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Synopsis
Three unusually gifted sisters in Georgian Scotland must protect their family fortress from those who would steal it's rumored treasures—and their hearts—in this sweeping, adventure-filled, historical romance series for readers of India Holton, Lex Crocher, Manda Collins, and Evie Dunmore.
Despite their village's wild, insistent rumors, middle sister Freya MacLeod is no more a witch than her extraordinary siblings. Quiet and observant, she can't control the weather—although her magnificently skilled drawings often predict it. But now a very different sort of storm has besieged their home of Castle Cairncross. When Freya’s fearless younger sister disappears and is accused of murder, Freya is determined to prove her innocence—and bring her back. That means matching wits with a warrior—no matter how dangerous he may be . . .
A reluctant laird, Callum is glad to escape his clan’s intrigues. But helping to protect Castle Cairncross as a favor to a friend is far more difficult than he thought. Especially when the seemingly timid Freya eludes him, his battle-honed instincts—and enrages the village into putting a bounty on both their heads . . .
As they flee, Freya is stunned to see how caring—and vulnerable—Callum can be. . . . But he must keep his growing feelings for her hidden in order to honor a secret promise to his clan. Yet as their peril increases, they may find that battling side-by-side will uncover something more precious than gold . . .
Release date: May 26, 2026
Publisher: Kensington Books
Print pages: 336
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How to Lose a Laird
Anna Bradley
Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, Scotland
October 1775
“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.
From here, she could see for miles around the castle. The turret had been added to the original castle structure in the twelfth century. Most people considered it an ill-advised addition, jutting as it did like a scolding finger into the sky.
It was an ugly old thing, to be sure, but she loved it despite its oddities. Or perhaps because of them. She could never quite make up her mind. Whatever the case, there was no denying it was the turret that distinguished her castle from every other castle on the Isle of Skye.
Awkward or not, Castle Cairncross was famous for its turret.
Or perhaps infamous was a better word. Yes, infamous was a more apt description these days, but it did her no good at all to dwell on it.
It was much better not to think of it at all.
As for the strange noise, it had disappeared as suddenly as it arrived. She scanned the wood, then the narrow pathway to the village that wound behind the old stables, but all was silent, and the front drive, the wood, and the pathway were deserted.
Had she imagined the voices, or drifted off to sleep, and dreamed—
No! There it was again, a man’s voice. A single male voice on its own wasn’t cause for alarm, not since Lord Ballantyne had come to Dunvegan. If there’d been only one deep voice, she would have assumed he and Catriona had returned from their errand in the village.
But there were two male voices—a deep, cold one and a second one, warmer and with a hint of amusement.
Whoever they were, they were close. Too close.
She braced her arms on the ledge and leaned as far over the edge of the wall as she dared, and … oh, dear God, there they were, right below her!
Two men, both strangers.
She was no connoisseur of the male form, but they were much larger than the usual sort of man—big, strapping fellows with broad shoulders and massive hands. The man on the left with the dark hair was a veritable giant, and he looked … well, it was difficult to tell from here, but his mouth seemed to be turned down in a scowl as dark as midnight itself.
There could only be one reason they were strolling boldly up her drive as if they had every right to be there, coming closer to the front door with every step.
Oh, no. No, no, no. Not now. Not again.
She stumbled backward, away from the wall, her heart pounding in her chest. No good ever came of strange men approaching Castle Cairncross, especially men who could snap a lady’s neck with a mere twitch of their fingers.
What was she meant to do? There was no one nearby, not a single person to warn.
Two men she’d never seen before were a heartbeat away from her front door.
And she was here alone.
* * *
“So, this is Castle Cairncross.” Callum paused several paces from the top of the drive and took in the massive, iron-studded front door. “It’s exactly what I expected.”
A hulking abomination of dark gray stone topped with a turret that looked to be an instant away from crumbling into Loch Dunvegan. Neat rows of windows dominated the façade, but there wasn’t a flicker of life behind them. They were dark, blank, unblinking, a dozen suspicious eyes scrutinizing every poor fool that made the mistake of approaching the front door.
“The seat of Rory MacLeod, in all its dubious glory.” Keir squinted up at the weather-beaten front door. “Grim old pile, isn’t it?”
“Grim enough. If I’d been MacLeod, I’d have let it tumble into the sea long ago, and good riddance. Seems a fitting end to such an infamous place.”
“It’s not the castle itself that’s infamous.” Keir frowned as he took in the lopsided turret. “It’s the inhabitants.”
“It’s both.” It wasn’t a kind assessment, but whatever slender thread of kindness he’d been clinging to had disintegrated in the downpour they’d encountered in Strathcarron this morning. “MacLeod was a notorious smuggler, and his three daughters are witches. It doesn’t get any more infamous than that.”
“Witches.” Keir snorted out a laugh. “There’s no such thing as witches. Don’t tell me you believe all the wild rumors about the MacLeod sisters.”
“There’s a grain of truth to every rumor.”
“And all but that one grain is nearly always a load of bollocks.” Keir gave him a cheerful slap on the back.
Cheerful, for God’s sake.
A man couldn’t be expected to be cheerful with icy water dripping down the back of his neck and his boots squelching with every step, but Keir tended to remain jovial no matter what miseries befell him.
It was bloody irritating, was what it was.
The dousing they’d endured should have been more than enough to knock the smile off the man’s face. Highland downpours were a misery of a thing, especially in the fall, but even that resounding soaking had been no match for Keir’s good humor.
Callum didn’t suffer from the same affliction. He’d always been an impatient, sour-tempered fellow, and he didn’t see any reason to stop now. “Ballantyne better have a damned good reason for dragging us all the way up here,” he grumbled, as they resumed their trek up the graveled drive to the door.
Ballantyne’s summons couldn’t have come at a worse time. He had no business traipsing about on the Isle of Skye, hundreds of miles away from his clan, his boots overflowing with rainwater, but whatever trouble Ballantyne had gotten himself into this time must be dire. He never would have called them here otherwise.
Perhaps he’d been bewitched. If ever there was a man apt to fall victim to a bewitching, it was Ballantyne.
“I daresay he does.” Keir gave a careless shrug. “I don’t know why you’re so put out. Don’t you have the least bit of curiosity about the MacLeod sisters? I’m looking forward to meeting the young ladies at the heart of such spectacular rumors. It isn’t every day a man has the chance to meet a witch.”
Witches, of all ridiculous things. “You just said there’s no such thing as witches.”
Keir shrugged. “There are plenty of people in Scotland who insist otherwise. Not me, mind you, but plenty of others.”
“All that proves is that Scotland is awash in superstitious fools.”
The MacLeod sisters were something, yes—the fantastical rumors about them were proof of that much—but he’d wager his last penny that witchery had nothing to do with it. No doubt they were the usual, run-of-the-mill charlatans, but perhaps with better acting skills.
“They’re not witches. They’re just three troublesome chits with nothing better to do with their time than play at—”
“Callum.” Keir laid a hand on his arm, halting him on their way up the drive, and nodded toward the front door. “Look.”
He glanced up, his steps slowing.
A young lady was standing in the open doorway at the castle’s entrance. She’d appeared out of nowhere, as if born of the air itself, just like …
Well, like a witch. “Where the devil did she come from?”
“The castle, I presume.” Keir came to a stop beside him. “She must be one of the sisters.”
She was dressed in a dark green gown with a bulky dark blue cloak thrown over the top of it, the rough linen nearly drowning her, and she had a long, reddish-gold braid hanging down her back. “She looks like a housemaid.”
Keir shook his head. “I don’t think so. Ballantyne said the sisters live here alone.”
Whoever she was, she was watching them approach, her small frame rigid and her brow furrowed with … was that dread?
“What’s the matter with her? Why is she looking at us like that?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. She must know who we are, mustn’t she? Ballantyne would have told them we were coming.”
One would think so, but that wasn’t a welcome expression on her face, or even a curious one. No, she was gaping at them with such abject horror he glanced behind them, expecting to encounter something awful, indeed.
A fire-breathing dragon, perhaps, or a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers? There was no love lost between the MacLeod sisters and the villagers of Dunvegan, according to Ballantyne.
But there was nothing behind them. The drive was deserted.
“She doesn’t look as if she’s expecting us,” Keir murmured. “I don’t like to frighten her. Perhaps we’d better wait for Ballantyne to appear and make the introductions.”
Where was Ballantyne? Shouldn’t he be here to meet them?
They waited, locked in a strange sort of stand-off with the red-headed girl, who’d made no move to go back inside, or meet them on the drive. She appeared to be frozen, one slender hand resting on the door-frame, her face as pale as death.
The three of them stood there, none of them moving, and eyed each other over the empty expanse of the drive between them.
Waiting was the proper thing to do—the gentlemanly thing—but he wasn’t inclined to stand about in his wet boots while this bedraggled-looking chit mustered up the courage to squeak out a greeting.
“Enough. I’m going ahead.” If the girl fell into a hysterical swoon, then so be it.
“Callum, wait.”
But he didn’t wait. He strode forward, his eyes on the girl, who was shrinking back with every step he took toward her, her thin shoulders hunching. When he was a dozen paces from the front door he opened his mouth to offer a greeting, but before he could get a word out, an unholy shriek shattered the silence.
It was a battle cry. Not the first he’d ever heard. Clan Ross had been in their fair share of skirmishes with neighboring clans. It was bloodcurdling enough, and fairly trembling with rage, but the voice was much higher than one would expect, with a shrill edge to it.
It was a woman’s voice, but it wasn’t the girl in the doorway who’d uttered it. She was still frozen where she stood, one trembling hand over her mouth, her wide eyes dark smudges in her pale face.
Beside him, Keir was shouting something, but before he could decipher it, or even stir a step, something crashed into him, nearly knocking him down. It wasn’t heavy, but before he could react it scrambled up his back and wrapped an arm around his neck.
“What the devil?” He tried to throw it—her—off, but she clung like a burr.
“No. Don’t move, Callum.” Keir’s voice had gone quiet, but there was a thread of urgency in it that made Callum freeze where he stood.
That was when he felt it.
The cold press of a blade against the vulnerable stretch of skin just below his jaw, where his pulse beat, and blood rushed through his carotid artery.
“We don’t care for strangers here at Castle Cairncross,” a voice said near his ear. If there’d been a tremor in it, he might have made another attempt to toss her to the ground, but it was calm, matter-of-fact. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“We don’t mean you any harm.” Keir held up his hands. “We were invited to—”
“I didn’t invite you. You’ve made a mistake, coming here.” The blade moved against his flesh then, just the tiniest shift in the angle, but it was enough.
A trickle of warm blood slid down his neck.
Then, as if the spill of his blood wasn’t warning enough, she added, “A fatal mistake.”
A bloody murder was unfolding in the castle’s front drive.
There weren’t many things worse than a pair of enormous smugglers strolling up to the front door of her castle, but her sister slitting one of their throats without blinking an eye was one of them.
Five months ago, such a dramatic turn from the concerning to the unimaginably dreadful would have shocked Freya, but since her father’s passing, this was the way of things at Castle Cairncross.
Just when she was sure things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
“Sorcha?” Freya kept one eye on the two men as she sidled down the drive, one hand out toward her sister. “Let’s not act hastily, dearest. We don’t know who these men are. They may not be smugglers at all.”
“No?” Sorcha didn’t release her victim but pressed the blade against the oozing cut she’d already carved into the man’s neck. “Perhaps not, but you can be sure they’re some manner of blackguard.”
She could hardly argue that point, could she? Only wicked people with ill intent ever came to Castle Cairncross these days. She’d never seen any of the smugglers who’d come before, not face-to-face. None of them had ever made it as far as the castle’s door, but in the dozens of nightmares she’d had about them, they all looked just like the man under Sorcha’s blade.
She was close enough now to see his eyes, and they were … dear God.
His gaze met hers, and she suppressed a shudder. To be fair, a man wasn’t at his best with a knife-wielding hellion on his back, but his eyes chilled her to the bone. They were the same icy gray as Loch Dunvegan in the dead of winter, when there wasn’t any sun in the sky to lighten the dark roil of the water.
If there was ever a man with a villain’s face, it was this man. If the other one had been half as terrifying, she might have let Sorcha do her worst, but he was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and blessed with a most angelic face.
He was quite the prettiest man she’d ever seen, but weren’t the prettiest men always the worst scoundrels? The clouds scudding across the sky above them were pretty, too, but they were still harbingers of doom.
Yet doubt niggled at her. There was something not right about this, and the last thing she and her sisters needed was to add a murder to their already dire circumstances.
“Wait a moment, Sorcha. If these men have come with ill intent, then why would they approach from the drive? Anyone watching from the castle could see them coming well before they reach the door.”
“How should I know? Stupidity, perhaps?”
Oh, no. Sorcha was at her most mulish. Nothing was more difficult than reasoning with her when she was in such a state. “For pity’s sake, Sorcha. Surely we’re obliged to ask them why they’ve come here before you butcher this man in cold blood!”
“Very well, then.” Sorcha shifted her blade, and another trickle of blood inched down the man’s neck. “You have five seconds to persuade me you’re not another one of the villains after my father’s treasure before I spill your blood all over the front drive.”
The gray-eyed man let out a growl. “Enough.”
Every hair on Freya’s neck rose in alarm, but the warning came too late. His arm lashed out, and before she could take a step, hard fingers closed around her wrist and tugged. She stumbled, and before she had a chance to regain her footing she was trapped against a chest as unyielding as a stone wall.
One impossibly long, hard arm wrapped around her waist, and the other snaked around her neck, pressing against her windpipe. “Keep still.”
She should have screamed. The instant his cold fingers touched her wrist she should have writhed and struggled and lashed out with every bit of strength she possessed, but to her everlasting shame, the scream that swelled in her chest died with a whimper before it made it to her lips.
Either of her sisters would have fought the man with everything in them, but she’d never been as brave as they were. She went cold with panic, the strength in her limbs deserting her and leaving her as limp and unresisting as a rag doll in his arms.
Black spots danced at the edges of her vision, but this was no time to succumb to a maidenly swoon. Sorcha was still perched on the man’s back, with the dirk still pressed to his throat. She had to persuade her sister to release him before the thin rivulets of blood on his neck became a deluge.
“I—I’m all right, Sorcha. He isn’t hurting me.” She wasn’t all right, and he was hurting her, his arm like a vise around her neck, but this situation would go from bad to worse in a heartbeat if Sorcha lost her head.
“Release her at once!” Sorcha hissed, each word heavy with menace, but the tremor in her voice gave her away. “Let my sister go, or I swear I’ll tear off a strip of your flesh!”
The man ignored Sorcha’s threat, and as cool as you please turned and presented his back to his friend, with Freya still clutched against his chest. “A bit of help, if you would, Keir.”
“If you insist upon it.” The second man wrapped a burly arm around Sorcha’s waist and plucked her off his friend’s back like one would a burr stuck in a horse’s tail. “Although I confess I’m rather curious to see what she’ll do next.”
Sorcha, who’d never taken kindly to being manhandled, squirmed and kicked to get free, but the man had the good sense to keep her arms securely pinned behind her back. “Easy there, lass. We’re not going to harm you.”
As soon as he was free, the first man—Callum—pressed the fingers of one hand to the cut on his throat, his other arm still tight around Freya’s neck. He frowned down at his bloody fingers before turning to Sorcha. “Damned hellion. One accidental slip of your wrist, and you might have killed me.”
Sorcha, far from being intimidated, let out a harsh laugh. “If I had spilled your blood, it wouldn’t have been an accident.”
“Shall we try this again?” The fair-haired man raised one hand in a placating gesture, the other one still holding Sorcha’s wrists. “I’m Keir Dunn, Laird of Clan Dunn, and this gentleman here is—”
“Gentleman?” Sorcha spat, whirling around to face the man. “He’s holding my sister against her will! He’s hurting her!”
“He wouldn’t have needed to do either if you hadn’t pressed a blade to his throat.” Mr. Dunn nodded at his friend. “That’s enough, Callum. Let the lady go.”
He didn’t let her go, but the arm around her neck eased slightly. “I’ll let her sister go as soon as that vixen puts her blade on the ground.”
“What the devil is going on here?”
The fa. . .
October 1775
“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.
From here, she could see for miles around the castle. The turret had been added to the original castle structure in the twelfth century. Most people considered it an ill-advised addition, jutting as it did like a scolding finger into the sky.
It was an ugly old thing, to be sure, but she loved it despite its oddities. Or perhaps because of them. She could never quite make up her mind. Whatever the case, there was no denying it was the turret that distinguished her castle from every other castle on the Isle of Skye.
Awkward or not, Castle Cairncross was famous for its turret.
Or perhaps infamous was a better word. Yes, infamous was a more apt description these days, but it did her no good at all to dwell on it.
It was much better not to think of it at all.
As for the strange noise, it had disappeared as suddenly as it arrived. She scanned the wood, then the narrow pathway to the village that wound behind the old stables, but all was silent, and the front drive, the wood, and the pathway were deserted.
Had she imagined the voices, or drifted off to sleep, and dreamed—
No! There it was again, a man’s voice. A single male voice on its own wasn’t cause for alarm, not since Lord Ballantyne had come to Dunvegan. If there’d been only one deep voice, she would have assumed he and Catriona had returned from their errand in the village.
But there were two male voices—a deep, cold one and a second one, warmer and with a hint of amusement.
Whoever they were, they were close. Too close.
She braced her arms on the ledge and leaned as far over the edge of the wall as she dared, and … oh, dear God, there they were, right below her!
Two men, both strangers.
She was no connoisseur of the male form, but they were much larger than the usual sort of man—big, strapping fellows with broad shoulders and massive hands. The man on the left with the dark hair was a veritable giant, and he looked … well, it was difficult to tell from here, but his mouth seemed to be turned down in a scowl as dark as midnight itself.
There could only be one reason they were strolling boldly up her drive as if they had every right to be there, coming closer to the front door with every step.
Oh, no. No, no, no. Not now. Not again.
She stumbled backward, away from the wall, her heart pounding in her chest. No good ever came of strange men approaching Castle Cairncross, especially men who could snap a lady’s neck with a mere twitch of their fingers.
What was she meant to do? There was no one nearby, not a single person to warn.
Two men she’d never seen before were a heartbeat away from her front door.
And she was here alone.
* * *
“So, this is Castle Cairncross.” Callum paused several paces from the top of the drive and took in the massive, iron-studded front door. “It’s exactly what I expected.”
A hulking abomination of dark gray stone topped with a turret that looked to be an instant away from crumbling into Loch Dunvegan. Neat rows of windows dominated the façade, but there wasn’t a flicker of life behind them. They were dark, blank, unblinking, a dozen suspicious eyes scrutinizing every poor fool that made the mistake of approaching the front door.
“The seat of Rory MacLeod, in all its dubious glory.” Keir squinted up at the weather-beaten front door. “Grim old pile, isn’t it?”
“Grim enough. If I’d been MacLeod, I’d have let it tumble into the sea long ago, and good riddance. Seems a fitting end to such an infamous place.”
“It’s not the castle itself that’s infamous.” Keir frowned as he took in the lopsided turret. “It’s the inhabitants.”
“It’s both.” It wasn’t a kind assessment, but whatever slender thread of kindness he’d been clinging to had disintegrated in the downpour they’d encountered in Strathcarron this morning. “MacLeod was a notorious smuggler, and his three daughters are witches. It doesn’t get any more infamous than that.”
“Witches.” Keir snorted out a laugh. “There’s no such thing as witches. Don’t tell me you believe all the wild rumors about the MacLeod sisters.”
“There’s a grain of truth to every rumor.”
“And all but that one grain is nearly always a load of bollocks.” Keir gave him a cheerful slap on the back.
Cheerful, for God’s sake.
A man couldn’t be expected to be cheerful with icy water dripping down the back of his neck and his boots squelching with every step, but Keir tended to remain jovial no matter what miseries befell him.
It was bloody irritating, was what it was.
The dousing they’d endured should have been more than enough to knock the smile off the man’s face. Highland downpours were a misery of a thing, especially in the fall, but even that resounding soaking had been no match for Keir’s good humor.
Callum didn’t suffer from the same affliction. He’d always been an impatient, sour-tempered fellow, and he didn’t see any reason to stop now. “Ballantyne better have a damned good reason for dragging us all the way up here,” he grumbled, as they resumed their trek up the graveled drive to the door.
Ballantyne’s summons couldn’t have come at a worse time. He had no business traipsing about on the Isle of Skye, hundreds of miles away from his clan, his boots overflowing with rainwater, but whatever trouble Ballantyne had gotten himself into this time must be dire. He never would have called them here otherwise.
Perhaps he’d been bewitched. If ever there was a man apt to fall victim to a bewitching, it was Ballantyne.
“I daresay he does.” Keir gave a careless shrug. “I don’t know why you’re so put out. Don’t you have the least bit of curiosity about the MacLeod sisters? I’m looking forward to meeting the young ladies at the heart of such spectacular rumors. It isn’t every day a man has the chance to meet a witch.”
Witches, of all ridiculous things. “You just said there’s no such thing as witches.”
Keir shrugged. “There are plenty of people in Scotland who insist otherwise. Not me, mind you, but plenty of others.”
“All that proves is that Scotland is awash in superstitious fools.”
The MacLeod sisters were something, yes—the fantastical rumors about them were proof of that much—but he’d wager his last penny that witchery had nothing to do with it. No doubt they were the usual, run-of-the-mill charlatans, but perhaps with better acting skills.
“They’re not witches. They’re just three troublesome chits with nothing better to do with their time than play at—”
“Callum.” Keir laid a hand on his arm, halting him on their way up the drive, and nodded toward the front door. “Look.”
He glanced up, his steps slowing.
A young lady was standing in the open doorway at the castle’s entrance. She’d appeared out of nowhere, as if born of the air itself, just like …
Well, like a witch. “Where the devil did she come from?”
“The castle, I presume.” Keir came to a stop beside him. “She must be one of the sisters.”
She was dressed in a dark green gown with a bulky dark blue cloak thrown over the top of it, the rough linen nearly drowning her, and she had a long, reddish-gold braid hanging down her back. “She looks like a housemaid.”
Keir shook his head. “I don’t think so. Ballantyne said the sisters live here alone.”
Whoever she was, she was watching them approach, her small frame rigid and her brow furrowed with … was that dread?
“What’s the matter with her? Why is she looking at us like that?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. She must know who we are, mustn’t she? Ballantyne would have told them we were coming.”
One would think so, but that wasn’t a welcome expression on her face, or even a curious one. No, she was gaping at them with such abject horror he glanced behind them, expecting to encounter something awful, indeed.
A fire-breathing dragon, perhaps, or a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers? There was no love lost between the MacLeod sisters and the villagers of Dunvegan, according to Ballantyne.
But there was nothing behind them. The drive was deserted.
“She doesn’t look as if she’s expecting us,” Keir murmured. “I don’t like to frighten her. Perhaps we’d better wait for Ballantyne to appear and make the introductions.”
Where was Ballantyne? Shouldn’t he be here to meet them?
They waited, locked in a strange sort of stand-off with the red-headed girl, who’d made no move to go back inside, or meet them on the drive. She appeared to be frozen, one slender hand resting on the door-frame, her face as pale as death.
The three of them stood there, none of them moving, and eyed each other over the empty expanse of the drive between them.
Waiting was the proper thing to do—the gentlemanly thing—but he wasn’t inclined to stand about in his wet boots while this bedraggled-looking chit mustered up the courage to squeak out a greeting.
“Enough. I’m going ahead.” If the girl fell into a hysterical swoon, then so be it.
“Callum, wait.”
But he didn’t wait. He strode forward, his eyes on the girl, who was shrinking back with every step he took toward her, her thin shoulders hunching. When he was a dozen paces from the front door he opened his mouth to offer a greeting, but before he could get a word out, an unholy shriek shattered the silence.
It was a battle cry. Not the first he’d ever heard. Clan Ross had been in their fair share of skirmishes with neighboring clans. It was bloodcurdling enough, and fairly trembling with rage, but the voice was much higher than one would expect, with a shrill edge to it.
It was a woman’s voice, but it wasn’t the girl in the doorway who’d uttered it. She was still frozen where she stood, one trembling hand over her mouth, her wide eyes dark smudges in her pale face.
Beside him, Keir was shouting something, but before he could decipher it, or even stir a step, something crashed into him, nearly knocking him down. It wasn’t heavy, but before he could react it scrambled up his back and wrapped an arm around his neck.
“What the devil?” He tried to throw it—her—off, but she clung like a burr.
“No. Don’t move, Callum.” Keir’s voice had gone quiet, but there was a thread of urgency in it that made Callum freeze where he stood.
That was when he felt it.
The cold press of a blade against the vulnerable stretch of skin just below his jaw, where his pulse beat, and blood rushed through his carotid artery.
“We don’t care for strangers here at Castle Cairncross,” a voice said near his ear. If there’d been a tremor in it, he might have made another attempt to toss her to the ground, but it was calm, matter-of-fact. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“We don’t mean you any harm.” Keir held up his hands. “We were invited to—”
“I didn’t invite you. You’ve made a mistake, coming here.” The blade moved against his flesh then, just the tiniest shift in the angle, but it was enough.
A trickle of warm blood slid down his neck.
Then, as if the spill of his blood wasn’t warning enough, she added, “A fatal mistake.”
A bloody murder was unfolding in the castle’s front drive.
There weren’t many things worse than a pair of enormous smugglers strolling up to the front door of her castle, but her sister slitting one of their throats without blinking an eye was one of them.
Five months ago, such a dramatic turn from the concerning to the unimaginably dreadful would have shocked Freya, but since her father’s passing, this was the way of things at Castle Cairncross.
Just when she was sure things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
“Sorcha?” Freya kept one eye on the two men as she sidled down the drive, one hand out toward her sister. “Let’s not act hastily, dearest. We don’t know who these men are. They may not be smugglers at all.”
“No?” Sorcha didn’t release her victim but pressed the blade against the oozing cut she’d already carved into the man’s neck. “Perhaps not, but you can be sure they’re some manner of blackguard.”
She could hardly argue that point, could she? Only wicked people with ill intent ever came to Castle Cairncross these days. She’d never seen any of the smugglers who’d come before, not face-to-face. None of them had ever made it as far as the castle’s door, but in the dozens of nightmares she’d had about them, they all looked just like the man under Sorcha’s blade.
She was close enough now to see his eyes, and they were … dear God.
His gaze met hers, and she suppressed a shudder. To be fair, a man wasn’t at his best with a knife-wielding hellion on his back, but his eyes chilled her to the bone. They were the same icy gray as Loch Dunvegan in the dead of winter, when there wasn’t any sun in the sky to lighten the dark roil of the water.
If there was ever a man with a villain’s face, it was this man. If the other one had been half as terrifying, she might have let Sorcha do her worst, but he was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and blessed with a most angelic face.
He was quite the prettiest man she’d ever seen, but weren’t the prettiest men always the worst scoundrels? The clouds scudding across the sky above them were pretty, too, but they were still harbingers of doom.
Yet doubt niggled at her. There was something not right about this, and the last thing she and her sisters needed was to add a murder to their already dire circumstances.
“Wait a moment, Sorcha. If these men have come with ill intent, then why would they approach from the drive? Anyone watching from the castle could see them coming well before they reach the door.”
“How should I know? Stupidity, perhaps?”
Oh, no. Sorcha was at her most mulish. Nothing was more difficult than reasoning with her when she was in such a state. “For pity’s sake, Sorcha. Surely we’re obliged to ask them why they’ve come here before you butcher this man in cold blood!”
“Very well, then.” Sorcha shifted her blade, and another trickle of blood inched down the man’s neck. “You have five seconds to persuade me you’re not another one of the villains after my father’s treasure before I spill your blood all over the front drive.”
The gray-eyed man let out a growl. “Enough.”
Every hair on Freya’s neck rose in alarm, but the warning came too late. His arm lashed out, and before she could take a step, hard fingers closed around her wrist and tugged. She stumbled, and before she had a chance to regain her footing she was trapped against a chest as unyielding as a stone wall.
One impossibly long, hard arm wrapped around her waist, and the other snaked around her neck, pressing against her windpipe. “Keep still.”
She should have screamed. The instant his cold fingers touched her wrist she should have writhed and struggled and lashed out with every bit of strength she possessed, but to her everlasting shame, the scream that swelled in her chest died with a whimper before it made it to her lips.
Either of her sisters would have fought the man with everything in them, but she’d never been as brave as they were. She went cold with panic, the strength in her limbs deserting her and leaving her as limp and unresisting as a rag doll in his arms.
Black spots danced at the edges of her vision, but this was no time to succumb to a maidenly swoon. Sorcha was still perched on the man’s back, with the dirk still pressed to his throat. She had to persuade her sister to release him before the thin rivulets of blood on his neck became a deluge.
“I—I’m all right, Sorcha. He isn’t hurting me.” She wasn’t all right, and he was hurting her, his arm like a vise around her neck, but this situation would go from bad to worse in a heartbeat if Sorcha lost her head.
“Release her at once!” Sorcha hissed, each word heavy with menace, but the tremor in her voice gave her away. “Let my sister go, or I swear I’ll tear off a strip of your flesh!”
The man ignored Sorcha’s threat, and as cool as you please turned and presented his back to his friend, with Freya still clutched against his chest. “A bit of help, if you would, Keir.”
“If you insist upon it.” The second man wrapped a burly arm around Sorcha’s waist and plucked her off his friend’s back like one would a burr stuck in a horse’s tail. “Although I confess I’m rather curious to see what she’ll do next.”
Sorcha, who’d never taken kindly to being manhandled, squirmed and kicked to get free, but the man had the good sense to keep her arms securely pinned behind her back. “Easy there, lass. We’re not going to harm you.”
As soon as he was free, the first man—Callum—pressed the fingers of one hand to the cut on his throat, his other arm still tight around Freya’s neck. He frowned down at his bloody fingers before turning to Sorcha. “Damned hellion. One accidental slip of your wrist, and you might have killed me.”
Sorcha, far from being intimidated, let out a harsh laugh. “If I had spilled your blood, it wouldn’t have been an accident.”
“Shall we try this again?” The fair-haired man raised one hand in a placating gesture, the other one still holding Sorcha’s wrists. “I’m Keir Dunn, Laird of Clan Dunn, and this gentleman here is—”
“Gentleman?” Sorcha spat, whirling around to face the man. “He’s holding my sister against her will! He’s hurting her!”
“He wouldn’t have needed to do either if you hadn’t pressed a blade to his throat.” Mr. Dunn nodded at his friend. “That’s enough, Callum. Let the lady go.”
He didn’t let her go, but the arm around her neck eased slightly. “I’ll let her sister go as soon as that vixen puts her blade on the ground.”
“What the devil is going on here?”
The fa. . .
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How to Lose a Laird
Anna Bradley
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