Not Without Juliet - By L.L. Muir Page 0,3

neck. Every time the one on the left pulled at the prize, her twin was pulled forward.

Jules couldn’t help laughing.

Nothing to worry about. Even if they’d been a couple of ghosts, they couldn’t scare her off. The only thing capable of raising her heart rate now was a sexy Highlander or someone with the power to stop her—like the people she’d just escaped. The FBI was staffed by a bunch of mean sons-o-bitches who didn’t take too kindly to sole eye-witnesses squirming out from under their thumb. And if she could get away from them, a couple of Scottish ghosts shouldn’t even raise her heart rate.

She moved back into a thick cluster of pines, hoping against hope that the fighting sisters had poor eyesight too. She steadied the boughs bouncing around her and hoped her black leather jacket and new dye job would blend into the shadows. Then she looked through the binoculars again.

The old women weren’t fighting anymore, and the one on the left was gesturing over her shoulder with her thumb, toward the North. Jules was just relieved the old girl wasn’t pointing her way. The other one took the strap from around her neck and handed over the binoculars, then she looked over her sister’s shoulder while that one turned and aimed the lenses up at the road running along the ridge behind Castle Ross.

Whatever it was, the sisters found it fascinating. But when the sisters suddenly ducked down behind the wall, Jules swung her own binoculars to the North to see what had scared her would-be ghosts.

The trees were in the way. She had to inch out a bit, but kept well below the boughs that would give away her progress. A prickly branch reached out and snagged her coat, as if it would hold her back. She unhooked a sticky pinecone from her precious coat, rubbed her thumb over the scratch it had made in the smooth leather, then crawled forward, grateful for the lengthening and deepening of the evening shadows around her.

At first, all she could see was a car tire with a shiny hubcap. She kept losing track of it between branches heavy with pine cones and dense green needles. When she pulled the glasses aside to get a natural perspective, she realized the car was well off the road, intentionally hidden.

Like hers.

Through the binoculars, once again, Juliet followed the hill as it sloped away from the car. Spindly black legs stood on a visible patch of grass. A tripod. Then, a man’s knees as he squatted behind it.

“Shit!” Her voice sounded like a gunshot in her ears. She clamped her lips between her teeth and held her breath until she realized she was too far away for him to have heard her.

A Skedros. It had to be. If he were FBI, agents would have been skulking around the castle, hiding on the roof and taking over the big manor house where human beings actually lived. They wouldn’t care about disrupting lives while they waited for her to show up.

She tried to calm the panic ringing in her ears, telling her to run, reminding her that every second she waited lessened her chances of getting away. But she didn’t want to run. It had taken her days to get psyched up to confront that woman. If she ran, she’d never get that chance again. And no one could be expected to run away from all that money, let alone the chance to look into that man’s face just once.

She tried to think rationally, to keep her heart from jumping through her ribs.

Maybe the guy was a photographer. Castle Ross probably smiled for a couple dozen cameras a day. Maybe the North side was its good side. Maybe the FBI had decided to give her what she’d asked for—just a little time to take care of some personal business. Maybe the Skedros family had no clue she’d left the country. Maybe she was just being paranoid.

Yeah, and maybe Gabby Skedros hadn’t murdered Nikkos right before her eyes. “You’re like a son to me,” he’d told the kid, just before he shot him. And how many times had he told Jules she was like a daughter? Yeah, she could live without that kind of family affection. She was better off as she’d always been. On her own.

Paranoid? Yeah, right. Paranoid was a way to stay alive. And she wasn’t the only one freaking out. Those old sisters had disappeared fast, as if their footing had