Bound By Passion: No Desire Denied / One More Kiss / Second-Chance Seduction

To fulfill her fantasy. Her fault. They’d made love right out in the open when someone was threatening to kill off her family. And Reid. Her fault again. She tightened her grip on him and held on for dear life.

“Relax,” he murmured, pulling off her hands. Then he shifted so that he could keep an eye on both entrances. “Daryl will be here in a moment, and we’ll get you safely back to the castle.”

But it wasn’t her safety that had been threatened. She’d put her subplot in front of her plot, and it had nearly cost Reid his life.

10 (#u838c0fae-1d89-5303-9e2e-1306e3078cfa)

“WHOEVER IT WAS, they’re a damn good shot.” Daryl studied the extra whiteboard he’d dragged into the main parlor from Adair’s office. On it he’d sketched the clearing, the stone arch and the hillside beyond. He pointed to the place where he thought the sniper had taken his shot. “I bet he was standing right here.”

Reid’s mind flashed back to the instant he’d felt the fiery sensation sear the side of his shoulder. He remembered that, and the icy stab of fear that had pierced right to his core—and then nothing until he was standing by Nell midway beneath the stone arch. Even now, he had no recollection of how he’d gotten her there.

That was a first for him. He took a sip of the brandy Daryl had poured him after Vi had tended to the scratch the bullet had left.

A bullet meant for Nell.

In the bright lights of the kitchen with Vi and Nell, he’d seen how tired Nell had looked. There’d been dark circles beneath her eyes, and for the first time he’d glimpsed fear in them. His fault. He’d never treated a woman with less care. And he’d never been this careless on a job.

Vi had agreed with his assessment of Nell’s exhaustion, because she’d hurried her niece upstairs, so that she could shower and change and get some rest. The dog had gone with the women.

In the parlor, Daryl drew his finger down to where he’d sketched the stone arch. “If you were here, you would have been out of range of the floodlights. I’ll bet he was wearing night vision goggles.”

“Which means he’s either a pro or he’s had military training,” Reid said.

“Agreed.”

Reid wanted badly to pace off his nerves. Another first for him. He never paced.

“While Vi was patching you up, I updated Sheriff Skinner. He’s got a man stationed there right now to guard the area.”

“At first light, I want to search for the bullet.”

Daryl met his eyes. “My thoughts exactly. It might shed some light on who we’re dealing with.” Then he tapped on the sketch again. “By then, Skinner will have volunteers patrolling the hillside and searching for any casing. He said he’d have no trouble getting the manpower. Edie’s a popular woman in Glen Loch, and no one wants trouble at her granddaughter’s wedding rehearsal. Everyone in town’s grateful for the economic boost that this wedding business has given the local community.”

“Nell is not going to want to stay inside the castle,” Reid said. “She’s determined to find the necklace, and I’m worried about the number of strangers who will be here tomorrow.”

“With the extra manpower Skinner is mustering up, we ought to be able to handle it. I’ll print up copies of the police artist’s sketch that Duncan sent us so Skinner can distribute them to his volunteers. Not that it will help much since he was wearing sunglasses and a beard. That reporter from the Times will be here at ten to interview Vi and shadow her for the rest of the day. I’ll stick with them. Vi has two appointments with prospective clients, and the wedding rehearsal starts at four. That will involve less than a dozen people, and none of them will be strangers. I’ll also have a man at my office check more deeply into Gwendolen Campbell’s known acquaintances. He can take another look at Deanna Lewis’s circle. Someone with a military background might pop up.”

Reid could hear the clock ticking in his head. “I never should have agreed to take her out there tonight. I let her convince me that they wouldn’t want to eliminate her until she’d found the necklace. I’ve never been this off my game.”

Daryl turned to him. “You’re not off your game. The shooter didn’t want to hit Nell. He wanted to hit you.”

Reid stared at him. The man was right. And he should have realized it sooner. He was definitely off his game. That had to stop.

“What did we miss?” Nell asked as she and Vi joined them.

“You should be in bed,” Reid said.

“Save your breath,” Vi said. “I lost that argument ten minutes ago.”

“I was just telling Reid that he was the shooter’s target and not you,” Daryl said.

“I know,” Nell said. “It’s my fault for convincing Reid to go out there.”

“No.” Reid waited until she met his gaze. “I’m responsible for what happened, and I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Nell felt a band tighten around her heart. He was talking about more than the shooter, and he was right. Hadn’t she already realized that she had to modify her subplot? She couldn’t, she wouldn’t put him in danger again. If that meant she had to put her garden fantasy on hold until she’d figured out where Eleanor had hidden her necklace, she could live with that. She’d waited seven years. She could certainly wait to seduce him in the garden until after sundown tomorrow. If all went well, she’d find the necklace by then.

At least that was the argument she’d made to herself when she had been in the shower.

So why did it hurt so much that he’d come to the same conclusion?

“The person responsible for all this is the person who thinks they have a right to Eleanor’s sapphires,” Vi said as she urged Nell toward sofa. “The best way to put an end to it is to catch them.”

Daryl poured two brandies and handed them to the women. “Reid and I agree that the shooter is either a professional or perhaps ex-military.”

“What if it’s someone who shoots for sport?” Nell asked. “Gwendolen and Deanna are both from Great Britain. Perhaps they hunt or skeet shoot. Obviously Deanna couldn’t have been out there on the hillside tonight, but Gwendolen could.”

The two men exchanged a look. “Nell could be right,” Daryl said. “I’ll have my man check it out.” Then he turned to Nell. “How did you think of that?”

“The characters I create for my stories all have backgrounds, and we’ve pretty much established that the villains in this case have a connection to Eleanor and Angus that reaches back to Scotland.” She smiled at Daryl. “Plus hunting and skeet shooting are big on British television.”

“Reid tells me that you think the clue to the location of Eleanor’s necklace is in the painting,” Daryl said.

Nell moved so she could stand directly beneath the portrait. As she passed the second whiteboard that Daryl had used to sketch out the time line of events, she gave it a glance and once more experienced that little tug on her memory that she’d experienced earlier in the evening, but whatever was lingering at the edge of her mind stayed there. Shifting her gaze to Eleanor, she tried to focus.

Finding the necklace had to be at the top of her priority list. “She was so careful hiding the two earrings. She wanted them to be eventually found. So she had to have left clues.”

“Cam is sure that’s why someone was paying those nocturnal visits to our library six months ago,” Vi said. “Trying to find those clues before Adair found the first earring.”

“The stone arch is definitely in the portrait,” Daryl said. “But what about the cave in the cliff face where Duncan and Piper found the second earring?”

He was right, Nell thought with a sinking heart. In the beats of silence that followed Daryl’s comment, she waited for Reid to say something. Anything. When he didn’t, the little band of pain tightened around her heart.

The necklace, she lectured herself. Plot before subplot. But no matter how hard she stared at the portrait, she couldn’t make the cliffs appear. If Eleanor was seated in the gazebo as her father had always insisted she was, there was no way to fit the cliffs in the background.

“If she left the jewels behind in different places, maybe she didn’t feel the need to put the clues all in the portrait,” Vi said. “Maybe that’s why our nighttime visitor spent so much time in the library.”

No one said a word, but Nell was sure they were all thinking the same thing. If there was a clue in the library, discovering it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Someone had spent six months working there and had come up empty.

A wave of exhaustion suddenly hit Nell. An arm went around her shoulders. Not Reid’s but her aunt Vi’s.

“We need to sleep on it,” Vi said as she drew Nell toward the door. “Let our subconscious minds sort through it. Things will be better in the morning.”

They’d better be, Nell thought. Then she remembered the notes she’d tucked into her fantasy box, and her tiredness began to fade. She was going to find Eleanor’s necklace by sundown tomorrow.

And she was going to seduce Reid Sutherland tonight, just not in the garden. Yet.

* * *