The Knight's Temptress (Lairds of the Loch) by Amanda Scott Page A

again, Ian faced his father.
    Without preamble, Colquhoun said urgently, “JamesMòr demands that I go to him at once, lad. This very afternoon or not at all.”

    Lina could hear Lizzie’s soft breathing as the younger girl concentrated on her stitches. The rain had stopped temporarily, allowing them to open the shutters and proceed with altering the old blankets into rough cloaks.
    Glancing out the window, Lina saw that dark clouds still hung low over the landscape. The stillness seemed ominous. It was going to rain again and would doubtless rain hard. Nevertheless, she could hear a bird whistling somewhere.
    Against that eerie, prestorm stillness, she also heard a murmur of male voices in the stableyard below. From her stool near the window, she could see the eastern wall. The long, narrow thatched roof that jutted from it barely covered the restless backsides of the few ponies in open stalls facing the wall.
    Distant, hasty footsteps sounded on the stairs.
    “Lizzie, put that cloak aside and take up a shirt,” Lina said. Pushing her own drab wool aside, she snatched up one of Dougal MacPharlain’s shirts in its place.
    “I don’t hear anything,” Lizzie said.
    “Quick!” Lina said. The footsteps had neared their landing. “Do it!”
    As a key scraped in the lock, Lizzie dropped the end of her blanket so that the cloth draped over her knees. Snatching up a linen shirt from the round table beside her, she thrust her needle through its fabric near one of the rents in it just as the door opened and Dougal strode in, leaving the door open.
    Having had the foresight to use one of her own needles asa second one and to thread them both, Lina calmly finished a stitch and looked up at him. Fearing that he might notice something amiss, especially if Lizzie tried to pull her thread through and revealed that it would bring the blanket on her knees with it, Lina said quietly, “What is it, sir?”
    He regarded her silently, looked outside, then back at her. “It is going to storm,” he said. “Is the cloak ye wore here on Wednesday a thick, warm one?”
    “The weather is warm enough without it,” she said, wondering guiltily what demon had turned his thoughts to cloaks.
    “Is it warm enough to wear outside if it grows colder?”
    Sensing Lizzie’s immediate, joyful reaction to his words and feeling an icy chill that had naught to do with cloaks, Lina said hastily, to silence Lizzie, “On most days, aye. But if you mean would it keep me dry on a day like today—”
    “I do, aye,” he said.
    “I knew I did not misjudge you!” Lizzie cried. “You mean to take us home!”
    “Not ye, lass,” he replied harshly. “Ye’re too important to James Mòr.”
    Lina did not need to see the stricken look on Lizzie’s face to say flatly, “Then I cannot go either, sir. You must know how wrong that would be.”
    “Ye’ll do as I bid ye,” he retorted.
    Hearing footsteps again on the stairs, Lina said, “No, sir. I won’t leave her.”

    Ignoring the relief he felt at hearing that James Mòr and not he had irked Colquhoun, Ian said, “He does not again demand that you go alone, does he?”
    “Nay, nay, we settled it in the second round of messages that I’ll take my usual tail. But he does say we must go afoot and my men must stay in the yard whilst I go inside. I can take one man in with me, though. That will be ye, lad. But neither of us may enter James Mòr’s presence armed.”
    “I see,” Ian said, mentally rejecting the idea that he be the one to accompany Colquhoun. To be sure, it was his right. And the last thing he wanted to discuss with his father was any still-amorphous plan of his own. Even so, everything in him screamed that being closed up in an audience chamber with James Mòr and Colquhoun would be fatal to any plan of his that might present itself.
    To his delight, as that thought formed, so did the possible outline for a plan. Needing time to think, he said, “We’d be wise to consider just