Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

T he road to Murrayshall House was even more twisted than the one to Murray Smithworks. It led out of the town and up into the hills of Perthshire where the track dipped and rose over hills, crossing small creeks and winding through forested creases in the landscape.

The lady at the front desk had been disappointed that Carys was checking out early but was happy to give directions to "the auld house" when Carys mentioned Duncan's address.

She got a cup of coffee from the café down the street, then struck out in her rental car, her belly fluttering from the idea of possibly seeing Lachlan after a month of silence.

If he was really okay, what would she say to him?

What would he say to her?

Was she angry? Confused? Hurt?

She was all those things, but mostly she was worried.

If Lachlan had really decided to just call it quits, why hadn't he given her a reason? Why had he turned off his phone? He wasn't on social media, but he could have contacted her. He was a grown man, and she wasn't in hiding .

Messages could be sent.

The road widened on a turn, then narrowed again over a bridge. The trees grew taller and the shade deeper. The sun had broken through the clouds, so the light under the trees flashed like light on water, the dappled tapestry of green, grey, and black punctuated by occasional flashes of a red roof or a yellow bunch of wildflowers struggling to life.

She came to a large wrought iron gate that was cracked open with a sign hanging off it.

Murrayshall House .

"Okay, this is it."

The gates and the stone wall on either side of them framed a large cobbled driveway that led into dense woods on either side of the road.

She navigated her rental car through the gate and wound through the trees as the driveway twisted through a forest.

The farther she drove, the more Kiersten seemed right. If this was all part of Lachlan's family home, the Murrays were sitting on a lot of land in a very small country.

There was a stone archway with another wrought iron gate on either side; then the road widened into a large courtyard with a giant house sitting at one end. It was a massive edifice framed by two round towers that rose on each corner, complete with a steep roof covered in moss-flecked tile. The manor house was built of light brown stone that shone with a pale pink wash in the morning light.

Behind the house in the middle of a lush meadow, a grey stone castle rose in the distance, its narrow towers framing the hill in the distance where another ruin was barely visible through the trees.

Carys stopped the car. "Holy shit."

Castle. Lachlan's family had a castle. Apparently.

She pulled in where she saw other cars parked. A red compact sedan, two beat-up Range Rovers, and a pickup truck with a tarp over the bed.

Carys grabbed her purse, leaving her suitcase in the car. She was not making any assumptions about staying in this place. It wasn't that far from town, and she could afford the gas—petrol—to make the half-hour drive back to her very nice, non-manor-like hotel next to the Four Crowns.

She walked across the courtyard, gravel crunching beneath her feet, toward the nearest door that looked like someone might answer. There were multiple doors to the house, but she went to the smallest one on the side and knocked.

A few moments later she heard laughter, and then the door was yanked open and a cheerful-faced woman answered the door. "Can I help you?" She narrowed her eyes. "Are ye looking for a tour or something?"

The woman was in her late forties or early fifties if Carys had to guess, and her accent was thick. She had a headband holding back a mass of brown curly hair, an apron around her waist.

"Hi. Maybe I'm at the wrong place." She looked around, but she didn't know what kind of car Duncan drove. "I'm looking for Duncan Murray. Or Lachlan Murray if he's here?"

She cocked her head. "Okayyyy. Yer looking for Lachlan?" Were her eyes a little bit afraid? What was that about?

"Or Duncan, yes." She stuck out her hand. "Sorry. Hi. I'm Carys Morgan."

"Why are you coming to the kitchen door, love?" She smiled a little. "If you're here to visit the laird, ye should be going to the front." She leaned forward and pointed to the left. "Is he expecting you?"

"Duncan?"

"Aye, the laird."

"I think so." Her fingers closed around the note. "He left me a note and?—"

"No worries, my girl. I don't need to know the details." She nudged Carys toward the path. "Go on then. Mary will meet you at the front. Just ring the bell."

Carys pointed to her right. "At… the front door?"

"Aye, the front." The woman seemed amused. "I'll go ahead and put the tea on though, so thanks for giving me the heads-up." She winked at Carys, then closed the door in her face.

Carys stepped back and then started down the stone pathway that ran along the front of the house. She passed immaculately kept formal garden beds and some stone statuary before she came to a set of grand stone steps that led to a pair of massive carved wooden doors.

She saw a bell to the right of the door and pulled the chain hanging from it, which produced an echoing, clanging sound inside the house. A few moments later, a younger woman opened the door.

"Miss Morgan?" She held out her hand. "I'm Mary Burris. My husband is the groundskeeper here, and I run the house. Duncan told me to expect you this morning, and Samantha already shouted from the kitchen." She opened the door wider. "Please come in. Welcome to Murrayshall House."

"Thank you." Carys had never been on a Scottish estate, but she'd watched movies, and Duncan's house looked like a movie set. There was a wood-paneled sitting room to the right and a large dining room to the left with a collection of armory hanging on the walls.

"Please have a seat in the front room," Mary said. "I've already started a fire. This house is magnificent, but it's an ice box this time of year."

"Right." She had never been more grateful for her cozy cabin in the woods, because Duncan's housekeeper was correct. She could nearly see her breath in the air. "I think I'll keep my coat for now if that's all right."

"Perfectly." Mary smiled and pointed to her wool sweater. "But we do have plenty of good wool jumpers if you'd like to borrow one."

"I'll let you know."

"Duncan was out with Andy this morning," Mary said. "That's my husband. He should be in shortly. Would you like me to keep you company while you wait for him? Or would you like a tour of the house? We usually only do them in the summer months for the tourists, but I'd be happy to give you the brief version if you want to keep moving. "

"Uh…" She looked around the big empty sitting room. It had large windows and comfortable-looking couches, but Carys didn't like the idea of waiting for Duncan by herself. "Sure. That would be great."

"Excellent." Mary smiled. "Let's start in the dining room. How much do you know about swords?"

However much Carys had known about historic arms, she knew more after Mary's tour, which covered the building of the four-hundred-year-old house by the ancestral owner of the land—the Laird of Murrayshall—of whom Duncan was the current iteration.

It wasn't a royal title, according to Mary, but a traditional Scottish one that had passed from Duncan's father to him on the old laird's death a few years ago.

There was not a single mention of Lachlan, and Carys didn't bring him up, but she was silently judging a family that had numerous family portraits with one son and not the other. Was Lachlan illegitimate?

How did you have an illegitimate twin brother? That wasn't possible. What the hell was going on with this family?

Then again, Lachlan had failed to mention a lot. He hadn't told her his brother was a laird. He hadn't said much about his family, but she'd definitely gotten the impression they were closer than they appeared.

"Mary!"

They were in the library when Carys heard Duncan's voice.

"Mary!"

Mary rolled her eyes. "The way he bellows, you'd think I was deaf." She motioned toward the door. "I'm sure the tea is ready, and the man is clearly ready for company. Don't yell at me, old man!" She gave Carys a cheeky smile. "He never had a sister, so I try to needle him as much as I can."

"I think he needs it," Carys murmured.

Mary smiled. "I like you. You don't come from a grand family, do you?"

Carys almost laughed. "My dad was a high school woodworking teacher, and my mom was a somewhat successful artist. No blue blood in these veins."

"Right." Mary nodded. "Like you even more."

Carys followed the housekeeper back into the large central corridor that ran down the center of the house and back toward the entryway.

Duncan was glowering in the entry, his pants caked with mud up to the knees. "Your damn husband had me pushing his tractor out of the back meadow when he knew I had company coming today."

Mary laughed. "He told you about that days ago. Not his fault you were too busy with your hammers and your fire."

"Will you…" His eyes found Carys. "Miss Morgan, good morning." His voice held more propriety than it had the day before. "Excuse my appearance. My groundskeeper is an ogre who enjoys tormenting me." He turned back to Mary. "Pour Carys a cup of tea while I change. She and I need to speak privately." He lowered his voice. "Lachlan."

"Of course."

So Mary did know about Lachlan.

Carys followed Mary into the front room, which had warmed up considerably since she'd arrived. A carafe of tea was waiting, which Mary poured from before she left the room.

Carys sat by the fire, trying to digest the revelations that morning.

Duncan was a laird, which basically meant he was rich, which likely meant that Lachlan was also rich. The "disgustingly wealthy prince" line hadn't really been a joke.

Still, there was something odd about all this. Mary knew about Lachlan, but none of the family portraits in the house, covered with blue, green, and red tartan, showed two boys' faces. There were plenty of pictures of a younger boy who could have been either Lachlan or Duncan, but none of the boys together.

The door open and Duncan walked in. "Carys Morgan."

Duncan had clearly taken a shower because he smelled like spice and leather. His beard was freshly trimmed, and he was dressed in clean khaki pants and a worn olive-green sweater that brought out the color of his eyes. Somehow his massive shoulders didn't look out of place in a room like this one with rich wood, armor in the corner, and swaths of tartan decorating the throw pillows.

He didn't look like a brute—he looked like an ancient warrior come home.

She rose. "Duncan, thank you for agreeing to take me to Lachlan."

"You're the lady." He walked over and stood across from her. "I rise when you enter the room, not the other way round."

Carys sat down. "I'm not a lady, but I feel like you're… some kind of lord or something," she said. "Is Lachlan one too?"

Duncan sat. "We're not lords in the English way, thank God. I'm a laird, which means my family owns the estate here and we have for… many years. And Lachlan…" He huffed out a breath and leaned forward. "Can I convince you that Lachlan is fine? He's healthy and he's fine. And it would be far better for you to leave him to his life and continue with yours?"

"Can I convince you that my next stop is going to be the police station if I don't see him today?"

He closed his eyes. "Fill the fetters," he muttered. "I'll take you to Lachlan, but this isn't a simple thing."

"So he's not here?"

"No, he's not here." Duncan sat back and his shoulders dropped. "You're going to hate me," he said softly. "You don't think that now, but you will."

She raised her chin. "What do you care if I hate you or not?"

"Just remember that I tried to talk you out of this" —he kept his voice low and steady— "when you start to hate me."

"Enough. Fine, I'll remember." She gripped her hands together. "Where is Lachlan?"

He looked into her eyes. "Do you believe in fairy tales?"

Carys looked up from the book she'd been reading into the eyes of a man she'd never seen before. "Excuse me?"

"Do you believe in fairy tales?" He had an accent. Scottish? The man nodded at the book in Carys's hand. "You're looking at George MacDonald's work. Fairy tales, yes or no?"

"Do you believe in the sun?" It was the strangest encounter she'd ever had at Redwood Pages, the outdoor bookshop where she usually shopped. Most book browsers kept to themselves.

Probably too many years in the library.

"Do I believe in the sun?" The man's brow furrowed. "What kind of question is that in this place?"

Carys cocked her head. The man had an odd way of phrasing things. "Fairy tales are as real as the sun. They exist. Folk stories and myths and legends are told all over the world." She put the used volume of MacDonald in her basket. She liked the marbled endpapers and the faint scent of cherry tobacco in the pages. "Asking if I believe in fairy tales is like asking if I believe math is real or if trees grow." She motioned to the towering redwoods that soared overhead. "Fairy tales just… are."

The man said nothing for a moment, then smiled.

And Carys realized if she hadn't believed in the sun before—a fair doubt when endless winter fog had set in on the Northern California coast—then she'd believe in it after seeing this man's smile.

"Your brother asked me the same thing the first time we met," Carys said softly. "I was shopping for books and found an old copy of George MacDonald. He saw it and asked me…."

Duncan kept his eyes on her. "What did you tell him?"

"I asked him if he believed in the sun."

Duncan snorted out a laugh. "And what did he say to that? I'm actually dying to know."

"Nothing, he just smiled."

Duncan looked at her with an expression she couldn't read. It was… intent. Then he stood and walked to the fire, bending down to add wood to the flames.

"I'm a mythology professor," Carys explained. "My father told me stories from the Mabinogion before I could speak. I learned to read from The Hobbit , and I was obsessed with Greek myths when other kids were playing soccer."

"So that's a yes," Duncan muttered.

"I'm saying I study myth the way that other people study history. So yes, of course I believe in them." She looked out the window at the forests surrounding the house, thick with pine trees and dense shrubs. "Fairy tales tell us about ourselves in ways that might make us uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean they're not their own version of truth."

Duncan stared at the fire, and the silence seemed to stretch across an ocean. "Maybe this will be easier than I thought."

"Tell me."

He turned and leaned his back against the mantel, crossing his arms over his chest. "I was seven years old when a boy with my own face walked out of the forest."

Carys felt her heart skip a beat, but she remained silent.

Duncan's voice stayed low and steady, his gaze fixed on the ground near his feet. "My nanny was the superstitious kind. I didn't follow the lights into the woods. I didn't speak to strangers in the wild. And I never gave my name to anyone I didn't know."

Carys frowned. "Do you mean?—"

"I need you to let me finish." He looked up and met her eyes. "And if you want to leave after it and write me off as cracked, that's good. That would be better."

That stiffened her spine. "I'm not leaving until you take me to Lachlan."

Duncan stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. "I saw him, but I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I ran away and the boy chased me, speaking in an accent I didn't recognize. Using words that didn't make sense." Duncan shrugged. "Eventually I stopped running and I let him catch up. I was tired and… curious. But I wasn't scared." He looked at her. "There was something about him that was so warm. He wanted to know me, and if you knew my father—or any of the rest of my family—you'd know that was a rare thing."

Carys had to assume that Duncan's family wasn't affectionate, but she kept her mouth shut and kept her eyes steady. So Lachlan and Duncan hadn't grown up together like Lachlan had told her, but the men were clearly the same age and looked identical. Half brothers? It would hardly be uncommon for a rich man to have an illegitimate child or two.

"The boy ran up to me, and he said his name was Lachlan and he only wanted to play. He said he'd never been in the forest before, and he didn't want to get lost." Duncan turned and leaned against the mantel, his back to the fire. "I was confused that he looked like me, but I was a lonely seven-year-old boy. Presented with a playmate in the forest behind my house, I didn't question it. We started to talk and then explore the forest, the ruins, the streams and gullies around the place. I ran back to the house and got food for us, and at the end of the day when the sun was starting to set, he left. Went back into the forest with a wave."

Duncan walked over and sat across from Carys again. "And I missed him. The moment he was out of sight, I felt like half my own self had gone."

"You'd only known him one day."

"Have you ever met someone and the connection is so immediate that you'd swear you'd known them your whole life? Maybe in another life even?"

"Yes. Lachlan."

Duncan nodded. "Aye, he has that way, doesn't he?" The corner of his mouth turned up. "Lachlan came back over and over, and eventually he told me that he lived on the other side of the forest. That was all he'd tell me, and I didn't question it. The village was on the other side of the forest, so that made sense."

A slight frown marred Duncan's forehead. "Over time, I thought of Lachlan like a brother, but he never came to the house. If I had friends over, he would come visit and play with us, but he was never around the grown-ups. Not my parents. Not the staff. He wore clothes that didn't match our own. He spoke Gaelic along with English, which none of my other friends did, but he taught me." Duncan folded his hands together. "I was ten when I asked Lachlan if we could go to his house for a visit."

A knot twisted in Carys's belly, and she didn't know why.

"He told me that we could, but that his home was different than mine. That we would have to go in the nighttime and that I couldn't bring any of my usual kit." He swallowed. "My grandfather had given me an old compass that we played with and a pocketknife. He said I couldn't bring them, and I said that was fine."

"You trusted him."

"Didn't you?"

"Yes." She'd always trusted Lachlan.

Carys felt the room cool, and a log broke in the fireplace, falling to the stone hearth with a crack. Duncan rose, walked over, and added two more pieces of wood.

"I snuck out that night—it wasn't the first time—and I met him on the edge of the forest. There was a tall man with Lachlan. A man with dark hair and gold eyes. Pale skin—pale even for a Scot—and no expression. None at all. I was afraid of him, but Lachlan took my hand and told me he was a friend. Told me he was our guide and we'd follow him so we didn't get lost."

"Duncan, why would you?—"

"I was with Lachlan, wasn't I? I didn't question it. He's so… confident." Duncan shrugged his massive shoulders. "So reassuring. You do things for Lachlan that you'd never do for anyone else because he makes you feel special, Carys. And he means it. He does . He's completely sincere in his affection for people, and I'd never tell you different because I know you've felt it. I know you know it."

She didn't say another word.

"We walked into the forest, and I didn't blink when we followed the lights no matter what my nanny had said. I had forgotten all her lessons. The wisps?—"

"Wisps?" Carys filled in the blanks. "Will-o'-the-wisps? The little glowing lights?"

Like the lights in the forest behind her house. Ghost lights, they called them in America.

"They seemed to move in front of us as we walked, and I followed Lachlan, who followed the man. We walked into the forest, and I knew where I was, but it got darker. It grew… stranger. I heard things. I saw shadows I couldn't explain. But I kept going because I was with Lachlan, and he wasn't scared at all. Eventually I didn't recognize where we were. Nothing was familiar, but I saw a light, like the sun rising on the horizon on a winter morning."

"You'd walked all night?"

"No, Carys Morgan. We'd walked into the Shadowlands. That was Lachlan's home. That's where he came from, and that's where he is now." Duncan sat back. "If you believe in fairy tales, you'll come with me tonight and I'll take you to Lachlan. And if you don't, then you can walk out the door right now, dismiss me as the crazy blacksmith spinning tales to excuse his brother's bad behavior, and fly back to America."

Carys felt the fire grow, warming the room, but she was frozen inside, automatic disbelief battling with what she knew of gruff, practical Duncan Murray who ran a business, owned a huge estate, and pulled tractors from the mud on a Thursday morning.

This was nonsense.

And Duncan believed it. She could see it in his eyes.

"The second choice is what I'd prefer," Duncan said quietly. "But if you insist on finding Lachlan, I will take you."