Barefoot in the Dark

by Suzanne Enoch

  “Too early to tell.” Samantha spoke almost absently, her gaze still on the castle as they crossed over the loch and set down on the large, sloping lawn to the east side of the main building. “You’re sure there aren’t any vampires?”

  “Reasonably sure.”

  “And the roof isn’t going to fall in and smash us into pancakes?”

  “I put our odds at fifty-fifty. The west wing’s been closed for years, so the being pancaked odds increase there.”

  By this time, he had no idea whether she was looking for ways to gain illegal entry or if she’d already moved on to categorizing the various time periods when his ancestors had added rooms or done renovations over the years. He certainly hadn’t done anything to the place. Eighteen years. Had it truly been that long since he’d last set eyes on Canniebrae? Growing up, this had been where he spent a good part of nearly every summer, at least until his fifteenth year. Richard shook himself. This was about Samantha and him and their future. Not about the past.

  “Thanks, Blakely,” Samantha said, shedding the headphones and unlatching the door to hop out of the helicopter.

  Richard joined her on the lawn, the stirred-up chill digging through his light jacket and reminding him that autumn in the Highlands was far different than autumn in southern Florida. A pair of men in matching black waistcoats and black and green kilts emerged from the house to unload their luggage. With some bobbing and greetings that he couldn’t quite hear over the rotor noise, they moved well away from the copter.

  The helicopter lifted off again, and in less than a minute was out of sight behind the hills and trees. The sound lasted for another handful of seconds, then faded into silence.

  “Wow,” Samantha whispered, stepping sideways to take his hand and lean into his shoulder. “It’s really creepy now that I see it from ground level.”

  “Samantha, y—“

  “Easy, Brit. Nobody’s asking me if we’ve set a date, where I get my hair cut, who my favorite designer is. It’ll do.”

  Kissing her pretty, autumn-colored hair and more relieved than he cared to admit, Richard smiled. “Then we can go in the front door, I assume, rather than scaling the walls?”

  “Sure. This time.”

  3

  Wednesday, 10:31 a.m.

  Rick owned a lot of antiques, but he was careful with them. He appreciated their rarity and their beauty. Even if the west wing of Canniebrae had started falling apart a long time ago, it wasn’t like him not to have repaired it. That left Samantha with the hanging question of “why”. Before she asked that out loud, though, she needed to look around a little. She was one mostly former cat burglar who preferred to know where the alarms were before she started stomping around willy-nilly.

  She kept an eye on Rick as the butler, Yule, welcomed them and showed them up the mahogany-railed grand staircase, down a long, high-ceilinged hallway right out of Beauty and the Beast, and out to the end of the castle’s east wing where the master bedchamber had been aired out and made ready for them. There were no cobwebs in the corners here, but Canniebrae didn’t feel at all like any other place he owned.

  Even with the broken windows and the holes she’d seen in the roof, the place did ooze with power. The old, inherited kind of power. The stone walls practically hummed with it. For a few minutes she felt like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, except that her Mr. Darcy made way more than ten thousand pounds a year. It was times like this, though, when he stood looking out the open bedroom – bedchamber – window, the wind ruffling his wavy black hair, that she remembered he was Mr. Darcy. Or Richard Addison, the Marquis of Rawley, rather. He came from an old, old line, with bazillions of years of history and pomp and shit. She, on the other hand, couldn’t even remember for certain what her mom’s maiden name had been.

  “What?” Rick asked, turning around as Yule deposited the last of the luggage and left the room.

  “What, what?”

  “You’re staring at me.”

  “I’m always staring at you. You’re gorgeous.”

  Rick grinned, walking over to casually latch the bedchamber door – it actually had one of those old, oversized brass keys stuck in the keyhole – and shed his light jacket. “Thank you, but your expression was more contemplative than lustful.”

  Sam shook herself. “I just forget sometimes how oldy, moldy – I mean pedigreed – you and your family are.”

  “Mm hm.” With the same smooth motion, he pulled the black T-shirt over his head and dropped it onto the floor. “I am not oldy. Nor am I moldy.”

  No, at thirty-three he wasn’t at all oldy. With everything he’d already accomplished it seemed like he should be older, but he had her beat by only seven years. As for being moldy, uh uh. Six pack abs and a light dusting of chest hair that narrowed as it traveled down his flat abdomen to disappear beneath the line of his jeans – an arrow pointing to the very nice package below, an athlete’s lean, graceful lines... Yummy. “Your heritage is.”

  “So is yours. Everyone’s heritage is old. Mine just happens to be better documented.”

  “Well, that’s very non-snobbish of you to say.”

  The loose grin with which he favored her spoke more of heat and sin than humor. “Yes, well, I might have avoided mentioning that I’m an aristocrat from a long line of them. We can’t all come from peasant stock.”

  “Jerk.”

  “You’d be just as happy to be staying at the Roadside Burger and Dentistry Inn in Duluth, Minnesota, then?” he mused, approaching her with a slow, steady step. “Us being in the master bedchamber of a seven-hundred-year-old castle larger than the Queen’s doesn’t affect you in the slightest?”

  “Burger and Dentistry?” she repeated. “Do you get to choose which side you stay on?”

  “Samantha.”

  “Okay, yeah. I’m a snob, too. But only because Dentistry. Staying there sounds risky.”

  Stopping in front of her, he hooked a finger around the neck of her blouse and unbuttoned the top button. Heat spooled down her spine, and she lifted on her tiptoes to kiss him. Mm, Rick Addison sex. In some ways, it was more addictive than that adrenaline punch during a good B and E.

  “Hey,” she murmured, running a thumb along his lower lip as she kissed him again.

  “Hey,” Rick returned, finishing the rest of her buttons and then opening her blouse to run his palms up her ribs and beneath her frilly pink bra to cup her breasts. “I want you to enjoy yourself here. My stuff is your stuff. My house is your house. Oldy and moldy or otherwise.” His mouth took hers in a hot, open-mouthed, tongue-tangling chocolate sundae with a cherry on top. “My heart is your heart.”

  For a second she couldn’t breathe, much less talk. This was the Rick who’d caught her – the sexy, warm, generous one, not the hard-assed, cutthroat guy who bought and sold companies like kids did baseball cards. “Well, if it’s all the same,” she finally managed, reaching down to yank his belt off and undo his jeans buttons, “you can keep this part, as long as you share.” With a grin she slid her fingers down between warm skin and denim to stroke his hard cock.

  “That’s a deal, Samantha,” he rumbled, his Oxford-educated accent deepening. Bending, he scooped her up in his arms and walked over to dump her on the high bed.

  “Hey, careful!” she cautioned, shedding her top and bra as she scooted backward, wincing a little at the squeaking sounds emitting from the frame. “This is a seventeenth century bed, hoss.”

  “Yes, I know. I can hear it. Tell me why my ancestors thought it was prestigious to own a bed so high off the ground they needed a stepladder to use it.” Taking a step back, he hopped up to join her on the heavy, elegantly-quilted coverlet.

  “I would, but it might spoil the mood,” she returned once the creaking subsided, unzipping her own jeans and squirming out of them. “Something about vermin.” Another thought occurred to her, and she eyed him as he pulled off his hiking boots and dropped them to the floor next to her Nikes. “You weren’t...conceived in
this bed, were you?”

  Rick laughed. “It’s entirely possible, I suppose, but I promise it’s a new mattress.” Yanking off his jeans, he turned onto his hands and knees and crawled up over her.

  “Not a new frame, though.” Samantha wrapped her ankles around the back of his thighs, pulling him closer.

  With a deep sigh he canted his hips forward and entered her, hot and hard. “Welcome to Scotland, Sam Jellicoe,” he growled, pumping into her deep and fast.

  Christ. He felt so good, and the way he always wanted her was...amazing. Sam lifted her hands to tangle her fingers into his black, thick hair, drawing his face down for another deep kiss. Whoever said the British were reserved had never had sex with Rick Addison. She moaned, drawing tight and coming around him, shifting her grip to his shoulders so she wouldn’t yank his hair out.

  “I’m afraid this is going to be a quickie,” he grunted with a half grin, increasing his pace.

  “That’s good,” she gasped, tilting her head back, panting in time with his thrusts and the responding rhythmic squeaking of the old frame. “Not sure how long the bed will last.”

  A moment later he came, groaning as he emptied himself into her. Rick lowered his head against her shoulder, sinking his weight along her body. “Traveling with you plays the devil with me,” he murmured, “seeing you so close and all those pesky pilots and drivers about.”

  “And busty flight attendants,” she agreed, kissing his ear.

  A low-pitched howl came through the window, distant and mournful, rising and falling with the light wind. If she hadn’t been so relaxed, it would have made her shiver. She kept listening, but the sound faded away and didn’t repeat.

  “Tell me that was the Hound of the Baskervilles,” she finally whispered.

  “We’re in the Highlands, not the moors,” he commented, his voice muffled and still breathless. “And the Hound signaled the lord and master’s untimely death, so I do hope it’s not him.”

  “And you’re a Rawley and not a Baskerville.” Which was a good thing, since the idea of him being torn limb from limb by a hellhound wasn’t anything she wanted to contemplate. “Maybe it was a ghost, then.”

  He lifted his head to look down at her. “And maybe it was someone’s hunting dog. This is an old house in an old land. Isn’t that intriguing enough?”

  She held his gaze. “That depends.”

  “We’re still not moving into the local inn.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Samantha took a slow breath. “You said your stuff is my stuff, but do I really get to have the run of the place, or are you going to try to keep tabs on me every minute?”

  Putting his arms around her, he rolled them so that she was on top, looking down at his deep blue eyes. “I meant what I said.”

  Samantha grinned. “Yes, but that was during sex. I don’t think it’s binding.”

  He visibly relaxed. “It’s binding. And by all means, explore anywhere you want. Just keep in mind that after seven hundred years there may be some loose stones, and the west wing is rubbish. For the sake of my heart be careful.”

  “Security system?”

  “None but the butler and other servants and some ancient weaponry. No cameras here to capture your arse doing anything suspicious.”

  Sitting up, putting her hands on his chest for balance, she rocked forward and back. “This arse? It’s busy right now.”

  “So I’ve no—”

  The light beside the bed flickered and went out. “Ghost,” she said, looking down at him, a very kiddish feeling of excitement trilling down her spine. Yes, this castle was really, really old, and probably not in as good shape as it could or should have been, but whatever Tom Donner thought she would or wouldn’t like, this was swiftly becoming her kind of place.

  A moment later faint echoes of “power’s oot again” began sounding through the house. So evidently this kind of thing happened a lot. For her, used to the precise timing of locks and the challenge of avoiding cameras and alarms, the idea of a place where the power seemed to be...iffy, was kind of cool. But then Rick grabbed her shoulders and tossed her onto her stomach. Figuring out Canniebrae could wait.

  “What do you mean, ‘it happens all the time’?” Richard asked, holding back a scowl only because his life with Samantha had shown him quite clearly that there were several layers of trouble and that a power outage was barely a blip on the newly-reconfigured Addison radar.

  “Well, just that it does, m’laird,” Yule said in his soft Scottish brogue, shrugging. “I’m verra sorry, but when the wind comes up, the pines play hell with the power lines.”

  “Don’t you have a generator?”

  “Aye, a grand monster of one. When Freddie comes back from the village with Agnes the cook, he’ll bring the petrol to start ‘er up.”

  Out at the edge of his peripheral vision Samantha strolled past the office doorway. Then she walked back in the other direction. On her third pass she finally stopped, leaning into the room. “Do you have candles, Yule?” she asked. “I want to look in the attic.”

  “Candles? We’re nae so primitive, Miss Sam. We have torches aplenty. The power—”

  “Goes out a lot. I heard.” With a grin, she straightened. “I’ll be in the drawing room, when you’re finished here.”

  Yule lifted a bushy red eyebrow. “The drawing room? Alone?”

  She paused halfway out the door. “Yes. Why?”

  “I...” The butler glanced at Richard. “No reason, Miss Sam. Please keep in mind, though, that this house is quite old.”

  The glance she sent Richard was full of amusement and, unless he was mistaken, excitement. But then she’d been trying to get him to admit that he believed the house was haunted from the moment she’d found out where they were going. Having the damned power out didn’t help his denials.

  “Do your best,” he said aloud, clapping Yule on the shoulder. Before the big and rather startled Scotsman could reply, Rick left the office for the drawing room at the far end of the hall.

  At this time of year six o’clock was definitely evening, the sun less than a rosy memory in the western sky. Dim hardly described the long, wood-paneled hallway, and even if he refused to rush his steps, he was quite happy when the wall sconces flickered into yellow light. The orange glow of the fireplace as he neared the drawing room was brighter than the questionable electricity, and he slowed to see Samantha squatting to one side of the hearth, an open book in her hands.

  “What’s that you have?” he asked, dropping into the chair closest to her.

  She looked up. “You look so lord of the manor,” she said, grinning up at him. “All you need is a pipe and a hound at your feet.”

  “I am lord of the manor,” he returned. “You found that old copy of Haunted Balmoral, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, settling onto her backside and folding her long legs beneath the book. “This ghost somebody drew on the inside of the cover has a word bubble saying ‘Boo’.” She opened it, flipping the book around to show him. “Your handiwork?”

  “Good God. Yes. I must have been six years old. My mother caught me at it and informed me that I was too young to be reading ghost stories, and that one did not mark up first editions of any books. Even rubbish tourist books.”

  Samantha snorted. “When I was six, my dad told me not to bother snatching any book that wasn’t a first edition.”

  That made him frown. For God’s sake, she’d had a different upbringing than he had. How did someone raised to believe that she had every right to walk away with anything as long as it wasn’t nailed down, come up with her own sense of morality, and more importantly, have such a good heart?

  “Uh oh,” she muttered, and knocked him in the knee with the book. “Don’t give me that look.”

  “What look?” he responded.

  “I grew up inside my life, Rick. Not looking at it from some enlightened, elevated height. I thought it was cool. By the time I was twelve I’d been to twenty different countries,
all without a passport. I could trick anybody into doing anything, pretty much. People were saps.” She grimaced. “Realizing the world wasn’t my personal jewel-encrusted platter took some time.”

  “But you did realize that. That, my dear, is why I find you so remarkable.”

  “I realized it mostly,” she amended. “Remember, just a year ago I was after a stone tablet that belonged to you. Maybe I got more selective as I got older, but the rush of it all never goes away.”

  Richard tilted his head at her. Samantha was frequently reflective and thoughtful, but she deigned to talk about her thought process and her past much more rarely. “Why did you stop, then? Truly?”

  Making a face, she flipped through a few more pages of the book. “Because you’re a whole different kind of rush,” she muttered after a moment, keeping her head down. “I had to choose. I chose you.”

  He slid onto the floor to sit cross-legged in front of her, their knees bumping. Perhaps she’d merely exchanged one addiction for another, or perhaps that was simply how she chose to describe it. Either way, and however uncomfortable she felt admitting that she needed him, she was here. “Samantha,” he murmured, reaching out to tilt up her chin, to gaze into her bottomless green eyes, “I love you more than you love Godzilla.”

  Her burst of laughter sounded surprised and delighted – two things he most prized being able to give her. “Even the new Godzilla?” she asked him, leaning in to give him a kiss that ended with her nibbling on his bottom lip.

  “I love you quadruple the amount you love the new Godzilla.”

  “Wow. That’s a lot.”

  “Shut up and kiss me again, Yank.”

  She shifted up to her knees, stretching forward and draping herself down his chest as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and sank against his mouth. Her trust, her admission that she’d willingly given up her old, lucrative life to stay with him – taken all together, it meant that this might well have been his favorite kiss. And they had shared some rather spectacular kisses previous to this one.