Scarlet Nights: An Edilean Novel Read online

“Right.” As always, Sara backed down. As she put the dress on the to-buy rack, she thought, And I’ll have to completely remake it to fit her. Which is what she was doing now. She had a closet full of dresses, slacks, jackets and even underwear that needed to be remade to fit their exacting customers.

  But in spite of what she thought of his methods, Sara had to admit that under Greg’s expertise, the shop was making money. As he’d predicted, they had customers coming in from Richmond, and even a few women from D.C. had shown up. Their selection was extensive, and their free alterations were a hit. They had women buying a size six dress and asking if Sara could please “let out the seams a tiny bit.” In other words, make it two sizes larger. Every time, Greg said, “Of course she can.” His trick was that he kept the larger sizes in the back. After Sara took the big dress apart and shortened sleeves and hems and drew in the shoulders, Greg would—with a flourish and great charm—present the customer with a dress with a size six label in the back.

  The only problem with this scheme—besides the deception, which Sara hated—was that she was the only seamstress.

  “Just until we get established,” Greg said. “Then we’ll buy that house in the country you’ve always wanted. We’ll have a dozen kids and you won’t even own a sewing machine.”

  It was a wonderful dream, one that Sara clung to with all her might, especially now when Greg had left town so abruptly and mysteriously, and Sara was stuck with about twenty-five pieces of clothing to rebuild. At least the wedding was all arranged, she thought, thanks to Greg’s splendid planning abilities. In fact, she’d had nothing to do but choose her dress—and that was an heirloom. Greg said, “Leave everything to me. I know exactly what you like.” Sara’d had so much work to do for the shop that all she could say was, “Thank you.”

  But the truth was, the possibility of his absence during next week’s Scottish Fair was a bit of a relief. That she’d wanted to go and he didn’t had been one of their few serious arguments. He’d told her she was welcome to stay in Edilean for it, but he was going to New York and he had tickets for a Broadway play that he knew Sara wanted to see. When she’d said it was almost as though he’d arranged the trip to keep her from going to the yearly event, he got angry.

  “Of course I did!” Greg yelled. “I want to be with you all the time, but how can I go to some rural hoedown in this town? All your friends and relatives hate me. And you know why? Because I’ve taken their precious little workhorse away from them!”

  “I’m not—” Sara began, but she’d said it all before. Sometimes she felt torn between the man she loved and the town she adored. Which was, of course, absurd. But it was true that in her hometown of Edilean, people didn’t like the man she was going to marry. Out of town, people loved him. Their customers asked his advice, laughed at his jokes, and soaked up his compliments like rum on sponge cake. But in Edilean…

  So Sara had agreed to go to New York with Greg and miss the fair for the first time in her twenty-six years. She wouldn’t be sewing the Scottish costumes for her many cousins, wouldn’t help her mother bake bannocks and tattie scones. She wouldn’t help run Luke’s booth full of herbal wreaths, and she wouldn’t have a day of laughter at seeing the knees of all the men in town when they wore their kilts. She wouldn’t get to—

  She broke off her thoughts because to her astonishment, part of the bedroom floor seemed to be lifting upward. She put the dress she was working on down on the bed and rubbed her weary eyes. She was in Tess’s apartment, on the opposite side of Edilean Manor from her own apartment, so maybe it was normal for the floor to start to lift. Or maybe she needed a whole lot of sleep.

  Silently, Sara got off the bed and stood on bare feet by Tess’s dresser. It was dim in the room, with only the light from the floor lamp she’d put by the foot of the bed so she could see to work.

  As she stared at the floor, she realized there was a trapdoor under the little rug. She’d not seen it before, but then, until today when her cousin Luke had run her out of her own apartment with his nasty termite spray, she’d never been in Tess’s bedroom.

  As the door in the floor rose a couple more inches, Sara’s first instinct was to get out of the apartment, and grab her cell phone off the kitchen counter as she ran. She’d call the police, then go over to Luke’s.

  But the bedroom door was facing the front of the trapdoor. Whoever was sneaking into her room would see her—and be able to reach her—before she could get out. She decided to risk it and try to escape. In one quick gesture, she switched off the light and made a leap across the trapdoor, meaning to hit the floor on the other side running.

  But to her utter disbelief, a man tossed the lid back just as Sara leaped, and she would have fallen if he hadn’t shot up through the floor and caught her. Instinctively, she fought as they went down together. She tried to use her nails on the back of his neck and to bring her knee up between his legs, but he blocked her. She would have pulled his hair, but it was cut so short she couldn’t get hold of it.

  “Damnation!” he said in a deep, raspy voice that sounded as though it had come off a horror movie.

  The voice and the fact that they were now on the floor wrapped about each other made Sara fight harder. He was half on top of her as she twisted and kicked to get him off.

  “Would you stop it!” he said in his odd voice. “I’m already in pain. You don’t need to add to it.”

  “Get off of me!”

  “Gladly,” the man said and rolled to one side, his back on the floor.

  Instantly, Sara stood up. The only way out of the room was to step across him, but she had one foot in the air when he grabbed her ankle, paralyzing her in place.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “I think you should explain to the police what you’re doing in here at this time of night.”

  What he’d said was so preposterous that Sara stopped moving and stared down at him—even as he was holding her ankle above his chest. It was too dark in the room to see clearly, but he had on a white shirt that she knew cost quite a bit. It was not the normal dress of a thief. “Police?” she whispered. “You want to call the police on me?”

  He let go of her ankle and in an easy move stood up in front of her. “All right then, tell me what you’re doing in here.”

  “Tell you?” Sara felt that she’d entered some comedy act. “I live here.”

  The man leaned to one side to switch on the floor lamp, and when Sara started to move toward the bedroom door, he caught her wrist. He didn’t hold it tightly, but she knew she couldn’t break his grip. “I know that’s not the truth,” he said as he pulled her forward, then deftly set her in the only chair in the room. “Now, young lady, start talking.”

  Sara looked up at him. He wasn’t an especially large man, certainly not as tall as her cousins Luke and Ramsey, but he was quite handsome—in a street thug sort of way. For all that his hairline was halfway back on his head, he had a heavy growth of very black whiskers. All in all, she did not like being alone in a poorly lit room with him.

  Her very ordinary life in a small town hadn’t prepared her for such an encounter as this, but then she, like everyone else, had seen a lot of movies. She put her shoulders back and took a breath—and wished she weren’t wearing a nightgown of semitransparent Irish linen. And it was too bad her hair was down about her shoulders. She would have liked to look more “tough.”

  “The question,” she said as calmly as she could manage, “is who are you?”

  He bent down to close the open door in the floor, and when Sara shifted in the chair, he looked back at her. “I’m the brother of the renter of this apartment and you are trespassing.”

  Sara’s mouth came open in astonishment. “Tess? You’re Tess’s brother? You don’t look like her.”

  The harsh expression left his face, and when he gave a little smile that showed a dimple in his left cheek, he no longer looked frightening. “She got the beauty, but I got the brains.”

  Sara had to work not to smile at t