The air between them was sizzling. “Aye,” she cried out. “Aye, I deceived you. Aye, I tricked you. But I did not relish it.”
“And what just happened? The two of us together, Maura? Was that part of your plan?”
Her heart squeezed. A wrench of shame went through her. He couldn’t know the guilt she felt. But she knew that if it happened all over again, her choice would have been no different.
His mouth twisted. “I see that it wasn’t. Why then, Maura? Why?”
There was a stifling heaviness in her chest. She braved the biting demand in his eyes as best she could.
“I needed to find you. I—I needed to come here. To Scotland. To Gleneden.”
“And I was the means?”
“Yes! Yes! It was the only way I could think to come here. To stay and not arouse your suspicions. To search for the Black Scotsman—”
“The Black Scotsman!” He made a sound of impatience. “It’s just a name conjured up by some silly young maids—”
“No. Not you, Alec. The pirate. The first Black Scotsman. The real Black Scotsman.” The instant she spoke his name, it was as if her veins filled with ice.
His eyes narrowed. He tugged her down on a small settee, his expression grim. “What the devil is this? Maura, you make no sense.”
“What the devil, indeed.” Her tone was fervent. “The portrait downstairs. James, the seventh Duke of Gleneden. The one who wore the black glove. You said it yourself—that he was a nasty fellow—and he was, Alec. Far more than you realize.”
Alec made no remark.
“You didn’t know, did you? That he was a pirate. No one knew.”
His eyes narrowed. “Nonsense. My lineage is honorable. Respectable—”
“Oh, stop! I daresay all families have skeletons in the closet.”
“If no one else knew he was a pirate, what makes you so certain he was?” He was thin-lipped and abrupt.
Maura suddenly shivered. “I know, Alec.I know. And my father did, too. That’s what brought me here. That’s what brought me to you.”
She recounted the myth then. How the Circle of Light brought fortune and favor to those of the Clan McDonough.
How the Black Scotsman plundered the seas, concealing his identity.
How he stole the Circle of Light.
She told of how death came to Randall O’Donnell, the lord who had lost the Circle of Light to the Black Scotsman. Pain bled through to her voice. “It happened just this way to my father, and my father’s father before him. Death, without warning. Death, so unexpected, since the time of Randall O’Donnell, grandfather to my grandfather!”
Alec’s lips pressed together. “This is what you meant when you said I’d robbed you?”
“Aye.”
Alec said nothing.
“You don’t believe me?” she cried.
“An enchanted Celtic relic come down through the ages? One that no one has seen—provided it even exists!—for nearly two hundred years? Maura, you’ve begun to believe in the tales you tell the children.”
Her eyes grew stormy. “You would not doubt it if you saw my homeland.”
Alec thought of Thomas Gates. Very soon he would know.
“My family was cursed when the Black Scotsman stole the Circle of Light, because we failed to protect it. Yours was cursed as well. Cursed by Randall O’Donnell as he sailed into the night. Cursed when the Black Scotsman stole the Circle of Light!”
