Cowboy in a Kilt

Chapter 2

Two

Raleigh stood in the middle of the casino floor, amid countless people and unfathomable noise, missing home so much it hurt. He should never have let Zeke talk him into this insanity. Sin City certainly wasn’t the cure for what ailed him. There was no cure. The old bastard had seen to that from beyond the grave.

Needing to escape the chaos of flashing lights and the haze of smoke, he wandered into one of the hotel bars as far from the casino floor as he could get. It wasn’t the wide-open spaces and silence he craved, and the high-backed stools sure as hell weren’t a saddle. But they’d have whiskey. That would have to do. Never mind that Zeke had dragged him out of a bottle to get him here. Better the bottle than needing bail money. It had been a close call after he’d found out that his horse had been among the assets left to his stepmother. He’d raised Zodiac from a colt, done all the training himself. He was one of the best damned cutting horses in Texas. The rodeo cowboy who’d bought him had been sympathetic, but unwilling to sell back to Raleigh. So he truly had almost nothing left. Having lived on the ranch almost his whole life, he’d never had reason to kit out a house with furniture, so the only things that had gone into storage were his saddle and the dozen or so boxes of family memorabilia Twila wouldn’t have been able to sell. He’d call for them once he figured out where he was gonna land. Zeke or Charlotte would get them to him.

The sounds of the slot machines and crowds were more muted here, so he could breathe a little easier.

The bartender wandered over. “What’s your pleasure?”

“Whiskey. Neat.”

With a nod, the guy flipped over a glass and poured two fingers of something from the top shelf. That’d probably cost a pretty penny. Raleigh ought to be mindful of that, what with being jobless. But Zeke was bankrolling this trip, and for once, he wasn’t gonna argue. Taking the drink, he held up a finger for the man to wait and tossed it back in one swallow. Wincing at the burn, he set the glass down. “Another.”

The bartender didn’t even raise a brow, just refilled the glass and moved a little way down the bar to serve someone else. Raleigh took his time with this one, slowly spinning the glass between his fingers and having what his mama would’ve dubbed a good brood. He figured he’d earned it.

A frisson of irritation skittered over him as someone slid onto the next stool over. There were more than a dozen empty seats. Why had she chosen that one? He sure as hell wasn’t looking for company. The weight of her gaze settled on him briefly before she ordered a whiskey for herself.

The bartender filled another glass and pushed it to her. With a silent toast to no one in particular, the blonde drank. Raleigh didn’t miss her grimace of disgust in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar.

“What’s wrong with you Yanks, having the temerity to call this piss whisky?” The accent made him glance up because she was definitely not from around here.

“My advice is drink more. After number two, you won’t care anymore.” With that in mind, he finished his second, which was starting to dull the edge of annoyance at all the people.

With some amusement, he watched as the woman eyed her drink before tossing it back and pulling another face. “You’re sure two will do it?”

Recognizing someone drinking to forget something, and sensing a kindred spirit, Raleigh signaled the bartender for two more, one for each of them.

“Thank you.” She shifted far enough in her seat to study him as she sipped at the drink. “You should know, I’m not emotionally available.”

Raleigh snorted into his own glass. “Sugar, no offense, but getting tangled up with a woman is the last thing I’m looking for. One just ruined my life.”

“Did she break your heart?” Ah ha. Those rolling r’s finally identified her accent as some kind of Scottish.

“Not like you mean. But yeah.”

“Want to talk about it?”

He gave her some side eye. “You actually want to hear about it?”

“It might distract me from my own problems.”

Well, all right then. Shifting on his stool, he clasped his glass loosely between both hands. “I’m from Texas. Old ranching family. My great-great-great-great granddaddy, James Hepburn—”

“Hepburn. Your family is Scottish?”

“Way on back there somewhere, yeah. Anyway, he started the spread—fourteen-thousand acres—and passed it on down through the family. That’d be on my mama’s side. She died about fifteen years ago. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.” The soft voice was full of a legitimate empathy that told him she’d lost someone, too.

“Well, at that point, I wasn’t considered old enough to run it yet, so it passed to my daddy. Then he remarried—a pretty little viper who was barely older than me. I never dreamed a city-girl like her would stick, but she did. Made me feel like a stranger in my own home. If not for Charlotte, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me.”

“Who was Charlotte?”

“My mama’s best friend. She stayed on at the ranch as housekeeper and more or less finished raising me. Anyway, the old man died recently and left everything to Number Two. She sold the place out from under me. Every stick, stone, and cow. Even my horse.”

A faint trace of sympathetic amusement lit his companion’s brown eyes. “I’d say that makes you a walking country western song.”

He huffed a humorless laugh. “You’re not wrong. There probably is one out there somewhere. Anyway, the stepmonster’s turning it over to a developer. I lost everything. All the people we were responsible for are out of work, out of a home. And I can’t do a damned thing to help.”

With a wry twist of her painted lips, the stranger lifted her glass. “That kind of responsibility isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

“Maybe not for everybody, but I spent my whole life, my whole education, getting ready to take over my family’s ranch.”

“Isn’t there a part of you that’s relieved to not have the burden of that responsibility?”

Raleigh didn’t even have to think about it. “No. It’s what I was born for. What I always wanted. It wasn’t a burden, it was a privilege. It wasn’t just about my family’s legacy. It was about making sure we were good stewards of the land. I had all these ideas for how to innovate, reduce our carbon footprint, and bring the place into the twenty-first century. Hell, I got a damned graduate degree in all that. And now? I’ve got nothing. No job. No horse. No home. No prospects.”

“So why did you come to Vegas?”

“A friend dragged me. He thought it was sensible to get me the hell out of Dodge before my temper got the better of me and I did something I might regret.”

“You didn’t come to gamble?”

“I’m not normally much of a risk taker.”

“Neither am I. But recent circumstances are changing my mind.” She finished off the drink. “Are you single?”

After her announcement that she wasn’t emotionally available, Raleigh hadn’t expected the question. “Uh… yeah?”

“Do you play poker?”

“Used to have a weekly game on the ranch with chores as the stakes. That’s about as far as it goes.”

Leaning across the bar, she snagged a napkin. From her tidy little purse, she pulled out a pen and scribbled something before shoving it across to him. “Meet me in this room in half an hour.”

“For what?”

Her gaze seemed far too assessing as she looked him over. “An opportunity.”

* * *

“You look like you could use this.”

Kyla watched as Ewan McBride, her distant cousin who owned The Stag’s Head pub in Glenlaig, poured amber liquid into a glass. When he started to step back, she simply lifted a hand. “You may as well leave the bottle.”

He arched a dark brow. “It’s like that, is it?”

“Sit, if you can. You can hear the update along with everyone else.”

Crossing to the doorway, Ewan scanned the few patrons out in the pub’s main room before coming back to take a seat at the table with the rest of their rag-tag search party. Connor had taken over pouring and passed out glasses to Angus, Malcolm, Kyla’s friend, Sophie Cameron, and his oldest friend, Hamish Colquhoun, who’d come up from Edinburgh for the meeting.

Two days had passed since Malcolm had broken the news, and none of what they’d uncovered since was good.

Kyla tipped back the whisky, wishing it would burn away the worry eating her from the inside out. “As you know, I had David call in some favors in an effort to track Afton down.”

Her long-term, long-distance boyfriend was nearly as motivated as she was to see this wedding through. He wanted her focus to be freed of the danger to Ardinmuir so she could finally, truly consider their future—something she hadn’t been willing to commit to until her family legacy was safe.

“His contact was able to track her to Glasgow, where she took a flight to the U.S., to Los Angeles. From there, she hired a car.”

“To go where?” Sophie asked.

“We don’t know. The trail went cold there.”

“Should one of us head to the States after her?” Connor asked. “I could go. She might listen to me.”

If only. Kyla sipped more whisky. “She hasn’t been willing to answer any of our phone calls or emails. That seems like throwing good money after bad. Without knowing where to look, you’d be looking for a needle in a very large haystack. And much as I would like to, we can’t very well extradite her for the sake of a wedding.” She glanced to Hamish, their resident legal expert, for confirmation.

He inclined his head in concession of the point, but otherwise stayed quiet, his expression grave.

Sophie rolled her glass between her palms. “I understand that the idea of an arranged marriage must be incredibly hard, but to leave everybody in the lurch like this, with so much at stake…”

“It’s selfish.” Kyla couldn’t keep the judgment out of her voice. “If Afton harbored doubts, the time to bring them up was years ago, not days before the wedding.”

“To what end?” Connor demanded. “There’s no other solution. Hamish has been trying to find one his entire legal career.”

“If she’d brought up her fears sooner, at least we could’ve tried to address them. Gotten her into therapy. Something.”

Her brother snorted. “You can only say that because you aren’t the one whose life is on the line.”

Kyla bristled. “If circumstances had been different, if she’d had a brother and it was me, you can be damned certain I’d have done my duty.” The good of the many who’d be impacted by the Crown taking control of all that property was worth the sacrifice.

But there was no one else. Darcie Lennox had struggled with fertility, and ultimately, Afton was the only child she’d been able to carry to term. So all that weight of responsibility had fallen to her. For better or worse.

Was it right or fair? No. Nothing about this lunatic marriage pact was. Then again, its authors certainly couldn’t have predicted that illness and disaster and quirks of birth would make it so three entire centuries would go by before two eligible heirs even could marry. Either way, this was the reality they’d all grown up with, so a last-minute abdication of responsibility was unconscionable to Kyla’s mind.

She didn’t even want to think of all the money they’d put into this wedding that would go to waste if she didn’t return. And that hardly mattered when their very homes were at stake. Kyla’s heart ached at the thought of it. More than six-hundred years of her family history lost because of one woman’s selfishness.

“Laying blame is hardly productive, at this point,” Ewan pointed out. “It seems like we need some sort of plan.”

Sophie knit her hands. “Should we send out notice that the wedding is cancelled?”

“What if we do that, and she comes back?” Connor asked.

“What if we don’t, and an agent of the Crown shows up and sees the wedding not happening as planned?” Kyla challenged. “At least if we put the word out locally, we can control the narrative. Suggest that it’s been postponed. We have six months from the submission of the marriage paperwork to see it executed. That’s time enough to find her and get some answers, isn’t it?” Again, she looked to Hamish.

“In theory. The truth is, we don’t know exactly what they’ll do. It’s not as if there’s a lot of newer legal precedent around situations like this. But make no mistake, they are watching, because they want this land. If they have reason to believe she’s going to renege on the terms, chances are, they’ll move to start reclamation.”

Anxiety twisted Kyla’s gut. “There has to be some way to slow things down.”

“I’m trying to find one. I can attempt to file for an injunction. I don’t know that it’ll be accepted or how long it’ll hold. But by dint of it taking time to actually go before a judge, it’ll buy a little time.”

“Do what you can. At this point, we simply have to pull out all the stops. We cannot give up our home.”