Highland Heiress - By Margaret Moore Page 0,39

in a puddle and so cold and damp, he started to shiver.

Mercifully, the men who attacked him didn’t notice, perhaps because it was too dark, and they moved away. The wind rose, rustling the remaining leaves of the trees around him, sending droplets of water onto his already-wet clothes and hair.

Cold, wet, in pain, bleeding, drifting in and out of consciousness, he tried to stay awake, to listen for sounds of the men leaving.

Then the wind brought the smell of smoke and the snap and crackle of burning wood.

They’d set fire to the school.

He tried to get up on his hands and knees. If he could crawl, maybe he could get to the road, and if he could get to the road, he could fetch help. He could save the school. He had to save her school….

Although it was past midnight and Moira was dressed in her fine linen nightgown and sky-blue silk bedrobe, her thick hair in a long braid down her back, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Her mind was abuzz in a way that made sleeping, or even lying down, impossible.

It was more than worry about her father and what he might be doing. He’d gone on another business trip to Peebles and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow afternoon, or so he’d told the butler, and so Walters had informed her when she returned from the market in Dunbrachie. Her father had said nothing to her about business in Peebles but just because he hadn’t told her about his plans earlier, that didn’t mean he was meeting some of his old cronies to play cards and drink. Or so she hoped.

It wasn’t frustration that Big Jack MacKracken and his cronies didn’t want her to build her school, or dismay over anything Sarah Taggart had said. It wasn’t the lawsuit Robbie had brought against her.

What kept her awake tonight was confusion about Mr. McHeath’s feelings and behavior when they were together, and her own.

What was it about him that stripped her of all restraint? she wondered as she paced restlessly in the large room that faced south and overlooked the gardens and wood.

It couldn’t be just his looks and form, although they were impressive. After all, she’d met other good-looking men before, business associates of her father, or their sons, or other social acquaintances, for she had many friends in Glasgow. And Robbie McStuart was considered extremely good-looking. Yet she’d never felt for any other man even a tenth of the desire that Mr. McHeath aroused.

No doubt their first meeting, when Mr. McHeath had behaved so chivalrously, accounted for some of the difference, she supposed as she stirred the coals in the fireplace, making the flames rise a little higher and the room a little brighter.

At night, this room was about as comfortable and cozy as a cave, even with a fire in the tiled hearth. Despite the presence of oil lamps and candles, every corner was dark with shadows. The mournful cries of peacocks in the garden added to the gloomy atmosphere, and not even the furnishings from their home in Glasgow could give her much comfort.

The armoire had been her mother’s, and her writing desk had been a present from her father when she was ten years old. One of the chairs by the tiled hearth had been her grandmother’s, and her father had bought the landscape of a mountain meadow covered in heather that was hanging over the mantel on a business trip to the Isle of Skye.

During the day, and especially when the sun was shining, the room was much more pleasant. Then she could see the brighter colors of the wall covering decorated with oriental birds and flowers, and the large windows revealed a pleasant landscape, instead of looking like tall pools of ink.

But it was night, not day, as she put the poker back into its stand and drew her bedrobe more tightly about her. She sat in her grandmother’s chair now upholstered in cream-colored silk, the same chair where she’d spent several other anxious nights waiting for her father to stagger in the door, drunk and jovial.

He was always jovial when he was drunk, and always in an ill temper the next day. He wasn’t mean or cruel, only quick to anger or take offence, something that had cost him more than one business transaction or customer. If he hadn’t been so good at striking bargains, his business would have suffered; mercifully, so far, it had not. But if he