead their procession toward freedom.
“You’ve a very charming wife,” the Rook observed casually. “With two very convincing pistols.”
Samantha? What did she have to do with this? Was she here? Gavin wished his traitorous heart didn’t thump against its cage at the prospect.
“Ye’re joking,” he gasped.
“Partly, yes.” The Rook’s chuckle made a devilish echo down the forlorn hall. “I was on my way to London, anyhow. Why not travel at the government’s expense?”
Gavin wondered if it were possible to expire from astonishment. He stared down at his soiled, blackened hands and the once-white shirtsleeves he’d worn for too many days, before gathering the strength to look up at the brother who wore his hated father’s features.
“Why are ye here, Liam?”
“I already told ye—”
“And I informed ye on my wedding day that I’m no longer a Mackenzie. Ye’ll no longer be clan Laird of Inverthorne lands.”
The rumble in Liam’s chest truly was nothing less than demonic. “Do ye think papers in an English court decide yer blood, Gavin? Ye can have every trace of our clan erased from the annals of every record and history book from the beginning of recorded time if ye want. Ye’d still be my brother.”
It distressed Gavin, a man used to discarding emotion instead of facing it, to suddenly lose control over the muscles of his throat. He cleared the offending tightness with a rough sound.
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