Page 33 of A Scot on the Rocks
“Who sent ye, Mistress Bennett?”
“No one.”
He moved around the mare, buying himself a moment to watch her face. “That’s a poor answer.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Why are ye here?”
Instead of answering immediately, she turned toward the tunnel behind her, and Jamie followed her gaze to the dark opening in the hillside. He knew the old passage. Everyone involved in moving Glenbrae whisky knew it, though they only used the lower portions now because too much of the upper route had collapsed long before Jamie was born.
“I was in that tunnel,” she said.
“I gathered that.”
“No, I mean I was in the tunnel with a… with a traveling companion.” She pushed the damp hair away from her cheek and stared at the entrance as if expecting her fellow traveler to come striding out.
“There was a storm, and then things started falling and…”
She stopped.
Jamie looked around the empty hillside. “There is no one with ye now.” His shoulders tightened. “Where is he?”
“How the hell should I know? I told you, there was a storm and part of the tunnel collapsed.”
The sharpness in her voice remained, but it had thinned. Jamie had heard fear disguised beneath temper often enough to recognize it.
“I think he’s… gone.” Her eyes were huge as she looked around.
If a man had been in the tunnel when it collapsed, he was already dead. Before he could press further, she looked down the slope, her attention fixed on something below them.
Jamie followed the direction of her gaze and saw the edge of one wool covering had shifted, exposing enough of a cask that anyone paying close attention might guess what the ponies carried.
“Those are whisky casks.”
His hand stilled on the mare’s reins.
Most people would have recognized the barrels. A merchant might have guessed whisky if he knew the district, though there were any number of other goods that could be packed in barrels.
She’d looked once and had known they carried whisky.
“How do ye know that?”
Her gaze snapped back to him. “Know what?”
“What’s in the casks.”
She hesitated, just enough to sharpen his interest, then tucked both hands beneath her arms as a colder gust moved across the hillside. “They’re in the Highlands.”
“A great many things travel through the Highlands in barrels.”
“Are you telling me they aren’t full of whisky?”
Jamie leaned one shoulder against the mare and considered her. “I’m asking how ye know.”
Her blue eyes narrowed as rainwater gathered on a chestnut strand of hair near her cheek. She stood tall for a woman, though the way she held her ground interested him more than her height.
“Are you smuggling whisky?”
