Page 8 of To Wed a Wild Scot
Logan stared down at the elegant missive as if it were a coiled snake about to strike, then snatched it up, a dark cloud of foreboding descending on him as he held the corner of it pinched between his fingers.
There was every chance it was nothing. A harmless letter with an account of her recent marriage, or a simple query as to the recipient’s health.
Logan was not the recipient, but that didn’t stop him from breaking the wax, smoothing the paper flat against the table, and reading the dozen or so lines scrawled across the page. He read through it once, and then once again before he rose from his chair, crossed the room, and tossed it into the fireplace.
The letter was brief, but Lady Juliana Bernard didn’t need more than a dozen lines to throw everything into chaos.
* * * *
“For pity’s sake, Stokes, I already said I’d be careful. He won’t even know I’m there, I promise you.”
Lady Juliana glared up at Stokes, her arms crossed over her chest. It was times like these when she wished he’d behave less like an overprotective uncle and more like a servant.
“How can you be sure he won’t see you?” Stokes’s nose twitched. “Or—forgive me, my lady—smell you?”
Juliana sighed. Who would have guessed the smell of vomit could linger with such persistence? Even three days of hard riding hadn’t managed to disperse it. Other smells had been layered over it, of course, but that could hardly be said to have improved matters.
In short, she smelled like an overflowing chamber pot.
Still, she was inclined to be optimistic. They’d trailed their quarry all the way to Inverness without him having the slightest idea they were following him, and now they were closing in on Castle Kinross.
It was near here. She could feel it.
“I’ll stay downwind of him,” she said, bringing her attention back to Stokes.
He grimaced. “Ten miles downwind? I don’t understand why you need to see him at all. Why can’t we just wait here until he comes out? It worked well enough at the other inns.”
It had indeed, but she hadn’t sent dozens of letters to any of those other inns. She’d sent them to the Sassy Lassie, and now she was here, she wanted a look inside the place. Perhaps they’d used her letters to paper their walls. It would explain why Fitzwilliam hadn’t answered most of them. “Now we’re so close, I don’t like to let him out of my sight.”
“I don’t like to letyouout of my sight.”
Naturally he didn’t, and she couldn’t really blame him. Like her father, Stokes thought ladies were best suited to dancing, shopping, and paying calls, not running about all over Scotland and darting in and out of public inns.
Stokes wanted to protect her, but this journey had proved to her she was capable of far more than she’d ever imagined she was. She’d come nearly six hundred miles, the last third of those on horseback, chasing a man three times her size. She’d been blinded by the relentless sun, had her toe crushed under a horse’s hoof, and swallowed at least a pint of dust.
She’d been vomited on, for pity’s sake.
Now, against all odds, she was on the verge of finding Fitzwilliam.
Juliana laid her hand on Stokes’s arm. “I’ve made it this far.”
Stokes glanced down at her in surprise, but then he smiled and shook his head. “So you have, my lady.”
After that he ceased his grumbling and went off to the stables to see to their horses, leaving her to do as she wished.
Juliana glanced around the yard. No one was paying her the least bit of attention, so she walked over to the inn’s entryway and peered around the corner. There was no sign of their quarry, but quite a number of people were bustling about, so she ducked in among them, kept her head down, and made it to a long hallway just in time to see a serving maid carry a tankard of ale through a door on the left.
A private parlor?
She waited for the serving girl to return, then crept down the hallway. Fortunately, the girl had left the door open a crack. When Juliana peeked through it she saw their dark-haired prey lounging in a chair with his long legs sprawled out. An empty tankard of ale sat on the table in front of him.
A vague feeling of disappointment washed over her. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting to find, but certainly something more interesting than a man innocently refreshing himself. Still, she had no intention of letting him out of her sight. She wanted to be mounted on a fresh horse and waiting to follow him when he left the inn.
She took another peek, and this time she noticed a half-open window behind him that faced the back of the inn. Ah, perfect! She could see him easily from there, and with very little risk of him seeing her.
She hurried back down the hallway, through the front door, and around the side of the building to the back. As she drew closer she noticed a low murmur of voices floating through the open window. When Juliana peeked through it, she saw the man had company now.
A dark-haired girl stood in the doorway, a flirtatious smile on her lips, and a packet of letters in her hand.
