“Don’t these children ever have any fun?” Temperance said as she looked about the ballroom at the children standing stiffly against the walls. In the center of the room was a pile of roller skates.
“Yes, of course they do. But they’ve never been inside a ballroom and you’re a lady,” Grace whispered. She said the last word as though Temperance were so refined she wouldn’t drink tea out of a mug but must have only the finest china.
Temperance gave a sigh. “Alys, you and Ramsey—” She stopped when she saw the horror on the faces of these, the two oldest children. If they could have, they would have disappeared into the wooden paneling.
“And this is what I missed sleep for,” Temperance said as she stifled a yawn. So much for her brilliant idea of giving the children of McCairn a secret day of fun. Maybe when the food arrived, they’d perk up. She’d had Eppie and her younger sis-151 ter baking since fourA.M.,and there were the oranges and chocolate that her mother had sent, so maybe . . .
But Temperance couldn’t help feeling great disappointment. Two days before, she’d had to actually meet—face-to-face —with that dreadful man, Hamish, and she’d had to be nice to him. She’d asked him to forgive her for her rude behavior of the first day and she’d quietly and demurely asked him to allow her to teach a Bible class on Sunday. She’d then shown him the Bibles that she planned to present to the children during her class.
Of course the odious man had made her grovel. He’d demanded to know what text she planned to teach the children. With a mind full of nothing but hat shapes and thoughts of what dreadful woman her mother would dredge up next, Temperance couldn’t think of a single Bible story. Stalling for time, she opened one of the white Bibles and saw the word, “Esther.”
“The story of Esther and King . . . And the king. I’ve always loved that story, and I think it has a good moral to it.”
“That depends on how you interpret it,” he said suspiciously.
“How would you interpret it?” Temperance said, then gave him the smile she reserved for men she was trying to persuade to donate money to her foundation.
After that she’d had to listen to a forty-five-minute lecture about the morality of the story of Esther.
“And all for nothing,” Temperance said now.
“What?” Grace asked.
“I said that I went through all of this for nothing. I could have fed the children in the open, but I wanted to give them something that was more fun than just eating.” But for all her persuasive powers, she’d not been able to coax the children into so much as touching the skates.
“But they do look dangerous,” Grace said, looking at the pile on the floor.
“No they aren’t,” Temperance said in disgust. “I spent half my childhood racing along the sidewalks of New York. I was a terror on skates, and my mother constantly received complaints about me. There wasn’t a kid in the neighborhood who could outrace me, or do more tricks.”
“But these children don’t know you, and they’ve never even seen skates, so of course they’re a bit shy.”
At that, Temperance had strapped a pair of skates to her shoe soles, and she’d taken a few turns around the ballroom floor, nothing fancy, just rolling about, and telling the children how easy and fun skating was. But still, the children refused to so much as try on the strange-looking contraptions.
Temperance would have sworn that Ramsey would have jumped at the chance to do something adventurous; after all, he rode dangerous horses on a daily basis. But Ramsey had looked at her as though she were crazy and said, “A body could get hurt on them things,” and had stepped away from her. “When will the food get here?” he asked.
So now, here she was with over a dozen children all lined up against the wall, all looking sleepy and grumpy from the boring old church service, and she could get them to do nothing.
“Maybe if I—” she began, but at that moment the door to the ballroom flew open and in the doorway stood James.
Everyone in the room, including Temperance, drew in their breath sharply. Even if they weren’t touching the skates, they all knew that what they weren’t doing was having a Bible class.
“What’s going on here?” James demanded with a scowl, looking about the room. “I thought you were teaching Sunday school?”
Temperance wasn’t absolutely, positively sure, but she thought she saw a twinkle in his eye. Was he teasing or was he serious?
Temperance decided to take a chance. Skating to the middle of the ballroom (and the silence was so deafening a feather hitting the floor would have sounded like a crash), she picked up a pair of skates and held them out toward him.
“Bet you can’t do it,” she said, then held her breath.
The twinkle in James McCairn’s eyes brightened until there was a galaxy of stars in there. “Want to put money on that, woman?” he said as he took the skates from her, then sat down on a chair and started to strap the skates onto his shoes.
But he didn’t know how to use the key Temperance handed him to widen the front piece so his big shoes would fit. Instead, he tried to twist the skate and when that didn’t work, he tried to wedge his shoe sole into the hooks.
When Temperance heard a tiny snigger, she thought she’d better help him. He might not take kindly to having the children laugh at him. “Like this,” she said, then inserted the key and turned. Within minutes, she had the skates adjusted and strapped to his heavy work boots.
“Now, hold my arm,” she said as she stepped back, “and I’ll help you.”
“Ha!” James said as he stood up. “I’m the Laird of Clan McCairn, and I don’t need a woman to— Oh! Oooooooohhhhhh,” he said as he stood and the skates began to roll. James’s long arms spread out, and he began to turn them in circles as he tried to keep his balance.
A child sniggered; then one laughed.
James’s movements grew more exaggerated as he rolled across the floor. His legs spread wide, and when he started to roll faster, his arms turned in such big circles that he looked as though he were trying to fly.
Two more children laughed. Not loudly, and Temperance saw that they covered their mouths with their hands, but they were laughing. Most of the others were smiling.
James moved forward, toward Temperance, and when he reached her, he fell.
But how he fell! His face hit her smack in the bosom, and his hands grabbed her rear end.
Involuntarily, she gave a little squeal and started to push him off of her. But his feet kept slipping and he kept grabbing on to her for support. And each time, his hands latched on to a “forbidden” part of her. His hands held on to her thighs, her buttocks. At one point she pushed him away, but his feet flew out from under him and he would have landed on top of her with his hands clutching her breasts, but she did a quick about-face and skated away from him.
With sounds of “Oooooooohhhhhhh” escaping from him, he tried to keep his feet under control as he slipped and rolled toward her.
As though the Hounds of Hell were after her, Temperance skated to the other side of the huge ballroom. But James was right behind her, and his hands were outstretched toward her. If he fell, he was going to take her down with him.
Frantically, Temperance fled from him, but his strength and ineptitude were too much for her; wherever she went, he was right behind her.
It was in front of the windows that he caught her. She was trapped in front of the glass and he was coming fast toward her! His legs were wide open, his arms twirling rapidly, and he was going to crash into her. There was nothing she could do to escape.
Putting her arms over her head for protection, she waited for the coming blow; she just hoped that he didn’t propel both of them through the windows to the ground below.
But when he reached her, James’s arms encircled her, pulled her forward, and only then did she hit the wooden floor—and the landing was softened by his arms around her waist. It wasn’t so much that she fell as it was that he’d picked her up and set her on the floor. And in the next minute, he had flipped himself over and the back of his head was against her stomach and he was raising his arms as though to an audience.
It was only then that Temperance looked up. For the last several minutes she’d been fighting for her life as this crazy man had chased her about the room, but now she saw that everyone in the room was laughing hilariously. Grace had her arms around her stomach as she bent over in laughter. Ramsey’s face was red from laughing so hard. All the children were screaming with laughter; some of them had even fallen to the floor, their legs unable to hold them up.
“You great fake,” Temperance hissed into James McCairn’s ear. “You can skate.”
“Never said I couldn’t,” he whispered back, smiling at the children. “I didn’t grow up in McCairn so I learned a little about the outside world. But you’d think, what with all those sidewalks in New York, that you’d be a little better than this.”
She looked down at him, his head on her stomach, lounging on her as though he meant to spend the rest of the day there; then she looked up at the children. They had their laughter under control now and were beginning to talk to each other. But all she could hear was McCairn this and McCairn that.
Temperance would never have admitted to herself that what she was feeling was jealousy, but she was used to being the center of attention. After all, she gave speeches that hundreds of people paid to hear. But now she was just the buffoon in a skating melodrama, and . . . Well, maybe she wanted to have the children think highly of her. On the other hand, it was McCairn’s land and his people and Temperance would be leaving soon, so maybe she should allow him to make such a laughingstock of her that the children would remember this for the rest of their lives.
“Like hell I will,” she said under her breath, then pushed him off of her and came to her feet.
“How dare you treat me like that,” she said loudly, and everyone in the room instantly stopped laughing and stared at her.
Then, with her eyes solely on James, Temperance began to skate backwards. “You think you can make a fool of me and get away with it?” she half shouted as she put up her fists as though she meant to fight him.
There was silence in the ballroom.
Slowly, James got to his feet. “I don’t have to make you into what you already are,” he said quietly, his dark eyes hard and angry.
For a moment Temperance hesitated. Was he serious? But then she saw those sparkles in his eyes, and she almost smiled in relief. But she didn’t smile.
“You think you’re man enough to take me on?” As though she were a clown in a circus, she began to make exaggerated gestures of anger, all the while backing up, her legs wide apart, her feet weaving in and out to give her momentum.
When James stood, at first he acted as though he were doing all he could to keep his balance and his dignity. No more churning arms, but he wove about unsteadily.
He was good. Temperance could see that now. He was good enough that he could purposefully throw himself off balance yet never lose control. As a kid, no one had ever been able to keep up with Temperance, but she could see that if she’d met an eleven-year-old James McCairn, he would have given her a run for the money.
Now they were at opposite ends of the ballroom, and around them the children were watching in wide-eyed silence. She could feel that they were afraid. Was this a real argument? Or were these two adults pretending again?
When Temperance looked up at James, she saw him move his chin downward in a quick gesture. It took only a second to know what he had in mind.
“I’m going to murder you,” she yelled, then gave a couple of powerful strokes and went flying toward him. Could she pull it off? she wondered as she neared him. Had she understood his gesture correctly? Would he catch her, or would she go flying through the windows at the end of the room?
But she trusted him.
Seconds before she was about to run into him full force, she crouched down, tucked her head into her chest, stuck one leg out, then put her arms straight up in the air, and she was moving fast between his legs. James caught her by the wrists, and in one lightning-fast powerful movement, he then turned quickly, and instantly, they were both facing in the opposite direction and James was skating backwards, holding Temperance’s uplifted hands, her compressed body balanced on her one skate, between his legs.
When James finally stopped against the opposite wall, Temperance didn’t move. Her head was down, her leg was still up, and her thigh muscles were screaming with pain. But she didn’t hear a sound from the children.
“Are they still there?” she whispered up to James.
“Scared,” he whispered back.
But in the next second Temperance heard the sound of a single pair of hands clapping, and in the next, the room erupted in laughter and applause.
After several minutes, when the sounds began to die down, hands grabbed her under the arms and she was pulled out from between James’s legs. When she tried to stand, she was stiff, both from the unaccustomed exertion and from her fear that the trick wasn’t going to work.
It was Ramsey who’d helped her up, and Grace was beside him. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” she breathed, looking at Temperance with eyes full of astonishment. “Did you two practice that?”
“No,” Temperance said, her hand to her back. “We just—” Breaking off, she looked up at James. He was surrounded by children, each with a pair of skates in hand and wanting him to help put them on. Grace was still waiting for an answer. “We just—” What? Have a natural rapport so we can communicate with just tiny gestures given between us?
Temperance was saved from answering by the door opening and Eppie and her younger sister bringing in the first of four trays full of food. With a collective squeal, the children ran toward the food, Grace behind them, so Temperance and James were alone at the far end of the ballroom.
Temperance didn’t know what to say to him. In a way, what they had just done had been very intimate.
“And what are you planning to teach next Sunday?” he asked; then they both laughed and the awkward moment was gone.
“You have any horse liniment?” she asked, putting her hand on her hip where she was sure she was bruised.
“Never need it myself,” James said. “Since I climb mountains and herd sheep and—”
At that moment one of the older children lost control of his skates and slammed into the back of James. This time he went down in earnest, grabbing Temperance as he fell, so that she landed on top of him.
Of course all the children thought this was more of the show, and with their mouths full, they laughed at the two of them.
Temperance pulled herself off James, then looked at him as he stayed where he was, in a crumpled heap on the floor.
“So?” she said, looking down at him, her eyes full of laughter.
“In the tack room, third shelf down, on the right. But, first, get these things off of me.”
Smiling, Temperance bent down, and using the key that was on a string about her neck, she removed his skates; then he sat there while she took hers off as well. By now the floor was full of children, all wearing skates and pulling each other about the room. Frequent thuds of children falling were followed by screams of laughter.
Standing, James put his arm around Temperance’s shoulders. “Think anyone will miss us?” he asked, standing on one foot.
She looked at the activity around them, with kids screaming, laughing, some eating, some scooting about on the skates. “Somehow, I don’t think so,” she said, then she caught Grace’s eye and Grace nodded, meaning that Temperance had done well.
“Come on,” James said. “I know where there’s a bottle of wine and some cheese and something soft for our backsides.”
“All right,” Temperance said, smiling up at him. His arm was about her shoulders, and one of hers was around his waist. Her other hand was on his hard, flat stomach muscles. Usually when a man offered her wine and “a soft place,” she ran the other way, and if he followed, she’d been known to use the steel point of her umbrella as a means to stop him. “Sounds wonderful,” she said, then helped him limp out the door.
The “something soft” was a pile of straw that wasn’t too clean, and the wine and cheese was just that: a bottle of wine and a chunk of cheese. No glasses, no pretty porcelain plates, no candles; just sustenance.
However, as soon as they were in the dirty tack room that smelled of horses and old leather, James sat down on a bale of straw and pulled his shirt off over his head. “Right there,” he said as he held out a bottle of wine to her, then pointed to the back of his left shoulder.
It took Temperance a moment to realize that he wanted her to rub liniment into that area.
All her life, she’d prided herself on being a “free spirit,” an enlightened person. So what was she to do now? Say to him that her sense of propriety didn’t allow her to pass a bottle of wine back and forth with a man? That she couldn’t be alone with a half-dressed man? And, besides, wouldn’t that sound absurd when, just ten minutes before, she’d been rolling between his legs?
“What are you waiting for?” he asked impatiently.
“For my mother to come storming in and tell me I’m doomed,” Temperance said.
The look he gave her over his bare shoulder told her that he knew exactly her dilemma. His eyes turned soft and seductive. “You’re not going to turn coward on me now, are you?”
Ignoring the bottle of wine, as she needed her senses to remain clear, she took the bottle of liniment down from a shelf, poured it on her hands, then began to massage his shoulder. His big, thick, muscular shoulder. On his warm, smooth, dark skin.
Well, she thought as she tried to override her senses with her brain, she was once again experiencing lust and, as before, she was going to be able to say that she had overcome it. She had not given in to her baser needs and—
“Care for a tumble in the hay?” James said with a lowered-lashes look up at her.
That broke the spell by making her laugh. “So tell me about your late wife. If you never liked her, why did you marry her?”
He grimaced, the invitation gone from his eyes. “For a housekeeper, you certainly are interested in things that aren’t any of your business.”
“It’s none of my business to entertain the children of your village, either, but I did it, didn’t I?”
“Oh? When I got there, it didn’t look as though you were being very entertaining. It looked to me like you wanted to run away and hide. Oh! Watch those nails of yours.”
“Sorry,” Temperance said with no sincerity in her voice. “If you want to rub this on by yourself, just tell me.”
“No, that’s all right. Lower, yes, yes, that’s the right place.”
When she saw him close his eyes in what appeared to be ecstasy caused by her touch, she knew she had to either leave or talk very fast.
“Wife, remember? You were telling me about your wife.”
“No, you were snooping into my business again, but I wasn’t telling you anything.”
At that Temperance took her hands off his bare back.
James started talking immediately, and Temperance went back to rubbing. “I was in love with a village girl, but my father took me to London and dangled beautiful women in front of me, so I gave in and married one of them. The one he chose. Then I brought her back here to McCairn to live. There’s nothing else to tell except that she cried for the whole two years we were married.”
“What happened to her?”
James was quiet for a moment; then he looked at the row of horse harnesses hanging on the wall. “One moonless night she tried to run away. She jumped on one of my nervous racehorses, and I guess she meant to go to Midleigh, but she must have become disoriented.” His voice lowered. “She rode the horse over the cliff, and they both went into the sea.”
Temperance didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “Do you think it was suicide?”
“No!” James said sharply. “I don’t want another suicide in the family. With what my grandmother did, we have enough sins on us.”
“But your grandmother didn’t commit suicide,” Temperance said, then put her liniment-coated hand over her mouth in horror at what she’d said. She’d just betrayed a confidence!
For a moment James just looked straight ahead, saying nothing. “All right, out with it,” he said softly. “What has that nosy nature of yours snooped out now?”
“If you’re going to talk to me like that, I don’t think I’ll tell you anything,” she said as she popped the cork back into the liniment.
This time when he spoke, his voice held command. It was soft, but she knew that he wasn’t joking. “You will tell me what you know about my grandmother.”
But Temperance refused to be intimidated by him. “I thought you didn’t like her. Didn’t you call her The Great Spender?”
Standing, James picked up his shirt. “Because the woman had faults didn’t stop me from loving her. She was a good woman to me. Now tell me what you know.”
Temperance didn’t want to tell him anything and wished with all her might that she’d kept her mouth shut. But she could see from his face that he wasn’t going to let her get away with saying nothing.
“Sit,” he said, nodding toward the bale of straw he’d just risen from.
Temperance obeyed him, then sat in silence as he untied the laces from one of her walking boots.
“You might have the opinion that this was not a happy house,” he said as he pulled off her boot.
At that Temperance could only make a sound of disbelief. Gambling. Murder. Revenge. No, not exactly a happy household.
“I know that the villagers love to talk about my family and Grace is a big talker.”
“You would know that,” Temperance said, then opened her eyes wide, for her voice sounded quite bitter. Why had she said that? But when he’d mentioned Grace, she’d instantly thought of the very intimate relationship that he’d once had with the woman. And now Grace was living in the same house with him. Were they still . . . sharing?
“You want to . . .” He nodded his head toward her stockinged foot.
“Oh,” she said, then hesitated before pulling up her skirt and unfastening her garter in front of him. Should she tell him to look away? There was a wicked part of her that wanted to stretch out her leg and—
But James solved the problem by turning away long enough for her to quickly unfasten both stockings and roll them off her feet. She tucked them into her pockets. When she was finished, he knelt and his big hands held her small foot.
James didn’t seem to have heard the tone of her voice. “I know that you’ve heard of gambling and feuds that lasted for generations, but—”
“No one told me of a feud,” she said with interest.
At that James clamped down on her ankle with his big hand. “Are you going to listen or try to get even more information from me?”
“I’d like to see all the pieces of the puzzle.”
At that James shook his head. “Damn it, woman! My grandmother is buried in unconsecrated ground, and it plagues me. If you know something about her death, I want to hear it.”
“Your grandfather killed her,” she said, then held her breath as she waited for the coming explosion.
But there was none. Instead, James opened the bottle of liniment and began to massage it into her sore ankle. “Yes, I can see that,” he said after a while. “The old man had a ferocious temper.”
“And how many girls did he throw out the window?” Temperance said, trying to lighten the mood. After all, this had happened many years ago.
James looked up at her with a one-sided grin. “A few. So now, tell me everything that you know and where you heard it.”
Temperance started to say that she was under a bond of secrecy, but it was too late for that now, so she told him how Grace’s husband had seen the accidental shooting, then later James’s grandfather had claimed that his wife had committed suicide.
“Bastard!” James said under his breath as he picked up Temperance’s other foot.
“It was an arranged marriage,” he said as he rubbed her ankle. “And they hated each other.”
“Like you and your wife,” Temperance said softly.
“Yes,” he said flatly. “Like my wife and me. But theirs was a loveless marriage from the start, and my grandparents wanted nothing in the world but to hurt each other. He gambled and she spent.”
At that Temperance leaned toward him, her face eager. “But where is what she bought?”
When James looked up at her, there was amusement on his face. “Don’t tell me you’ve believed that old legend? That somewhere in that house is Aladdin’s treasure trove?”
“Oh,” Temperance said, deflated, as she leaned back and he began to rub her ankle with liniment. “I thought maybe . . .”
He looked up at her with one eyebrow raised. “You thought what? That you and I could start tearing down walls and looking? You don’t think that my grandfather did that, as well as my father? Or that my brother and I didn’t spend every moment we were in that house looking for the treasure?”
Negativity had never made Temperance give up anything. “But Grace said that her husband found receipts for things that your grandmother bought, things made of silver, and even gold statues by Cellini.”
For a moment James was silent as he massaged her ankle, and as his silence lengthened, her heart began to beat faster. As a child she’d loved the book Treasure Island.
“What receipts?” James asked quietly.
Temperance wanted to whoop with triumph. But she took a deep breath and calmed herself. “I have no idea. What do they matter, anyway, since there is no treasure to be had? Just because your grandmother spent the family fortune to keep it out of the hands of your gambling grandfather but she died without telling anyone where she’d stored the—
She broke off because James had grabbed her shoulders and planted a kiss on her mouth. It was a hard kiss that soon turned soft and sweet, and she never wanted it to end.
After too short a time, he moved away and looked at her. There was amusement on his handsome face. “Whatever you’ve been doing all your life, it’s not been kissing,” he said.
At that Temperance lost her good mood and pushed his hands away. “That’s because I don’t want to kiss you.”
“Sure about that?” he said as he bent forward again.
But there was nothing that could kill ardor more effectively than being told one was no good at something. Her mother would say that Temperance wasn’t supposed to be good at kissing because Temperance wasn’t married. Whatever, all Temperance’s good feelings were gone.
James put his hand under her chin and lifted her to look at him. “I hurt your feelings?”
“Of course not!” she said with an insolence that she didn’t feel. “But are you interested in anything at all besides sex?”
At that he blinked at her. Obviously he wasn’t used to hearing women say that word. “No, it’s all I think about. I can’t get any work done for thinking about what I’d like to do to women in bed. I think about—”
She knew that he was teasing her, but she also knew that she didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Receipts, remember? This all started when I— Hey!”
James had grabbed her by the wrist and was pulling her out of the tack room toward the house. He didn’t seem to notice that her shoes had been left behind, but as Temperance stepped on stones and something squishy, she was well aware of her bare feet. Please don’t let it be horse manure, she said as he half dragged her into the house.
Temperance tucked her bare feet under her skirt and yawned. Last night she’d stayed up till early morning helping Grace make hats. She’d spent today in a rigorous bout of roller-skating, and now here it was late at night and she was going over account books with a man who had told her she didn’t know how to kiss.
“Nothing,” James said for at least the seventeenth time.
Around them were account books dating back to 1762. “If these books were in America, they’d be in a museum,” Temperance said, yawning again.
“If you want to go to bed, do so,” James said, but his tone let her know that he’d forever after consider her a wimp if she did.
She stretched out her feet in front of her and wiggled her bare toes. There were half a dozen candles lit in the room, but the old library was still so dark that they might as well have been in a cave. “What I want to know is why your grandmother didn’t tell someone what she was doing. If she did buy and hide all these things, why didn’t she tell someone?”
“She didn’t expect to die when she did.”
“No one expects to die ever, but we still make out wills. Accidents can take anyone at a moment’s notice. And if your grandfather’s temper was such that you weren’t surprised to hear that he’d murdered her in a struggle, why didn’t she prepare for that possibility?”
“Accidentally.”
“What?”
“It was an accidental death, remember? Not murder. It wasn’t as though he picked up the pistol and shot her.”
“Sure. Right. But I wonder who it was who had the pistol in the first place? Did he threaten her with it? ‘You tell me where the things you bought are or I’ll blow your head off,’ that sort of thing.”
“Remind me never to go to America,” he said absently as he flipped through an account book for the fifth time. “Do you think Grace knows what Gavie did with the accounts he found?”
“She didn’t say. You should go ask her. I’m sure you know where her bedroom is.” At that Temperance froze. Why had she said that?
James didn’t look up. “That’s the second time you’ve acted jealous of Grace. Are you sure you don’t want to stay here in McCairn?”
“Jealous?” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. And there are people in New York who need me. Look, I’m going to bed. We can look for whatever you hope to find in the morning,” she said as she stood up. “It’s just too bad that your grandmother didn’t return your love enough to entrust you with the knowledge of what she’d put where.”
“Sweet Mother of—” James said under his breath.
When Temperance turned to look at him, his eyes were wide in shock. “What?!” she demanded when he just sat there saying nothing.
“She gave me a pack of cards.”
“She was buying great works of art and all she shelled out for her beloved grandson was a pack of cards? Didn’t she know you weren’t the gambling brother?”
“That’s just it,” James said softly. “She told me to hide the cards from Colin and my grandfather or they’d take them from me and lose them and they were very, very important cards.”
Temperance’s mind was racing. “If she’d given you anything else, you would have played with it and worn it out, but you’ve kept the cards hidden and safe all these years?” Hope made her voice rise on the end.
“Yes,” James said, and the sound was barely a whisper. “In a box in my bedroom.”
At that Temperance made a leap for the door at the same time that James jumped up and started running. They reached the doorway at the same time, and both tried to go through it at once. Temperance was determined to win, so she pushed hard, her body slammed up against James’s as they were wedged in the doorframe.
It was after several moments, when she wasn’t making any progress, that she looked up at him. He was smiling down at her, with that one-sided smirk of his. The front of her body was wedged up against the front of his body, and he was toying with her, keeping her from getting through the doorway.
She narrowed her eyes in threat at him. He laughed, then stepped back to let her pass. “You may be bad at entertaining the children, but you’re certainly keeping me amused,” he said.
Temperance didn’t bother answering him as she ran up the stairs to his bedroom. At the doorway she paused; he was right behind her. She looked into his bedroom, then back up at him. “You touch me and I’ll put sand in your food all next week,” she said.
“After what I found out from kissing you, I’m not even tempted,” he said, then moved past her to enter the bedroom.
For a moment Temperance stood outside the room frowning. She’d never met a man who could make her as angry as he could. Part of her wanted to turn away, go to her own bedroom and get some sleep. Let him unravel his own family mysteries by himself!
But then she saw him digging inside a big old chest that she was sure some medieval ancestor had carried on the Crusades, and she went into the room to look over his shoulder.
“Here!” he said as he pulled out a little box, then carried it to the bed. “Get that candle, would you?”
One of the “girls,” Eppie or her sister, had lit a single candle in his bedroom, so Temperance carried it across the room to set it on the table by the bed. “No, put it here,” he said, frowning, meaning for her to sit on the bed beside him.
She was so interested in what he had in his hands that she didn’t hesitate, but climbed up on the high bed, put the candle in its pewter holder down on the heavy velvet spread, and looked at what he held.
“I haven’t looked at these in years,” he said, leaning on one arm toward her. “My grandmother gave these to me when I was nine, only a year before she died.”
His voice was soft, and the heavy hangings of the bed made them seem as though they were isolated. Suddenly, all her annoyance with him was gone. It was as though she could see the little boy who had grown up among gamblers and a grandfather with a “ferocious” temper.
As he opened the box, he spoke softly. “She told me these were very, very valuable and that I was to keep them always.” He looked up at Temperance, their heads mere inches apart. “She said they were my future.”
Temperance thought of about a dozen things she wanted to say to that, but she bit down on her tongue and kept quiet.
“I thought they were fortune-telling cards, but I couldn’t figure out how to use them.”
By the time James spread the cards out on the bed, Temperance’s heart was pounding. He spread them out in a perfect fan, and from the formation she could tell that he wasn’t a stranger to a deck of cards.
But as soon as she saw the cards, her heart steadied. There was nothing at all special about them. They were red-and-white on the back, one of those intricate patterns that card makers seemed to love. Nothing at all even interesting.
When she looked at James, her disappointment showed on her face.
James gave her a tiny smile, then looked down at the cards. Slowly, he turned one over.
On the face of the card was a picture of a diamond necklace. In the corners were the symbols for the ace of diamonds.
The next card he turned over was the three of hearts. It had a picture of a small golden cherub.
Slowly, Temperance picked up the card and held it to the candlelight. “Looks Italian to me,” she said, then looked back at James. He was smiling at her as though he were waiting for her to figure out something.
Looking at him, trying to read his mind, she suddenly had a thought. Turning, she reached down and flipped the whole curved fan in one gesture. When the other side was exposed, she saw works of art and jewelry and silver serving dishes.
“Oh, dear,” Temperance said. “Do you think that these are the things she bought?”
“I always thought so, but I could find no verification. And of course my grandfather wasn’t telling. That’s why the reciepts Gavie found interested me.”
“But in all those years you found nothing?”
“Not really. A couple of times we found some things like dishes, like you found, but nothing else. The first time we showed the dishes to my grandfather and he smashed them. After that we had to keep anything we found secret and we had to keep our searching a secret. He didn’t like any reminder of his wife.”
“Can’t imagine why. Guilt maybe?” She held up one of the cards and looked at it. There was a sapphire ring on the four of diamonds. “Except for some of the silver pieces, everything seems to be small, and all of it’s nonperishable, no oil paintings that would rot. All of these things would hold up over long storage.”
“Any idea where she stored them?” James asked.
“That’s the question I should ask you. Remember, you’re the laird and I’m the visitor.”
“Right,” he said, smiling, as he picked up another card. The six of spades showed a small bronze statue, probably Greek, probably ancient. “So now that we have an inventory, how do we find the goods?”
“Did she leave you anything else? A map maybe? Think hard.”
He knew she was making fun of him, but he still laughed. The treasure was part of his childhood, and since he’d become laird, he hadn’t had much time to think of anything but work. As he gathered the cards up and put them back into the box, he said, “I can’t see that we’re any closer to finding the treasure than we were before.”
There was something about the way he said “we” that suddenly made her aware that they were alone in a house where the other occupants were sleeping. They were alone in his room on his bed.
Quickly, Temperance rolled to the other side of the bed and put her feet on the floor. “I think I’ve had it for one night.” She gave a fake yawn as though she were dead tired. Truth was, she seemed to have lost her sleepiness.
Lazily, James rolled off the other side of the bed. “That’s right. You have to go into Edinburgh tomorrow, so you’d better get your sleep.”
“Edinburgh?” she said, not having any idea what he was talking about. “Why—”
“You said you and Grace had to buy something for the house, remember?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said. She’d forgotten the lie she’d made up to explain why she and Grace were going to the city. Tomorrow was the day of the secret luncheon when they were to wear Grace’s hats. “Shopping. I nearly forgot.”
“I have a few things you can pick up for me. Tobacco. Sheep-dip. A couple of wolf traps. A bit of horse harness.”
With each word, Temperance’s face became more contorted. “Wolf traps?”
“Sure. You can take the wagon and a couple of the men. You’ll need the wagon if you mean to pick up produce, so why not get the other things at the same time?”
“Are wolf traps part of the housekeeper’s job?” she asked.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should go with you. It would do me good to get out of here. I’ll see if I can find some trousers and—”
“No!” she said, trying to think of a reason why he couldn’t go. But she’d had too little sleep to be able to think clearly.
“No trousers? I can see why a woman would want me to have bare knees, and if you insist—”
She was just too, too tired to think of a lie of any sort. “I don’t care what you wear, but you’re not going with me. I want a day away from this place and from you. And no wolf traps. Or sheep harnesses. Or—”
“Dip. Sheep-dip. Horse harnesses.” She saw then that he was teasing her again, and she doubted that he’d ever meant to go with her into Edinburgh. From what she knew about him, he’d probably rather walk across barbed wire barefoot than spend a day in a city. And she doubted if he ever wore trousers. Or underwear, for that matter.
She walked to the door, opened it, but he stopped her before she could close it.
“Thank you for what you did for the children today,” he said softly. “That was kind of you.”
She tried to keep from blushing with pleasure at his praise. “You’re welcome. They’re nice children and I enjoyed it.”
“Me too,” he said, and he sounded so like an enthusiastic little boy that she laughed.
“Good night.”
“Yes, good night, and if I don’t see you before you leave tomorrow, happy shopping.”
“Yes, thank you and good night.” She started to close the door, but she opened it again. “James,” she said.
“Yes?”
“What happened to your village girl? The one you said you were in love with?”
“My mother felt sorry for her, so she sent her to school in Glasgow. I heard she married some old man a few years later.”
Temperance wasn’t sure, but there still seemed to be some bitterness in his voice. But then, she’d heard a thousand women tell her that they never got over their first love. So maybe it was the same with men.
“Well, good night,” she said again, then quietly closed the door behind her and went to her own room. She was asleep minutes later.
