“You think I would mind?”
Colleen felt her body warm. “Actually, I would. I mean, I love looking at that hot body of yours, but I don’t want everyone else to get an eyeful.”
He laughed.
“I suppose no one else would have kept journals. Your father, perhaps, who might have said what he felt had happened to your mother.”
“Nay.”
“Archibald told me that you were stealing from me. I wonder how he knew.”
“I wasn’t stealing from you, lass,” Grant growled.
“I know. He made it sound like you were in charge so you had knowledge. Which you did, and you hadn’t let me in on the truth. So how would he know?”
Grant didn’t say anything until they arrived at Neda’s chambers and found ten taped boxes sitting squarely on the floor beside her bed. Grant got out his knife and cut through the tape. “I wouldn’t think the thief would tell Archibald or anyone else about what he’d done, for fear he’d never get a job again.”
“Unless he bragged about it.”
“Or Archibald…” Grant shook his head and began lifting journals out of the box.
“Or Archibald what?” Colleen began sorting the journals by decade.
“This is going to take forever,” he said, cutting through the tape on another box. “Or Archibald knew the man had done it.”
“As in he had been involved in the theft somehow? How long had the cook worked for you?”
Grant stopped what he was doing and stared at her. “Since your father took over.”
She let out an annoyed sound. “So Archibald and my father were behind cheating himself out of money?”
“Nay. Your father wasn’t sober enough to focus on the accounts. He had issues with several things but nothing that was a problem. But he had found this great cook and wanted to install him as the main cook.”
“Was he a great cook?”
“Aye. He was.”
“But one of Archibald’s men, maybe. So he may have thought all he had to do to discredit you was say that you were responsible for the theft, and Archibald’s man would have made sure you were somehow seen as the villain.”
“But your father left, then he died, and I discovered the theft and booted the cook out.”
“And failed to mention it to me.” She started organizing the second box of journals.
“You are still sore with me over it.”
“Yes, because Archibald tried to discredit you as one of the bad guys.” She sneezed. The books were full of dust. “This will take forever.”
“I took care of it,” he reiterated.
She glanced at him. “You thought I’d be like my father. High-handed. Unreasonable. Threaten to fire you?”
Grant paused. “Aye, lass. After dealing with Theodore, I didn’t know what to expect from you.”
“I’m nothing like my father.”
“Which is one of the reasons I mated you.”
She chuckled.
He cast her one of his hot, sexy, wolfish smiles.
He finished cutting open the rest of the boxes, and she started on the third one while he began separating the journals into piles. “Wait, I think these look like the very first. Calf skin leather. Very old. Earliest date.”
“Okay,” Colleen said, taking the precious journal in her hands and sitting on an embroidered rose-colored chair. “Why don’t you see if you can find anything around the time of your mother’s death? See if you can learn what Neda thought. Maybe the journal shortly after your father’s death also.”
The reading wasn’t easy. Colleen didn’t recognize some of the terms or the ancient way of spelling things or the old cursive handwriting. But then she came to the part about Uilleam and she said, “Ohmigod, Grant, he was courting her. She had lost her mate, who was Theodore’s father, my grandfather, Gideon Playfair, and then she had hired Uilleam as her manager when her other manager died. Her husband had hired the first manager.”
“So there was a manager even before Uilleam. How did the other manager die?”
“Accidental death. Fell off the cliffs while they were building the walls of the keep on the leeward side.” She glanced up at Grant, her skin crawling over the similarity to the other deaths.
“Convenient,” Grant said, still looking for the other journals.
“Yes, sounds like a tried-and-true method for getting rid of competition. Neda was really happy, talking about seeing Uilleam on walks and running with him as wolves in the woods, and then she didn’t write for several days. When she did, she said John MacQuarrie, scribe for the clan, had told her about discrepancies in the accounts.”
“Neda’s husband, Gideon, was supposed to have died on the battlefield. Was it true?” Grant asked.
“Clan battle, she says. Looks legit.”
“Aye, unless one of his clan stabbed him in the back and made it look like it was the enemy’s doing.”
“True,” she said.
“Here’s the one for the time period when my father died.” He handed it to her. “I’m still looking for the one when my mother died.”
Colleen read some from the first one he’d handed her, then said, “Nothing else in this one. Just a lot of praise for John and how glad Neda was that she had installed him as the new manager. Wait, okay, here is when he was murdered. She was horrified, swore it was Uilleam who had been behind the killings. She…yes, she’d had spies learn the truth. Then she sent men to hunt him down.”
“Good. Bastard.”
“Then she installed your father.” Colleen opened the journal that Grant had handed her. “Okay, she loved your father just as she had his mate, Eleanor. But when Robert died, Neda suspected foul play because it was too much like when Eleanor had died years earlier. She couldn’t learn who had done it.” Colleen skimmed through page after page after page. “Wait, here we go. She learned that Archibald’s father, Haldane Borthwick, had been visiting Theodore the day Robert died. She’d been away at her aunt’s sickbed and stayed for the funeral, then got word that Robert had fallen from the cliffs to his death. She was furious. Some had said he might have committed suicide. She didn’t believe it for a minute. You boys were away at college and she… Holy cow.”
“What?” Grant asked, setting down the journal he was holding and joining her. He rubbed her back as he looked over her shoulder.