To Beguile a Beast (Legend of the Four Soldiers #3)(2)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

Helen tilted her chin and smiled for Abigail. “Perhaps they’re lit in the back where we can’t see them.”

Abigail didn’t look particularly convinced by this theory, but she dutifully nodded her head. Helen took the bags and marched up the shallow stone steps to the huge wooden doors. They were within a Gothic arch, almost black with age, and the hinges and bolts were iron—quite medieval. She raised the iron ring and knocked.

The sound echoed despairingly within.

Helen stood facing the door, refusing to believe that no one would come. The wind blew her skirts into a swirl. Jamie scuffed his boots against the stone step, and Abigail sighed almost silently.

Helen wet her lips. “Perhaps they can’t hear because they’re in the tower.”

She knocked again.

It was dark now, the sun completely gone, and with it the warmth of day. It was the middle of summer and quite hot in London, but she’d found on her journey north that the nights in Scotland could become very cool, even in summer. Lightning flashed low on the horizon. What a desolate place this was! Why anyone would willingly choose to live here was beyond her understanding.

“They’re not coming,” Abigail said as thunder rumbled in the distance. “No one’s home, I think.”

Helen swallowed as fat raindrops pattered against her face. The last village they’d passed was ten miles away. She had to find shelter for her children. Abigail was right. No one was home. She’d led them on a wild-goose chase.

She’d failed them once again.

Helen’s lips trembled at the thought. Mustn’t break down in front of the children.

“Perhaps there’s a barn or other outbuilding in—” she began when one of the great wood doors was thrown open, startling her.

She stepped back, nearly falling down the steps. At first the opening seemed eerily black, as if a ghostly hand had opened the door. But then something moved, and she discerned a shape within. A man stood there, tall, lean, and very, very intimidating. He held a single candle, its light entirely inadequate. By his side was a great four-legged beast, far too tall to be any sort of dog that she knew of.

“What do you want?” he rasped, his voice low and husky as if from disuse or strain. His accent was cultured, but the tone was far from welcoming.

Helen opened her mouth, scrambling for words. He was not at all what she’d expected. Dear God, what was that thing by his side?

At that moment, lightning forked across the sky, close and amazingly bright. It lit the man and his familiar as if he was on a stage. The beast was tall and gray and lean, with gleaming black eyes. The man was even worse. Black, lank hair fell in tangles to his shoulders. He wore old breeches, gaiters, and a rough coat better suited for the rubbish heap. One side of his stubbled face was twisted with red angry scars. A single light brown eye reflected the lightning at them diabolically.

Most horrible of all, there was only a sunken pit where his left eye should have been.

Abigail screamed.

THEY ALWAYS SCREAMED.

Sir Alistair Munroe scowled at the woman and children on his step. Behind them the rain suddenly let down in a wall of water, making the children crowd against their mother’s skirts. Children, particularly small ones, nearly always screamed and ran away from him. Sometimes even grown women did. Just last year, a rather melodramatic young lady on High Street in Edinburgh had fainted at the sight of him.

Alistair had wanted to slap the silly chit.

Instead, he’d scurried away like a diseased rat, hiding the maimed side of his face as best he could in his lowered tricorne and pulled-up cloak. He expected the reaction in cities and towns. It was the reason he didn’t like to frequent areas where people congregated. What he didn’t expect was a female child screaming on his very doorstep.

“Stop that,” he growled at her, and the lass snapped her mouth shut.

There were two children, a boy and a girl. The lad was a brown birdlike thing that could’ve been anywhere from three to eight. Alistair had no basis to judge, since he avoided children when he could. The girl was the elder. She was pale and blond, and staring up at him with blue eyes that looked much too large for her thin face. Perhaps it was a fault of her bloodline—such abnormalities often denoted mental deficiency.

Her mother had eyes the same color, he saw as he finally, reluctantly, looked at her. She was beautiful. Of course. It would be a blazing beauty who appeared on his doorstep in a thunderstorm. She had eyes the exact color of newly opened harebells, shining gold hair, and a magnificent bosom that any man, even a scarred, misanthropic recluse such as himself, would find arousing. It was, after all, the natural reaction of a human male to a human female of obvious reproductive capability, however much he resented it.

“What do you want?” he repeated to the woman.

Perhaps the entire family was mentally deficient, because they simply stared at him, mute. The woman’s stare was fixated on his eye socket. Naturally. He’d left off his patch again—the damned thing was a nuisance—and his face was no doubt going to inspire nightmares in her sleep tonight.

He sighed. He’d been about to sit down to a dinner of porridge and boiled sausages when he’d heard the knocking. Wretched as his meal was, it would be even less appetizing cold.

“Carlyle Manor is a good two miles thataway.” Alistair tilted his head in a westerly direction. No doubt they were guests of his neighbors gone astray. He shut the door.

Or rather, he tried to shut the door.

The woman inserted her foot in the crack, preventing him. For a moment, he actually considered shutting her foot in the door, but a remnant of civility asserted itself and he stopped. He looked at the woman, his eye narrowed, and waited for an explanation.

The woman’s chin tilted. “I’m your housekeeper.”

Definitely a case of mental deficiency. Probably the result of aristocratic overbreeding, for despite her lack of mental prowess, she and the children were richly dressed.

Which only made her statement even more absurd.

He sighed. “I don’t have a housekeeper. Really, ma’am, Carlyle Manor is just over the hill—”

She actually had the temerity to interrupt him. “No, you misunderstand. I’m your new housekeeper.”

“I repeat. I. Don’t. Have. A. Housekeeper.” He spoke slowly so perhaps her confused brain could understand the words. “Nor do I wish for a housekeeper. I—”

“This is Castle Greaves?”

“Aye.”

“And you are Sir Alistair Munroe?”