Free 0764213512 (R) by Roseanna M. White

here?”
    Lilias was dressed for outdoor exercise, and the pink in her cheeks said she’d been at it for some time. “The Kinnaird asked me to check on Old Maud. Come. Look what I’ve found.”
    Rowena followed Lilias through the trees, toward the loch. With what dim light remained, she noted the moisture that had gathered on her maid’s silvering hair. “How long have you been about it?”
    Lilias waved a hand. “Since a few minutes after you went down to receive your guests. Have you had a good evening, Wena?”
    “Aye, I suppose. Though Annie will be jealous that we have come out here without her.”
    Lilias chuckled. But there was something strained in it, something not so light as usual. Perhaps the ailing crofter’s wife had not been on the mend. “Ye can take her out tomorra to make up for it. And tell her all about yer dinner with the duke.”
    “Oh.” A few fingers of fog rose off the loch and slithered over her neck. “I wouldna say I had dinner with him . We scarcely exchanged a sentence.”
    “Ach, Wena. Ye’ll have to be devising a better story than that one to entertain the wee lass, ye ken.”
    Rowena chuckled, ducked under a branch . . . and paused. “Where are we going, Lil?”
    Lilias turned back to face her, showing a mischievous grin and the same warm brown eyes she had looked into all her life. “Ye’ll see, lass. Trust me.”
    “Lead on, then.” She ducked under another wayward twig and tracked the flight of a golden eagle soaring overhead. “Is Old Maud all right?”
    “Hmm? Oh, aye. Though ye ken how she is—always dying, to her own mind. I dinna ken why yer father always takes her seriously.”
    “As soon as he doesna, it’ll be the real thing. And ye ken how Father cares for her—what with her being like a grandmother, his own father’s wet nurse when he was a babe.” Rowena only saw the old woman a few times a year, lately. At nearly one hundred years old, Old Maud didn’t leave her cottage much. Though her ancient husband, every bit as old, still doted on the sheep with his son and grandson.
    They walked a few minutes more, chatting about the miracle of their ages, the children that stuck close, those who had gone away. A conversation she had probably had with Lilias at least a score of times over the years. Comfortable and thoughtless and just distracting enough that it took her a long moment to realize it when they emerged from the trees at the embankment that led down into the still waters of the loch. They were a good five miles from the castle now—Rowena could see its mist-shrouded promontory in the distance. Gaoth Lodge would be beyond it. In this direction lay nothing but old abandoned crofts, their sheep long since moved to other pastures. What could Lilias possibly—?
    “Trust me,” her maid said again, as if reading her thoughts. “And forgive me. It’s for your best, Rowena. Because I love you. Ye ken?”
    She had somehow ended up ahead of Lilias, closer to the hillside. So she had to turn around to try to see her lady’s maid’s face, knowing her own was drawn into a frown.
    Before she could register more than the anxiousness in Lilias’s eyes, those hands that had nurtured and tended found her shoulders. And pushed.

    “Was that a scream?” Brice paused midstep, stopping beside one of the uprights. The Pay attention had been echoing in his mind all evening, though just now he wondered if he had been paying attention to the earl when he ought to have been doing so with the man’s daughter.
    Lochaber lifted his brows but kept moving beyond the circle. “Impressive, sir. I’ve never met an Englishman who could hear the ghosts howling in the circle.”
    Brice opened his mouth to argue but then checked himself. It was no ghost he had heard, nor had it come from the circle. But it could have been that eagle in the distance, perhaps. Or some other animal of the glen. If the earl who knew the land far better than he weren’t alarmed, he would try