The Devil’s Due by Boucher, Rita (free reads txt) 📗

too briefly the night before, the soft flesh, the clean female scent? Yet, although this pocket Venus seemed as fragile as spun glass, she was made of stronger stuff and therein, perhaps, was the answer. “Then your husband sounds like a bloody fool. Did he wish you to become a Dresden figurine, Kate? To live upon his shelf and be admired?” Duncan guessed.

His perception was wholly disconcerting, much too close to the truth. Kate opened her mouth to deny, but thought the better of it. Far wiser not to speak at all. She had already betrayed too much.

“Did he fancy himself Pygmalion then?” Duncan sensed his advantage and pressed the point. “I had always thought that the gods did Galatea no great favor when they brought her to life. ‘Tis an easy thing for marble to maintain perfection, but when Pygmalion’s creation became flesh and blood, I warrant she was bound to disappoint him. Is that who you are running from, ‘Mrs. Smith’? Did Galatea suddenly find that she had dreams of her own, a will that would not be chiseled to suit the sculptor who would shape her to his own image?”

“You are a fanciful man, milord,” Kate said, trying to conceal her sudden confusion. “I had always thought that rogues were of a pragmatic frame of mind.”

“And how did you become aware of my rakish history, Mrs. Smith?” he asked, advancing slowly.

She had made a grievous tactical error, in fact, several, she realized as she rapidly tried to recall what else she had let slip. It was so long since she had allowed herself to be carried away, to give vent to her true feelings. What magic did this man have to make her so reveal herself? “Your behavior is common knowledge . . . the crofters . . .” She left the words dangling, hoping that they would be adequate.

They were not.

“I left this place at the age of fourteen,” he said. “As far as the crofters were concerned, I might as well have fallen off the rim of the earth and good riddance. The last news to reach beyond the passes of this corner of Wester Ross was likely the Bonnie Prince’s defeat.”

“Very well then, if you must know.” Kate gave a shrug of feigned indifference, knowing that any retreat could be fatal. “The ‘Mad MacLean’ something of a byword in military circles, milord. Your exploits both on and off the battlefield gained you no little notoriety.”

Her use of his sobriquet gave the explanation credence, but he knew that it was not of whole cloth. Something was missing and he pressed the attack once again. “Almack’s, military circles, dining with Prinny does not add up to ‘Mrs. Smith’, poaching off the land and existing hand to mouth. I find myself tiring of this ‘Mrs. Smith’, nonsense. We both know it to be a fiction, so I refuse to call you by that last name any longer. Tell me, why are you here, Kate?”

Once again, she found herself scrambling to maintain her position. “If you think me a liar, milord, perhaps it is best if we go,” she said, facing the possibility that the battle was lost.

“Is he a brute, Kate? Did he hurt you? Or the child?” For a brief instant, he saw something flare in her eyes, then disappear as quickly as it came.

“No,” Kate said, meeting his gaze squarely, “There is no husband searching for me, milord. Anne’s father is more than a year in his grave and he would never have knowingly harmed his daughter, or me.”

That was truth; there were no lies in that straightforward look. “Then why? Why have you abandoned the world of Mayfair and the beau monde? Were you left destitute? Is that why you are hiding at the edge of nowhere, living in a crumbling ruin?”

“It was never truly my world,” Kate said. It was a private opinion that she had never voiced to anyone except for Daisy. Why was it so easy to tell a stranger of her grievous failure? “With my husband gone and my funds limited, there is nothing for me there now. In honesty, I sometimes wonder if there ever was. As for your question, I turn it back to you, milord. Why have you returned here? To a crumbling ruin?”

Duncan lifted his eye beyond her toward the stone turrets of Eilean Kirk. “Why? Aye, well you might ask! Why would I leave London when Lady Jersey and all her fellow patronesses were fair to swooning at the sight of me? Abandon Town though His Highness would have me at his right at his next Carlton House fete to thank me for the service I gave my country? It was my duty as the MacLean to hie to my auld ancestral home, to enjoy the splendor, the adulation of my clan,” he said, the burr adding bite to his sarcasm. “My mother would be calling it destiny that this haunted place is the only shelter left to me. We Scots are great believers in the forces of fate, you know. Do you put credit in destiny, Kate?”

Thinking of the twists and turns that led her to Eilean Kirk, Kate nodded. What if she had not received Ian Dewey’s belated letter with the inheritance for her dead husband? What if Dewey had not chanced to mention that the castle was deserted and that there was neither heir nor a buyer to be had?

Her father had always believed that every step in life was guided by providence, but Kate had lately been convinced that the attentions of fortune were capricious. Now her opinion was decidedly a mixture of the two. She was a wealthy woman, but she dared not touch a penny of her funds lest John trace her. She was beyond her brother-by-marriage’s reach for the time being, but well within touching distance of her late husband’s unusual comrade. Her current circumstances made the choice between Scylla and Charybdis seem quite comfortable by