When the Laird Returns Read Free

woman in the paintings was lovely. Her long black hair was adorned with a wreath of daisies, her winsome green eyes and smile seeming to welcome him. Ionis’s lady.
    On the other side of the cave was the opening he sought. Staring up at the steps, Alisdair realized that he didn’t need the lantern. Leaving it on the bottom step, he started upward.
    The echo of his boots thudding against the stone steps marked his journey. A pleasing breeze accompanied his ascent, freshening the air. Near the top, he encountered broken slabs of chiseled slate, one bearing an iron ring. The answer to a riddle, then. Light filtered through the staircase because the entrance had been shattered. He pulled himself up with both arms, wondering at the destruction. Had the English, angered at their colonel’s disappearance, hacked their way through it?
    But it no longer mattered that the two secrets had been discovered. Every MacRae knew of the existence of both the cove and the staircase, having been either part of the exodus from this place thirty years ago or a descendant of those who had fled Scotland.
    The priory seemed more suited to shadows than the bright sunlight. But there was no roof, no walls, and little more remaining of the structure than the slate floor beneath his feet. The atmosphere, however, was one of serene sadness, as if the death of Gilmuir had been expected but not unmourned.
    A series of arches had once stretched across the back of the priory, facing Loch Euliss. Only part of one arch remained, framing the view. Loch Euliss stretched out before him, gradually narrowing until it flowed into Coneagh Firth and from there to the sea. On either side of the lake were thickly forested glens, the trees appearing more black than green.
    Turning, he entered a hallway that had been described to him numerous times. The fortress had originally been built in the shape of an H, with the priory and castle connected by a covered corridor. But there were few signs remaining of what Gilmuir had once been. There were no tall chimneys, steeply pitched roofs, or towering walls aged by the passage of centuries. Instead, he viewed a crumbling ruin.
    His father had spent years of his youth at Gilmuir, and later his mother had been held hostage within these walls, before becoming a rebel and then a wife to an English colonel engaged in treason. Here, his great-grandfather had ruled as laird and tragedy had swept over the clan, beginning with his grandmother’s death.
    Reasons enough for feeling an affinity toward the old castle. Or it could be that the answer lay in his great-uncle Hamish’s words to him as a boy. “It doesn’t matter where you’re born, lad. If there’s a drop of MacRae blood in you, you’ll always be from Gilmuir.”
    Unexpectedly, Alisdair heard a soft, keening cry, as if Gilmuir’s ghosts rose up to greet him. He shook his head,amused at himself and the fact that he’d momentarily allowed tales from his boyhood to overshadow reason.
    Striding through an opening in the corridor, he found himself standing beside mounds of rubble and one weak-looking wall leaning precariously over a pit. He heard the sound again, but this time, instead of inciting his curiosity, the plaintive cry irritated him.
    “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said loudly, staring down into the opening. But the skin on the back of his neck tightened when something moved in the shadows.
    “I am very happy to hear that,” a female voice said weakly.
    He frowned, studying the darkness.
    “Show yourself,” he said.
    She stepped out of the shadows into the afternoon light, glancing up at him, a solemn expression on her face.
    He wondered for a fleeting moment if it was true, after all, that there were spirits at Gilmuir. The intruder was the image of Ionis’s love, the woman painstakingly crafted in the cave portraits.
    Not a ghost, but human.
    Her long black hair seemed part of the shadows, her eyes as delicately green as the stem of a flower. Her