She stayed hunched over the boulder, barely able to swallow around the shock still clogging her throat. The path remained empty and the forest quiet, as if the man had never been here at all. Oh, he had been quite real. His roaming gaze had left a smoldering trail across her body. She had refused to flail and twist to cover her breasts; he had already looked his fill anyway and it would have probably given him satisfaction to see her squirm.
Eventually, she picked up her spectacles. They had survived the fall intact. She put them on, and Castle Applecross slid into focus on the plateau on the opposite bank, its old stone towers sharply delineated against the clear sky. She was rather far from home here, on the other side of the loch. Sudden energy surged, and she rushed to take her chemise down from the tree. What a neat, pretty bow the creeper had tied, voilà! Would it be safe to walk home? He could be lurking in the brambles and pounce after all. She looked back at the castle, half a mile across a rippling surface. The decision was made quickly: she chose the risk of the water over the man. Back at the boulder, she put down the chemise and pulled her shawl from under her gown instead, wound it round her head, and secured it with her hatpin. She gave the Virgil an apologetic pat. “I shall fetch you later.”
The loch engulfed her body like a large cold fist.
When she staggered onto the shoreline below the castle, her arms and thighs were burning with exhaustion. The plateau enclosed the beach like a protective wall, so she took some time to regain her breath. Wrapped in the plaid, she hurried up the crumbling steps her ancestor had once hewn into the side of the rock face. Overgrown vegetable beds and a tumbledown cottage blurred past on her dash to the castle walls. She slipped through the side entrance into the dimly lit wine cellar, then up the cobwebbed spiral staircase, one floor, two, three. On the final landing, she threw her shoulder against the servants’ door, until she burst into her chamber.
A scream rang out.
MacKenzie was pressing a fist to her chest, her wide-eyed gaze fixed on Catriona as if she were one of the castle ghosts. “Milady. I near jumped out of my skin.”
Catriona padded past her on numb feet to the rocking chair with the tartan throws. She sat and huddled into the blankets while her former-nanny-turned-lady’s-maid surveyed her with a hand on her sturdy hip. After thirty years of service in the Campbell household, MacKenzie was accustomed to remarkably eccentric behavior, but parading around in nothing but a plaid was a novel, unacceptable development. Sorry, MacKenzie. Crossing the loch with the added weight of waterlogged undergarments would have been rather too reckless.
Before MacKenzie could inquire about her clothes, Catriona asked: “Do you know if the earl has employed a new gamekeeper?”
MacKenzie’s consternated expression changed to concern. “A new gamekeeper,” she repeated in her thick brogue. “I hadn’t realized you let the old Collins go.”
Catriona rocked with the chair. “I would never.”
Neither would her father, come to think of it. Then why the binoculars on that man?
She couldn’t feel her face. The hexagonal room on top of the south tower, despite thick wall tapestries and sprawling Persian carpets, was never warm, and the fright from being watched was still lodged in her chest like an icicle.
“You must make haste,” MacKenzie said, and nodded at the copper basin in front of the hearth. Steam was swirling lazily into the cool air. “His lordship’s guest has arrived.”
“What—already?”
The clock next to the chamber door said it was not yet three in the afternoon.
MacKenzie pursed her lips. “He’s arrived early. Poor manners if I may say so—everyone’s in a tizzy. But the tub’s ready for you.”
“Good grief,” Catriona muttered. A sudden change in schedule made her feel queasy on the best of days. “Oooh,” she then said. “Oh no. Oh dear.”
She felt so weak, it was as though her heart had stopped.
“Dinna fash,” came MacKenzie’s voice from a distance. “The earl has just returned, he was at the Middletons’—they are separating, the Middletons, have you heard . . . but his lordship is back, and he’s entertaining the young gentleman until dinner. All’s well.”
All this was easy for MacKenzie to say, because she didn’t know about the stranger at the loch.
“He rolled his r’s,” she moaned.
“Huh?”
She buried her face in her hands. “This is bad.”
“If you bathe now, you should be ready soon enough,” MacKenzie said in the soothing tone she used on the unwell.
Catriona looked up at her, feeling dizzy. “Did our guest take a walk after his arrival?”
The math was damning: two strangers on the same day in remote Applecross was highly improbable. Had she not been so shocked, and so set on him arriving at seven, this would have occurred to her it was happening.
“I don’t know if the gentleman went for a walk,” said MacKenzie. She opened the top drawer of the dresser next to the fireplace to take out a stack of towels. “Once Mary told me he was here, I saw to the bath and laid out your clothes.”
While MacKenzie’s back was turned, Catriona rose, dropped the damp plaid, and climbed into the heat of the tub.
“What’s he like?” she forced herself to ask.
MacKenzie placed the towels on the footstool next to the tub and straightened with a soft grunt. “I haven’t seen him,” she said. “Mary said he’s brought a trunk full of wine and he carried it from the carriage all by himself.”
She should have asked questions about the man when the earl had announced a visitor, but, frustrated by the news, she hadn’t. She knew he was an expert on Phoenician high culture from the Levant, Mount Lebanon more precisely, with several terms at Cambridge among his credentials. He was one of the numerous international scholars interested in an exchange with Oxbridge academics, and, apparently, just the person Wester Ross needed to assist with cataloging some of the Eastern artifacts back at Oxford. Voilà. What if he had said wallah—Arabic—and not voilà—French—and in the heat of the moment, she had misunderstood? The penny would have dropped sooner. Wallah, you shall never see me again. Well. Well, they would see about that.
“What a day,” she said tonelessly.
“I’ll be back to help do up your hair in half an hour,” MacKenzie said. She walked to the door with a slight limp that had certainly not been there before.