Read A Bewitching Bride Online
Authors: Elizabeth Thornton
A Bewitching Bride (7 page)
The growls subsided, leaving Gavin free to contemplate what the girl had told him. She hadn’t lied. He’d been with her in his dream when she’d run from the man who was pursuing her. He’d felt her pain and her shortness of breath as she tried to outrun him. He hadn’t seen everything, but it was enough to convince him that she had told him the truth. But she hadn’t told him everything.
Had she not been so exhausted, he would have kept on probing about the note she had received. Most people would have been suspicious when she refused to share its contents, but not he. His intuition was honed to a fine point, and he sensed an emotion behind her reluctance. What was it?
He thought about it for a minute or so, then moved on to something else that troubled him. Will had not kept his appointment with the girl. Was his friend delayed, or was there a more sinister reason for Will’s absence? He remembered their conversation at the reception, and he felt deeply uneasy.
Will had wanted to confide in him, but when it came to the point, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His suspicions were too bizarre, Will said.
Murder.
That was what Will was alluding to.
That was what Will was alluding to.
Gavin worried at that thought for a long, long time.
A blast of cold air had him awake on an instant, with all his faculties honed for action. The moment the intruder stepped through the door, he leaped at him, and they both tumbled to the floor. The fire had dimmed and there were no candles lit, but he knew at once that he had made a serious blunder. He lowered the fist he had raised to disable his assailant. Beneath him, covered in a blanket, a wriggling, nubile, squawking female fought to free herself of his punishing grip.
“Bloody hell!” he roared as he rolled off her. He got to his knees, then to his feet. “What game are you playing, Kate Cameron?” He turned aside to light the lamp.
She sat up, pushed out of the blanket so that she could breathe, and blew away the hair that had tumbled free of her makeshift turban to fall over her face. “Imbecile!” she hissed, as angry as he. “Do you always act first and ask questions later?” She tossed her turban on the floor and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “I went to the privy, that’s all.”
Her answer only added to his ire. “You went to the privy? That’s why you left the cottage?”
“Don’t shout! I’m not deaf!” She allowed him to help her up and guide her to the bed. When she sank into the bedclothes, she shrugged. “What else was I to do? I did not want to waken you, so I took Macduff with me instead. It’s all your fault, anyway. You kept forcing me to drink cup after cup of tea till I thought I would drown in it.”
Macduff chose that moment to pad behind the bed and cower in the corner with only his massive paws showing.
Gavin’s temper, fueled by fear, barely softened. “There’s a perfectly good chamber pot under the bed.”
She squared her shoulders and answered him with all the dignity of a duchess. “As I am well aware. I, however, prefer to have some privacy. Good God, even the patients at Dr. Rankin’s clinics expect privacy when they need to use the facilities, even if it’s only a bedpan.”
He sat on the edge of the stool and regarded her steadily. Until now, he’d never considered her one of the beauties, but with her color up and temper glinting in her eyes, he allowed that Miss Kate Cameron could hold her own. Her hair, gilded by the light from the lamp, hung heavy and straight to her shoulders. She kept flicking it back as she glowered at him from beneath her straight black brows.
“Did I say something amusing?” she asked truculently.
He shook his head.
“Then why,” she demanded, “do you have that silly grin on your face?”
Because he was bemused. When he had first set eyes on her, he’d discounted her beauty and her power to make her presence stand out. It seemed that the laugh was on him.
He turned away and poked the fire to life. “Will tells me,” he said, “that you’re a frequent visitor to his clinic.”
He sensed her wariness, and that made him more alert.
“I’m not really a visitor,” she said. “Visitors come to gawk. Dr. Rankin does not encourage gawkers unless they are immensely rich and willing to endow his work.”
“There are two clinics, aren’t there?”
“Yes. One in Aberdeen and one in Braemar. The clinic in Aberdeen serves the poor and castoffs in our society, you know, people who can’t afford to pay a doctor’s bill. There’s no money to be made there, but Dr. Rankin has several backers whose generosity keeps the clinic open.”
Her voice had gentled considerably when she talked of Will’s work, and once again Gavin wondered whether there was more to her relationship with his friend than either of them had cared to admit.
“What about the clinic in Braemar?” he asked crisply.
“There is a surgery attached to it, but it’s more of a rest home for those who have lost touch with reality or have suffered some terrible loss in their lives. I think that’s where Dr. Rankin’s heart lies. He says that these patients can be healed, too. We do what we can.”
He thought of Fox, the retired headmaster, who sneered at Will’s work. The stigma would extend to his patients. No one wanted to be known as a loony. Kate Cameron’s credit rose by several degrees.
A smile lit his eyes. “You’re an amateur psychiater?”
“I’m a volunteer. I do the most menial tasks.” She held up her hand to stay the next question. “I don’t know why you’re asking me about the clinics. You’re Dr. Rankin’s friend. Surely he told you all this already?”
“Well, he did, but . . .”
“But what?”
He didn’t want to betray a friend’s confidence, but the events of that night had added a new ingredient to the mix. Will suspected someone connected to his clinics was up to no good, and that was putting it mildly. Kate Cameron was connected to the clinics, and tonight someone had tried to kill her.
He had to get to the truth.
He gave a careless shrug. “Will is worried about his clinic in Aberdeen. Do you know anything about it?”
Her eyes went very round, and she shook her head. “He said nothing to me. You should speak to him directly, Mr. Hepburn. I can’t answer for him.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I can’t. Dr. Rankin doesn’t confide in me.”
She was telling the truth, or was she? He could read her, but imperfectly. This was getting him nowhere.
“We’ll leave here at first light.” As he spoke, he stood, reached above his head, and began to pull their garments from the pulley. “They won’t start looking for you until you don’t turn up for breakfast or until someone raises the alarm.” A thought occurred to him. “What about your lady’s maid?”
“She’ll think that I have gone out for an early morning walk. What difference does it make? I don’t see where this is going. Shouldn’t we raise the alarm and send for the police the first chance we get?”
She was examining the gray dress he had thrown at her, poking her fingers through holes in the delicate lace bodice that was smeared with blood. He heard her sniff.
“You’re not going to weep over a ruined frock, are you?” he asked incredulously.
Something flashed in her eyes, and she tipped up her chin. “This is no ordinary frock. It’s a gown that was designed by a couturier from the House of Worth, and it cost a small fortune. It doesn’t belong to me but to my sister. She loaned it to me for the occasion of Juliet’s marriage, and I promised to return it in pristine condition.”
“I’m sure she’ll make allowances when she hears the circumstances.’
“You don’t know my sister. There will be hell to pay.”
“He’s not French. He’s as English as you or I.”
“What?”
“Worth. He trained in France, but he is as English as you or I.”
“Why would he pretend to be French?”
His look verged on the satirical. “For the cachet. Every lady wants a French dress designer, just as every bachelor wants a French chef presiding at his table. It’s all for show.”
She frowned down at the ruined dress. “I can’t go back to the hotel wearing this. What will everyone think?”
“I’ll lend you my coat. When it’s buttoned up to your throat, no one will notice what you’re wearing underneath. You can slip upstairs to your room and change your gown before we meet with the police.”
She was shaking her head.
“What?” he asked.
“Shouldn’t we go to the police at once and tell them what happened? That villain may be hanging around the hotel. He may even be one of the guests.”
“You may be right, but if we want to be taken seriously, we won’t broadcast the fact that we spent the night together, at least not to the rank and file. We’ll do this discreetly. I’ll talk to the police first. They’ll want to question you, of course, but they’re decent fellows. They’ll keep their mouths shut and their speculations to themselves.”
Her hand went to her throat, and she rubbed it distractedly. “People have such filthy minds.” She spoke under her breath, then heaved a sigh. Raising her eyes to his, she went on, “Thank you for thinking of my reputation. You’re more farsighted than I am.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it.” He touched his index finger to the dimple in his jaw in a half hearted attempt to conceal his grin. “Your thanks are unnecessary, though. You see, Miss Cameron, I have as much to lose as you. Should it become known that we spent the night together, I might feel obliged to make an honest woman of you.”
She lifted one brow. “Why should you? From what I hear, you make a practice of spending the night with women who are practically strangers to you. You haven’t tried to make honest women of them.”
“That’s because they don’t have cousins who would break my arms and legs should I be so bold as to refuse. At heart, I’m a fearful coward.”
She gave an impish grin. “Don’t worry, Hepburn. It will never come to that. I have enough courage for the two of us. Now, where is this coat you promised me?”
He watched her dress with a kind of grudging respect. There were more facets to this woman’s character than showed on the surface. He swallowed a sigh. He might as well have been a knight in shining armor entrusted with her care. It would have helped had she been twenty years older and running to fat.
A spear of guilt twisted inside him. Why had he been sent to save this woman and not Alice? What indifferent deity had decided who should live and who should die?
“Ready?” she asked, then raised her brows when she saw his expression.
His face cleared. “You’ll do,” he replied.
In her tattered dress and borrowed coat, she should have looked like a scarecrow. Maybe it was her haughty smile or the way she held herself that made him feel like a supplicant in the presence of a duchess. Opening the door was easy; closing it was hard. The duchess and his dog did not spare him a glance as they sailed into that twilight just before dawn.
The sun had risen a little higher by the time they reached the hotel. It wasn’t deserted as they’d hoped it would be. Several gillies in their deer hats and cradling their guns in one arm were fanning out as they made for the snow-covered moors.
“Dalziel!” Gavin called out, recognizing one of the men who wasn’t dressed as a gillie. It was Will Rankin’s man of business. “What’s going on?”
Dalziel quickly crossed to him. He was a young man, not much older than thirty, with dark, receding hair. His usual bland expression had vanished, and worry lines puckered his brow. “It’s Dr. Rankin, sir,” he said. “He asked me to waken him early this morning, in case the trains were running, you know. His bed hasn’t been slept in, and he is nowhere in the hotel.”
Kate’s hand had gone to her throat. She looked at Gavin. All the color had drained from her face. He clasped her hand. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said softly. “Say as little as possible until we have a chance to talk things over.” He motioned to Dalziel and said something she could not hear.
Dalziel nodded and offered her his arm. They entered the hotel together, leaving Gavin with the gillies.
Five
Mr. Dalziel escorted her to her room. He was discretion itself. Not one awkward question passed his lips. However, Kate was aware that he was a keen observer. “Nothing much gets past Dalziel,” Dr. Rankin frequently told her. But he was referring to his business affairs, keeping track of the clinics’ funds and supplies. Dalziel had no contact with the patients.
He was murmuring soothing inanities in her ear. She wasn’t listening and brusquely broke into his monologue. “Tell me again, Mr. Dalziel. Dr. Rankin parted company with you last night. Then what happened?”
“He asked me to wake him early if the trains were running again. I couldn’t get to the station for snow-drifts, so I turned back. I thought I’d look in on him and, if he was awake, warn him that the hotel was still cut off, but his bed had not been slept in.”
She didn’t tell Dalziel that Dr. Rankin had arranged to meet her after the guests had retired for the night. What had happened in the interim? Her heart beat in slow, heavy strokes.
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