Midnight Honor

warrant,” Anne said. “He knows who his friends are … and who would sell him out for a few copper pennies.”
    “A thousand pounds is hardly a few coppers.”
    “Nor is it thirty pieces of Judas silver.”
    The barb struck home, for Angus had been apportioned somewhat more than thirty pieces of silver to form up a regiment of MacKintosh men to serve under Lord Loudoun's command. According to Duncan Forbes, the compensation was intended to provide the men with uniforms and weaponry as well as the half shilling a day they earned in pay, but few Highlanders saw it as such. Not when wealthy lairds insisted on several thousand pounds sterling over and above any expectations of costs.
    Anne did not wait for a rebuttal—not that one appeared to be forthcoming. She walked toward the dressing room instead, dragging the sodden ribbon out of her hair as she went.
    “I am cold and tired. Can we not talk about this in the morning?”
    “Actually, no. Since I have been sitting here for the past three hours with all manner of imagined and creative explanations for your late-night absence running through my mind, I would rather talk about it now.”
    She paused at the door and cast a small frown in his direction. Although his voice was as smooth as satin, there were fine white lines of tension bracketing his mouth, and while the hand that held the wineglass was no longer swirling it, the contents continued to shiver.
    Her gaze flicked involuntarily to the neatly turned sheets on the bed. The bedchamber itself was half of a four-room suite, the largest in Moy Hall, with two suitably well-appointed dressing rooms that divided Anne's bedroom fromhis. In the first three and a half years of their marriage, they had slept apart only a handful of nights; most of the time they had shared—and enjoyed—the massive canopied bed in Angus's room.
    In the last six months, however, the opposite had held true, and the strain between them had become so obvious, even to the household servants, that the maids had begun to turn down both beds.
    “Surely you could not have been thinking I was with another man,” she said softly.
    His hand curled around the stem of the glass and his mouth formed a small pucker before he met her gaze. “Frankly, no, that was not my first thought, but I admit it was one of them. And in truth, it might have been preferable over some of the alternatives. The mind … conjures all manner of things on a dark, windy night.”
    “I am sorry if you were worried. But I truly thought you would stay the night in Inverness.”
    “And that makes it all right to gallop around the countryside with loaded guns in your belt?”
    “I was hardly galloping about the countryside. I was at Dunmaglass.”
    “Ah.”
    There was enough innuendo in that one little sound to make her search his face a second time. The exercise proved to be futile, as it always was when his guard was up—which seemed to be most of the time these days. When he chose to retreat behind his well-groomed mask of indifference, regardless of what he was thinking, regardless of whether he was in a rage or the height of despair, his eyes, his expression gave away nothing. There were occasions Anne envied his ability to detach himself so completely, and others—such as now— when she resented it with all the passion of her Highland blood.
    The notion that he might have thought…
    But that was foolish. The very idea that he would even suspect she had gone to see John MacGillivray …
    “I went to Dunmaglass to see Granda',” she said evenly. “He was the one who set the place for the meeting, not I.”
    She watched him empty the dregs of his wineglass, thenreach for the decanter to refill it. “If you were so sure I was not coming home tonight, you could have invited him here. You've done it before, have you not?”
    Anne chewed on the edge of her lip. Indifference might be the mask he wore, but ignorance was never a question, and not knowing how to answer the charge, she merely evaded it. “He is my grandfather. He wanted to see me; I obliged.”
    “I am your
husband
. I
expect
to see you when I come home.”
    “Perhaps if you were at home more often,” she retorted, “those expectations would be more happily realized.”
    She went into her dressing room, and when she was out of sight, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She heard a sharp sound as the base of the glass hit the table, but when he did not appear in the doorway as she