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He spoke without looking up. “Have you come to distract me from my work, Mrs. Halifax?”
“Your sister has arrived.”
He glanced up sharply at that. “What?”
She blinked. He’d shaved. His unscarred cheek was quite smooth and rather nice-looking, actually. She mentally shook herself. “Your sister—”
He surged around the table. “Nonsense. Why would Sophia come here?”
“I think she’s merely—”
But he was already striding past her. “Something must be the matter.”
“I don’t think anything’s wrong,” she called as she trailed him.
He didn’t seem to hear, descending the stairs rapidly. She was panting by the time they’d made the lower hall, but he wasn’t out of breath at all.
He stopped and frowned. “Where did you put her?”
“In the sitting room with the ugly animal heads,” Helen gasped.
“Wonderful. She’s sure to say something about that,” Sir Alistair muttered.
Helen rolled her eyes. It wasn’t as if she could leave his sister waiting in the drive.
Sir Alistair strode ahead and burst into the sitting room. “What’s happened?”
Miss Munroe turned to him and frowned through her odd spectacles. “Grandfather’s hunting trophies have moldered completely. They should be thrown out.”
Sir Alistair scowled. “You didn’t travel all the way from Edinburgh to critique the state of Grandfather’s hunting trophies. And what are those things on your face?”
“These”—Miss Munroe touched her ugly spectacles—“are Mr. Benjamin Martin’s visual glasses, which he has developed scientifically to reduce the damage that light has upon the eye. I had them shipped all the way from London.”
“Good God, they’re ugly.”
“Sir Alistair!” Helen gasped.
“Well, they are,” he muttered. “And she knows it.”
But his sister was smiling tightly. “Exactly the reaction I’d expect from a philistine such as yourself.”
“So you traveled all the way here just to show them to me?”
“No, I came to see if my only brother was still alive.”
“Why wouldn’t I be alive?”
“I haven’t received an answer to my last three letters,” his sister shot back. “What was I to think but that you lay rotting somewhere in this old castle?”
“I answer all your letters.” Sir Alistair frowned.
“Not the last three you haven’t.”
Helen cleared her throat. “Would anyone care for tea?”
“Oh, that would be lovely,” Miss McDonald said from beside Miss Munroe. “And some scones, perhaps? Sophie loves scones, don’t you, dear?”
“I loathe—” Miss Munroe began, but then stopped abruptly. If Helen didn’t know better, she’d swear that Miss McDonald had pinched her. Miss Munroe drew in a breath and admitted, “I could take some tea.”
