Free Moonlight on My Mind by Jennifer McQuiston

he headed for the posting house, the sound of her voice trailed him out the door, already demanding a hot bath and tray of food to be brought up to her room.
    The quiet of the street should have felt like a balm to his soul after the last few hours in her stinging presence, but instead, the darkness sent his thoughts tumbling. He’d lost a brother in the last year, and Julianne’s claim that he had now lost his father was still untenable.
    It was easier to keep grief at bay when one considered whose lips had delivered the news. He reminded himself he’d seen this woman lie before: beautifully, flawlessly, with tears in her eyes and the perfect, thin waver to her voice. Then, she’d been describing how she had seen him point his hunting rifle at his brother and pull the trigger.
    Annoyance coiled beneath his skin as he stepped into the posting house. He was willing to admit a role in his brother’s death. Grief had not clouded his judgment in this regard—he blamed himself almost every day. The truth was there, and he was man enough to take responsibility for his actions. But not for the account she had provided to the world—and, more importantly, to the magistrate.
    Mr. Jeffers had already gone home for the evening, but Julianne’s bag and his own letter were produced by a dutiful clerk. Patrick returned to the Blue Gander with no clearer a plan than when he had left Julianne there, but he did take a childish pleasure in at least denying her the courtesy of dry clothing while he indulged in a much-needed drink. He carried her bag to a table at the farthest corner of the inn’s public room, dropped his limbs into a chair, and ordered up a whisky he couldn’t afford instead of the pint he ought to have.
    He searched her bag first, though his actions gave him the merest moment’s pause. His fingers tripped over filmy nightclothes and silk stockings and endless handfuls of neatly folded frocks that looked better suited for garden tea parties than a sojourn to northern Scotland in autumn. He took pleasure in shaking them apart, destroying the evidence of her care in packing.
    Childish, perhaps, but one had so few chances to get the best of Miss Julianne Baxter.
    When he had firmly established she carried neither a weapon nor a sensible cloak with her, his impatience and his conscience finally gained enough ground to move on. Pulling the letter from his coat pocket, he studied the address. By tacit agreement, his father’s letters had been forwarded through a trusted third party to avoid detection by the authorities, though they had all been written—and addressed—in his father’s hand. His stomach turned over as he admitted to himself this missive was already different. The other letters had been addressed in a tight, neat scrawl, his father’s mark of efficiency.
    This one held loops and flourishes. A feminine hand.
    His mother’s hand.
    He broke the plain wax seal with his lungs sealed tight, then scanned the pages with an almost fatalistic sense of expectation. Regret to inform . . .
    Dire circumstances . . .
    Please come home.
    He read the last line three different times, scarcely able to make sense of it. What, exactly, was he to come home to? His mother believed him guilty. Or at least she had, once upon a time. Worse than the puzzle of his mother’s words was the irrefutable proof that Julianne appeared to be telling the truth, at least in the matter of his father’s death.
    He scrubbed a hand across his face, wondering how his mother had even known where he was. She must have, all these months when he’d thought she wanted nothing to do with him. And yet, she’d not set the authorities to his path, though she’d believed him well guilty that day he’d left. Too afraid to lose yet another son, even one such as he?
    Or had forgiveness finally found its way into her heart?
    The grief he had held at bay this full hour past surged upward like a welling tide. His family had always been close, and