easy for either of ye.”
“Thank ye, friend,” Gregor murmured.
Just then, the stable lad drew up with Gregor’s horse.
“Luck be with ye, MacLeod.” Lamond shook Gregor’s forearm once more, squeezing his shoulder with his free hand.
“And ye.”
Gregor led his horse to the edge of the bluff, where the little footpath wove down to the water’s edge. It would undoubtedly rend them both asunder once more to see each other for one last farewell.
Still, he felt himself drawn to her, as he always was, like a moth to a flame. Leaving his horse, he shuffled down the path. Mayhap if he spied her without letting her see him, he could save her the heartache of a goodbye. Just one glimpse, he told himself, even knowing that he would never get enough of her.
He crossed the rocky strand in long strides, headed for the spit of land he must round to reach her favorite spot. When he had almost turned the corner, he slowed, easing his head around.
The strand was empty. Strange. Mayhap she had walked farther along, but that would be unusual for her.
He continued out to where he knew she savored her privacy from the guards’ watch—where he’d given her pleasure only two nights before. Memories stormed over him, of her lips, her heated skin, her breathless moans.
Mayhap it was for the best that she wasn’t here. He couldn’t trust himself not to do something mad and foolish whenever he was near her.
He let a long breath go. Aye, he was both mad and a fool when it came to Birdie.
He’d been living a dream these last three sennights, acting as if the real world would never encroach. In loving Birdie, he’d gotten above himself, thinking he could have a woman like her. At the end of the day, he was naught more than a soldier, a man with precious little else besides his strength.
But now the dream had ended, and reality was putting him back in his place.
Shaking his head, he turned from the empty strand. But his gaze landed on a scrap of something that stood out against the rocks. Approaching, he realized it was a leather shoe. He picked it up. It was small and slightly pointed at the end.
A frown tightened his brow. It was small enough to be a woman’s shoe, but was cut in the style of a man’s.
It is for a bairn—a lad. The only lad who’d been about the castle of late was Padraig Gunn.
Foreboding coiled like a snake in the pit of his stomach. Something was wrong.
He took two more strides before his gaze landed on something that sent ice through his veins.
The rocks were churned up with the muddy sand underneath. A scuffle had happened here. He glanced up toward the castle, but the exposed, overhanging bluff blocked its view.
Gregor fell to one knee, searching the disturbed rocks for some other sign. Crushed beneath the overturned stones, a flash of blue caught his eye. He scraped the rocks and sand aside.
A ribbon, stained with mud and crumpled by the rocks, lay on the ground. A ribbon exactly like the kind Birdie used to fasten the end of her braid.
Birdie.
Before he knew what he was doing, Gregor surged to his feet, tearing back over the route he’d walked around the spit. Instead of turning up the path to the top of the bluff, he scrambled on. Just beyond where the path turned off, the strand was churned by at least two sets of horses’ hooves.
The tracks stretched farther up the strand, cutting deep into the loose rocks.
Bloody fecking hell and damnation.
Whoever had been here hadn’t even bothered to cover their trail. There could only be one of two explanations for such brazen carelessness.
One, the riders could be utterly confident that no one would notice either their arrival or their departure. Given the chaos buzzing around the castle, that was plausible.
But eventually, whoever had ridden down here must have known that someone would notice Birdie and Padraig’s absence, someone would recall seeing them come down here, and someone would notice the obvious tracks leading south along the strand.
Which led Gregor to the second explanation—they didn’t care about being followed, for they intended to finish whatever they meant to do to Birdie and the lad before they could be caught and stopped.
Even as hot bile rose up his throat, Gregor broke into a sprint. He drove himself up the path to the top of the bluff, uncaring of the burn in his legs. When