Her cheeks stung as if she had been slapped.
“Then why,” she cried, “are you still standing there—oh!”
Her startled gasp did make him look back at her, just as a translucent shape flew toward him on a fresh gust of wind. Hell. Her untethered underclothes, fine like cobwebs, had taken off in the breeze.
“Blast.” She lunged forward and slammed her palm down on a remaining stocking. She cast a quick glance sideways. The man was straightening from a crouch with her chemise caught in his fist, as if he had swiped it from midair like a large cat. He eyed her pantaloons next—they had landed in a shrub, and it had to be the pantaloons because there were blurry pink ribbons, doing a saucy dance.
“Don’t touch that,” she wheezed.
He raised his arms over his head. “I won’t touch.”
Her chemise fluttered in his hand like a white flag.
“You really ought to take your leave now,” she suggested through gritted teeth.
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “See here.”
He turned around, seemed to survey the nearest tree, and then he deftly tied her chemise to the trunk by its decorative cords.
“Voilà,” he said and spread his fingers. “You shall never see me again.”
Without a backward glance, he strode into the forest at a fluid pace.
“Nearly gone now,” he called out before his elegant form disappeared around the bend.
She stayed hunched over the boulder, barely able to swallow around the shock still clogging her throat. The path remained empty and the forest quiet, as if the man had never been here at all. Oh, he had been quite real. His roaming gaze had left a smoldering trail across her body. She had refused to flail and twist to cover her breasts; he had already looked his fill anyway and it would have probably given him satisfaction to see her squirm.
Eventually, she picked up her spectacles. They had survived the fall intact. She put them on, and Castle Applecross slid into focus on the plateau on the opposite bank, its old stone towers sharply delineated against the clear sky. She was rather far from home here, on the other side of the loch. Sudden energy surged, and she rushed to take her chemise down from the tree. What a neat, pretty bow the creeper had tied, voilà! Would it be safe to walk home? He could be lurking in the brambles and pounce after all. She looked back at the castle, half a mile across a rippling surface. The decision was made quickly: she chose the risk of the water over the man. Back at the boulder, she put down the chemise and pulled her shawl from under her gown instead, wound it round her head, and secured it with her hatpin. She gave the Virgil an apologetic pat. “I shall fetch you later.”
The loch engulfed her body like a large cold fist.
When she staggered onto the shoreline below the castle, her arms and thighs were burning with exhaustion. The plateau enclosed the beach like a protective wall, so she took some time to regain her breath. Wrapped in the plaid, she hurried up the crumbling steps her ancestor had once hewn into the side of the rock face. Overgrown vegetable beds and a tumbledown cottage blurred past on her dash to the castle walls. She slipped through the side entrance into the dimly lit wine cellar, then up the cobwebbed spiral staircase, one floor, two, three. On the final landing, she threw her shoulder against the servants’ door, until she burst into her chamber.
A scream rang out.
MacKenzie was pressing a fist to her chest, her wide-eyed gaze fixed on Catriona as if she were one of the castle ghosts. “Milady. I near jumped out of my skin.”
Catriona padded past her on numb feet to the rocking chair with the tartan throws. She sat and huddled into the blankets while her former-nanny-turned-lady’s-maid surveyed her with a hand on her sturdy hip. After thirty years of service in the Campbell household, MacKenzie was accustomed to remarkably eccentric behavior, but parading around in nothing but a plaid was a novel, unacceptable development. Sorry, MacKenzie. Crossing the loch with the added weight of waterlogged undergarments would have been rather too reckless.
Before MacKenzie could inquire about her clothes, Catriona asked: “Do you know if the earl has employed a new gamekeeper?”
MacKenzie’s consternated expression changed to concern. “A new gamekeeper,” she repeated in her thick brogue. “I hadn’t realized you let the old Collins go.”
Catriona rocked with the chair. “I would never.”
Neither would her father, come to think of it. Then why the binoculars on that man?
She couldn’t feel her face. The hexagonal room on top of the south tower, despite thick wall tapestries and sprawling Persian carpets, was never warm, and the fright from being watched was still lodged in her chest like an icicle.