Men of Midnight Complete Collection

by Emilie Richards

  She was beginning to feel something very much like fear. “Jeremy, stop! I don’t want to hear this.”

  Another voice sounded from behind Jeremy. “You would have had to hear it sooner or later, Billie.”

  Billie watched Iain emerge from the stairs. His head was bare, and his black hair was tossed by the wind. Despite the cold, his dark leather jacket was thrown open.

  Jeremy whirled and faced Iain. His fists came up, as if to ward off an attacker, but Iain shook his head. “Leave, Fletcher, and leave now, while you still can.”

  “You don’t want her to hear the rest, do you?” Jeremy inched backward as Iain climbed the last few steps. “You don’t want Billie to know what kind of family you come from?”

  “Is there more you’d like to tell her? If you prefer, I’ll wait until you’ve finished before I throw you down these steps.”

  “You’re the son of a bloody madman and a murderer!”

  “And you’re the extortionist who caused the death of the finest woman in the world.” Iain advanced on Jeremy. “And I have the documents to prove it. Maybe I should mete out a bit of justice now, the way I didn’t twelve years ago.”

  “Stop it!” Billie moved forward. “Iain, don’t. Get out of here, Jeremy.” She put her hand on Iain’s arm.

  Iain shook it off, but he stopped just short of grabbing Jeremy. “What’s it to be, Fletcher?”

  Jeremy straightened, and his hands fell to his side. “I already have what I came for. Now she knows enough to find out the rest on her own.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. I’d have told her myself.”

  Jeremy barked out a counterfeit laugh. “Just the way you’ve told everyone else?”

  “Right now certain papers bearing your signature are in the hands of my solicitors. When they’ve examined them, it will be up to them whom I tell and what the consequences will be for you. But were I you, Fletcher, I would leave Scotland before any more of this comes to light.”

  Jeremy narrowed his eyes. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Am I? What have I to lose? My wife? My children? A life worth living?”

  “You’re a Ross! You don’t want the world to know the things I do!”

  “On the contrary. Perhaps it’s past time.”

  Billie watched indecision play across Jeremy’s face.

  “Do you need more to convince you?” Iain asked. “Actually, I have more. I’ve proof that the brakes on my Jaguar were tampered with the night of Duncan Sinclair’s wedding. And I’ve proof that you were seen on Fearnshader’s grounds that night.”

  “Brakes? I had nothing to do with your brakes!”

  “No? Coupled with everything else I have on you, your word won’t be worth much.”

  “I was nowhere near your car!”

  “I would choose a country far away,” Iain said. “One without an extradition treaty.”

  Jeremy circled, giving Iain a wide berth. At the stairs he turned and fled.

  Billie realized her knees were weak. She stared at Iain. His blue eyes were hooded. For all the passion in the things he had said, not a bit of it was evident on his face. The wind rumpled his hair, but his expression was that of a man who wasn’t touched by anything. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She nodded, although it wasn’t true. “How did you know…?”

  “That you were here? I saw Mara’s car. I’d already guessed it would only be a matter of time before you came up here to inspect the stone.”

  “I thought you were out of town.”

  “I learned that Jeremy was on his way back. I beat him by an hour or so. I’ve known where he was every second since.”

  “You’ve had him followed?”

  “I was afraid he might go after you again.”

  “You weren’t far from wrong.” She approached him slowly. “So, you waited until he did, and then you showed yourself? What am I, the bait in a trap?” She stopped just in front of him. “Couldn’t you play your little games with Jeremy without me?”

  “How much of what we said did you understand?”

  “I haven’t had much time to put it together!”

  “He’s been using you.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to him. He really knows how to pick ‘em. Or maybe I just have a sign on my forehead.”

  “It’s not you he was after. He wanted to get revenge on me.”

  “Then why use me? And why does he want revenge?” She was torn between wanting to shake him and wanting to give him comfort. He showed signs of needing neither, but she sensed despair behind his tight control.

  “Billie.” For a moment his guard slipped. She saw deep sorrow in his eyes. “Everything he said was true.”

  She was afraid to touch him. “Explain it to me, so I can understand.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Iain, was your father a murderer? Is that what Jeremy was saying? Did he go insane and kill somebody?”

  “My father killed no one.”

  “Then what?”

  “My mother did.”

  For a moment she couldn’t breathe. She stared at him and wished she had never asked.

  “My mother helped my father die, Billie, long before there were controversial doctors to do it. My father had slipped into madness. Both he and my mother had known for some time that it was happening. Fletcher was right. The Rosses have been cursed for centuries. We’re victims of a neurological disease so rare that it doesn’t even have a name you’d recognize. But the symptoms appear in middle age, and by then it’s already been passed on to the next generation. The disease has gone through our family for centuries. Sometimes we were foolish enough to believe it had ended, then another family member succumbed. My father wasn’t the eldest son. By all rights he shouldn’t even have inherited all this.”

  He swept his hand in an arc. It was the saddest thing Billie had ever seen, because now she knew that nothing Iain owned mattered at all. “Did he have a brother who died?” she asked.

  “Two of them. One in the war, another at birth. His own father died in an accident before he was old enough to show any symptoms, although his brother, my great-uncle, was diagnosed late in life. By then, after centuries of superstition, the genetics of the disease were just beginning to be understood. The hope was that my grandfather had never been afflicted, and so my father would be free of the disease, too, as well as all his descendants. Despite that, Father was nearly forty by the time I was conceived. He waited that long, just to be certain. And then, when there was still no evidence of symptoms, he made a leap of faith.”

  Billie felt tears well in her eyes. But she couldn’t comfort him, because she knew he wouldn’t accept it.

  He turned and stared out at the loch. His back was rigid. “I don’t know when he realized the truth. But I remember well the final year of his life. He went from a healthy, hardy man to a shell of what he’d been. He would seem almost normal one day, then the next he wouldn’t recognize me. He believed I was his brother come back to haunt him, or one of the servants. Sometimes he couldn’t control his own body. He sat beside the window, refusing a wheelchair. And when he could speak, he said terrible things, primarily that he wanted to die. He begged us to kill him.”

  He faced her again. His eyes were carefully blank. “One night he became very ill. There was no time to get him to a large medical center. The best my mother could do was take him to the hospital in Druidheachd. Dr. Sutherland was the only person in the village who knew about Father’s illness and exactly what it meant. He made my father as comfortable as he could, then he left the room for a few minutes. My mother had been a nurse. The sedative Dr. Sutherland had given Father was in easy reach. There was a fresh supply of hypodermics in the cabinet.”

  He looked away.

  “Iain.” Billie didn’t have to be told the rest. Tears slipped down her cheeks now as she imagined the horror of that night.

  “It was over swiftly. She put an end to what could have been years of deteriora
tion and suffering. If Dr. Sutherland suspected what she’d done, he never let on. But somebody else suspected. Jeremy Fletcher was a young man of twenty then. He’d been in a brawl at the hotel pub that night, and he’d come into the hospital for some patching up. He was in the next room when he heard my mother wish my father farewell and heard her sobbing. He was still there when Dr. Sutherland came back into the room and found that my father was dead.”

  “And he blackmailed her?”

  “Aye. Until the day she died. She was still a young woman, but the strain of what she’d been forced to do and the terrible fear of exposure robbed her of what strength she had left. She caught a pneumonia that was easily treatable, but she didn’t respond. She died just a year after my father. And the day I turned eighteen and came into my inheritance, Fletcher came to me and told me everything. Then he demanded that I give him money, too, or he would expose my mother’s actions and my own potential illness.”

  “You didn’t…”

  “No! I went through all my mother’s papers, and I found proof that he’d been blackmailing her. He’s not particularly intelligent. He had sent her threatening notes, and fortunately she had kept them. There were bank drafts and canceled cheques. All the proof I needed. I convinced him that if he tried to expose my mother or blackmail me, I’d make his extortion public. It’s been a standoff since then. I’ve never reported him to the authorities, and he’s never exposed my family’s secrets.”

  “Until now.”

  “He’s been waiting until he could hurt me the most.”

  For a moment she didn’t understand. Iain obviously saw her confusion. “Jeremy believed that if you knew the truth, you’d leave me.”

  “Leave you?”

  “He isn’t especially bright, our Jeremy, but he has an unerring sense of who and what matters to people.”

  There was nothing Iain had said that had shaken Billie more.

  “Only this time, he was wrong,” Iain continued softly. “Because I’ve known from the beginning that there couldn’t be anything between us, Billie. I watched the hell my mother went through, and later I watched my grandfather’s brother go mad and die by slow degrees. I couldn’t put a woman through that. Not any woman. Particularly not one I loved.”

  “Do you have the disease, Iain?”

  He shrugged.

  “There’s no test to determine whether you do?”

  “Aye. There is a test for those at risk, a recent innovation that isn’t yet perfected. Right now it can absolutely rule out the chromosomal defect in only about thirty percent of all those who take it.”

  “But it didn’t rule it out in yours?”

  “I haven’t had the test.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not infallible. It’s only conclusive in one of every three or four possible cases. The others still have to live with uncertainty, knowing that without a true negative they may or may not be destined to succumb. So there’s only one way to end this curse. I have to end my days alone. No wife. No children. Then, and only then, can I be certain that no more Rosses will have to suffer the way my parents and ancestors did.”

  She tried to digest everything he’d said. But only one word stood out. “Curse? Don’t tell me you think that this terrible disease is the MacFarlane curse? Tell me you don’t think this is some medieval legacy from my family to yours.”

  “Only a madman would believe in curses.” He smiled, and it was the saddest thing she had ever seen.

  “No!”

  “Does it matter?” He took her hands, but there was reluctance in the way he held them. “There have been centuries of suffering in my family. There won’t be any more after I’ve died. Call it a curse, or call it genetics. It’s up to me to see that it ends.”

  “What does the stone say, Iain? Because I’ve found the other half, and I’ll put the two inscriptions together.”

  “Leave it alone. Leave it all alone. I’ve told you everything you have to know. Go back to America. Forget everything you’ve learned here.”

  Her mind was whirling too fast. She was vaguely aware that he was gripping her hands too tightly. “What did you mean about the brakes on your car? That’s what you said to Jeremy, wasn’t it? Did someone really tamper with them?”

  “Go home! Haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you? There can’t be anything for you here.”

  “Iain, you’re in trouble, and you want me to leave you?”

  “More than anything. Leave while you can.”

  “Tell me the rest of it!”

  He dropped her hands. “There’s nothing for you here. There’s no reason for you to stay.” He walked over to the inscription and lifted the paper off the floor. He ripped it into a dozen pieces and sent them sailing in the wind.

  He turned at the doorway and stared at her. She couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, and she was mute. He had already started down the stairs before she found her voice.

  “You think this is the end of it, Iain? Well, this is just the beginning. I’m not leaving.” She ran to the stairwell and shouted after him. “Do you hear me? I’m not leaving Druidheachd!”

  Her own words echoed back to her. Even the sound of Iain’s footsteps had died away.

  CHAPTER 10

  Like most of Druidheachd, the cottage hospital was gray stone and charming, although in the gloom of a winter morning even the smoke frothing from the chimney and the warm glow of lights through the windows failed to make it seem welcoming.

  Billie stepped inside and closed the door securely behind her. A woman in her seventies sat in the tiny reception area shuffling papers at a long table. She spared Billie one glance before she returned to her work. “You’ve come to see young Dr. Melville?”

  “Yes. But I’m not a patient. I just need to talk to him, if he’s not too busy.”

  “I’m certain he’s no’. You’re the American? Billie Harper?”

  Billie wasn’t even surprised her identity was known. “That’s right.”

  “I’m Jeanne Sutherland. Just dinna think you can persuade Alasdair to leave his employment here. My husband could no’ find another to replace him.” She looked up. “He’s the third young doctor that’s come, you know. No’ a one of the others could get along with Angus.”

  Since the entire conversation was preposterous, Billie ignored the majority of it. “And Alasdair does?”

  “Aye. He knows what to say and when to say it.” She did a quick visual examination that made Billie feel as if she’d just had her annual physical. “You’ll find him at the end of the corridor.”

  Billie passed two large rooms with hospital beds. Iain’s father had probably died in one of them. She kept her eyes averted.

  There was a small room at the end of the hallway with a battered metal desk and a wall crammed with filing cabinets. Alasdair sat at the desk, reviewing a folder. She paused in the doorway. “Alasdair?”

  He looked up, and his smile lit the morning. “Billie.” He stood. “Come in and close the door.”

  She did. “Alasdair, who’s the Rottweiler at the front desk?”

  “Jeanne? Why she’s the very heart of this hospital.”

  “I think she believes I’m going to capture you, drag you back to America and lock you in a room until you marry me.”

  “There would be only a wee bit of dragging, I ken,” he said gallantly.

  She smiled, but it faded quickly. She was here now, clutching the satchel she’d used to protect her reason for coming. And she didn’t know where to begin.

  “This is no’ a social call, is it?”

  “I’ve brought you something. I need this translated, Alasdair, and you’re the only person I can trust to do it.”

  “Would you like to have a seat?”

  She shook her head. She thought she should probably face the next few minutes on her feet.

  “I’ll be pleased to help if I can.”

  Billie reached inside the satchel and took out a piece of paper. “You reme
mber the stone we found, and the inscription?”

  “Aye.”

  “Well, I’ve found the other half. It’s imbedded in Ceo Castle. I’ve put the rubbings together and copied the letters. It’s so old that some of it was a little hard to decipher. This was the best I could do.”

  Alasdair reached inside his pocket and pulled out glasses. Billie handed him the paper, and he studied it intently.

  She thought about Jeanne’s insinuation as she watched him. She was not and would never be in love with Alasdair Melville. She was much too flawed. She didn’t fall in love with men who were uncomplicated and good-natured. Last year she had believed herself in love with a man who possessed no values or morals. This year she was in love, hopelessly and totally, with a man consumed by terrible secrets.

  Alasdair looked up at her. “It’s no’ a bonny thing, Billie. Are you certain you want to know?”

  “I’m sure.”

  With an expression of total resignation he began to read. “On the blood of my daughter, Christina, I swear an oath of vengeance. May the descendants of Uchtred macRoss of Druidheachd forever be cursed, as the wild swan that flies from the shores of the firth to the lonely mountain tarn. May his descendants never know home and never know peace. May the children of his blood forever live in fear for their lives. May they always be forced to look behind them for the children of mine.”

  He looked up again. “And if this curse falters and our families are united again, may they who commit this blasphemy writhe in agony and terror for the remainder of their days.”

  She was silent for a few moments, absorbing what she had just heard. When she spoke, her mouth was dry. “Good old Grandpa didn’t pull any punches, did he?”

  “This must have been inscribed many years after his death. It may have been passed down and embroidered from son to son, or even invented by a fanciful MacFarlane hundreds of years later.”

  “You’re trying to make me feel better because the curse inscribed on that stone may not have been set down exactly the way it was first uttered? You’re giving credence to the possibility that one bitter old man’s ravings could affect people for centuries?”