The Presence Page 7

  She shook her head. “He wasn’t in the room. He’s out somewhere…walking, playing in the stables, Lord knows.”

  Thayer came walking into the kitchen, bearing the newspaper from Stirling, the nearest major city. He set it on the table, offering them all a grimace. “Good morning, we can at least hope.”

  “Maybe, but only if we start over with the coffee. Gina, did you make this?” Kevin asked, tasting the brew. “What did you use, local mud?”

  “It’s strong, that’s all,” Gina protested.

  “So, what do we do?” Thayer asked.

  “We’ll wait for Ryan and then figure out what we can do. Of course, we have until Monday before we need to worry about where we’ll sleep!” Gina sighed. “I should call the travel agency in Stirling and start canceling the arrangements for tonight.”

  “Sixty people at twenty-five a pop—pounds sterling,” Thayer said woefully. “My place in Glasgow is small, but if we buy a few pillows we’ll be fine.”

  “We all quit our jobs,” Kevin reminded him.

  “And we can get new ones,” David said.

  “There has to be some recourse here,” Toni said.

  “Toni has been talking to Laird MacNiall again,” Gina warned, trying to keep emotion from her voice.

  “I wasn’t fighting with him!” Toni protested.

  “Well, you didn’t exactly offer him warm and cuddly Southern hospitality,” David reminded her.

  “I’m not Southern!”

  “You could have faked it,” Kevin said.

  “Actually, you are from the south—the south side of D.C.,” David offered.

  She glared at him. “Look, I had a conversation with him, and he wasn’t miserable at all,” Toni said.

  David gasped suddenly and walked around to her, looking down into her eyes. He squeezed her shoulders. “You didn’t… I mean, Toni, we’re in trouble here, but you don’t have to…you don’t have to offer that kind of hospitality, no matter how dire things are looking!”

  “David!” she snapped, feeling a flush rise over her cheeks. “I didn’t, and I wouldn’t! How the hell long have you known me?”

  Gina giggled suddenly. “Hey, I don’t know. In the looks department, he’s really all right.”

  “What she really means is,” Kevin teased, “if it weren’t for Ryan, she’d do him in a flash.”

  Gina leveled a searing gaze at him. “The breakfast better be damned good.”

  “Look!” Toni said. “I talked to him but I didn’t sleep with him. He was in my room, but…”

  “What?” David demanded, drawing out the chair at her side and looking at her, his dark eyes very serious.

  “It seems that I was in his room, so I moved into the next one,” she told him. “We had to talk and we were both cordial, okay?” she said.

  “You just talked to him…without…”

  “Being bitchy?” Kevin asked bluntly.

  “Dammit! I was polite.”

  “Okay, okay!” David said.

  That was it. She was offering no further explanations of how she might have gotten into a cordial conversation with the laird. “And now I’m thinking that if we ask really politely, maybe he’d let us do tonight’s performance so that we can recoup some of our losses.”

  “She’s got a good idea there,” Thayer said.

  “Omelettes!” Kevin said suddenly. “Salmon and bacon on the side. So who gets to ask Laird MacNiall if we can do the tour tonight?”

  “Toni,” David said, suddenly determined. “She has to ask him. She’s the one who’s talked to him.”

  “Toni? Oh, I don’t know about that,” Thayer protested. He looked across the table as she glared at him. “Sorry! But you seem to have a hair-trigger temper with the guy. It’s kind of like sending in a tigress to ask largesse of a lion!”

  Toni groaned. “I don’t have a hair-trigger temper. Ever. He was very aggravating last night, and I thought that I was defending us.”

  “You were,” David assured her.

  “All right,” Gina said. “Toni, you ask him.”

  “Ask him what?”

  They all jolted around. Bruce MacNiall was standing in the kitchen doorway with Ryan. This morning, he was in jeans and a denim shirt. Apparently, he hadn’t been sleeping. His ebony hair was slightly windblown and damp.

  “I’ve got to get dressed,” David said. “Excuse me.”

  “I might have left the water running,” Thayer murmured. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Got to plan the menu!” Kevin said, hurrying for the door. “Mr. MacNiall…Laird MacNiall, we’re going to cook a great…uh…brunch. In thanks for your hospitality, whether intended or not.”

  Ryan, staring at all of them as if they’d lost their senses, came striding in, heading for Gina and Toni. “The countryside! My God, I thought I’d taken a few good rides, but you should see the sweeping hills! There is nothing like seeing this place through Bruce’s eyes!” Ryan loved both horses and free spaces. His work the last several years as a medieval knight at the Magician’s Court right outside Baltimore had seldom allowed him a chance to spend time with his beloved animals that wasn’t part of training in closed-in spaces. He must have been happy.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it upstairs, sweetheart?” Gina said, rising.

  “Why upstairs?” Ryan demanded.

  “Toni wants to talk to Laird MacNiall,” Gina said. She rose, caught hold of his shirtsleeve and dragged him along with her, smiling awkwardly as she passed Bruce MacNiall.

  Toni was left alone at the table. Bruce was aware that his arrival had caused an exodus, and he was evidently somewhat amused. Especially since it had been so very far from subtle.

  “They’re afraid of me?” he queried.

  Toni inhaled. “Well, it seems that we’re all realizing that you do actually own this place and that we have been taken.”

  “Good,” he said, striding toward the counter.

  Toni winced. “The coffee is a bit…”

  He’d already poured a cup and sipped it.

  “Like mud. It will do for the moment,” MacNiall said. He turned and leaned against the counter, looking at her. “What are you supposed to ask me?”

  “Well…”

  “Well?”

  He might be in jeans and tailored denim, leaning against a counter with a coffee cup, but she could well imagine him in something like a throne room, taking petitions from his vassals.

  She stared at him a minute, determined that she wasn’t going to be so intimidated. They weren’t living in the feudal ages, after all.

  “We had booked a large tour group for tonight. We don’t want to have to cancel.”

  “What?” His question was beyond sharp. It was a growl.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have been quite so blunt. He had slept in a chair in her room last night, but that hadn’t made them bosom buddies.

  “Look,” she said impatiently, wondering what it was about him that goaded her own temper so severely. “You know that we’re really in a mess here. And if you take a good look around, you’ll have to admit that you owe us.”

  “I owe you?” The words were polite, but it was quite evident that he found the mere idea totally ludicrous.

  So they were right! she thought with a wince. She was quick to become defensive and then offensive with the laird. But she had gone this far with a brash determination. There was little to do other than play it out.

  “Yes,” she said with conviction. “We’ve worked on walls, done masonry, fixed electric wiring…scrubbed on our hands and knees! Quite frankly, we’re more deserving of such a place—at least we’ve put love and spit and polish into it. How you could own such an exquisite piece of history and…let it go like this, I can’t begin to imagine.”

  She could see the outrage and incredulity slipping into his eyes. Though he didn’t move, every muscle in his body seemed to tense, making his shoulders even broader.

  Inwardly she winced. Great, she thought. So
much for playing it out!

  She was supposed to be talking him into allowing them to operate their tour, not offending and angering him.

  “So now you’re an expert on maintaining a Scottish castle,” he said.

  She stared into her cup. A sudden and vivid recollection of falling into his lap came to mind. Her fingers against his flesh, pressing into his…lap. The easy way he rose and simply deposited her down…

  Last night his behavior had been courteous—and kind. She realized then that she was attracted to him, and somewhat afraid of him, as well. And her hostility toward him had everything to do with her inner defense mechanism.

  Ryan suddenly burst back into the kitchen. Toni was certain that he hadn’t been far away, that he’d been listening in.

  “Toni isn’t explaining this very well,” Ryan said, turning toward her with a fierce frown. “We really did do a lot, and not just cosmetic work. We did some structural work, as well. Honestly—”

  “Yes,” Bruce said, staring at Toni.

  Her heart quickened.

  “Pardon?” Ryan said.

  “Miss Fraser wasn’t particularly eloquent in her plea, but I do see that you’ve done a lot of labor here. And I quite understand that you’re in a bad position. Your group can come. Apparently you’re going to need the money.” He poured his coffee down the drain and exited the kitchen.

  Ryan stared at Toni in amazement. Then he bounded toward her, drawing her from the chair, grinning like a madman. “Yes! Yes!”

  Gina came in behind her husband. They hugged one another, dancing around the kitchen.

  In a moment Thayer was back in, and then David and Kevin. They were so pleased, Toni wondered if they realized that they hadn’t gained anything but a single night. And though it would keep them from sleeping on Thayer’s Glasgow apartment floor for the next week, it would far from recoup their investment.

  “We’re going to cook up the best breakfast in the world,” David said.

  “We might want to start by brewing a new pot of coffee,” Toni told them, and she couldn’t help a grimace toward Gina. “Laird MacNiall just dumped yours down the sink.”

  “Really!” Gina said.

  “So your coffee sucks!” Ryan said cheerfully, kissing her cheek. “You’re still as cute as a button.”

  “Get out of here, the lot of you,” Kevin said. “Shoo! We have to cook.”

  Toni rose to leave, and as she did so, she glanced at the paper Thayer had left on the table when he’d first come in. The headlines blazed at her: Edinburgh Woman Still Missing. Police Fear Foul Play.

  “Wait! Not you, Toni,” David said.

  She looked over at him. “What do you mean, not me? You all insult my cooking!”

  “But you’re the best washer, chopper and assistant we’ve ever had,” Kevin told her sweetly. “And then there’s the table. We should set it really nicely.”

  “Wait, I get to wash, chop and be chef’s grunt?”

  David set his arm around her shoulders, flashing her a smile, his dark eyes alive and merry. “Think of it as historical role-playing. Everyone wants to be the queen, but you have to have a few serfs running around.”

  “Serf you!” she muttered.

  “The others will have to clean up,” he reminded her.

  “All right, there’s a deal,” Toni agreed. She walked over to the table and picked up the newspaper, sliding it under the counter so that she could go back for it later.

  “Laird MacNiall?”

  Bruce had been at his desk—where, he had to admit, the lack of dust was a welcome situation—when the tap sounded at his door. Bidding the arrival enter, he looked up to see that David Fulton was at his door.

  “Aye, come in,” Bruce told him.

  Fulton was a striking fellow, dark and lean. His affection for Kevin was evident in his warmth, but he also seemed to carry a deep sense of concern for the rest of his friends, as did they all.

  Bruce was surprised to discover he somewhat envied the repartee in the group. The gay couple, the married couple, Toni Fraser—and even her Scots cousin. They were a diverse group, but the closeness between them was admirable. Riding with Ryan that morning, he had gotten most of the scoop on the group, how they had met, and how they had first begun the enterprise as a wild scheme, then determined that they could make it real.

  “We’re really grateful to you,” David said. “Anyway, we like to think that we’ve prepared a feast fit for a king—or a lord, at the very least. Would you be so good as to join us?”

  Bruce set down his pencil, surveyed the fellow and realized his stomach was growling. He inclined his head. “Great. I’ll be right down.”

  He waited for David to leave, then opened his top drawer and set the sheets he’d been working on within it, along with the daily news.

  He didn’t close the drawer, but studied the headline and the article again, deeply disturbed. The phrase all leads exhausted seemed to jump out at him.

  Jonathan Tavish was fine enough as a local constable, but he hated giving up any of his local power, and he just didn’t have the expertise to deal with the situation that seemed to grow more dire on a daily basis.

  Down in Stirling, Glasgow and, now, Edinburgh, they believed that the girls were seized off the streets of the main cities, then killed in other locations and finally—with the first two, at least—left in the forest of Tillingham because it was so lush and dense that discovery could take years.

  Bruce’s question was this: Were there others, sad lives lost and unreported, decaying in the woods, their disappearance unnoted? And now another.

  Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The killer was striking all over, yet in Scotland, the distances were certainly not major. The first three abductions had taken place in large cities. But if he had found it easy enough to seize women off busy streets, would he grow bolder and seek out quieter locations?

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. Thus far, the local populace had not felt the first whiff of panic. But thus far, the girls reported as “missing” had not been what the locals would consider “good” girls. Not that the people here were cold or uncaring; it was quite the opposite. But since the victims had been known to work the streets and to have fallen into the world of drugs, the average man and woman here did not worry.

  It was sad, indeed, tragic. Hearts bled. But women who fell into the ways of sin and addiction left themselves open to such tragedy.

  But MacNiall didn’t feel that way. There was a killer on the loose. And no matter what the state of his victim’s lives, he had to be stopped.

  And he had the power to stop him? MacNiall mocked himself.

  He had come home—as far as Edinburgh, at least—when Robert called and told him that there had been no leads on the case and he was just about at wits’ end. Then, just two days after arriving in Edinburgh, Robert had told him of a new missing persons report.

  The strange thing was, he’d felt an urge to return even before he’d gotten the phone call. Actually, he’d wanted to ignore the haunting sense that he’d needed to be here. But after speaking to Robert, he’d taken the first flight out of New York.

  So here he was. Yet, really, why? There were fine men on the case, and he wasn’t an official anymore.

  But they needed…something. Hell, they needed to realize what they were up against.

  Bruce was afraid that all available manpower would not be put on the case until the killer upped his anger or his psychosis, or until the “wrong” victim was killed.

  By then, God alone knew what the body count could be.

  He pressed his fingers against his temples, remembering the other reason he was actually anxious to have the group gone—his dream. How could he explain having such a strange dream?

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. After all, he had found the first body. That vision would never leave his mind.

  And now maybe it was natural to meet a woman, find her irritating beyond measure and then sexy as all hell…. An
d then fear for her.

  Annoyed with himself, he snapped the drawer shut and rose to join his uninvited guests in the kitchen.

  The setting was a wonder to behold. Toni was certain that Bruce MacNiall thought as much, because he paused in the doorway. And for once, he certainly wasn’t angry. He gave that slight arch to his brow and curl to his lip that demonstrated amusement, then he wandered in and took the seat left for him at the head of the table.

  Everyone was there, seated and looking at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that I’d kept the rest of you waiting,” he said pleasantly, taking the napkin that had been arranged into an elegant bird shape from his plate.

  “Almost hate to use this,” Bruce said, looking around the table.

  “Please, they’re nothing to fold,” Kevin said. “I’ve worked in a number of restaurants. That’s the fate of most theater majors. Actually, though, I’m a set designer.”

  “So Ryan told me,” Bruce said.

  “We each have special and unique talents,” Gina said.

  “I’ve heard a few,” Bruce said.

  “That’s right, you were out riding with our Ryan,” Thayer said, clapping his hand on Ryan’s back. “He’s our master of horse and arms! There’s not an animal out there our boy can’t ride.”

  “Yes, Ryan is quite skilled,” Bruce agreed.

  David lifted a hand. “Costumes,” he said.

  “Yes, and he juggles,” Kevin said. “He’s really a fantastic actor, as well, but we are the technical whizzes.”

  “And they’re both so humble and modest,” Toni said sweetly.

  “Sorry, modesty never gets us the job,” Kevin reminded her.

  “Touché,” she agreed.

  “And you? What were you doing in Glasgow?” Bruce asked Thayer.

  “Piano bar,” Thayer said ruefully.

  “I’m marketing and promotions, and whatever else is needed,” Gina said. “The jill-of-all-theatrical-trades, but my major was actually on the business side.”

  “Ah.” Bruce stared at Toni then, waiting.

  “Writer,” Toni said, certain that he thought her one hell of a storyteller all right.

  “Now you see,” Kevin said. “Her imagination is legendary.”