How to Lose a Laird (Cairncross Castle #2)
Chapter 1
Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, Scotland
“You needn’t behave as if you’re innocent, sir. I recall with perfect clarity the circumstances of our first meeting, and the catastrophe that followed it.”
There was no reply. A lucky thing, as it would have been jarring indeed if there had been. A shadow fell over her notebook, but Freya didn’t look up, focusing instead on her pencil and the lines and curves flowing from the blunt tip.
“You insult my intelligence if you believe I will trust you, after what happened the last time. I’m no fool, to be seduced again by your pretty wiles. You, sir, are no gentleman.”
As if in answer, the shadow shifted, drifting eastward on the light breeze coming off Loch Dunvegan far below her perch on the castle roof. Light spilled over her, illuminating the page and bathing her bare head in warmth.
She did look up then, blinking against the sunlight emerging from behind the passing cloud.
“Ah, it’s just as I suspected. You think to beguile me again.
You may do your worst. You may glow and billow and float all you like, but I won’t be taken in by your beauty.
You’re a rogue and a cheat, and I’m too clever a lady to be duped a second time. ”
She’d only seen these sorts of clouds once before, but she’d sketched them then, too. It would be helpful if she could find that earlier sketch so she could compare them and be certain she was looking at the same formation.
She plucked up her sketchbook, balanced it on her knees, and began turning over the leaves, one by one.
Hundreds of sketches filled the pages, some of them messy, sprawling things that took up every available inch of a page, while others no larger than the tip of her thumb were crowded into the margins.
There were sunrises and sunsets, and sketches of Loch Dunvegan when it was as smooth as a pane of glass and as angry as a nest of hornets, with the crushing waves threatening to reduce the rocks below the castle to powder.
There were drawings of the midday sun perched high amidst a canvas of clear blue sky, and drawings of the moon presiding over a sea of velvety darkness.
She had an entire notebook filled only with drawings of the stars, twinkling like pinpricks of silvery light in the midnight sky.
Those sketches were from the summer when she’d turned eight years old. Her father had spent hours on the roof with her that summer, teaching her all about the constellations.
Orion, Cepheus, Draco, and Cassiopeia …
They’d sat together on this very roof, gazing into the darkness above, with the warm breeze stirring her hair, and her father’s voice, deep and quiet and filled with wonder.
It seemed like a lifetime ago now.
There were dozens of notations scribbled across the bottom of each page of this notebook.
The scrawled numbers and calculations would look like nonsense to an untrained eye, but to her the recordings of shifts in temperatures, rainfall estimates, wind speeds and directions, and notations of the height of the waves that came crashing against the castle walls on stormy days were a subject of endless fascination.
She turned over the next leaf, and a laugh caught in her throat at the awkward row of trees marching across the page.
“Oh, dear. Those aren’t very good, are they?
” She’d been attempting to catch the motion of the wind through the woods surrounding the castle, but the branches looked more like the ruffled feathers of an outraged bird.
And there were clouds. Dozens of clouds. Light, airy ones, like puffs of smoke from a pipe, and long, diaphanous ones that looked as if they’d been stretched by a giant hand until they were no more than wispy white shadows.
One would never suspect the clouds above her now of being harbingers of chaos.
The sun was still shining, and the sky behind the charming billows was an ocean of bright blue.
They looked harmless enough, like the seed heads of cotton grass, soft, bright white bits of fluff that made one’s finger itch to stroke them.
But their beauty was a deception.
It was foolishness, to imagine a beautiful thing must also be a benign one. Pure folly, to believe destruction couldn’t come out of a clear blue sky.
It could. It did. If she’d learned nothing else these past few months, she’d learned that.
She turned to the next page, then the next, and …
ah, yes, here it was. This was the sketch she’d been looking for.
It was a drawing of a thick bank of clouds, except there was no sun to be seen in this sketch.
These clouds were the same strange, bright white as those above her now, but these were edged with an ominous band of dark gray that would prove to be prophetic.
They were dense, towering things, and the storm that had followed that unusual mass of clouds had wreaked havoc on Dunvegan and the surrounding areas.
Crops had been destroyed, and half a dozen villagers were injured by the debris the wind had tossed about.
It had come in such violent gusts that entire trees had been torn from the ground, exposing their raw, tangled roots to the world.
There’d been something almost obscene about it, like getting a peek beneath a lady’s skirts.
She’d written the date in the bottom left corner of the page.
October 21, 1774.
No, that couldn’t be right, could it? Had it only been a year since she’d sketched these clouds? It seemed impossible, given how much had happened since then, but there it was, in her own messy scribble, as plain as day.
Now a second storm was coming, and Dunvegan was directly in its path.
Not so long ago, the threat of such a storm would have had her scrambling to warn her sisters, but what good did a warning do? The storm would come either way, and there was little they could do about it aside from tucking themselves into the safest corner of the castle until it passed.
In the end, all her sketches and notes and calculations served little purpose. Catriona might persist in calling her abilities a “gift,” but unlike Cat’s cures and Sorcha’s falconry, it was little more than a hobby, and a rather silly one, at that.
Now, if she were able to control the weather, as some of the more suspicious villagers believed, that would be another thing entirely. What would it be like to have the wind at her fingertips? To have the power to summon the thunder with a wave of her hand?
She settled herself more comfortably against the stones at her back, smoothed her skirt over her bent knees and took up her pencil, suppressing a sigh. It was a forlorn little stub of a thing, no longer than her thumb.
She needed a new one. A new notebook, as well, as this one was in a shocking state. The once pristine white pages were now smudged and grubby with overuse. There was hardly a sliver of blank space left, aside from one small corner at the top of the page.
She pressed the dull tip to the paper, and her hand moved idly over the space until a face began to emerge.
Her face, except it wasn’t the same face she saw reflected in her looking glass every morning.
This face was sharper, the chin ending in an obstinate point, and her eyes looked wild, her eyebrows two dark, arched wings above them, and her mouth—my goodness, that was a wicked curve of a smile on her lips.
Why, she looked marvelous! Like herself, but fiercer. She added a mane of untamed curls and a pair of upraised hands with lightning bolts shooting from the fingertips, then traced her finger over the pencil lines, a laugh bubbling in her throat.
How wonderful! No one would dare trifle with such a ferocious creature.
But alas, she was no witch, no matter what the gossips said. The sketch was a lie, just as so many of her other sketches were. Anyone looking through her notebook might be fooled into believing she lived in the world she spent so much time depicting, when the truth was, she only recorded it.
She had lived, once. Her life in Dunvegan had been quiet enough even then, but there’d been a time when she’d walked into the village every day. Back then, the villagers had greeted her with nods and smiles. She’d had friends there, people who were pleased to see her.
But no longer. It had been months since she’d left the castle, months since she’d spoken to a single soul aside from her sisters, and Lord Ballantyne.
If only she …
No. There was no sense in wishing for the impossible. It would only make her melancholy, and anyway, it was better this way.
Safer.
Still, it was an amusing sketch. Carefully, she tore it out of her notebook and slipped it into the pocket of her cloak, then set her pencil and notebook aside in favor of watching the clouds skimming across the sky.
Cool fingers of light played over her face.
She closed her eyes, and bursts of pale yellow and muted orange danced behind her eyelids.
The impending storm would come, whether she told anyone or not.
There was no one around to warn, in any case.
Catriona had gone off to the village with Lord Ballantyne, and Sorcha was …
well, she hadn’t any idea where Sorcha was.
In the woods somewhere, no doubt, getting up to goodness only knew what sort of mischief.
But the storm was still hours away. Even as much as a day might pass before it hit, and in the meantime, there was sunshine to be had. Weak sunshine, with hardly a breath of warmth to it, but still rare enough a Highland lass knew to appreciate it as the gift it was.
Perhaps a wee nap was in order? Goodness knew a sound sleep was rare enough these days. A wise lady seized it when it presented itself, rather like sunshine in October.
But her eyelashes hardly had a chance to brush her cheeks before she was startled awake by a noise so strange, so utterly out of place she was on her feet and peering over the edge of the wall surrounding the turret’s roof before her eyes had fully opened.