Free Taken by the Laird by Margo Maguire Page B

better of her. She took another step into the room and stood at the foot of the bed where Lady Glenloch had slept, trying to understand how it was possible to be so despondent as to take one’s own life.
    Bree went to Amelia’s richly carved, mahogany dressing table and touched the brush and ornate combs that lay there. She herself had felt a terrible, deep grief at the loss of her beloved aunt, and she was on the verge of being forced into an abhorrent marriage. And yet Brianna would never dream of doing herself in, of ending it all. She could not imagine what had driven Lady Glenloch to such despair.
    Surely not her husband.
    Now that Brianna had actually met the rakish Laird Glenloch, she did not understand how his wife could have felt so discontented. But her questions faded when the ghostly glow of the phantom returned, its light fluctuating like the unsteady light of a candle. It seemed to flatten against the wall above the table, then a few strange sparkles of light slid down, flowing almost likea stream of water, to disappear below. Bree tried to look down into the space where it disappeared, speculating that there was something the ghost wanted her to notice. But there was hardly any gap between the wall and the table.
    Brianna touched the wall, then slid her hand down the same path the ghost’s light had taken, stopping when her fingers met the rough side of the table.
    She pushed the table aside and looked down at the floor. There was nothing. She started to move the table back, but caught sight of something that had caught on the rough edge of the table. She reached down and came up with a long gold chain with a locket attached.
    She knew of married ladies who wore miniatures of their husbands or children in their lockets. Bree snapped it open, expecting to see a small picture of Laird Glenloch, but it was another man altogether. Brianna did not recognize him, but it was obviously not Laird Glenloch.
    Perhaps it was a portrait of her father or a brother.
    Or a paramour.
    Brianna closed the locket in her hand and glanced about the room, looking for the ghost, for some explanation of what she held in her hand. But Bree had been left alone to wonder if the phantom’s intent was to indicate something about Lady Glenloch’s affections.
    Feeling distinctly troubled, she quickly replaced the chain exactly where she found it and shoved the dressing table back against the wall. “Whatever she might have done, the woman is dead,” Bree admonished the ghost, who must be hovering somewhere nearby. “ ’Tisnot right to intrude on her privacy.” Though Brianna could not imagine a wife who would cuckold Laird Glenloch.
    He did not seem to be a brute, nor was he unkind. If Bree had been his wife—
    She gathered the front of her shawl in her fist. She intended never to find herself in such a position, ever. There would be no marriage to Roddington or to anyone else. After Bernard’s defection, she had decided to spend her life as Claire had done—as an independent woman, free to travel, or to raise her horses as she pleased. She might go to Greece and spend a few years there, in the village where Claire had lived before coming to London to take Brianna away from Lord Stamford.
    Or maybe she’d go to France on an extended trip and see about buying some new stallions to improve the Killiedown stock.
    Feeling like an intruder in the dead woman’s room, Brianna exited, closing the door behind her. Where Lady Glenloch had placed her affections had naught to do with her, though Brianna wished she could be as immune to Laird Glenloch as his wife seemed to have been.
    Brianna returned to her room and wondered how she was going to manage to avoid the laird’s advances this evening, after the servants had all gone. She had never been so susceptible to any other man, not even Bernard Malham. And her reaction to him was bothersome. She could not allow herself to succumb.
    “If you can help me,” she whispered, hoping the