Barefoot in the Dark

by Suzanne Enoch

  The door behind him opened again, and his aunt and uncle walked in, both of them dressed to the nines. Richard stifled a frown. From what Samantha had said only the females were to know about the dinner garb. He looked at her again to find her attention on his relations as well.

  “Huh,” she muttered.

  Before he could respond to that, Reg and Miss Nyland joined them, his cousin in a damned tuxedo. The Viking, as Samantha referred to her, had somehow wriggled into a skin-tight red dress with one shoulder strap, and a hole from just below her breasts to just above her navel. Like Sam she wore ridiculously high heels, hers a red sandal with bindings all the way up her calf.

  Perhaps he was prejudiced, but the tight fit had the effect of making her look desperate for attention, completely at odds with Samantha’s elegant sexiness. Even that, though, wasn’t his first thought. “Was I the only one not supposed to know we were dressing up?” he murmured, catching Sam’s hand in his.

  “It kind of looks like it,” she returned in the same tone. “I don’t get why, though. The only thing I haven’t told you about tonight is that I’m not wearing any underwear, either.”

  “The… Well, now I can’t recall what I was going to say,” he murmured back. Abruptly he felt better about all this. And yes, he would have been mildly annoyed to see everyone but himself dress for dinner. At the same time, it was small, petty, contrived, and very like a reality show stunt. Compared with some of the turmoil he and Samantha had survived, supremely insignificant. It did give him a very good indication of just how shallow and desperate for attention Reg’s significant other was. The Viking did have her phone with her, swiftly handed over to Reg. Was that it, then? Had she meant to record his anticipated annoyance? A reality-television style stunt, indeed. And it would not be allowed. Not here, and not with him and Samantha involved.

  “We all clean up well, don’t we?” Reg straightened his bowtie. “I see you went native, Rick.”

  “Chicks dig kilts,” Samantha put in, before Richard could comment on Reg’s resemblance to any number of head waiters. She wrapped both hands around his arm. “How do they say it? ‘Ye’re a braw lad, Rick’.”

  Again her Highlands accent was, of course, spot on. Then, even though he knew that she was aware that his aunt and uncle had some rather serious reservations about her joining the family, she released him and glided up to them with a broad smile.

  “You look fabulous, Lady Mercia,” she said, reaching out to squeeze one of his aunt’s hands. “That necklace brings out the green in your eyes. It’s North Carolina emerald, isn’t it? The color’s so deep you could almost sink into it.”

  Of course Samantha would know a stone’s origins simply from its color. His aunt looked flattered, but a little cautious. Considering that they knew at least some of Martin Jellicoe’s history as a jewel thief, he wasn’t entirely certain that Samantha had taken the correct tack. And that was extremely unusual for her.

  Aunt Mercia put her free hand over the silver-bound stone. “It is, I believe. Rowland gave it to me for our last wedding anniversary.”

  Samantha’s smile deepened, even as Rick moved into rescue position. “My dad was kind of a notorious guy, but he would never touch emeralds. He always said a vain woman insists on diamonds because they sparkle, a greedy woman wants rubies to make her look desirable, but only a husband who’s memorized the color of his wife’s eyes gives her emeralds. They were kind of sacred to him, I think.”

  And just like that she’d won them over, at least for tonight. Uncle Rowland put an arm around his wife’s shoulders, both of them melting into smiles. As Sam released Aunt Mercia’s hand and strolled back to Richard’s side, she flashed him a swift grin.

  At that moment he realized two things: She’d completely made up her father’s quaint saying; and Eerika Nyland was wearing rubies. “You haven’t made a friend tonight,” he whispered, offering her an arm as Yule appeared to throw open the formal dining room’s double doors and announce dinner.

  “She meant to embarrass you. I don’t want to be her friend.”

  He took a slow breath. She was an F-5 tornado, and for some reason she’d chosen to stop spinning long enough for him to catch her. “I thought you and I were still at odds.”

  “We’re at odds because you’re a jackass. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fight a dragon for you.”

  “Is she a dragon, then?”

  “Nope. A snake, maybe. I’ll figure it out.”

  As they took their seats, him at the head of the table and Samantha on his right, he sent a swift glance in Norway’s direction. Reg tended to go after glamour and looks and money, and she at least gave the appearance of having all three. At the same time, Reg had told him that she hadn’t bought the car that had been the ruse to bring them together.

  Perhaps she did need some figuring out. Not because she might be digging after Reg’s money, however. Because of the look she sent at Samantha when no one else was looking. Sam might be willing to slay a dragon on his behalf, but that was nothing compared to what he was prepared to do for her.

  11

  Saturday, 3:07 a.m.

  Samantha opened one eye. Beside her, one arm draped across her hips and the other beneath her head, Rick breathed softly against her forehead. He still wore his kilt, and if she had any say in his wardrobe choices he wouldn’t ever be wearing anything else. Hoo, baby. With the heavy blue curtains shut it could have been broad daylight outside, but the still air and the quiet house, even the tap of a breeze-blown branch against the window, felt like night.

  Night had always felt like it belonged to her. Most people would be sound asleep, but she wasn’t most people. Taking a breath, she lifted his arm and rolled out from beneath it. That done, she picked up her phone and scooted silently to the floor. Just after three o’clock. Heavy shadows, sinking moon, and deepest sleep – mortals beware. The cat burglar stirred.

  The ex-cat burglar, that was. With a sigh she slipped into the bathroom, because even burglars had to pee once in a while. Back in the room she stood by the door, listening to Rick’s steady breathing. After awesome kilt sex he wasn’t likely to wake up because of her minimal pitter patter, but she waited anyway. This was solo time, and she didn’t feel like either explaining or arguing.

  Silently she pulled on the dark sweatshirt and black jogging sweats she’d tossed into the old dressing room, donned her sneakers, and tied her hair back in a loose pony tail before she slipped into the cold hallway. A dim light had been left on at either end of the corridor, but that left a lot of room for shadows in between.

  Going down the stairs she kept close to the wall and avoided the typical old house step-squeaking. All of Rick’s other properties were pretty high tech, and she’d even made him upgrade the system in Florida in order to keep out nefarious types other than herself. She’d learned how to beat all of them, which made no-tech Canniebrae no kind of challenge at all.

  But it was still night, and she still didn’t want anyone else spotting her, so that was sort of fun. She grinned as she darted across the hallway and into the library, putting her weight against the handle as she pushed the door shut so it wouldn’t creak. The library hearth was dark, so she turned on her phone’s flashlight. It was too much light, and she lowered the brightness level and made sure the curtains were shut. Unless somebody walked in on her, she was invisible. Even if someone did, she had a good chance of going unseen.

  She’d already found the local ghost lore book, and if she recalled correctly – which she did, with her near photographic recall – the local legends book was on the same shelf. Except that it wasn’t. Samantha squatted in front of the row of books. Ghosts, churches, plants, villages…and six inches of space where books weren’t.

  “Dammit, Rick,” she muttered. Whatever the hell it was about Will Dawkin or his legend or his rumored treasure, Rick really didn’t want her digging into it. He didn’t want Reggie doing anything about it, either. Reggie already knew things that she didn’t know, bu
t she was not going to go to Rick-light for information. She couldn’t – not while Rick was pissed off at him. Aside from that, if anyone at all was going to find this whatever it was, it was going to be her.

  Okay. No book on local Highlands myths and legends, but there were always tourist books. Villages always had some hook, some fanciful story, with which to attract tourist dollars. She pulled out the Balmoral-printed Villages in the Shadow of the Cairngorms and sat cross-legged with her back to the shelf.

  Because she needed a starting point, she began with the area directly around Canniebrae. Some sort of map had been here, and that made here important. Orrisey was just a mile down the lane, and on Canniebrae land. According to the book, it boasted a picturesque church, once known to shelter first Catholic priests and then Jacobites. It averaged blah blah blah of rain per year, had gotten electricity fairly early for a place this remote, and its oldest building was The Bonny Lass tavern, which had begun as a coaching inn some six hundred years ago, and was now a locally-renowned pub.

  Blah blah local whisky, and for ten years beginning in 1738 the infamous highwayman Will Dawkin had been known to share a drink with travelers and then follow them down the road, where he would don a mask and caped greatcoat and rob them of everything but the clothes on their backs. “Ha,” she breathed, turning the page to view a facsimile of a wanted poster showing a hulking guy in a Dracula cape, a black hat low over his brow, and a black cloth covering his face from above his nose to below his chin. With crazy arched brows, wide-set, narrowed eyes, the old-timey cops might as well have been looking for Bela Lugosi.

  The next paragraph actually said that on one particularly dark and stormy night Will Dawkin vanished, never to be heard from again. Ooh. And his hoard of riches was rumored to be somewhere in the hills above Orrisey, though no one as of yet had recovered any of the loot.

  “Bingo.”

  Usually her next step would be a combo of library and internet. Rick apparently had the books she would need – which explained why he’d told her to go ahead and do her worst – and they wouldn’t have internet until next Tuesday at the earliest. Okay, maps, then. An old map, preferably. Climbing to her feet, she went back to searching the shelves. A couple of street atlases and a topography of the world book, but nothing that gave her an old overview of the countryside. A couple more empty spaces on the shelves though, of course.

  Grimacing, she turned around. The tourist collectibles shop down past the tavern had had some long tubes in a basket, but the Viking hadn’t wanted to set foot inside. That meant tomorrow, and business hours, and other people. Sure, she could trot down there and risk it tonight, but that would mess up her karma in some horrible ways. Sam Jellicoe never had and never would steal from mom and pop shops.

  So yay for her rules, but they still left her mapless. Standing, she replaced the atlas. She’d bet her underwear that the books Rick had pulled out of his library could give her a few more clues, but going after something he’d hidden from her on purpose crossed a couple of other lines.

  “Well, this sucks,” she murmured. That treasure map Reggie seemed obsessed over could always be up in the attic, but it just as likely wasn’t. In this house and without any clues, finding it could take her a week or more, if it actually existed.

  She could do an aerial survey with a drone if she had one, which she didn’t. Balmoral might well shoot it or a circling helicopter down anyway, just on principle. The Cairngorms loomed up behind them, but climbing a mountain seemed kind of desperate at this point. GPS was out because no cell service. The gods of nefarious deeds didn’t seem to be willing to offer her any breaks on this one.

  Samantha glided to the window and looked outside. A quarter sliver of moon hung at about its midway point, turning the trees a silver blue that deepened to murky black shadow below. A clear night in the autumn Highlands. That couldn’t be too common. Hmm.

  The widow’s walk. With a loose grin she snagged the atlas again, found a couple blank sheets of paper and some pencils, then went up into the attic. She unlocked the hatch that opened onto the roof, and a few seconds later she was outside. An iron rail ran around the top section of roof, but she wasn’t about to count on something that practically screamed “come, let me lead you to your doom”. The iron lattice walkway looked even less promising than the floor in the west wing.

  Ignoring them, she climbed up beside a chimney, shoved at it a few times to make sure it wouldn’t come down tonight and take her with it, then sat back against the upslope side. The view would of course have been much clearer in daylight, but then the whole other people peskiness came into play.

  Using the atlas as a lap desk and drawing a rough outline of Canniebrae in the center of the page with the village in the lower right, she sketched in the river Dee, the hills, the loch, and the valleys immediately around them. She had to leave some blank spaces where trees obscured her view, and a chunk of the twists and turns of roads and trails were pretty iffy, but she had an idea how to fill them in. Rick liked horseback riding, and he would jump at the chance to pull her away from her investigation.

  An hour later she’d filled four sheets of paper with Canniebrae’s surroundings, her face and hands were numb with cold, and she figured she’d pushed her luck far enough. She left the sketches in the attic, replaced the atlas, and headed back into the master bedchamber.

  Rick still lay there, thankfully, and she stripped out of her dark clothes to hike herself onto the bed and crawl beneath the covers beside him. The chill felt like it had sunk all the way to her bones, and he practically radiated heat, so she surreptitiously snuggled her back up against his chest.

  “Christ,” he mumbled. “Where did you go, the North Pole?”

  Dammit. “Scotland is cold,” she chattered, and turned around, shoving her hands into his chest and her face against his neck.

  He actually flinched. Instead of shoving her back out of bed, though, he growled and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tighter against him. “Next time you go sneaking about, put on a bloody hat and gloves.”

  Now might be a good time to point out that if he hadn’t hidden those books she wouldn’t have had to go sit on the roof, but on the other hand she’d kind of maybe pushed him into pulling out the books in the first place. He would totally point that out, too. “Maybe I’ll just wear you,” she said instead. “You’re nice and warm.”

  “Thanks, but we can mess around after you warm up. You’re cold enough I’m genuinely terrified that if I go in, my cock might break off.”

  She snorted, kissing his throat with her cold lips. “Neither of us wants that. Just some nice, close cuddling.” Samantha wrapped her feet around his.

  “Good God, you’re killing me. I’ve changed my mind. I want to be a bachelor.”

  “It’s too late. You’re all mine now. Every toasty inch of you. Snuggle up, buttercup.”

  Sex probably would have warmed her up nicely, but she wasn’t sure he would have liked her cold appendages groping on him. Little as she generally liked being trapped, this didn’t quite feel that way. Instead it was…nice. Warm and safe and comfortable and kind of heart-lifting. Great. Now she was getting sappy.

  “Sam?” he murmured.

  “Hmm?”

  “Wherever you went, were you safe?”

  “Yes. Just not well-enough insulated.”

  And still tempted to tell him just what she’d been up to. But he wouldn’t tell her what had him so wound up about the supposedly non-existent highwayman treasure, even if it would stop her from prying into it – which it would. So stale, meet mate.

  “Okay, then. Good.”

  “Riding,” Richard repeated, an eyebrow lifting before he could gain control of his own skepticism.

  Seated on one of the chairs facing the master bedchamber’s fireplace, Samantha stomped into her second hiking boot. “With you. Not to go bronco busting or anything. Just, you know, a walking tour of your realm, my liege.”

  Samantha liked going on run
s, driving fast cars, flying helicopters when she could get away with it, and riding in airplanes. Her feet and the machines did what she wanted them to, when she wanted them to do it. A horse, though, had a mind of its own. One that might not agree with what its rider wanted. That wasn’t his opinion; she’d stated that very thing the last time he’d tried to take her riding.

  “I’ll have two horses saddled after breakfast, then. You can have me until noon. I want to be here if and when the bulldozer arrives so I can mourn the destruction of my front drive.”

  “Me, too. There could be Roman artifacts here, even though it’s kind of too far north for that. Celtic would be awesome, though. Or Norse.”

  “Or feet of accumulated oyster shells and some glacial rocks,” Richard returned with a grin. “But I don’t want to crush your dreams of legitimate archaeology, so we’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “Cool.” Snapping to her feet, she slid her arms up around his shoulders, leaned up along his chest, and kissed him.

  Richard kissed her back. It would have physically hurt him not to do so, even if this morning did feel just a little too perfect. Some voracious morning sex that had begun before dawn, no arguing, and Sam willing to go riding with him. The Highlands was the most dramatically beautiful place they’d been together, so it could simply be the scenery. Or she was leading him somewhere, and he was trotting along happily behind her as long as he could ogle her arse.

  In his defense, she did have a nice arse. And over the past year he’d learned that going along with her netted him more cooperation than trying to shut her down – in which case she went ahead with whatever she thought was necessary anyway, and just did it behind his back.