“And?”
“She came across this little book. It was published in the mid-eighteen hundreds by a man named Ezra Bean, who was enthralled with the Scottish patriarchy and what happened to it after the Battle of Culloden.”
“Culloden was long before my time.”
“I know. That was interesting, but not as interesting as the chapter about your family.”
“Myfamily?” he said with a humorless chuckle. “You mean that pit of traitorous vipers, don’t you?”
“Your brother, no doubt. But in his research, Mr. Bean came across some diary entries that hadn’t seen the light of day for over fifty years.”
“A diary? Whose?”
“Apparently,” she said, glancing at Emma, “it belonged to Violet.”
The color left Connor’s handsome face, and his jaw went rigid.
“Apparently,” Emma put in, “IamViolet. If such things are to be believed.”
Elspeth’s expression softened. “I know. I heard that, too, from Marguerite.”
Connor shot to his feet. “Oh, for the love of—Does everyone know my business but me?”
Emma stared at the book with the strangest feeling tugging at her. Her words, written two hundred odd years before, by her alter ego. But this validated everything he had told her about the woman he’d once loved, the one who’d broken his heart.
“You should read it,” Elspeth told him. “This one section anyway. Though Bean has a nineteenth-century take on everything she said, I think those entries were meant for you.”
“I don’t want to read it,” he told her.
“Well,Iwant to read it,” Emma piped in. “After all, I wrote it. Isn’t that the going theory?”
Connor sent her a grouchy side-eye. “And how, exactly, will that work, Emma? Shall I turn the pages for you? Hold the book at eye level for ye so ye can take in all the juicy scandal of it? So ye can read all your love letters to your devil of a husband?”
“That’s hardly fair,” Emma argued. “You can’t be mad at me because I’m trying to sort out what you clearly don’t want to.”
“She has a point,” Elspeth agreed, lowering the babe to cradle her in one arm.
He scowled at her. “Oh, aye. You, too?”
She pushed the book in his direction. “Just read the excerpt, Connor. I think you’ll find it enlightening. At the very least clarifying.”
“What?” he asked. “Now?”
“Not the whole book. I marked the pages,” Elspeth encouraged.
Reluctantly, he took the small book, staring down at it as if it might contain one of those vipers he’d mentioned. “Fine. But it won’t change a thing.”
Elspeth smiled sweetly at him but kept her thoughts to herself.
Scanning the yard with a scowl, he headed down to the dock on the water to read in private.
Elspeth turned to Emma. “I should apologize for him, but I won’t. He can be cranky, but his heart is good. He’s one of my favorites.”
Yes, that she understood. He was hers as well. Emma had settled her gaze on him already, watching the way he moved—with duke-ish confidence—as he stalked off to the water, oozing sexy power without even trying. He must have been something in life. She would really have liked to have seen that.
Heat climbed, unbidden, through her, as it did so often when she was near him or watching him or thinking of him. Was it specifically against the universe’s rules to covet an angel? To imagine that powerful body of his entwined with hers? To picture him holding her, touching her, kissing her without all the baggage he carried around in his soul?
And how foolish was she to imagine such things? With an angel, whose aspirations were for some otherworldly position she couldn’t even fathom. Superbly foolish, that’s what.
