Days of Gold (Edilean 2)

“She does and I will be, but...”

When he trailed off, she looked at him.

“But not to Angus,” he said softly.

Edilean almost giggled. “But not to Angus.” She started to say more, but when she saw a shock of surprise on his face, she looked out the window.

Beside the expensive green carriage was an old wagon with three men on it. They were moving slowly so they made no sound, and they motioned to each other in gestures.

“We—” Edilean said, meaning to go get Angus, but Shamus quickly put his finger to his lips for her to be silent.

She was puzzled, but when he pointed out the window, she looked. The men on the wagon were thieves, and they were stealing the big trunk from the back of the carriage.

Standing beside Shamus, Edilean watched in fascination as the men labored with the big trunk as they slid it onto the wagon bed. When it was securely on the wagon, two men jumped onto the seat and took off, while the third one started for the carriage, meaning to steal it and the horses. But Shamus moved with snakelike speed and was out the door in seconds.

The thief was alone, and when he saw the bulk of Shamus, he ran into the darkness.

Edilean was behind Shamus, and for a moment they just stood there in silence. The street was dark, with no one around. It hit them both at the same time that their huge problem of what to do with James’s body was now solved.

Shamus looked down at Edilean, gave a little smile, and she smiled back at him, and in the next minute they were laughing. Edilean started laughing so hard that she couldn’t stand up and would have fallen if Shamus hadn’t caught her. She held on to him and he held on to her and they supported each other as they howled with laughter.

The others came rushing outside, fighting to wedge through the doorway.

“What in the world—?” Angus began as he snatched Edilean away from Shamus.

“Honey bear?” Prudence said sweetly but with an undertone of anger. “What have you been doing out here with Edilean?”

Shamus was laughing too hard to answer. He pointed at Edilean, grabbed his legs just above his knees, and kept on laughing—as did she.

“Shamus!” Prudence said in a voice that caused sleeping birds to fly off the roof. Four dogs began howling and a rooster thought it was dawn breaking and began to crow. “I demand that you tell me what’s going on.”

“I think we’ve been robbed,” Malcolm said from the back of the carriage.

Matt said, “We’ve had a lot of robberies around here. Nasty place. What did they steal?”

Harriet put her hand to her mouth. “They didn’t take the... The... ?”

Edilean started laughing harder. “They did. They took James.”

“Oh,” Prudence said, eyes wide. “They took the trunk?”

“Bloody hell,” Tam said, speaking for the first time. “Where do you think they took it?”

“To the devil,” Malcolm said, looked at Harriet, and they began laughing too. Harriet kept her handkerchief over her mouth and pretended that she wasn’t happily relieved—after all, he had been her brother—but it was so good to know that no one was going to prison and no one would be hanged that she couldn’t control herself. They weren’t going to be caught disposing of the body or in having anything to do with the dead man.

They all looked at one another, and the words in their eyes was that it was really and truly over.

But after that night, Angus disappeared without a word to anyone, and for the first week afterward, they all feared that someone would come to question them about James. At the very least, they expected someone to tell them that Harriet’s brother’s body had been found. But as the days passed and nothing happened, they stopped worrying about it.

And now, Edilean and Angus were married, they were in each other’s arms, and they were on their way back to Scotland to take care of the legal matters of giving the clan’s lands back to the McTerns.

“I’m glad it all happened,” Edilean said sleepily. “If I hadn’t had such a greedy uncle I would have married James and—”

“And been broke within a year,” Angus said. “He would have spent you dry.”

“When we get back to America, what are we going to do?”

“Run your Bound Girls,” Angus said. “I look forward to telling all those women what to do every day.”