Free Claimed by the Laird by Nicola Cornick Page A

“Still consorting with criminals and smugglers, I hear.”
    “I beg your pardon?” Christina’s voice dripped ice.
    Eyre, however, was not a man to be intimidated. He thrust his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels, smiling. “I saw you entering Mrs. Keen’s cottage yesterday. Her son was arrested for illegal distilling back last year—”
    “Which is one of the reasons why I visit her.” Christina did not trouble to hide her dislike. “She is an elderly woman, in poor health, alone in the world, who has little income and who has been persecuted unforgivably by the authorities.”
    Eyre snapped his fingers. “She should not have harbored a known criminal, then.”
    Christina could feel her temper rising. She knew that Eyre deliberately set out to anger her; he had been an enemy ever since she had written to Lord Sidmouth to complain about his methods and his corruption. It was always a struggle not to rise to his provocation.
    “Was there a point to your visit, Mr. Eyre?” she inquired politely.
    “Indeed.” The excise officer’s eyes gleamed. “I am here to introduce my nephew, Richard Bryson, my sister’s boy, who has come to help me hunt down the malefactors who plague our area. I am confident that with his help and the other resources granted to me by Lord Sidmouth, we shall soon have the Kilmory Gang behind bars.”
    “How gratifying for you,” Christina said. She had not seen the younger man who was hovering in his uncle’s shadow, but now he came forward into the room and made a bow.
    “At your service, Lady Christina.”
    This was a very different man from his uncle. He was young, surely no more than twenty, slight and fair, with dreamy brown eyes and the hands of a musician. His bow was elegant; he could have stepped from an Edinburgh drawing room. His uncle was looking at him with ill-concealed contempt. Christina wondered how on earth the two of them could possibly work together and why a man like Richard Bryson would want to take on the dirty task of the excise officers. But perhaps he had no choice. She thought of Lucas Ross again and how inappropriate it was that he was a servant. A man had to earn a living, no matter how incongruous it might seem or how ill suited to it he might be.
    “I wish you success in your career, Mr. Bryson,” she said. She gave his uncle a cool smile. “If you will excuse me...”
    As Galloway ushered the gentlemen out, she wondered at Eyre. There was not a courteous bone in his body. His visit had been for quite another purpose, to warn her, perhaps, of his intent to increase his efforts at trapping the whisky smugglers. He suspected her of more than sympathy toward the smuggling gang.
    Christina shivered. His visit had been a threat. Of that there was no doubt. She was going to have to be very careful indeed.
    * * *
    T HE SUMMER LIGHT was fading as Lucas left the servants’ hall to stroll back to his tiny cottage in the castle grounds. Dinner had been delicious, a rich lamb stew with dumplings that had been just what he had needed after working up an appetite digging over the flower beds. He had been at Kilmory for three days and already he was settling in to the routine of his work. It was physically hard but not challenging in other ways; he simply had to keep his head down, watch, listen and not put a foot out of line.
    The servants were wary of him. A stranger who looked and sounded as though he should be serving tea in an Edinburgh drawing room rather than digging up root crops in the Highlands was bound to be treated carefully. Word had gone round of his failure to obtain the footman’s post—a boy called Thomas Wallace looking shiny and scrubbed in his new livery was proudly sitting in the footman’s chair. There was a whiff of uncertainty about Lucas’s background that he chose not explain, though the reference from the Duchess of Strathspey that had arrived that afternoon had helped to soothe any concerns. Galloway at least was now