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The Highlander's Maiden
Elizabeth Mayne


Her Heart Was In The Highlands Indeed, every hill and vale seemed a mapping of her soul. Cassie MacArthur doubted any man could ever understand the freedom of roaming high road and low. Especially not Robert Gordon, enemy to her clan - yet, ironically, the one man in Scotland who made her blood sing!Driven by a questing spirit, Cassie MacArthur would make a bonny bride - Robert Gordon felt it in the marrow of his bones. Truly, the legendary Lady Quickfoot would be the perfect partner for his life's work - and his life! But was he fleet enough to catch her?









Table of Contents


Cover Page (#ufcd60e3a-65e3-5758-afa7-f870da1ee087)

Excerpt (#u72d1162c-2f9c-54d3-a3fe-23d808e28cb0)

Dear Reader (#u8205131b-ee74-5398-a374-a7d74fec3295)

Title Page (#udad62daa-86f1-5416-9646-81a5f59ed6ed)

About the Author (#u5853a06d-7d1a-5d23-ad58-03e95cfd72cf)

Dedication (#u7917d563-4f82-5e88-ab69-6169eea61072)

Chapter One (#ud1667497-efdb-5208-9007-83eb2765fe97)

Chapter Two (#u12253cf7-b54b-5ff9-8dba-a454a551c870)

Chapter Three (#u8cd0a5bf-952c-586b-96a1-cf3b6c4b09fd)

Chapter Four (#u3f052c7e-324a-5fcc-b6fc-e7f910aee7d0)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Dear Reader (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)




Had she a blade on her, she’d certainly have run him through.


Unarmed, Cassie settled for jabbing a stiffened finger in the middle of his chest. “Stop mincing words and say what you mean, you blackguard, else I’ll cut out your heart and make you eat it. Don’t think 1 don’t dare. You’re beginning to make me very angry.”



Robert caught her hand and restrained it, infuriating Cassie even more. Her already flushed face hovered just under his in a delicious temper. The urge to pull her into his arms and kiss her quivering lips was almost more than he could bear. He hesitated to be that imprudent.



“Let go of me!” Cassie tugged to get her hand free. He didn’t let go.



“Och! You’re a proud Highland maiden, full of temper and spirit and as hotheaded as your own fearless father!” Robert laughed.…


Dear Reader (#ulink_7297f612-2065-508b-ab83-4f673d76e6e3),

If you’ve never read a Harlequin Historical, you’re in for a treat. We offer compelling, richly developed stories that let you escape to the past—by some of the best writers in the field!



Author Elizabeth Mayne is notorious for her alpha heroes, and has won the hearts of many readers with previous books such as Heart of the Hawk and All That Matters. Her latest, The Highlander’s Maiden, is a tension-filled Medieval tale about a handsome Scottish mapmaker who, by king’s decree, must join forces with a fearless female mountain guide from an enemy clan. He vows to make this the partnership of a lifetime!

Be sure to look for Hawken’s Wife by talented Rae Muir. In this continuation of THE WEDDING TRAIL series, a beautiful tomboy falls for an amnesiac mountain man. A Rose at Midnight by Jacqueline Navin is a dark and passionate Regency tale about a powerful earl who thinks he’s dying and must find a wife to have his child. He never intended to find love…

Rounding out the month is For Love of Anna by multipublished author Sharon Harlow. In this sweet, heartwarming Western, a young widow with children finds her happily-ever-after in the arms of a cowboy who is running from his past. Don’t miss it!

Whatever your tastes in reading, you’ll be sure to find a romantic journey back to the past between the covers of a Harlequin Historical® novel.

Sincerely,

Tracy Farrell, Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Harlequin Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3




The Highlander’s Maiden

Elizabeth Mayne













www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




ELIZABETH MAYNE


is a native San Antonian, who knew by age eleven how to spin a good yarn, according to every teacher she ever faced. She’s spent the last twenty years making up for all her transgressions on the opposite side of the teacher’s desk, and the last five working exclusively with troubled children. She particularly loves an ethnic hero and married one of her own eighteen years ago. But it wasn’t until their youngest, a daughter, was two years old that life calmed down enough for this writer to fulfill the dream she’d always had of becoming a novelist.


For Gabriel

You promised all,

and wouldn’t settle for anything less.

My hero.




Chapter One (#ulink_225d864c-1881-5d30-a7e6-37c8487eb2a1)


Glencoe, Scotland

February 20, 1598

“Aunt Cassie.” Five-year-old Millicent MacGregor caught a handful of Cassandra Mac Arthur’s snood and yanked on it urgently. “Did Lady Quickfoot sink to the bottom of wee Black Douglas’s bog?”

“Millie!” Cassie exclaimed as her eyes were blinded by the sudden drop of her cloak’s deep hood over her face. Thick wool muffled the rest of her words. “I’m trying to tie this skate on your brother’s foot. You’ll hear the rest of the Lady Quickfoot story tonight.”

“But now is a verra good time to tell it.” Millie smiled winsomely.

“Annie Cass, lookie! Soldiers!” Ian swung his hand over Cassie’s head to point behind her.

“One thing at a time!” Cassie pleaded. She pushed the cloth behind her head, and gave more effort into fastening a wooden skate to a child’s wiggling brogue. “Sit still, Ian!”

“Tickles!” Ian chortled, squirming restlessly as Cassie’s fingers tied the laces firmly around his ankle.

“Lord, for another pair of hands,” Cassie proclaimed, pulling a knot secure.

“I dinna think I can wait till bedtime to find out if Black Douglas saves the last jewel of the Highlands.” Millie danced about, looking for the soldiers Ian had spotted.

“We’ve come here for a skating lesson.” Cassie firmly redirected the girl. “You’ll hear what happened to Lady Quickfoot, Black Douglas and the bard of Achanshiel at bedtime, not a moment sooner, lassie.” She sat back on her skates, muttering, “How does your mother keep clothes on your back, wiggle worm?”

“Whisht, Aunt Cassie,” Millie scolded. “Those men will think y’er daft. Y’er always talkin’ to yerself.”

“And what makes you think I care who hears my private conversations, eh?” Cassie winked at her dark-haired niece before she glanced over her shoulder. “Maybe I’m talking to my angel.”

“‘Twouldn’t be an angel,” Millie proclaimed. “‘Twould be a fairy.”

“No difference there.” Cassie shrugged “I hear fairies were angels in the beginning of time, till God sent them to stay in the Highlands because their queen was so vain.”

“Go on.” Millie shook her head. “What they need a queen for if they had God to look upon all the time?”

Cassie tweaked one of the girl’s braids. “Now that is a very good question, lassie. I don’t pretend to know the answer…save that fairies were the most beautiful angels God ever made…and I think it must have something to do with vanity. So God had no choice but to banish them from everyone’s sight. Vanity is an excessively awful sin to this very day, is it not?”

“Aye,” the child agreed solemnly.

They were high up in the north meadow, a wee stretch of the legs from Euan MacGregor’s farmstead. Within hailing distance, Euan claimed—if one had lungs as capacious as a blacksmith’s bellows—as Euan did. Cassie had heard him yell his clan’s battle cry once. He’d scared the daylights out of her.

This was a time of peace, a lull between the clan wars. Still, it paid to be alert at all times. Cassie continued to look for men in sight of the frozen pond. Here the air was frosty enough to keep ice solid until April. Lower on the mountain, everything melted in today’s mild sun.

Cassie spied the men on the mountain. Two scruffy travelers hiking through the mud-bound mire of MacDonald’s cow pasture. They led two packhorses weighted down with a great number of rucksacks, poles and bags. Cassie’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Tinkers, maybe.

A small alarm ran deep in her chest. They weren’t the Watch or king’s soldiers if their dun-colored plaids meant anything. No, they couldn’t be from the king, not coming from the south. No one knew Cassandra was at Glencoen Farm save her parents. Cassie shielded her eyes to lessen the glare of the wintry sun, studying the men more intently.

“Da says it’s fey to talk to yerself. You do it ‘cause y’er redheaded. Tha’s why he married Mama instead of ye,” Millie continued, proud of her scolding. So big she sounded and all of five. Cassie looked back at her niece and laughed over what she’d said.

“Och, and marrying yer mam wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that yer da wanted a woman to wed when he sweet-talked my poor sister Maggie into taking on this farm of his, eh? And me naught but a flat-bosomed lassie like you at the time.” Cassie tapped her niece’s nosy nose. “Fey, am I?”

She turned her chin in the direction of the two strangers, saying casually to the children, “Do you know them, then?”

Ian’s baby blue eyes rounded as he shook his head.

“They’re no’ MacGregors!” Millie’s identical eyes fixed upon the newcomers with calculating interest. She had the soul of a gossip and knew all her kinsmen and everyone who lived within thirty miles of Glencoe. “Could be MacDonalds. Da says they’re thick as flies ‘round shite hereabouts.”

“Millie! Mind your tongue!”

“Weel, Da says it.”

“And ladies don’t!” Cassie scolded.

“How come Da can say things that leddies shouldn’t?”

“Och, that’s because men say wicked things to keep all the wickedness inside them from festering like a rotten egg put on the boil. It can’t do anything but explode and ruin everything around it for a little while. Men can’t hold their passions quiet like we ladies do.”

“So we’re gooder?” Millie asked.

“Aye, we are better.” Cassie stressed the correction on the assumption that Millie’s grammar would improve with exposure to proper speech. “It’s nice to be a lady and refined like your dear Grandmother MacArthur. We must strive to be more like her every day. Besides, my child, men like doing hard and dirty work. Why, even the best of them can’t keep clean from the time they crawl out of the cradle until they fall into the grave.”

“Tha’s verra true.” Millie cast a wise look at Ian.

Not many strangers wandered into Glencoe in the wintertime. The pass to the north was beautiful but stark. You had to know what you were about to travel it in the winter. Neither of Maggie’s children had any innate fear of Highlanders walking the land their father worked. Soldiers, Englishmen or reivers were another matter. Cassie decided to wait and see.

“No’ stalkers neither.” Ian mimicked his sister’s acumen for quick judgment. “No bows or spears.”

“You’re right there, my lad,” Cassie murmured, though she saw the butt of a musket poking from between the saddlebags, and both men wore claymores and dirks, slung from broad leather belts fitted around their hips. That told her they were prepared for trouble if they came upon it.

“Can I run and ask who they are?” Millie said eagerly.

“I think we’ll wait and see if they have any business with us, first,” Cassie decided. “Speaking of which, we did come here to skate, did we not? Up you go, Wee Ian.”

She set the little one on his feet and guided him to the icy pond. His legs wobbled unsteadily on the rough skates, but he was game to give it a try.

Cassie kept a cautious eye on the strangers as they came up the steep incline from MacDonald’s meadow. They weren’t showing the slightest interest in the activities of the children or the cattle in the high field. Not reivers, then. But who were they? A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her they were the king’s surveyors, damn their eyes. What luck! That didn’t mean they knew who she was.

They seemed absorbed in the tall one’s pacing. The other stood back and counted his companion’s steps, letting out a cord, the end of which the other carried.

At the stony rise where MacGregor’s high field jutted up and away from MacDonald’s grazing pasture, they stopped and talked heatedly. The drum of their conversation carried on the north wind. At the peak of the hill, the lean one made a great commotion of pointing east, north, south and west, all of his motions becoming a sort of comic dance.

They were lost, then, Cassie concluded. Some mapmakers these two were, if they were Messrs. Hamilton and Gordon of the king’s surveyors’ ilk. She wondered which one was the Gordon, and how it could be that they’d traveled through Glen Orchy and were still alive. She wouldn’t waste a king’s penny betting on their odds of survival if they ventured into Lochaber without protection. Say, the certain protection of Cassandra’s Lady Quickfoot reputation. Then she smiled, because she would see to it that they never found the elusive Lady Quickfoot, the best guide in the Highlands.

The tall one put down his cord and stacked a few nearby rocks on the cord to hold it in place. Then he walked back down to the horses and took a brown folio from the packs. He settled the folio in his arms, using his back as a shield against the sharp wind. He shuffled parchment after parchment to the top, pulled a stub of a pencil out of his sporran, moistened the point with his tongue and began to scribble, it seemed to Cassie’s curious eyes.

The stout one took this pause to help himself to a healthy swig of the liquid his pocket flask contained. He offered a drink to his companion. That man shook the offer aside—too busy with his scribbling to break from it. When he finished and began putting the folio away, the stout one took hold of the string lying on the snow-dappled ground and began winding. It was a very, very long string with many knots in it and made a large and oddly bumped ball.

“How curious,” Cassie observed aloud.

“Faster!” Ian called her attention back to him.

Cassie caught the loose ends of her wind-ruffled hair together and tucked them back inside the hood of her cloak. She needn’t advertise her marital status to outright strangers. “Shall we teach this little ram how to really skate, Millie? Take his other hand.”

“I kin do it,” Ian yelled boldly, legs splitting and wobbling underneath him.

“No, Ian, you have to learn how first.” Millie sounded very much like her mother, Maggie.

A week of skating lessons on the pond behind the farmhouse had turned Millie into a very confident skater. She was bright and quick and it only took someone with a little time on their hands and energy to keep up with the girl to teach her anything. Unmarried aunts like Cassie suited that task perfectly. Sadly, the unusual winter warm spell had turned that convenient pond too slushy for Ian’s lessons.

Taking firm hold of opposite hands, Cassie and Millie wheeled the little one around the sheltered mountain pool. Euan had brought the sheep up to this field himself this morning and tested the ice’s thickness and strength before telling his children at dinner that they could continue skating lessons this afternoon.

Ian laughed and laughed, delighted by the wind that was so cold it stung his cheeks bright red and took his breath away in big puffs of frosty air.

“I do it m’self!” Ian grew impatient with their steadying hands.

Millie’s small face formed the perfect picture of long-suffering sisterhood. She sighed before letting go of her little brother’s hand. Cassie also thought it time to let him try skating on his own. When he fell on his bottom a couple of times, he’d accept their help more readily.

“You’re on your own, little man.” Cassie saw him turn around and head into the soft snowdrift on the north bank of the pond. Here, the ice was thickest. She had no fear that it would shatter under his little weight, no matter how hard he fell. If she remembered it right, this pool was deep and treacherous in other seasons because of its wicked currents.

He inched away, his little body struggling to keep his balance. His arms flopped in great awkward circles. His knees and ankles wobbled. His bottom went up and down and back and forth. Somehow—through all the gyrations, one little wooden skate inched forward after the other.

“Slide yer feet!” Millie shouted, skating in front of Ian on gleaming skates her father had made her last evening at his forge. Her old wooden skates now graced Ian’s nimble toes. She stopped and dropped to her knees, holding out her arms for the little boy to come to her. “Oh, Auntie Cassie, you should see Ian’s face, he’s trying so very hard! Why, it’s all screwed up like the last apple in the stillroom and red as the devil’s toes!”

“Is not!” Ian grunted and threw himself at his sister’s arms. He crowed in triumph, “I did it!”

“So you did, wee Ian-Dhu.” Cassie came to a graceful stop beside them, put her knee to the ice and hugged Ian affectionately. She was so pleased with his efforts she even rumpled his dark curls till he laughed with glee.

“Mumph,” grunted a male voice nearby, making that throaty sound every Highland woman recognized as a preamble to actual speech.

Expecting to find Old Angus scowling at her for spoiling the boy, Cassie looked up to find both travelers standing at the edge of the pond, grinning like a pair of loons.

“Pardon me, goodwife…” the taller one began. The second man cleared his throat as if he was correcting his companion without words.

“Och, Auntie Cassie’s not a goodwife,” Millie declared impulsively. “If y’er looking for a goodwife, you’ll be wanting to see my mother. She’s at the dairy, churning butter.”

“‘Tis my auntie Cassie,” Ian chimed in possessively, patting Cassie’s wind-stung face. “‘Tisn’t married.”

“Whisht, children,” Cassie said repressively as she came gracefully to her feet. “May I help you, gentlemen?”

“We hope you can.” The taller one spoke for both of them. “My friend and I were given directions to Glencoen Farm, though by our measurement, we seem to be north of it. We have a packet for Euan MacGregor who lives there, and a letter of introduction from his kinsman, Laird Malcolm MacGregor of Balquhidder. Do you know the precise location of that farm?”

The children giggled, but Cassie managed to shush another outburst with a stem glance. She wasn’t as good at that as her sister. Maggie could get these two imps to shush by just quirking one dark eyebrow. But then they probably couldn’t tell when Cassie’s pale eyebrows twitched or moved. Nobody could.

“Actually, sir, you’re standing on part of it as we speak. This is the north meadow of Glencoen Farm. You missed the turn coming through MacDonald’s cattle field.”

Cassie pointed to a narrow path beyond the snowd-appled rocks and foraging sheep. “You’ll find the right track there at the twisted pines and the sheepfold. The snow is melting, so be careful where you walk. Some of it is quite muddy. You can’t miss Glencoen Farm. It’s the only two-storied house in twenty miles. Just keep moving downhill.” She added a smile and a few extra words. “South by the southwest.”

Her addendum brought a sudden smile onto her questioner’s face. He thanked her and wished them a good day, then raised his hand to his brow in a polite salute on parting.

That gesture drew Cassie’s attention to a pair of very wonderful blue eyes and his hands. He wore mittens just like she and the children did. Simple fingerless tubes of knitted wool stitched at the great knuckles. His fingers were so dirty and chapped raw from winter’s cold that she could hardly tell where dark wool left off and skin began. That wasn’t unusual for any man trekking the hills in winter, but it certainly didn’t go with his gentle-seeming eyes.

Those eyes tilted deeply at the outer corners. While his skin was stung from exposure, the sparkle in those blue eyes and the length of his eyelashes betrayed his age. He was somewhere close to her own. She was days away from twenty. Those eyes declared he wasn’t older than twenty-five, if that.

As they strode away, her own eyes narrowed in revision of her earlier impressions. The two men were very nearly the same weight. The one she had thought stout was only larger boned and wore heavier clothing under his winding plaid. The other, the one she’d spoken to wore only a leather jerkin and woolen sark beneath his plaid. His slender frame was practically bare in comparison. Warm enough garments for most Highlanders. The leather surrounding his chest was as close as one could come to being waterproof—definitely a boon in Glen Orchy and Lochaber.

She noted another detail. His kilt was separate from his plaid and stitched. Precise knife pleats encircled his hips and fell in a neat swirl ‘round his knees. His plaid swung over his shoulder and was firmly clipped beneath a hunting brooch. Both ends were secured under his belt, keeping the cloth close across his chest and loose on his back. She recognized that habit, knowing intuitively that there walked a ready man whose garments wouldn’t betray him if he had to draw dirk or sword suddenly to be ready for battle. A murdering Gordon to be sure.

Other than both being garbed in serviceable Wallace hunting plaid, she could not tell from where they came or to which clan they gave allegiance, though she’d have had to be blind not to pay notice to his straight back and proud bearing—another giveaway of his clan affiliation. He moved with the proud strut of an invincible warrior, which the bloody Gordons were, curse their souls!

She could be wrong. The more slender man could simply be a soldier or officer in King James the Sixth’s garrison. God forbid he was a Gordon or Douglas scout, reconnoitering for rebels hidden in the pass. This was MacDonald territory and a Campbellton shire. Rebel earls and their war parties weren’t welcome here.

Both men hitched their plaids close over their backs as the brunt of the strong wind caught them and their overloaded pack animals descending the mountain.

Cassie saw that they had slogged through deep mud, probably in crossing the mire of MacDonald’s cow field. The hems of their muddy plaids slapped against the backs of their legs.

“You didn’t find out who they are!” Millie fussed when they went ‘round the bend and out of sight.

“Why should I want to know that?” Cassie responded, turning her attention back to Ian as he fell soundly on his bottom. Cassie winced at his impact, knowing that the fall had hurt. His bare shanks were exposed to the ice. He was so surprised he didn’t know whether to howl or pound his fists. Cassie waited to see what he would do.

“They could be im-por-tant!” Millie insisted as she pulled hard on Ian’s arm. “Whisht, Ian, get up. Let’s try again.”

Ian rose so unsteadily he clutched Millie’s waist, then leaned too far into her. His sturdy little body overbalanced Millie as well. Down they both went as quick as a blink, a small mass of tangled legs and banging skates.

“Ian, leggo! Y’er choking me!”

“Am not,” Ian insisted, mad now. He did a split getting up, both of his hands pushing heavily into Millie’s tummy. Cassie came to their rescue.

“Shall we skate together for a little while?” she suggested, righting the little one, firmly steadying his balance. Without argument, Ian gave her his hand. Millie dutifully took the other and they circled the pond without further mishap, restoring Ian’s confidence.

“The dark one had a signet ring, so he must be somebody im-por-tant!” Undeterred, Millie returned to her prior topic. She was like a dog that had dragged off a bone, determined to savor it down to the very marrow.

“One was dark?” Cassie repeated, adding under her breath, “Who could notice for the mud?”

“Och, y’er doin’ it again! Saying things ye don’t want me to hear but ye say them anyway. Mama says it’s because y’er always doing yer thinking out loud.”

“Your parents make a habit of discussing me in front of wee bairns, do they?” Cassie asked, teasing Millie naturally, the same way her older brother and sisters had teased her at Millie’s age. “Your da calls me fey and my own sister accuses me of being so witless I say every thought out loud like a five-year-old.”

Not one to be distracted, Millie continued. “‘Twas a gold ring on his little finger with a blue jewel in it. I saw it plain as day, winking at me from the edge of his ragged mitten.”

“Well, there. If your father gives them leave to have supper at his table, you’ll have time to knit the poor dark man a new pair of mittens,” Cassie said. “I didn’t see any ring, myself.”

“Tha’s ‘cause ye weren’ lookin’! You only looked at his face.”

Cassie shook her head, baffled by the girl’s powers of observation. The man had very nice blue eyes and came with an endorsement from Euan’s father. That was better than a king’s seal of approval in this part of the Highlands. Even so, if he was who she thought he was, he was a dead man. Like the rest of her MacArthur and Campbell kinsmen, Cassie had been brought up believing the only good Gordon was a dead Gordon.

Cassie loosened her hair from her hood. It spilled down the back of her cloak to be played with by the wind and tangled and blown about her face. The sun picked up its fiery colors and turned it into burnished gold. That was the only time she liked it, when she was in the sun.

One of these days she hoped to get the privilege of putting her red hair up in neat coils like her mother and all of her sisters. Until the day she was actually married, to put her hair up was the next worst thing to a sin. She had heard her brother James say that in England unmarried girls past a certain age were allowed that wonderful privilege…if they attended Queen Elizabeth at court. The day that happened in Scotland, Cassie would turn cartwheels up and down the nave of St. Giles Cathedral.

In her mind, she should have been granted that privilege when she and Alastair Campbell became engaged. But her mother had said no, and insisted the answer was still no, even when they’d buried what was left of poor Alastair in their chapel cemetery alongside his parents’ infants that hadn’t lived through childhood. Cassie still felt as if her heart had gone into the cold earth with him. It had been over a year since Alastair’s death. In that time a peace treaty had been signed and no further battles had disrupted the return to normal life.

In just a few days Cassandra MacArthur would be twenty. How could she hold up her head at the spring fetes if she was still wearing her hair down at twenty? Cassie sighed and gave up brooding over the impossible.

Ian was content to hold Millie’s hands and let her pull him along. So Cassie skated away, concentrating on making her figures with her blades in the pristine ice. Eights were easy, requiring little more than the careful management of her skirts. The circle within a circle was harder.

The children’s voices filled the high meadow with laughter, making Cassie realize she was happy at Glencoen Farm, happier than she was anywhere else in Scotland.

“Auntie Cassie,” Ian called to her. “I’m hungry.”

She’d come prepared for his inevitable hunger and produced two apples from her pocket. Millie left him standing on his skates and came to her, grabbing both apples greedily.

“Sit you down then.” Cassie instructed the girl firmly. “We don’t need to tax either of your skills with eating and skating, too.”

“I’d best take off Ian’s skates. Mama will want us home well before dark,” Millie added wisely.

Night came on quickly and early during winter. The sun was already sinking to the west. Millie skated as fast as she could back to Ian while biting into one of the apples. Then a devil got inside her and she circled the boy, holding his apple just out of his reach.

“Give it to me!” Ian demanded.

“Come and get it yerself,” Millie taunted. She skated far ahead of him, close to the rockbound edge where granite stones were frosted with a coat of dripping ice. She executed a sharp, quick stop on her iron skates. “Come get it, piglet!”

“Gimme!” Ian yelled.

Crack! went the ice at Millie’s feet. The sun caught the jagged line as it ripped across the length of the frozen pool.

“Millie, don’t move!” Cassie yelled, horrified as that jagged line zigzagged under Ian’s feet.

“Gimme it!” Ian screamed again, his hunger turned to temper.

Millie froze, clenching both apples, and looked to Cassie, who sped Millie’s way as fast as she could.

“Children—” Cassie’s heart thudded in her chest, but she kept her voice as calm as she could make it “—don’t move, please. I’m coming to you.”

“I want mine no-ow!” Ian stomped his foot.

The crack underneath him shattered like glass and roared with the voice of a cupboard full of pots and pans toppling onto a flagstone floor.

“Millie!” Cassie screamed a command. “Throw yourself on the rocks!”

“Owwww—iieee!” Ian screamed as he went down into the icy pool.

Millie scrambled onto the icy rocks, terrified by the sight of the ice closing over Ian’s head. “What do I do? Ian!”

“I’ll get Ian! Get help! Get your skates off and run, Millie. Run!” Cassie raced to the fracture.

The little girl moved quicker than Cassie could speak, catching hold of the buckles over her boots as an entire sheet of ice tilted crazily under Cassie, sending her skidding downward into a shockingly cold ice bath.

“Get your father!” Cassie screamed one last instruction before she, too, plunged under the ice.

Cassie’s arms and legs thrashed against the cloud of ice shards that accompanied her descent, in a failed effort to swim. Her cloak and heavy wool skirts rose as she sank. Then they tangled around her arms until she touched the rocky bottom. There the cold water was crystal clear save for a cloud of dark mud stirred up by Ian’s violent thrashing. Cassie bent her knees and pushed against the bottom to propel herself more quickly to Ian.

The little boy was trapped under a huge slab of unbroken ice. Even with the momentum of a firm thrust of her legs, getting to Ian quickly seemed to take Cassie an eternity in her heavy clothes. She grabbed the boy and pulled him to her, swiveling, looking for the hole in the ice, out of breath and as desperate for wind in her lungs as he was.

Ian’s fingers clawed at her, tearing at her billowing hair. His shoes, skates and knees pounded her as if he were trying to walk to the surface on a ladder made of her very body.

Their heads broke the sparkling surface at the same time and the cold air on their water-chilled skin was a second shock as they each gasped for wind. “Whisht, shh, shh, now, laddie,” Cassie gasped, lifting him above the water’s surface so he could breathe deeply. “I’ve got you, sweetheart, be calm. It’s only water.”

He coughed out mouthfuls of water, choked and gasped and sputtered like a floundering fish. While he got his wind back, Cassie looked for Millie and carefully gauged her own precarious position. Millie was nowhere to be seen, but the ice under the rocks where she’d been standing was intact. Her gleaming skates and the two apples lay negligently cast aside on the rocks. That gave Cassie a moment’s deep relief. One child was safe.

Ian, still thrashing, became heavier by the moment. Now how was she to get herself and Ian out of the mess they were in?

Cassie had nothing to grab hold of near her. As Ian came to his senses, he took a breath and coughed more normally. His little arms and legs clamped onto her body, limiting her own movements severely.

The coldness of the water had ceased being important. In fact, it almost felt warm compared to the air above the water. “Ian, let go of my arms. I’ve got to swim to get us out of here, sweetling.”

His jacketed arms clutched her so tightly, he strangled her. He was crying, too, a frightened little boy, and no wonder that—trapped under the ice as he had been. Cassie hugged him a moment longer as tightly as he hugged her, using her strong legs to keep their heads afloat. Her skirts and cloak tangled in her legs. Their weight, along with her boots and skates, made every circling motion an effort.

Mentally, she prayed, Millie, Millie, sweetheart, run as fast as you can!

The silence of the mountain pool paid a credit to its isolation. If she and Ian were to be rescued, she had best see to getting them out of the water herself.




Chapter Two (#ulink_688eb0d5-8640-5ca2-8987-03e410f45370)


Glencoen Farm was clearly in the travelers’ sight when the little girl from the skating pond came screaming and tumbling down the track, out of breath and too terrified to speak clearly.

She got out the words “ice broke” “Auntie” and “Ian” before she took off running for the farmstead, howling like a banshee again.

“What the devil?” Alexander Hamilton sputtered, confused by the child’s terror -and slurred Gaelic words.

Robert Gordon understood the child’s terror-driven message. Dropping the measuring cord in his hands, he turned and bolted back the way they’d come, running for dear life to the top of the first hill and up the twisting path to the high meadow. Pines hid the pool from sight, but he ran onward at full speed, dread building with each pounding step across the stony ground for what his eyes would find when the pond came into view.

It was worse than he’d had scant heartbeats to envision. The mountain pool had no skaters on its glistening, windswept surface. The southern corner of it thrashed with a froth of broken, disturbing shards of ice and the fractured glare of lights reflecting from it.

Broken ice, treacherous footing and no purchase anywhere, Robert stopped at the edge of the rocky pool, mentally assessing what he saw. A solid sheet of ice extended forward from his boots thirty feet. From there to the southmost bank, it had become a mire of sharp, fragmented shards. The young woman and the boy struggled to stay afloat at the edge of the solid sheet. Their heads bobbed up and down in his sight, competing with chunks of ice for space on the surface of the pond.

Robert shed his weapons, belt, sporran and plaid. In two quick jerks he removed his boots, flung off his cap, then his jerkin, and went out on the still firm ice. He felt the shock of the terrible cold underfoot.

He sighted the girl as she vainly struggled to put the little boy onto the slippery ice ahead of her. It broke, and he went under again only to be grabbed by her, and caught by her, forced forward and onto the ice again. Their dark wools performed that slow, exhausted dance over and over again as he watched, gaining only inches and losing vast ground as more and more ice shattered underneath them.

Likewise, Robert’s progress toward them felt like a snail’s dance. His heart dropped when her last effort put the boy on a floating island of ice, but caused her to sink in utter exhaustion as the island tilted and wedged under the remaining sheet of solid ice on which Robert made such laggard progress.

The child began to scream pitifully at having lost sight of his aunt. Robert picked his next steps carefully, eyeing hairline stress marks in the fractured sheet as he lay down on his stomach and inched onto the ice floe. He caught the boy by his sodden clothes and firmly tugged him off the icy island.

He turned the startled child in the direction of the shore, telling him calmly, “Stop yer bawling. I’ll fetch yer aunt. Go this way to the shore. Go!”

Ian found new hope. The other stranger was stretched out on the ice near Ian, holding open arms that promised safety and warmth only a few feet away. Beyond him, Ian’s father rode into sight with all his men from the farm, laying a whip on the horses hitched to his hay wagon. “Da!”

Robert took one look back, making certain Alex was close enough to reach the small boy to get him if the ice should break again. Satisfied, Robert shed his kilt and slid feetfirst into the ice bath. He sank to the bottom, his eyes open, actively searching for the girl among the water weeds and shards of ice that followed his quick descent.

The cold stopped his heart and his breath instantly. He found her on the bottom, struggling to remove her weighty woolen cloak from her neck. Pale white fingers clawed at her throat, unable to manage the simple work of unfastening a corded frog and eyelet. The most beautiful cloud of red curls billowed around her like an angel’s halo, sparkling with silvery bubbles of trapped air.

The maiden’s blue eyes were stricken wide with terror. She startled as he made eellike progress to her. He caught her under her arms, pulled her to his chest and kicked his legs hard, trying to lift them both to the surface. She didn’t budge. She was caught on something.

He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He let go of her and raced to the surface, broke it and took huge gasps of air, filling his lungs to capacity. Alex was there at the edge of the ice, concern written all over his long face.

“What’s wrong, Robbie?”

“She’s trapped. Give me your dirk.”

He pressed the blade into Robert’s palm instantly.

Robert plunged downward, swimming back to the bottom, feeling the length of her legs for her feet. He found the trapped foot and the skate wedged into the rocks, and, pushing the billowing wools aside, slit the laces of her boot clean to the top and hauled her foot free of the shoe.

Her arms floated out at her sides as he again gripped her chest, drawing her close, then he kicked for all he was worth and rose to the surface. Their heads broke water. Robert gasped for air as she fell limp against him. Fluids ran from her nose and mouth. Her lungs rattled in a faint reflex as Robert tightened his arm around her chest, expelling fluids.

There was no fight left in her. None. Her arms were limp and legs wooden as Robert gripped her chest securely and cut the heavy cloak loose before it sank them both. He let the cloth drop, then tossed the knife back to Alex and conserved his strength to keep them next to the firm edge of ice.

Alex had his own finely woven tartan stretched out like a rope for Robert to grasp. The men from the farm had planks laid out across the unstable ice and rope to finish the rescue.

Sweet Jesus save us, Robert prayed fervently as he moved the woman enough to tie the rope around her chest. If she was breathing at all, it was as shallow as a sleeping baby.

Robert knew why, too. The icy cold did that, robbed the body of all its strength and numbed the brain worse than 100-proof whiskey. His own deft fingers slowed down to abominable dexterity.

“Here, now!” he commanded. “Wake up, lass! We’ll have you out of here in a trice.” He grasped her chin, lifting her face, and marveled over her sweet, freckled beauty. Her cheek fell against his shoulder and water lapped at her jawline. They had to get out of the icy water soon. Alex hauled on the rope with all his might but it wasn’t enough to pull her out of the water—not in her sodden woolens. It was taking too long!

Some other sense told Robert to lend her what he could of his own supply of warmed breath. Her slackened mouth offered no resistance as he covered her full, colorless lips and filled her flooded lungs with his own warmed breath.

That action roused her more than his underwater rescue. Her eyelids fluttered open, her gaze fixed on his eyes and remained there. Again, Robert laid his mouth upon hers and breathed for her. That awoke her from her numbed lethargy, bringing forth a cough and a veritable flood of water bubbling up from her chest.

“Good, good!” Robert let her head rest on his shoulder. He stroked her cheek and throat encouragingly, treading water between breaths.

When the bubbling cough stopped he gripped her chin fast and breathed again into her mouth, giving her the only warmth he could under such intolerable conditions. The same gurgling expulsion of the pond’s water from her chest followed.

Alex held his place, flattened out on the planks of wood stretching across the ice. “Robert, they’ve got the ropes secure, man. Can you hold on? Is the woman tied?”

“Aye!” Robert released her chin and let her head fall to his shoulder as he adjusted his own hold on the rope and the familiar plaid of his companion. “Tell them to pull us out, now. Quicklike. You know how much I hate cold baths.”

“Aye,” Alex muttered to himself, backing off the ice on hands and knees, knowing that when the horse pulled, all hell was likely to break loose on this ice.

He was right, too, to anticipate that the whole pond would shatter at the intrusion of the horse-powered rescue. Euan MacGregor cracked his whip. His lead horse lurched, then pulled, pushing the remaining sheet of ice backward up the bank till it wedged on rock and the weighty human burden at the end of the secure rope came free of the water and slid across the ice, cracking what was left all the way to the shore.

Horror etched Euan MacGregor’s broad face as he knelt over his young sister-in-law, untying the tightened bad knots under her limp arm.

“Get my children away from here,” he said over his shoulder to his men. “Cassie’s dead.”

“Nay, she isn’t.” Robert let go of the heavy blanket someone had thrown around him and reached for the woman one more time. “She’s just frozen, the poor brave thing.”

He gathered Cassie into his arms once more, opened her slackened mouth and kissed her with life and breath once more. Her fingers fluttered over her sodden dress, then her arm lifted to reach up and touch his face softly before weakly pushing him away so that she could cough and breathe on her own again.

Without the slightest compunction, Robert turned her over and helped her to expel more water onto his lap. His efforts were rewarded by her first sputtering intake of breath. Granted it was no more than a short, choking breath that was followed quickly by another deep and raucous cough. The involuntary motion was started anew and continued, one labored breath after another.

“She’ll be all right,” Robert said confidently. His large hands rubbed between her cold shoulders blades to warm and soothe her. Her eyelids fluttered and her cheeks began to pinken, losing the bluish color of drowning.

Euan MacGregor laid another blanket on her. That helped greatly, but Robert knew getting her out of the wind and the elements would help best.

Euan sat back on his heels, realizing that a miracle had taken place before his eyes this day. He kissed Cassie gratefully on her cheek, thanking her for his son’s life, then gathered her and the layer of horse blankets into his huge arms and lifted her out of the lap of her savior.

“Bring the wet traveler along and his friend,” he briskly told his men as he moved his sister-in-law to the bed of the wagon. “He’s earned a place at my board whenever he wants for a hot meal.”




Chapter Three (#ulink_b40eb312-8ada-563d-b087-7c8a01d7d4c2)


Robert Gordon and Alex Hamilton jumped off the hay cart when it came abreast of the two packhorses tethered to the trees right where Alex had tied them. Cassandra MacArthur, as he now knew the young woman’s name to be, was conscious and on the road to recovery from her icy submersion.

It was the tidbit of bona fide information regarding her name, conceded by her solemn brother-in-law, that made Robert smile wryly as he watched the hay cart roll away.

Euan MacGregor paused only long enough to repeat his heartfelt extension of hospitality. Wrapped in rough wool, Robert thanked him for his kind offer and promised he and his companion, Alex, would be down directly. By the same token, Robert refused to be treated as some vaulted, kingly guest—accepting honors that he didn’t deserve and that these austere Highlanders would resent giving, heroic deeds or no. He’d only done what any thinking man should.

On the other hand, Robert would be grateful for a warm meal at this day’s end, provided he owed MacGregor no more than he was willing to give.

Taken back, Euan paused a moment longer, eyeing both strangers intently, understanding exactly where they stood. He was like that, too, a renegade of sorts from the eternal bonds of the Highlands’ all-pervasive feudal system of loyalties. Euan also preferred to stand on his own two feet, his word of honor his sole moral code after the word of God Almighty.

“Then ye are welcome to sit amongst the free men at my table if ye pitch the hay that was dumped from this cart into the pigs’ byre where it was intended. Do ye finish the task before sundown, the barn is free for yer beds this night. A fairer offer I couldn’t make any strangers this time of the year.”

“That will be sufficient to our needs, and I thank you again, sir.” Robert nodded his acceptance.

As the farmer’s cart rolled noisily off, Alexander Hamilton moved to their saddlebags and Robert huddled under the weight of the dry woolen blanket draped over his shoulders. Alex tucked up Robert’s weapons and handed his shivering friend a dry sark and kilt and dug in a pack of rolled garments for dry stockings.

In this part of Scotland, Alexander Hamilton was a man of few words. A Lowlander by name and association, he was better known in England as the wandering grandson of the wealthy and powerful Earl of Arundel, where he could lay honest claim to lands and estates of his own in Sussex. His heart, though, seemed permanently bonded to Scotland.

When Robert finally began stripping off his wet sark, Alex spoke for the first time since they’d been left alone by their packhorses. “I wouldn’t have objected to being transported inside yonder warm house and treated like a hero for a month or so.”

“Would you now?” In spite of his blue-tinged, goosebump-pebbled skin, Robert managed to hike a dark brow over that absurd statement. “And how long do ye think ye would last with the women of the house flutterin’ and cooin’ all ‘round ye, before that loquacious tongue of yours proved ye a Sassenach, a bloody Englishman, by birth and mother’s tongue, eh?”.

“Ah, well, a week, no more, if my luck holds.” Alex grinned, speaking the queen’s English. His bornand-raised-in-Sussex accent rang in his voice as clear as a bell. He had his English mother to thank for that. His Scottish father blessed him with other virtues: his easy smile, his height and his untainted Hamilton lineage.

“Humph!” Robert grunted. He dropped the blanket and stood stark naked in the icy air, rubbing himself down briskly with the rough wool before grabbing the dry sark Alex offered him and pulling that over his head and shoulders.

“You realize of course that we’ve found our elusive Lady Quickfoot?” Robert inquired mildly. He made fast work of pulling on socks and boots, bending to fasten the buckles.

Alex cast him a dazzling grin and ducked his head twice before looking around to make certain there was no one about to hear him speak out loud. “And here I was believing the lady a figment of fertile imagination. What a piece of luck that was. That wouldn’t happen again in a lifetime, eh, Robbie?”

Alex used the familiar nickname he’d known Robert Gordon by since childhood, before they had attended university. The moniker was used sparingly nowadays and in these hills. Only when they each knew they were safe and unattended, did either of ‘them use their Christian names.

“My thoughts exactly,” Robert added crisply.

Alex’s words reminded Robert that the king’s letter to Lady Quickfoot, Cassandra MacArthur, had gone unanswered since November. Robert knew better than to consider finding Cassandra MacArthur lucky. The renowned Lady Quickfoot preferred not to be found, or so he and the king had assumed since early in December.

Personally, Robert thought finding her in this particular circumstance and saving her life the way he had just done a piece of bad luck that boded little good for his mission in the Highlands. Now he knew for certain that Cassandra MacArthur was still a maiden. A minor detail of the sort King James rarely attended, but very problematic to the two surveyors who supposedly were in need of her guidance through the politically dangerous, Campbell-controlled shire of Lochaber.

Robert fitted his plaid across his shoulders last. His blood already ran warm again, for he was weatherhardened to the bone like every Highlander worthy of his salt. He shrugged his shoulders after he’d fitted his weapons back about his hips. “No matter, my friend. We’ll persevere. Gordons always do.”

* * *

By the time Cassie rose from the tub, her recovery, as far as she was concerned, was complete.

“I should think you’d be terrified.” Maggie insisted, handing her younger sister a mug of hot mulled wine.

“Och, I was when I saw Ian trapped under the ice,” Cassie admitted as she wrapped her cool fingers around the napkin-covered cup. “But as to the rest of it, I can’t really say that I remember very much.”

The whole terrible accident had assumed an unreal, dreamlike quality in Cassie’s mind. Only two things were really clear: Ian’s desperate struggle under the ice and the sight of the stranger swimming like a fish to her from deep in the pond’s icy depths.

She had a very vague image of the stranger kissing her, but surely that wasn’t real. It couldn’t be, because the image that came right after that one was disgustingly flavored with the fear that she might have vomited in his lap. That particularly revolting thought went against every ladylike behavior she had acquired from her beautiful mother, Lady Claire, wife of John James Thomas MacArthur.

So Cassie put that thought aside and refused to dwell upon it just as resolutely as she refused her sister’s urgings to sleep.

Maggie didn’t allow a pair of idle hands any more than their mother, Lady MacArthur, did. For that matter, when she stayed at Glencoen, Cassie rarely saw her abigail, Dorcas, or her gillie, Old Angus, during the day long enough to say hello. There was too much work to be done, work that everyone pitched in to help finish. The farm’s three most frequent visitors loved every minute of the bustle, work and commotion.

Old Angus couldn’t be found indoors unless someone opened a cask of whiskey and wanted his fiddleplaying after sunset. Dorcas couldn’t stay out of Glencoen’s kitchen. She reveled in being allowed to bake all her favorite dishes from Maggie’s overflowing larder. At Castle MacArthur, Cassie’s parents’ home, Cook wouldn’t allow anyone from upstairs in his kitchens unless to pick up a tray or give instructions.

Cassie dressed quickly and went to the kitchen. There, Ian sat, devouring a bowl of brose and a biscuit. Millie had just finished her lessons at the table. Maggie handed wee Willie to Millie and told her to take the sleeping baby up to the nursery. Ian dogged his sister’s steps out of the kitchen as Millie complained that she had enough to do with numbers and entertaining the baby without Ian coming along, too. Life was going on as usual without a single look back.

Cassie took that as her own cue for the balance of the day.

With a flash of her petticoats rustling about her quick feet, Maggie went out the door with Cassie following her. They were much alike, both sisters, but their faces and hair were very different. Maggie’s lampblack curls were as dark as their mother’s had once been. Cassie’s hair was the cursed color of her father’s, and she wished it weren’t.

Just as she had her father’s red hair, she had his blasted freckles. No man she had ever met took seriously a woman with pale lashes, colorless eyebrows, flaming hair and a face full of freckles.

Maggie, with her fine dark brows and flawless clear skin, was taken seriously by all men. None had dared to call Maggie by some silly childhood nickname the way Cassie had been called Lady Quickfoot since she’d won a boys’ footrace in the Highland Games at the age of nine. On top of that, Cassie’s slender body might be similar in shape and size to her mother’s, but her face was the mirror image of her father’s. She had his long straight nose with the little bump just at the beginning of the cartilage. Her lips were wide and thick and permanently curved into her father’s trickster’s smile, which always fooled people into thinking. she was amused by what they did or said.

Worse, she had John MacArthur’s chin, broad and blunt; not the sweet pointed chin that made her mother’s face so very pretty.

Cassie held her tongue until they reached the lower floor of the house. In the spacious hall, she blandly asked, “Who’s to supper then?”

“Och.” Maggie preened in a conspiratorial voice, unable to withhold the importance of her visitors. “The travelers, Cassie, the ones who saved ye. Euan told me they are the Marquis of Hamilton’s surveyors, whom the king has commissioned to make a new map of Scotland.”

“Aye, I know,” Cassie said lamentably.

Stunned, Maggie replied, “You know that? And here, Millie told me you did not speak of anything with them save the direction of our farmhouse. Cassie? I don’t understand.”

Cassie shrugged and looked away from her sister, at a loss to explain what she knew and hadn’t mentioned in her month-long visit.

“Something is going on here, Cassandra MacArthur,” Maggie demanded, as curious as a cat let loose in a basket of knitting yarn. “How is it that you know what a marquis and a king are a-plotting?”

“I dinna say I knew that.” Cassie took a deep breath, not knowing where to start, exactly. “Would it suffice to say I guessed who they were by the way they were measuring MacDonald’s high meadow?”

“No, it will not. Cassie, talk to me for heaven’s sake. Here we are indebted to them for two lives, yours and Ian’s. So they’ve earned the right to sit to our table as honored guests. For heaven’s sake, talk. to me!”

Cassie forced herself to look her sister in the eye and reluctantly began to tell her about the king’s messenger who came to Castle MacArthur in early December. “He brought two letters from the king, one to MacArthur and one specifically to me, which I received into my hand directly. The seal had not been broken so I am assured that MacArthur does not know the contents of the letters.”

“The king wrote to you?” Maggie did her best to keep her impatience under control. Cassie could be maddeningly secretive.

“Well, that’s the thing, you see,” Cassie murmured softly. “The king’s letter was really addressed to Lady Quickfoot, but the messenger gave it to me as though it had said Cassandra MacArthur.”

“And the contents…”

“Well, it was a royal command.” Cassie sat on the long bench of the table. Maggie settled beside her and took hold of her hand. “King James commands Lady Quickfoot to put her ‘services as a mountain guide at the disposal of his surveyors, Gordon and Hamilton, as they measure and survey Lochaber.’ The king also requires that all the proprieties of the Highlands be met.” Cassie stopped short of telling Maggie the worst codicil. Should Lady Quickfoot be a femme sole, all proprieties would be satisfied by her marriage to one Robert Gordon, surveyor, upon his arrival in Lochaber. The king was thorough, she’d give him that much.

Maggie went from shock to laughter. “King James wrote all of that to Lady Quickfoot, did he?”

“Aye,” Cassie replied somberly. “‘Twere it addressed to me, I would have told you straight away about it…but…it’s such a conundrum!”

“Aye,” Maggie said, her mouth having the same difficulty keeping the smiles at bay as Cassie was. Then the two of them burst into laughter.

“Oh, that’s rich,” Maggie laughed, wiping at the tears in her eyes. “To think our king doesna know a children’s tale from reality…It’s too funny for words. Why, imagine what you would do if he commanded Lady Quickfoot to come to court.”

“Well, I guess I’d dress up Millie and her dolls and send them to court, wouldn’t I?” Cassie broke up again, holding her sides to keep from hurting her tender ribs with laughter. “You know who’s behind this, don’t you?”

“No. Who?” Maggie asked, wiping her face with her apron.

“That devil, our dear brother Jamie.” Cassie reverted to her normal solemnity easily enough. “I can just see him at court, spinning tales to the king that would make mine sound as tame as Ian’s favorite pudding.”

“Aye, it has Jamie’s mark of deviltry to it. He’s as glib as an English bard. Well, you never know, Cassie, perhaps some good would come of this. You could be invited to court. Imagine your chances for finding the richest husband inland, if that were to happen. You’d certainly no’ have to settle for one of father’s choices then, would you?”

Cassie remained firmly noncommittal on that subject, which made Maggie press her hand down upon Cassie’s resting fingers. “Are you no’ ready to be making yer own home somewhere, Cassie?” Maggie asked, saying what was on her mind.

“Aye, well, I am and I’m not.” Cassie shrugged her shoulders rather helplessly. There wasn’t an awful lot she seemed able to do about her situation either way.

“Has Father no’ had offers for ye since Alastair was-buried?”

Plain speaking seemed to be Maggie’s forte inside these walls. Cassie wasn’t particularly warm to the subject, but she couldn’t see any route around the truth. After a moment of thought, her mouth deepened at the corners in that perpetual smile that graced her face. “Well, aye, one or two that made my hair turn white.”

“Old men, then?” Maggie didn’t quite frown over Cassie’s less than forthright admission.

“Older than James and Lord Sinclair, none so old as MacArthur.”

“He wouldn’t marry you off to an old bounder, would he?”

“Not unless I make him mad again. This past May he swore he would hand me off to the next man that offered.”

“What had you done?” Maggie laughed. Her littlest sister had been telling their father off from the time she started talking. Maggie had always counted that to the fact that redheads rubbed each other raw. So it had been for their elder brother, Jamie, too, as well as their oldest sister, Roslyn.

Cassie had taken the eternal battle for autonomy to a new height. At the age of ten she began speaking of their father only as “MacArthur” whenever she was forced to refer to him in passing speech. Maggie didn’t know why Cassie did that, but she’d always been curious to discover the reason. In that regard, Cassie had been as closemouthed on the subject as their father had been.

Cassie’s face scrunched up in a comical scowl. “It wasn’t anything, really. MacArthur favors his newest confidant, Douglas Cameron. You know him, the Cameron with the black beard that struts about like he’s the good Lord’s gift to womankind.”

“Aye, I ken who, sister. I’ve heard my serving girls call him Douglas the Darling, for he’s bedded every serving wench in Lochaber. Let’s see to the table while we’re talking,” Maggie urged, and the two of them got up and set to work taking out trestles to enlarge the table for supper. The corners of Maggie’s mouth twitched. “Douglas Cameron’s a verra comely man.”

“I’ve seen handsomer.” Cassie refused to be pinned on that point.

“He gets along verra well with Euan,” Maggie added. “They arm-wrestled to see who was stronger, and damn me if it didn’t turn out to be a draw.”

To that Cassie said promptly, “Aye, well, he’s a man’s man, isn’t he now?”

“Mumph.” Maggie laughed. “So what did you do to poor Douglas the Darlin’ that put you on the black side of Papa’s temper? Stick a burr under his saddle or poison his brose?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do anything like that,” Cassie said, with her blue eyes so wide and innocent she couldn’t be speaking the truth. “He came courting Beltane night, the first of May, and asked me to walk out with him. I said no—I wasna going up to the revelry in the hills. I wanted no part of the fumbling in the bushes, though I did say I’d go to the May crowning and watch the games earlier in the day.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, he said I was being as prudish as a papist nun, and I pretended neatly not to know what exactly he meant by that. The poor vain soul was being sorely put upon to explain himself clearly, so he grabbed me and smacked me on my lips to diagram things more clearly, then groped at my breasts like he was milking a cow.”

“Did you like it?” Maggie prodded, taking a cloth from her pocket to buff down the long polished tabletop.

Cassie looked horrified at the very thought. “Has breathing the air on a mountain farm robbed you of the last of your wits, Maggie MacArthur? No, I didn’t like it at all! Douglas the Darling hasn’t taken a bath since he sprouted the first whisker of that great black beard on his face. He smells like pig farts. After I clobbered him to bring him back to his senses, I told him that, too. You know what he did?”

Maggie shook her head, helpless to contain her laughter.

“He tried to put his hand under my skirts!” Cassie complained indignantly.

As straight-faced as she could, Maggie replied, “Well, Cassie, what else is a man with his reputation to do when you’ve likened his romantic efforts to pig farts?”

Cassie gave in to the need to laugh heartily. So did Maggie.

“Curiously enough, MacArthur laughed when I told him that, too.” Cassie grinned.

“So how did you get out of randy Douglas’s clutches and into our father’s bad graces?”

“I pushed Douglas off the battery wall to get away from the bounder. He slid down the stable roof and then tumbled into the well. Douglas caught the ague from the dunking and couldn’t drag his dirty hide off his cot for more than a month. That caused MacArthur to miss the Glorious Twelfth and all the fair hunting days between.”

“Now wait there.” Maggie held up her hand. “The Glorious Twelfth is in August. Douglas should have been up and running by August.”

“Och, did I forget to mention that when Douglas crawled out of the well he had a broken leg?”

“Cassie!”

Cassie shrugged. “Serves the great big oaf right. It didn’t mend straight. He can’t track boars anymore or keep up with the other hunters on foot. MacArthur is racking his wits trying to figure out what to do with the man now when he comes a-visiting. Douglas eats as much as a horse, and we don’t even want to go into his other charming attributes. Mother has about had it with Douglas the Darling and told MacArthur not to invite him to Achanshiel anymore.”

“Ah, I get it now. So what you’re really saying is that father’s sleeping on the cold side of the master’s bed and that’s why he threatened to marry you off to the next man that asks, bounder or no’. Look at things this way, Cassie, you’ve got two new men to choose from now that surveyors have come from court.”

“One’s a Gordon, the other is a Hamilton. They’re dead men if they cross Glencoe into Lochaber. Besides, I wouldn’t have either,” Cassie replied, ignoring the niggling frisson under her skin that told her she’d definitely have one of them.

“I can tell you this—I’d likely run off to Wales if MacArthur tried to force me to marry a man I find disgusting.”

Maggie threw up her hands. “Well then, there’s a whole countryside full of eligible of men. Didn’t you like one of the young Maitlands that danced with you at Cathy’s wedding?”

“I liked talking to him. Maggie, I don’t like really big men—warriors.”

“Och, don’t tell me you want a farmer.” Maggie groaned. “You’ve been cosseted and waited on hand and foot since the day you were born. A farmer’s no good for you.”

“I’m no more a princess than you were,” Cassie said, justifying herself. “I’ve been thinking about marrying a vicar.”

Maggie rolled her eyes at the ceiling. She probably couldn’t get her Catholic husband to go to a Protestant wedding if her sister married a vicar, let alone allow the two of them to enter his house as a married couple. “A vicar, Cassie? Why a vicar?”

It wasn’t easy for Cassie to explain, since she hadn’t had much time to explore the fantasy completely herself. “What I mean is I like to read, and all the ministers I know are always reading.”

“So.you want a learned and educated man.”

“Aye, and one who isn’t adverse to bathing,” Cassie quipped with a flashing grin.

“They will all do that if you make it a requirement to touching you,” Maggie assured her.

Men, in Maggie’s estimation, were merely overgrown, hairy little boys, needing to be managed and nurtured very carefully by a wise woman who knew what she needed and he needed. Cassie clearly hadn’t caught on to that fact. But then, her sister was very used to going about things her own way—and spent too much time in the hills reading and wandering, attended by no more than a couple of elderly gillies their father trusted with her safety.

Maggie came around the table and gave her sister a hug. “Oh, you mustn’t worry, sweetling. There’s the right man for you out there somewhere. All the good ones can’t be taken. I must go and see how the cooks are doing. Set out the candles, will you please?”

“Of course I will.” Cassie squeezed Maggie back, and only cast the smallest of envious glances at Maggie’s smooth unblemished complexion as their quick embrace ended. “Why did I get all the freckles and you didn’t get a one?”

“Because God always saves his best for last.” Maggie kissed her cheek and left her with one final gem of sisterly advice. “After you’ve done the candles, do go an’ rest awhile. You’re not as strong as you think you are, and the bairns willna let you go to bed without another of your stories.”

Cassie turned to the cupboards. She tucked her hand across her lips to cover a yawn, and the unconscious gesture brought to mind a stranger’s fingers touching her mouth. An honorable stranger whose liberties had been performed in an heroic and generous manner. She was not going to think about that.

She was not going to think about King James’s letter or demands either. It wasn’t her wish to lead a Gordon around Lochaber, revealing to him where each of her kinsmens’ fortresses and strongholds were situated in the hills. King James had the wrong idea of Cassandra and Lady Quickfoot.

Cassie only elaborated on older, more traditional MacArthur clan legends. The king thought he could marry off a woman who didn’t exist. Lady Quickfoot was a character in oral stories that were over two hundred years old. She wasn’t real. She wasn’t Cassandra MacArthur!

Besides that, the last person in the world she would marry would be a Gordon. He could well be the very man responsible for killing her beloved Alastair. God might forgive the Gordons the men they killed in battle, but that didn’t mean the Campbells or MacArthurs ever would. Not this MacArthur at least.

Did she have the king’s letter in her hands this moment, Cassie would burn it. At least she was consoled by the fact that the letter commanding “Lady Quickfoot” to serve his royal interests in Lochaber was safely hidden where no one could ever find it—behind a loose panel in the headboard of Cassie’s bed at Castle MacArthur. Furthermore, its obscure addendum to Cassandra MacArthur regarding an unacceptable marriage to a Gordon would remain hidden as well.

Instead, she turned her thoughts toward supper, hoping it wouldn’t last too long tonight. She, for one, intended to go to bed as early as the children did.

Cassie took out Maggie’s tall candelabrum. Beeswax candles were kept in the stillroom, where it was damp and cool all year long. She fetched her cloak and headed outside. The darkening sky above the faraway mountains took her breath away. Cassie stopped perfectly still in her tracks, absorbing all her eyes beheld.

To the west, the faintest glow of sunset still tinted the winter sky, but to the east it was dark enough for the stars to shine though the gloaming.

Cassie leaned on the fence, enjoying the quiet and the wind and the silence that settled so peacefully around this farm. If she stayed out long enough, the stars would become so bright and thick in the cold air that they looked like faint clouds racing and twirling in the heavens, heralds of Apollo’s chariot. She had half a mind to go up in the hills to where she always felt secure and one with the elements. That would certainly solve her current dilemma.

Granted, this Robert Gordon had said nothing to her about Lady Quickfoot. But that didn’t mean he was unaware of Lady Quickfoot’s identity.

Something bothered Cassie more than it had earlier. Alone, she could feel Gordon’s hand cupping her breast, touching her throat and chin and fluttering across cold, sodden cloth stuck at her waist.

Cassie shook her head, refusing to dwell on such memories. She needed to leave her sister’s farm as soon as possible, by first light tomorrow, before the subject of Lady Quickfoot could ever be broached. Before that blasted letter from King James could ever be mentioned.




Chapter Four (#ulink_468bcbc4-1849-5ea3-89d4-8c14c5b797b9)


A glaze of ice filmed over the water that Robert had planned to use for his ablutions before supper. One bucket was far too little if he was going to be presentable enough to sit down to the lady of the house’s table. No matter how filthy he was, Robert drew the line at immersing himself in the nearest loch. He refused to suffer such frigid torment twice.

He was too damned civilized for that.

The last hot bath he’d taken had been at an inn in Glen Orchy. He consoled himself with the hope that there would be inns up the road in Lochaber, too. He wouldn’t put the womenfolk of this house through the extra work of boiling water so he could shave or wash. They worked as hard in a day as he did. That mild consideration meant that those same ladies would have to suffer his presence at supper with a week’s stubble of beard, packing creases in his spare shirt and a kilt that had received no more than serious brushing to free it of Glencoe’s rich black mud.

He would wash anything he possessed in water drawn from a good well and did so all the time on his travels. Hence he stripped down inside the barn to his kilt and bare feet for the second night in a row, grimly facing the task before him.

A yellowed cake of hard lye soap made a gray lather on his hands. The light in the barn was dim, only a punched tin lantern helped him with his difficult task.

Road dirt was one thing, but the dirt from the muck in the byre was of another class. Robert dunked his hands in the water to rinse them and revolted against using that soil to wash his face or other parts. He had to throw it out and fetch fresh.

He shook the excess from his hands, picked up the bucket and went out into the darkening night. He didn’t really feel the snow under his bare feet. Experience on the march and through wintry mountains had hardened him to the point that he only felt the cold when he actually warmed up. There were some crofts that he couldn’t remain long in now. Robert couldn’t breathe when the air was close and overheated indoors, or so smoky it choked him.

Actually, he was most content to have a barnor a shed to pass a cold night in, sufficient harbor from the wind. Mostly he and Alex sheltered with crofters. Farmsteads like this were as rare as royal princes in Scotland. Wherever they were at suppertime, they were always invited to share what fare the family had. Glencoen Farm was a double boon. The food offered on this prosperous farm’s table was filling and plentiful.

If there was one thing Robert missed on this mission to complete the first stage of his cartographer’s work, it was hot food, served to him regularly. When this journey ended, he didn’t think he would be able to look at a blackened coney on a spit with any sort of relish. But he did now. At this moment he’d have eaten a raw rabbit. That was how ravenous he always was at the end of every arduous day of hiking and measuring mountains.

Come June, the task would be over. Nothing was going to distract Robert from the goals he had so permanently fixed in his mind—nothing. Once all of Scotland was measured, they could sit down to the next task, that of compiling all the measurements, diagrams and drawings into a concise and perfect graphic rendering of Scotland as she really, truly was.

In Campbell country, King James’s approval of their work carried about as much weight as the Marquis of Hamilton’s endorsement—none. The coin of commerce in Glen Orchy and Lochaber was the bond and goodwill of the Earl of Argyll, Archibald Campbell. Even if Robert had garnered that august man’s endorsement it wouldn’t have mattered. He was a Gordon and Highland Campbells hated all Gordons. Their ill will came with the territory.

On the positive side, Robert and Alex knew more about Scotland than any other Scotsman alive. They had cataloged the elevation of nearly five hundred mountains, identified the longitude and latitude of each hamlet, village and township in the realm and measured the length and breadth of every lake, bay, inlet and peninsula in their convoluted, mountainous homeland.

All save what terrain lay in the shire of Lochaber.

Lochaber was the last. The only shire remaining on their list to be surveyed. Someday soon, the end result would be a map that was as precisely accurate as their mathematical brains could make it.

It was an occupation that would fill the best years of their lives and no small ambition. They were sworn on their scholars’ vow before God Almighty to make their map the most accurate map ever made of their Scotland. A map that navigators could use for centuries to come with complete faith in its accuracy.

Since the age of ten and four Robert had been assigned to the George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly’s vanguard, as a scout reconnoitering the terrain ahead of the earl’s army. Robert had come to cherish accurate maps and guarded them with his life. It had paid in the end. He and his brothers and most of his kinsmen were all alive and for the most part, the victors in the recent civil wars.

Too many of Argyll’s poorly prepared Campbells weren’t.

Robert shook himself out of his reverie and stamped his way to the well. He hoped the day’s luck held and MacGregor would crack open a bottle of his whiskey and invite them to share a wee dram or two of it.

The mud was more dense at the farm’s well than anywhere else outside the pigs’ byre. No matter where he’d traveled it never seemed to get cold enough to freeze the mud under a bunch of dirty pigs. He caught the rope and pulled down the well pole, dropping the bucket into the water below. The crackle of filmy ice snapped in the cold air, quite loud.

“Who’s there?” a started voice asked.

Robert turned to find the speaker and found a woman at the fence gate of a shed. He raised his hand and called out, “Don’t be alarmed. It’s only me, Robert Gordon, the surveyor.”

“Ah, the man who saved my life,” replied the woman in a rueful voice.

He squinted across the increasing gloom and found the wry speaker. It was definitely the same young lady Robert had watched skate with the farmer’s children—the redheaded maiden with freckles on her nose and lips set in a perpetual smile. The young woman whose life he’d saved and body he’d held and breath he’d shared. He’d wondered if she was avoiding him apurpose.

His Lady Quickfoot wore a most unlikely disguise—that of a simple hill farmer’s sister.

It was dark. Not so very dark that he couldn’t see her hair forming a river of captured fire against the deep darkness of her woolen cloak. Drat that, he thought. What was she doing out in the cold? She was standing still as the night air against the closed gate. Perhaps she’d only come outside to take some cooler air. He hoped that wasn’t a sign that the farmhouse felt like Lord Hamilton’s African hothouse.

Robert shook his head and told himself it was none of his business what she was doing outdoors. Did he have the good sense the Lord had blessed him with, he’d get his water and go back to the barn before his whole body turned into an icicle without his ever knowing it.

He could forget that he knew she was Lady Quickfoot and go on about his business. He didn’t need a woman’s help to complete one speck of his work.-If the truth were told—which it never could be in Scotland when Campbell kinsmen were about—Robert had his own suspicions about King James’s peculiar motives. Why the king would even want to pair another Campbell or Gordon together was beyond him. Robert needed nothing more than his own astute gifts of logic and scientific investigation to complete this mission of his in Lochaber. Yet the king thought otherwise.

Ignoring the beautiful woman, Robert tipped the dipper and poured its contents into his bucket. The excess splashed onto a layer of dirty straw. Cold water skittered across snow, ice, straw and black mud, soaking the toughened soles of his bare feet.

“There’s a huge kettle full of heated water to bathe with in the shed behind the kitchens,” Cassie said, reluctantly deducing his purpose for sojourning out into the elements in only his kilt.

It neither alarmed nor impressed her to see any man going about without his sark at this time of the day on the farm. Nor could she figure out why she was speaking to him. She might well owe him something for her life, but that debt ought to be well paid by Euan’s offer of hospitality. Then she remembered, Gordon hadn’t just saved her. He’d rescued Ian, too. So Cassie offered more…as an appeasement to her conscience. Maggie would expect that of her.

“Euan keeps soaps and razors and scrub brushes for all to use. You are welcome to help yourself. Your friend has already gone in to see to his toilette. You’ve time before supper. Do you want me to show you where to go?”

Robert looked down at the full bucket of cold water. She couldn’t have tempted him more if she’d invited him to share her feather bed, provided the sheets were clean, and her body sweet and perfumed of lavender or roses.

He made a strangled sound inside the back of his throat that Cassie took to mean “give me a moment,” about-faced and marched back into the barn. He came out moments later, his plaid swirled around his body, his feet stuffed in muddy boots, strutting stiff-legged like the soldier he really was straight to her.

She thanked the coming night for obscuring her reaction to his face and those eyes that had taken her breath away when she’d come out of her deep faint with his lips hovering over her freezing mouth. He’d been so warm and alive and concerned, she’d thought him an archangel. Thank God he didn’t know who she was. No one at this farm would reavel her connection to Lady Quickfoot, either.

“The washhouse is this way.” She gathered her cloak around her and picked up her hems, leading the surveyor to the back of the manse. There, the kitchens and laundry room became a tangled warren of additions, expanded the south wing of the house.

Cassie opened the door and peeked inside, then stood it ajar. Her quick glance confirmed that the other surveyor looked better for the washing he’d already done. He was about to shave as Cassie motioned Robert Gordon to pass inside.

She stared frankly at Robert Gordon and boldly wondered if his darkly handsome face would wash up as well as his companion’s had. A bit shy of her own romantic thoughts and troubled by the memory of his life-restoring kiss, she wagged her hand in the general direction of tubs, soaps and huge black kettle steaming above the washhouse hearth.

“Euan and Old Angus have already gone in to the hall,” she said in a husky voice. “Help yourself to what you need. Excuse me, I have to get candles for the table.”

“Your servant, milady.” Robert bowed precisely to her. She surprised the very devil out of him by dropping to a brief but very formal curtsy. Then she was gone from his sight, vanished beyond the closed door in a heartbeat.

That rattled Robert. The last deep curtsy to him personally had been given by the Duke of Atholl’s youngest daughter. The silly twit had thought him some romantic knight errant, equivalent to the gallantto-his-very-soul adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh. Granted the setting had been Holyrood and Lord Hamilton had insisted Robert and Alex attend an audience with King James and explain their ambitious plan to the king and his full court. Both Robert and Alex had been flush with enthusiasm and idealism of the kind that belongs only to the very young and foolish.

As suited the king’s pleasure, each had dressed in his foppish best to please the court. Robert Gordon had cut the best figure with his lean, athletic grace and inbred military bearing, and well he knew it. At twenty-one his young man’s conceit had been without limit. The magical part of that affair was King James was not much older than he, Timothy or Alex, and was instantly caught up in the romance of their altruistic quest. Instead of being bored to tears by their pompous reasoning, James VI was delighted.

Had a bitterly contested civil war not interfered, their map would be complete today.

But war had interfered and could do so again before this new year was out. Robert accepted what he must. When a Gordon cross truach, a fiery cross, summoned the men of clan Gordon to their laird’s aid, Robert answered duty’s call. Today was another day of tenuous peace, forced upon the Campbells and Gordons by their king. Each day that the peace continued, Robert thanked God for it and best used the time to advance his work closer to completion.

Privately, he added his own prayers that the king’s peace would continue into a second year with no renewed hostilities.

The young woman whose life he’d saved was a Campbell kinswoman, his clan’s avowed enemy in every way, shape and form. He must never forget that fact when dealing with Cassandra MacArthur. Nor could he forget that he, needed the king’s peace to accomplish his goals of finishing his work. How much could Lady Quickfoot affect the uneasy peace? Would he: be better off ignoring her identity and hillfolk title. completely?

Robert snapped out of his reverie-induced thoughts as Alex snapped a razor blade against his face. He cut a crater through the thick lather coating his cheeks and hiked a fair eyebrow into the tangled elflocks dripping on his brow. He pointed the blade at the empty tub and full kettle, then spoke. “The water’s still hot, Robbie.”

When Alexander Hamilton deigned to speak at all, it was most commonly in the acquired brogue of the Lowlands. Alex’s innate inclination to shy from conversation with most Highlanders had been honed to a finely measured reticence by their travels in Glenlyon and his reluctance to place any further claim on his Lowlander father’s good graces. That they had funding to pursue their work was enough.

“Did you see that?” Robert asked in amazement.

“Eh, Robbie, what? No, I guess I didn’t.”

“That young woman curtsied to me. To me! For pity’s sake, don’t I look like something that just crawled out of a cave or washed up with a pile of wreckage from the Armada?”

Alex looked him up and down with a familiar jaundiced smirk, then said, “Oh, aye, laddie, you look all of that disreputable and then some—with your skinny arse barely keeping that kilt around your hips. Better ask MacGregor’s goodwife if she can sew a few more pleats in that raggedy scrap before you put it back on.”

“Shut yer face, ye half-wit.” Robert flung his kilt onto a peg and folded into the steaming, soapy tub. He sat a while just enjoying the heat swirling around his feet and hips, the tub deep enough with him in it to cover his navel.

“Mayhap it wasn’t so curious. You did save her life, Rob.” Alex resumed his silent shaving, the understatement in his words reverberating against the low rafters.

Robert swatted that statement aside as he might an annoying horse fly, firmly and irrevocably. He wasn’t going to launch himself on any young woman’s heroic pedestal and remain there long enough to be snared romantically deep in Campbell territory. Not when his surname was Gordon and would stay Gordon all the rest of his days.

“What do you intend to do about your Lady Quickfoot?” Alex asked softly. As a spy this quiet man ‘was always quick to draw the clearest deductions.

Robert’s dark eyebrows narrowed in a concerned frown. “I haven’t thought it through yet.”

He didn’t want to consider it now, either. He took a deep breath of the heavily scented air of this dark room and found it achingly aromatic. The sweet smells of soap and hair tonics competed with the overpowering aroma of the haunch of mutton sizzling in the kitchen next door.

One of the farm’s servants came in from the kitchen and out though the door into the yard. Robert knew Alex would not say anything more for a good while, so he began to wash his head, soaking his long, tangled hair with hot water.

Lined up on a shelf at his elbow were. soáps and sponges, back brushes and boar-bristle brushes to get the crusted soil off his elbows and knees and hands.

It was a while before he became conscious of Hamilton’s chuckles behind him. Robert turned and glared at his friend. “Well, what?” he demanded.

“I think there must be a lot of Viking blood running in the veins of all you Gordons, Robbie.”

“And what led you to that outlandish assumption?”

“Every last Gordon I’ve ever met takes more pleasure in a teacup full of hot water than they do in an entire loch. If you weren’t so squeamish a line, you could get the same task done and over with as easily as any Hamilton does.”

“And following on that erroneous pretense to logic, the first Hamiltons were great, fat, bloody seals, were they not?”

“At least we bathe whenever the mood strikes us, ice in the lake or no.” Alex quipped, then ducked so the soapy sponge flying at him didn’t stain his only clean shirt.



Cassie’s brow puckered as she hurried back to the stillroom, her purpose high on her mind. She mustn’t dawdle any longer. She didn’t want Maggie sticking her head out one of the doors, hollering for her to come with candles before supper turned cold.

As she selected candles from the supply in the stillroom, she couldn’t help wondering about the reticent young man. That bow of his had been delivered with what she knew to be military precision, modestly correct, elegant and brief. There was no artifice involved, no courtly posing or showing of the leg, which would have been ludicrous given his state of undress.

Twelve thick candles gathered in a fold of her cloak, Cassie shut the door of the stillroom firmly behind her and hurried back to the hall. She set each candelabrum on an imaginary line bisecting the long table. By then Sybil and Dorcas had come to put out the cold platters and tankards and silver.

Cassie hurried upstairs to see to her own toilette.

She unlaced her stays and shed her day dress, changed into a clean, ironed shift and scrubbed her face with mint water and coarse oatmeal to bleach her freckles. It never helped. Neither did vinegar nor great quantities of fresh cucumbers in season nor any of the exotic creams the Gypsies concocted or the tinkers sold. She powdered the worst of the spots and smoothed the rice powder onto her throat and shoulders with a soft puff of cotton lint.

She shook out her best gown and pulled it over her head, settling it down her chest and belly. Dorcas came to tie up her laces just as she picked up her new embroidered stomacher to put on over the gown.

“Is it time?” Cassie asked.

“Not yet,” Dorcas said. She pulled the stomacher tight and threaded the laces with nimble fingers, drawing the corsetlike outer garment snug across Cassie’s breasts and stomach.

The tight serge weave of the navy wool gown suited Cassie’s coloring, darkening her pale eyes and making the pure white linen of her cuffs and shift look pristine and white. Cassie sat so that Dorcas could tuck her slippers over her heels and do up the laces. It wasn’t possible to bend forward so much as an inch in the stiff stomacher when it was laced.

“Did ye hear that one of those surveyors is a Sassenach?”

“English, you say?” Cassie tilted her head, managing to feign surprise. “Which one?”

“‘Tis the stout one, Hamilton. The handsome one is a Gordon, a Scot.”

“Dorcas—” Cassie brought her head close to the woman’s to whisper emphatically “—you dinna think they’re here to forage out MacGregor’s gold and slit our throats in the dark of night?”

“Och, Lady Cassandra.” The elder clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Dinna be teasin’ me like ye do the bairns. I’m too wise for yer tall tales. Here, let me put a brush to yer hair.”

“I’m only teasing because you well know that Hamiltons have been notoriously breeding sons and daughters openly in Scotland since the Norman conquest, even if they do have the appalling habit of kidnapping rich English heiresses for brides.”

“Humph,” Dorcas grumbled. “Those that claim to be Scottish are Lowlanders.”

“So now it’s only Highlanders that deserve to be counted our countrymen?”

“There’s no much difference between a Lowlander and an Englishman, is there?” Dorcas said firmly.

“Aye. I hear tell they both get in and out of bed the same way,” Cassie agreed, but added a codicil in a delicious gossipy whisper. “One leg at a time.”

“Lady Cassandra!” Dorcas tugged the brush against Cassie’s scalp. “Ye shouldn’t be talkin’ of such scandalous things, or thinkin’ them either. And mind that those bairns don’t spill anythin’ on this fine gown. ‘Tis lovely enough to wear to the crowning of the king.”

Cassie didn’t think so, but it was good that her abigail did. “Thank you, Dorcas, I’ll do my best not to make a mess of it. You needn’t bother with brushing my hair too much. I’ll wear it braided tomorrow for the journey home. I want to get an early start, before the house has a chance to rouse, mind you, so pack tonight, please.”

“‘Tis glad that I am to hear that,” Dorcas declared. “And will ye be telling Lady Margaret that you’re going?”

“Aye, I’ll tell her at supper. See that’you keep my plans secret from the surveyors,” Cassie said unequivocally.

“So I will do,” Dorcas snapped, giving her a puzzled look. “I’m glad of that.”

“Why’s that? You never like going back to Castle MacArthur any more than I do usually.”

“Very well, if ye must know, Lady Cassandra, I don’t want the responsibility of ye being in the company of a Sassenach.”

Cassie chuckled. Dorcas thought she wanted to escape poor Alexander Hamilton when nothing could be further from the truth. He wasn’t the surveyor whose company would bother Cassandra at all. Robert Gordon, on the other hand, bothered her a great deal. She didn’t understand why, not yet, at least. Nor did she want to stick around and find out. “Betwixt us at dinner, we’ll probably scare the poor man back to London before the pudding is served,” Cassie said, and gave her abigail’s hand a squeeze.

Dressing and grooming done, Cassie went down to her sister’s hall, wondering how this evening at Glencoe Farm would turn out. If Maggie sat poor Alex Hamilton anywhere near Dorcas, he’d likely not get through the meal without getting a dirk stuck in his heart.



To Cassie’s great disappointment, supper turned into more of a trial than she’d bargained for.

Nothing had prepared her for Gordon’s appearance in Euan MacGregor’s hall. Granted the impact his eyes had made on her at first glance should have given her a clue, but eyes were only one of a dozen or more features that could attract a woman’s heart.

From somewhere in that tinker’s pack of overstuffed saddlebags, Robert Gordon had pulled out a spotless lace-edged cravat and tied it around his throat with continental flair that was more suited to the king’s court than a hillside farm. Likewise, a set of beautiful cuffs spilled out of the sleeves of an elegantly cut black jacket. The knife-edge pleats of his kilt set off the lean lines of his tall form perfectly.

His beard-stubbled face had been scraped clean, his hair pulled back into a tightly bound queue. All in all, he quite took Cassie’s breath away.

His hands elegantly punctuated his words every time he spoke. Swallowing food she never tasted, Cassie watched him as surreptitiously as she could, fascinated, but not wanting anyone at the table to guess how intrigued by this man she really was. Robert Gordon had transformed himself from a vagabond to a peer of the realm in the space of three quarters of an hour.

And he had kissed her.

Cassie found herself blushing to the roots of her hairline. Thank the Lord no one noticed. Even Maggie was much too entertained by the humorous anecdotes the surveyors told of their travels and travails while measuring Scotland.

Listening, Cassie realized very quickly that she was in the presence of a master in the art of dissembling. Robert Gordon never gave one hint why mapping the Highlands was so important to him any more than he missed savoring a heaping serving of the excellent foods put in front of him. Nor did conversation ever stray to what purpose their patron, the Marquess of Hamilton, had in mind for funding their audacious endeavor either.

“Why must ye make a new map of Scotland? What’s wrong with the map we have?” Millie’s clear soprano voice sang out, directly asking the question they all wanted answered.

Robert Gordon laid his hands flat on the table beside his empty plate, turned to Millie and answered her in a serious voice. “Because all maps of Scotland are wrong.”

“How do ye know they’re wrong?”

Children, Cassie knew, would do almost anything to escape being bored. She wanted to applaud her niece, but a quick check of Millie’s parents’ nettling brows kept Cassie silent.

“That’s a very good question, Millicent.” That he remembered her niece’s name took Cassie aback. “How do you usually know if something is wrong, Millie? May I call you Millie?”

Now he had Cassie’s undivided attention. Men rarely took notice of curious little girls, let alone engaged in conversation with them.

Cassie watched his right hand unfasten a horn button on his coat, then settle contentedly on the warm bulge of his lean stomach. She saw that his tapered fingers and nails were as clean as her own and frowned privately because that was another mark in his favor. Drat the man! Why did she keep discovering new things about him she liked?

“Oh, aye,” Millie chirped. “That’s what everyone calls me. I know something’s wrong because my da tells me so.” Millie then thought about what she’d said and added, “Or I ask my mother.”

“And if they can’t tell you the answer?”

Undaunted, Millie responded, “I would go to the Bible.”

“Have you seen any maps of Scotland in a Bible, Millie?” He sought clarity as subtly as an Edinburghtrained tutor.

“No, they didn’t know about Scotland in Our Lord’s time. My grandfather, Laird MacArthur, has maps of Scotland. I’ve seen them, but he won’t let me play with them because he says they’re more precious than jewels.”

“When I was a little older than you, I sailed as my uncle’s cabin boy to the Orneys and learned to navigate the ship, chart the course it traveled each day at sea. I learned to use tools that correctly measure a ship’s position., Let me give you an example. Do you know how far the pond you were skating at yesterday is from your home?”

Millie’s face scrunched up in deep consideration of that question. She looked to her father, then without any prompting said proudly, “A wee stretch of the legs is all.”

“Aye.” Robert Gordon smiled at the little girl, lavishing the child with his undivided attention.

Cassie thought the smile very kind of him. He had a beautiful smile, white, even teeth and a well-formed head. His brown hair was thick and wavy, still damp and curly at the nape of his neck. She tried to imagine him in a court wig and couldn’t.

She clapped her hand to her face and looked out upon the proceedings through widened fingers. Why was she was even trying to fit a vagabond wanderer into her imaginary daydreams?

“Three miles uphill is a wee stretch of any lassie’s legs.” Robert Gordon’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Or more precisely, it is exactly fifteen thousand eight hundred forty feet or three miles.”

“Lordy! Do ye mean it for true?” Millie quit staring at the mapmaker’s clear blue eyes and looked at Cassie, exclaiming, “Aunt Cassie, no wonder we dinna skate not nearly so much that day!”

“It’s easier to come down than it is to go up,” Cassie replied.

“Not with Ian dragging on yer skirts,” Millie observed as she turned to her father to see if he had known that his wee stretch of the legs was now officially three long, measurable miles.

Robert Gordon looked over the platters of food to Cassie, who was sitting at her sister’s side. They were alike and they weren’t alike. He’d never have picked them as sisters if the similarity of their blue eyes was not so pronounced. He spoke to them both, but his words rebutted Cassie’s rather foolish observation.




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