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He frowned.
‘So is Papa cleverer than me or me than him?’
‘Well, you are both cleverer than I, so I certainly won’t be able to answer that question.’
Jamie stared up at her, his eyes surprisingly warm despite their dark colour. He had Bella’s eyes, thick lashed and slightly uptilted at the corner, but she could not tell yet if the rest of his face favoured his father’s sharper-cut lines and rough male appeal or Bella’s delicate beauty. Whatever the case, with two such impressive parents he would probably be a handsome young man.
‘I think you are very clever,’ he said seriously, as if still working through her answer. ‘You found Muck and I have been searching for days. I shall be an explorer, you know.’
‘You look like an explorer. You certainly have the feet of an explorer.’
He glanced at his feet in wonder.
‘I do?’
‘Oh, yes. I am good at seeing what people really are. Will you explore Muck?’
The wonder became a grin.
‘Papa says I explore muck too much. Mud muck, not this Muck.’ He pointed to the map. ‘You said we will find Foula.’
‘And so we shall. Shall we sail from Muck?’
‘No, from home. Do you know where my home is?’
She turned to search the map, tracing the road from Inveraray.
‘Here?’
‘A little more, no...’ He was straining to reach upwards and she picked him up. He stiffened for a moment and then adjusted to settle on her hip and poked one still-plump finger to the tip of a tiny spit of green surrounded by blue. The colour was a little faded there, as if it had been touched often. By Jamie or by a younger Benneit Lochmore?
‘Here.’
He was not very heavy, though he was taller than her four-year-old cousin, Philip. His arm curved around her neck as he leaned forward to show her the point of the map and his body was snug against hers. She often held her cousins’ children. It was part of what she did—Aunt Joane picked up and put down and fetched and fixed and...
And this was different.
She did not pick this boy up because he expected it of her, but because he didn’t expect it at all. She saw it the moment he was brought into the drawing room that morning by his elderly nurse and the scarred, red-haired giant. He was, like his father, an island, self-sufficient and inward-looking despite his cheerfulness. Six years ago she’d noticed the same quality in Benneit Lochmore—behind the smiling charm was something still and watchful and unreachable. It had made her uncomfortable around him, as if he could see past her own armour and read her secret, resentful thoughts.
‘You have pretty hair,’ Jamie said, his voice dreamy.
She almost dropped him, but his legs tightened around her waist.
‘I do?’
‘It is like the colour of the desert in my new book. Papa bought it in the great big book store and it is my favourite book and Papa reads it to me, but I can find words, too. I will explore the desert when I am big. There are camels! Do you know what a camel is?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It is like a horse because you ride it, but it has a hill on its back and it has a sad face like Flops. Flops is my dog.’
‘I like his name.’
‘His real name is Molach, which means hairy, but I call him Flops because he does—he comes into a room and flops. Like a rug. A hairy rug.’
‘This I must see.’ She laughed.
‘Apparently, you shall,’ a much deeper voice said behind them.
Jo stiffened, but did not let go of Jamie as she turned to face the Duke.
He stood in the doorway and there was such animosity in his eyes she had to resist hugging Jamie’s body to her like a shield. The moment he entered the drawing room she noted how much he had changed in the years since she had last seen him, but the difference between this man, with the grey beginning to show at his temples, with his jaw tense and unshaven and his eyes narrowed with resentment, and the younger man she remembered was even more pronounced, as if he had aged again in the short moments that passed. He looked like the Duke of Lochmore might have looked two hundred years ago as he prepared to enter battle to defend his domain. Which was perhaps an accurate depiction of the state of affairs as he saw it.
