She barely breathed. Her family had done well, but they hadn’t made enough money to keep a blackmailer in riches. “So this man believes you sent me to try and get the contract.”
“You haven’t gone by the name ‘MacPherson’ since you were little. I didn’t think he’d connect you to the family.”
“Okay, so is he someone in Laird MacNeill’s clan? Assuming the guy is a werewolf. But what would his reason be? The MacNeills are having some major financial problems, or I’m sure they wouldn’t have agreed to filming the movie here. Not being lupus garous. What if the laird himself, or one of the men on his behalf, was attempting to blackmail you because of their financial woes?” Julia asked.
“I don’t know who it could be.”
“He has to have gotten wind of it somehow. What if one of Ian’s brothers didn’t want the laird to mate with an American so the title could go to one of the brother’s offspring?” Then she reconsidered what the man had said about Ian’s title. “Can you do a search for me on the Internet?”
“Let me turn on the computer. What are you looking for, Julia?”
“If you can buy a title in Scotland. The man said that Laird MacNeill had the title because he owned land. That anyone can be titled if they purchase land.”
While she waited for her grandfather’s computer to boot up, she tapped her fingers on the sofa. “If there is a marriage agreement, would that information have been written down in family journals?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“In ours?”
“Your grandmother destroyed ours when you were born.”
Julia swallowed hard. “Is that why you insisted I change my name to a red name when I was little? To Julia Wildthorn?”
“In hopes that our past would never catch up with us, yes.”
“Julia isn’t a Gaelic name. I looked it up. It means young in Latin, youthful in French.”
“You’re named after your great-grandmother who was French from Selencourt.”
She let out her breath in frustration. “What if I walk up to Laird MacNeill’s castle door and demand he mate me—because I am his betrothed?”
Ian would laugh her off the grounds. That would be the end of the blackmailer’s hold over them. Even if Ian was behind it.
“No, Julia.” Before she could ask him why it wouldn’t work, he said, “When Argent Castle was besieged, we were running out of food, and then when sappers undermined the west wall, we had no choice but to give in.”
“The castle was ours?” Her mouth gaped in surprise, and she couldn’t let go of her disbelief. “Are you certain?”
“Yes. Conaire MacPherson agreed to give his only daughter in marriage. But he couldn’t give his only daughter up to the usurper. Several of our kin escaped and eventually fled to Prince Edward Island.”
“But if the MacNeills haven’t found the box before this, it may never be found. And whoever is blackmailing us will not have a leg to stand on. Even if Ian’s family did locate it, Ian wouldn’t force me to mate him based on some contract made centuries ago.” Not when she was an American—and a werewolf writer on top of that.
“If not you, then a subsequent laird and a daughter born to you, or a granddaughter, would be liable under the same contract. Do you want to risk that?”
“Maybe the MacNeills don’t even know or don’t care. Things have changed since those early years.”
Her grandfather didn’t say anything, and knowing her grandfather, she envisioned him pacing. But then he said, “About the titles, you’re right. If you own some land, about any amount will do, you can claim yourself a laird… or lady.”
“Oh, brother. But since he has a castle, he seems more lordlike. What if he doesn’t want me? This Laird Ian MacNeill? Then the contract would be null and void. Right?”
Silence.
“Grandfather?” She had a sinking feeling about this.
“Both are bound by the contract. If Ian mated someone else, you or your next female heir would be the next laird’s mate.”
“So if I were already mated…”
“If you had a female child, she could be mated to the current laird when she turned of age.”
Julia ground her teeth. “Why didn’t you or Dad ever tell me about this?”
“We thought we could destroy the contract before you ever knew about it.”
“The castle had been ours.” She was truly amazed to think her family had at one time lived in the massive stone castle. Not just lived there but owned it.
“Since the time of William of Normandy’s rise to power, yes. Although it was built on a Roman site and was timber after that.”
And now impenetrable stone. Ian might not think much of her as a werewolf romance writer, but her family, not his, had once owned Argent Castle, and the MacNeills were the usurpers.
“It’s a contract, Julia. We need to destroy the cursed thing and be done with it.”
“All right. I’ll… I’ll try to find it, and I’ll destroy it as soon as I do. I don’t want to get caught red-handed trying to return to the States with it, though.”
Her grandfather remained quiet.
“If they catch me with it, the game is over. I should destroy it immediately.”
“Don’t open the box. Just bring it here to me. ’Night, Julia. Stay safe.” And then he disconnected.
She stared at the dead phone, not knowing what to think. Don’t open the box. Was there something more to the story that her grandfather wasn’t telling her?
Feeling wrung out and irritable, she hung up the phone. Her ankle tingled and annoyed her, so she knew it was healing. But with what she’d learned about the MacNeills of the past and the one who was blackmailing her grandfather and father now, she couldn’t sleep. The castle had been her family’s! That meant the kitchen where she’d sat and the great hall that Ian had carried her through. Ian’s office most likely would have been that of the laird of her clan, and her own people would have been there, not his.
She considered how horrible it had to have been for her great-grandfather as the MacPhersons tried to keep the MacNeills from entering the castle grounds. How the family must have felt about being forced to give up a daughter to the invading force. And then having to flee their own home.
Well, if Julia had anything to do about it, she would find that box, destroy that document, and set her family free from an obligation they should never have been forced to agree to. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do anything about returning the castle to the rightful owners—the MacPhersons.
Notepad in hand, she tried to think of the way she was going to write her story to get her mind off her ankle and Ian while she gave her sprain some more time to mend. But all she could think of was how lighthearted Ian had seemed in the woods, walking with the dogs, walking with her. And then how hungry he had been for her at the falls, desirous, craving, and needy—for her. No man had ever wanted her like that. Not in a feral way. But then again, she’d never had a wolf interested in her before.
She reminded herself that he wasn’t the one who had laid siege to her family’s castle, either. That had been an ancestor of his.
She ground her teeth, forced herself to focus, and began to write her story.
It wasn’t about Highland hunks. She was too angry with them for having taken her family’s ancestral lands and castle, and forcing her great-grandfather to make a contract that would have tied them to the MacNeills through an unwanted betrothal. And now one of them was blackmailing her family? No way could she make them heroes in her book. She let out her breath hard and began to pen her story.
Spurs clanking, sidearm holstered, Ian MacNeill grabbed hold of the mulish horse’s reins and looked up at the woman who rode the animal and was just as stubborn as the blasted horse. “Here in Texas, ma’am, we don’t cotton to horse thieves, so why don’t you just come on down from there, and we’ll have us a little talk before you get yourself into any further trouble.”
Another two hours passed as Julia wrote ten more pages of her new adventure—a cowboy story set in Texas that featured a transplanted Scotsman. Lots of them had ended up in Texas, so it wouldn’t be a far stretch. Only he’d wear chaps instead of a kilt. She sighed. She really did like the idea of kilts. But leather chaps, now they also had appeal. She’d change his name later, but she gleaned some satisfaction from turning Laird MacNeill into a cowboy.
She stretched her fingers and toes, tensing in anticipation of pain, but her ankle felt well enough again. She rose from the couch intent on getting some sleep while the dark still cloaked the area.
Despite what she knew now about the contract in the box, she was sure this trip was just what she needed to break through her stubborn writer’s block. She’d tried everything that usually worked: cleaning her condo—which always sorely needed it between writing the last book and starting a new one—watching a movie, reading a book, taking a walk, gardening on her small patio, even digging out some earlier manuscripts that she’d never sent off and revising them. But this time, nothing had worked. Then when she’d mentioned to her father the trouble Maria’s producer was having in locating a castle in Scotland to film the movie, her father had let her in on the family secret.
A Highland secret of old. Perfect to include in her story, but with different names and a different location to protect the innocent and the guilty.
But now, everything had changed. A blackmailer was involved, and he may even have had something to do with their car accident, although she hadn’t wanted to worry her grandfather about it.
What if she wrote about the secret documents in a box hidden in a castle, and even though the documents could be something different in her story, what if the blackmailer let Ian know that Julia had verified the existence of such a box in a Scottish castle—now his Scottish castle—through her fictional writing and claimed that was too much of a coincidence?