A Very Highland Holiday

by Le Veque, Kathryn

  Her gaze traveled down the length of him, and a very masculine sense of victory burned through his veins when he spied the glimmer of appreciation as it dashed across her features. An acute awareness of their proximity. Of his proportions in contrast to hers.

  She was a woman.

  He was a man.

  They were alone in a room together with very little clothing between them.

  And if he were naked, the warmth in her gaze told him she would drink in the sight of his body.

  Just as he had.

  “I cannot say what I would do in your case,” she admitted, her voice lower, huskier. “But if you asked nicely, I would turn around.”

  He could refuse. What would she do then? But even as the thought flickered through him, so did another indisputable fact. One hundred and fifty years later, he was still a nobleman, one tasked to uphold honor.

  And she was a lady deserving of his respect and deference.

  Goddammit.

  He bloody turned around.

  The rustles of her unseen actions intrigued and tempted him, but he clenched his fists and forced himself to stay right where he was.

  “I’m Miss Vanessa Latimer.”

  He heard the towel hit the ground and this time was able to bite into his fist. Death, it seemed, did not diminish desire.

  “Johnathan de Lohr,” he finally gritted out. “Earl of Hereford.”

  “I don’t think so,” she laughed over the sound of her belt buckling.

  “Do you presume to tell me I don’t know my own name?” he asked crossly.

  “Not at all, but I’ve been introduced to Johnathan de Lohr, Earl of Hereford at the Countess of Bainbridge’s ball a few years past, and have it on good authority that he’s very much alive. As far as I know, there was not an Earl of Hereford who died at Culloden.”

  He frowned, bloody irked by the entire business. “And how would you know that?”

  Her rueful sound vibrated through the dimness. “My mother always wanted me to marry a peer, so I’ve studied Burke’s more than the Bible, the encyclopedia, and most literature combined. More’s the pity. I find it tedious in the extreme.”

  “I was hardly Earl long enough to make it into the annals of Burke’s.” Hope leapt into his chest. News of his kinsmen never traveled to this place, and he always wondered about the fate of his family. “Tell me about him? About the Hereford you met.”

  “Well…” She drew the word out as if it helped her retrieve a memory. “He’s attractive but not in that charming, handsome way of most gentlemen. More like brutally well-built. Tall and wide, golden haired like a lion. His hand was warm and strong when we were introduced. And his eyes…his eyes were…” She drifted off, though the little sounds of friction and fabric told him she still dressed herself.

  “Blue?” he prompted after the silence had become untenable. De Lohr eyes were almost invariably blue.

  “Yes. But I was going to say empty.”

  “Empty?” he echoed.

  She made a melancholy little sound. “He stared at me for a long time, and I could sense no light behind the eyes. They were cold and hollow as a hellmouth, I’m afraid.” She seemed to shake herself, her voice losing the dreamy huskiness and regaining some of the crisp starch his countrywomen were famous for. “But worry not, he’s possessed of an impeccable reputation and an obscene fortune, so you should be proud of your legacy, all things considered… When were you the Earl, my lord?”

  “Please, call me John,” he requested. “I’ve technically no title now; I died during the Jacobite rebellion of seventeen forty-five. My brother, James, became the Earl after I perished at the battle of Culloden.”

  “You had no heir?”

  A bleak and familiar ache opened in his chest. A void that existed whenever he thought of the life he didn’t have the chance to live. “I had no wife.”

  She made that noise again, one that made him wonder what she was thinking. That made him want to turn around to search her beautiful face. Her remarkability was evidenced in the description she’d made of his kinsman. Most people, when asked, would recount reputation and accomplishments, not impressions of one’s soul behind their eyes. Miss Vanessa Latimer observed the world in a different way than most.

  “It remains strange to me,” she was saying, “that you are here. Culloden is miles and miles away.”

  “Yes. Well. I’ve gathered from listening to locals that we English won. That Scotland is firmly beneath the rule of King and Crown.”

  “Queen,” she corrected. “Queen Victoria.”

  “Still?” he marveled. “Surely she’s dead by now.”

  “She’s ruled for fifty-three years. Though, while we’re on the subject, I don’t know many Scotsmen who would deign to call themselves British, though we are technically united under one sovereign. It’s no longer a blood-soaked subject, but it’s still a complicated one, even after all this time.”

  Of that, he had no doubt. “I always respected the Scots. I fought because it was my obligation. I was no great supporter of the Stewarts or the bloody King. The de Lohrs prosper regardless of what idiot ass sits on the throne, but we do our duty by our birthright, and sometimes that means going to war.”

  “Why, then, do you think you’re stuck here haunting a small village inn some seventy miles from Culloden?”

  He shrugged. “It’s been a mystery I’ve been grinding on for one hundred and fifty years.”

  “Maybe I could help you,” she offered, her voice bright with optimism.

  “How could you possibly?”

  “I’m stuck here too now, aren’t I? At least until the storm blows over, and I love a good mystery. You’re obviously not going anywhere, so why not?” She emitted a short sigh one might after completing a task. “There. You can turn back around.”

  The first thing he noticed when he did was that her damp undergarments were pinned to the fireplace mantle, drying in the heat.

  Which meant beneath her clothing she wore… nothing but her corset. Somehow that knowledge was just as arousing as the idea of her completely naked.

  Well. Almost.

  He locked his jaw, glaring at her strange garments as if he could see through them. As if he’d never seen them before. The skirts of this decade were odd but ultimately flattering, spread tight and flat over the hips and flaring like a tulip toward her knees. A wide belt with an ornate buckle accentuated her impossibly small waist, and the bodice was made of some fabric other than silk. Something lighter that bloused out at the shoulders and bust.

  Suddenly he wanted to know everything there was to know about this strange and extraordinary woman.

  She peered up at him rather owlishly. “Goodness, I can see more of you now.”

  And he could see less of her, he silently lamented.

  “You have color,” she noted, as if to herself. “Your hair is as gold as your namesake’s. In fact, you rather look a great deal like him.”

  Did he? And she’d called him handsome.

  Sort of.

  He did his best not to preen. “The fault of the solstice, it seems, and the strangeness of the Northern Lights at such a time of year. There’s maybe been five such occurrences in the past one hundred and fifty years, and if this is anything like those, I’ll become more corporeal as the night goes on.”

  Her eyes flew wider. She opened her mouth, no doubt to ask a million questions, inquisitive minx that she was.

  So, he headed her off at the pass. “What sort of weapon is a camera?” He said the word carefully, tasting the syllables, trying to dissect its root words as he drifted toward the case. “You said you were going to take a photo with it. Do you really think to battle the Loch Ness Monster in the middle of winter?”

  She blinked, moving in front of the case as if to protect it from him. Her delicate features, once so open and intrigued, were now closed, defensive.

  Perhaps a bit reproving.

  “Photo is the abbreviation for photograph,” she informed h
im stiffly.

  He searched his education of the ancient languages. “Photo meaning light. And graph meaning…something written.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I couldn’t be more perplexed,” he admitted.

  “I’ll show you.” She crouched down to open the case, undoing buckles and straps and throwing it open to unveil the strangest contraption he’d ever seen. She didn’t touch it, however, but took a flat leather satchel from where it was tucked beside the machine. What she extracted after opening the flap stole the next words from him.

  Perching on the bed, one knee bent and the other foot still stabilizing her on the floor, she placed a strange and shiny piece of paper on the coverlet. And then another. And another. And several more until they were all splayed out in wondrous disarray.

  John could have been blown over by a feather.

  With unsteady fingers, he reached out to the first photograph, a portrait of the Houses of Parliament in London, but this depicted it with a cracking huge clock tower built. The edifice glowed and reached into the sky taller than anything he could imagine. The rendering was nothing like a painting. Colorless and with only two dimensions. But it was real, as if the moment had been captured by some sort of magic and…

  “Written by light,” he breathed.

  She nodded, watching him with a pleased sort of tenderness as he discovered a modern miracle that she probably considered quite pedestrian. The next photograph was of the Westminster Cathedral. Another a close-up of a tall lamp. The flame fed by nothing he could imagine, as there was no chamber for wood nor oil. It was as if the fire floated on its very own.

  He was about to ask after it when something else caught his eye.

  “What the bloody hell is this?” He smoothed his hands over a rather terrifying-looking automaton comprised of arms, levers, whistles, and wheels.

  “A locomotive engine. We call it a train, as it can pull dozens of boxcars behind it endlessly at astonishing speeds. I left England on the seven o’clock train last night and arrived in Perth early this afternoon.”

  He shook his head in abject disbelief, aching to see the real thing. To discover how his empire and world had changed in so long. “How does it work, this locomotive?”

  “I’m no engineer, but the engine is powered by steam created with coal fire.” She put up a finger as if to tap an idea out of the sky. “You’ll be interested to know, ships are powered by steam and steel, as well, rather than wind and wood. We can cross to America in a matter of six days.”

  “America?” He scratched his head. “Oh, you mean the colonies.”

  Her lips twisted wryly. “Well…that’s a long and rather disappointing story. But the short of it is, they are their own sovereign nation now.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re having me on.”

  “I am not. Declared their independence in seventeen seventy-six. They’ve their own parliament and everything.”

  “And what royal family, I’d like to know?”

  “A democratic republic, if you’d believe it. A society whose aristocracy is chosen from the best capitalists.”

  “Not landowners, then?”

  She shrugged, gathering back a few of the portraits from the bed into a tidy pile. “Some. But mostly industry giants and war heroes. Machines, factories and the like have changed everything. England’s like that too, now. The new century will belong to innovators rather than aristocrats, I’d wager.”

  “Good God, what I wouldn’t give to see that.” He couldn’t decide what would be worse, dying before his time and missing what might have been. Or existing past his death and learning what he was still missing. What if the Empire rose and fell, and he was still sitting here in the bunghole of Blighty, watching generations of Balthazars raise, eat, and sometimes bugger sheep?

  Her eyes brimmed with sympathy, as if she could read his thoughts. “I wish you could see it all. I plan to. I haven’t been to America yet, though I’m dying to visit New York. I think I’ll go there next if my journey to Constantinople is delayed.”

  “You’re traveling to Constantinople? With whom?” He looked pointedly at her ring finger, which he noted was bare.

  Why that ignited a little glow of pleasure in his chest, he couldn’t say. It wasn’t as though he could speak for her. It wasn’t as though he knew he would. They’d been acquainted for all of five minutes.

  “Oh…haven’t decided yet,” she hedged, glancing away and plucking at a loose thread in the coverlet.

  “You mentioned your family wanted an advantageous marriage for you, but you didn’t introduce yourself as nobility.”

  His observation seemed to displease her. “No. But my father owns a shipping company, and the thing to do is marry off rich heiresses to impoverished lords.”

  He made a sound in the back of his throat that he wished didn’t convey the depth of his derision on that score. It wasn’t that he thought women shouldn’t marry above their rank.

  It was that he instantly and intensely hated the idea of her being married.

  She was young, but old enough to have been made a mother many times over. Maybe twenty and five or so…So why wasn’t she spoken for?

  John allowed his notice to drift to another photograph, this one of a woman in a dark dress seated in a velvet chair. She posed like one would for any master of portraiture, looking off into the distance. Her features carefully still.

  From her place at his elbow, Vanessa said, “This is my eldest sister, Veronica. The Dowager Countess of Weatherstoke.”

  “A Countess. How fortunate for her.”

  “I wouldn’t have traded places with her for the entire world.” The melancholy note in her voice made him glance up at her, but her faraway expression didn’t brook further discussion.

  He saw the resemblance between her and the woman in the portrait. Hair the color of midnight. Bright eyes, a heart-shaped face, and elegant, butter-soft skin.

  “My family is visiting her in Paris, where she lives among the beau monde,” she said, her voice injected with a false, syrupy insouciance. She picked up the photograph as if to hide it from him, examining it with a pinched sort of melancholy. “Veronica is the beauty of the family.”

  “No,” he insisted more harshly than he meant to. “No, she is not.”

  She peered up at him oddly, her gaze had become wary and full of doubts he dared not define. “Yes, well…the photo doesn’t do her justice.”

  “It doesn’t have to. She doesn’t hold a candle to you.”

  Chapter Four

  Vanessa’s focus had been arrested. Nay, seized and held captive.

  The air thickened between them and the storm seemed closer now. The wild chaos of it slipping into the night. Invading the space between them. Prompting her instincts to prickle and her hair to stand on end.

  She was a kitten who’d stumbled into the den of a lion. Nothing more than a light snack. Something he could pick his teeth with.

  So why did she have the very feline urge to arch and glide toward and against the lithe strength of his form?

  To search for warmth. For protection.

  His body, as iridescent as it still was, radiated as much heat as the firelight. His shoulders were wide and his arms long and thick beneath the fitted lines of his crimson jacket.

  His features were distinguished, compelling, the product of centuries of such ancestors breeding his sort of perfection. His eyes weren’t just blue, they held a startling lapis brilliance, as if backlit by something electric, like lightning. His spun gold hair was caught behind him in a queue. It shone lambent, as did his gauzy specter, barely able to catch the light that pierced through him rather than reflected off him. The square chin above his high, white collar framed a wide, hard mouth that curled in such a way, she might have called it cruel.

  His eyes were kind, but that mouth was most certainly anything but.

  The word depraved came to mind.

  A corner of his lip lifted as she stared at it rathe
r rudely. Not quite a smile, but the whisper of one.

  The ghost of one.

  He cleared a gather from his throat and turned away, dispelling the tension as he drifted over to the camera.

  “So, this device is what you use to capture these photographs? This…camera?”

  She would never not smile at the way he said that word.

  Shaking off whatever had held her mesmerized, she hopped to engage. “Yes. Would you like to see how it works?”

  “Very much.”

  Vanessa had to stop herself short of clapping her hands like a delighted child. Photography was one of her passions, and while many people were curious about it, she’d never had the chance to show it to someone quite so captivated.

  Or, rather, captive. But who was she to split hairs?

  His feet levitated some six inches off the ground, and his hands locked behind his back in a posture befitting an officer of his class. He looked down at her from over his aristocratic nose and she had the sense he mentally disassembled her for examination whilst she assembled her tripod.

  “I eavesdropped on you and Bess before,” he admitted.

  “Oh?” She wasn’t quite certain how she felt about that, so she remained silent on the topic.

  “I’m given to understand you didn’t go to Paris with your family because you’d rather stand on the frigid shores of the deepest lake in the world and try to photograph a creature that only exists in folklore?”

  She glanced up from where she screwed on the mounting bracket. “And?”

  He gave a rather Gallic shrug. “It can’t be astonishing to you that someone might remark upon the decision. It seems…rather out of the ordinary.”

  Vanessa tried not to let on that his assessment stung, as if she weren’t aware that her behavior was remarkable. That she was doing what she could to make the most of her exile without advertising it. She didn’t allow herself to look up at him as she pulled the accordion-style lens and box from her case with a huff. “I’m a woman who is only interested in extraordinary.”

  “Evidently.”

  She cast him a censuring look as she affixed the camera to the tripod. “So says the iridescent apparition levitating above me.”