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The Lady and the Laird
Nicola Cornick
An Indecent Proposal.Bluestocking darling and secret scribe Lady Lucy MacMorlan has no interest in marriage. Putting herself second to a man is definitely not for her. Instead, she makes a profit from matchmaking others and her clandestine love letters are the hushed talk of Scottish society.Except now her talent is causing distress—one of Lucy’s more provocative letters has just cost Robert, Marquis of Methven, his much-needed betrothal. It doesn’t help that Robert is a bitter enemy of the MacMorlan family with a personal vendetta against Lucy. His revenge? She must marry him or he will wage war on what is left of her good reputation…


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‘RITA
Award-nominated Cornick deftly steeps her latest intriguingly complex Regency historical in a beguiling blend of danger and desire.’ —Booklist on Unmasked

The Lady and the Laird
Nicola Cornick

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Don't miss theScandalous Women of the Tonseries,available now!
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ONE WICKED SIN
MISTRESS BY MIDNIGHT
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DESIRED
FORBIDDEN
Also available fromNicola Cornick
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LORD OF SCANDAL
UNMASKED
THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUCHESS
THE SCANDALS OF AN INNOCENT
THE UNDOING OF A LADY
DAUNTSEY PARK: THE LAST RAKE IN LONDON
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Contents
PROLOGUE (#uce892ebc-685f-51c0-aadf-dada7a396616)
CHAPTER ONE (#u657d5053-aa10-5303-bb48-057eb8527096)
CHAPTER TWO (#u450f5bda-ce9e-5337-bbae-6e0383fbf246)
CHAPTER THREE (#ucb8a6acc-ea34-5ecc-89ea-465f9d8db034)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u752e360f-dccc-57d9-be16-7f28916cec19)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u48fb84ec-9724-5e0b-9c8f-75344ef63cec)
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)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
Forres Castle, Scotland, June 1803
IT WAS A NIGHT made for magic.
The moon was new that night and the sea was a thread of shining silver. The wind sighed through the pine trees and there was the scent of salt on its edge.
“Lucy! Come and watch!”
Lady Lucy MacMorlan turned over in bed and drew the covers up more closely about her ears. She was warm and cozy and she had no urge to leave the cocoon of the blankets in order to shiver in the draught by the window. Besides, she did not want to join in with her sister Alice in casting a spell. They were foolish and dangerous and would only get the two of them into trouble.
“I’m not getting up,” she said, wriggling her toes in the warmth. “I don’t want a husband.”
“Of course you do.” Alice sounded impatient. At sixteen, Lucy’s twin was fascinated by balls and gowns and men. Earlier that evening, Alice had run three times around the ancient sundial in the castle grounds, reciting the words of the equally ancient love spell that on the new moon would give her a glimpse of the man she would wed. Lucy had stayed in the library, reading a copy of Hume’s Essays Moral and Political. Now, after sunset, Alice was awaiting the outcome of her enchantment.
“Of course you will marry,” Alice said again. “What else would you do?”
Read, Lucy thought. Read and write and study. It was more fun.
“Everyone marries.” Alice sounded grown-up, knowledgeable. “We are to make alliances and have children. It’s what the daughters of a duke do. Everyone says so.”
Marry. Have children.
Lucy thought about it, considering the idea rationally as she did all ideas. It was true that it was expected of them, and no doubt it was what their mother would have wanted. She had died when Lucy and Alice were no more than a few years old, but everyone said she had been the diamond of her generation, the elegant daughter of the Earl of Stratharnon who had made a dazzling match and produced a perfect brood of children. Lucy and Alice’s elder sister Mairi was eighteen and already wed. Lucy was not averse to the idea, but she thought she would have to meet a man who was more interesting than a book, and that was more difficult than it sounded.
“Lucy!” Alice’s voice had turned sharp. “Look! Oh look, some of the gentlemen are coming out onto the terrace with their brandy! Which one will I see first? He will be my true love.”
“You have windmills in your head,” Lucy said, “to believe such nonsense.”
Alice was not crushed. She never listened when she was excited. Their father was hosting a dinner that evening, but both his younger daughters were still in the schoolroom and had not been invited. There was a pause. Through the open window, Lucy could hear the sound of voices from below now, masculine laughter. A trace of cigar smoke tickled her nose. There was the clink of glass on stone.
“Oh!” Alice sounded intrigued. “Who is that? I can’t see his face clearly—”
“That will be because he has his back to you,” Lucy said crossly. She was trying to sleep, but it was impossible while Alice kept talking. “Remember the spell. If he has his back to you, that means he will be a false love, not a true one.”
Alice made a dismissive sound. “It’s one of Lord Purnell’s sons, but which?”
“They are all too old for you,” Lucy said. She hunched a shoulder against her sister’s chatter. “Don’t let anyone see you,” she added. “Papa will be furious to hear of one of his daughters hanging out of the window in her nightgown. You’ll be ruined before you are even out.”
Alice was still not listening. She never listened if she did not want to hear. She was like a butterfly, bright and inconsequential, flitting off, paying no attention. “It is Hamish Purnell,” she said. She sounded disappointed. “He is already wed.”
“I told you it was nonsense,” Lucy said.
“Oh, they are arguing!” Excitement leaped into Alice’s voice again. She was as changeable as a weather vane, all disappointment forgotten in a moment. She threw Lucy a glance and then pushed the window open higher, leaning out of the stone embrasure. “Lucy!” she hissed. “Come and see!”
Lucy had heard the change in the voices from the terrace. One moment everything had been smooth and civilized, and the next there was an edge of anger, violence, even, that rippled across her skin, making the hairs stand on end. She slid from the bed and padded across the floor to where Alice was kneeling on the window seat, her body tense as a strung bow, to witness the scene below.
Two men were confronting each other on the terrace directly beneath them. They stood sideways to Lucy, so she could see neither of their faces. She recognized her cousin Wilfred’s voice though, smooth, patrician, holding the slightest sneer.
“Why are you here tonight, Methven? You’re no one, a younger son. I cannot believe my uncle invited you.”
His tone was full of contempt and deliberate provocation. Someone laughed. The men pressed closer, almost encircling the pair like a pack of dogs closing in, sensing a fight.
“Oh!” Alice said. “How rude and horrible Wilfred is! I hate him!”
Lucy had always hated her cousin Wilfred too. He was eighteen, heir to the earldom of Cardross, and he reveled in his status and his family connection to the Duke of Forres. He had spent the past year in London, where rumor said he had spent all his substance on drink and cards and women. Wilfred was snobbish, conceited and boorish, and here, surrounded by his kinsmen and followers, he thought he was brave.
“Perhaps the duke invited me because he has more manners than his nephew,” the other man said. His voice had rougher overtones than Wilfred’s drawl and a hint of Scots burr. He did not step back before Wilfred’s intimidation. He turned and Lucy suddenly saw his face in the light of the new moon. It was strong, the cheekbones, brow and jaw uncompromisingly hard. He was broad, too, wide in the shoulder and tall. Yet studying him, Lucy could see he was still young, no more than nineteen or twenty perhaps.
A whisper went through the men on the terrace. The atmosphere changed. It was more openly antagonistic now, but there was something else there, too, a hint of uncertainty, almost of fear.
Alice evidently felt it too. She had withdrawn into the shelter of the thick velvet curtains that cloaked the window.
“It’s Robert Methven,” she whispered. “What is he doing here?”
“Papa invited him,” Lucy whispered back. “He says he has no time for feuds. He considers them uncivilized.”
The Forres and the Methven clans had traditionally been enemies. The Forreses and their kinsmen the earls of Cardross had held for the Scottish crown since time immemorial. The Methvens had been brigands from the far north, descended from the Viking earls of Orkney, a law unto themselves. Lucy knew little about the Methvens other than that they were reputed to be as fierce and elemental as their ancestors. She looked down on Robert Methven’s face, etched so clear and sharp in the moonlight, and felt a shiver of something primitive echo down her spine.
Enemies for generations... It was in the blood, in the stories she had been told from the cradle. Clan warfare might be a thing of the past, but it was not long gone and old enmities died hard.
“One day,” Wilfred was saying, “I’ll take back the land your family stole from our clan, Methven, and I’ll make you pay. I swear it.”
“I’ll look forward to that.” Robert Methven sounded amused. “Until then, shall we partake of some more of the duke’s excellent brandy?”
He walked straight past Wilfred as though the conversation no longer interested him. Wilfred, looking foolish, barged past him to assert his precedence and go through the drawing room door first. Methven shrugged his broad shoulders, uncaring.
Alice let the curtain fall back into place. “I’m cold,” she grumbled. “I’m going to bed.”
Lucy struggled to reach up and pull the casement window closed. It was just like Alice to leave her to tidy up. That was the trouble with Alice; she was careless and thoughtless and Lucy was always having to smooth matters over for her.
“Hamish Purnell...” she heard Alice murmuring as she slipped beneath the covers of the bed. “Well, I suppose he is quite handsome.”
“He’s married,” Lucy reminded her. “Besides, he had his back to you when you first saw him.”
“He turned round,” Alice argued. “Face to me, back to the sea. True love. Perhaps his wife will die. Be sure to close the window properly, Lucy,” she added, “so no one knows we were watching.”
Lucy sighed, still struggling to shift the window, which remained obstinately stuck. The heavy velvet hem of the curtain knocked over the blue-and-white china vase on the shelf by her elbow. She watched as in slow motion the vase teetered on the edge, escaped her grasping fingers and tumbled through the open window to smash on the terrace below. Transfixed, she stared down into the darkness. Nothing moved. No one came. She could see the broken shards gleaming in the moonlight as they lay scattered on the stones.
“You’ve got to go and pick it up.” Alice’s voice reached her in an urgent whisper. “Otherwise they’ll find it and know we were watching.”
“You go down,” Lucy said crossly. “I didn’t knock the vase over,” Alice argued.
“Neither did I!” For all their age, there was a danger of this degenerating into a nursery quarrel. “You go,” Lucy said. “It was your idea to hang out of the window like a strumpet.”
“If I get caught I’ll be in trouble again,” Alice said. Suddenly her bright face looked young and anxious and Lucy felt a pang of something that felt oddly like pity. “You know how Papa is always telling me how Mama would have been ashamed of how naughty I am.”
Lucy sighed. She could feel herself weakening. She would never get Alice into trouble. It was part of the pact between them, binding them closer than close, sisters and best friends forever. Lucy sighed again and reached for her robe and slippers.
“If you go down the steps in the Black Tower, you will be there quickly and no one will see you,” Alice said.
“I know!” Lucy snapped. Nevertheless she felt a frisson of disquiet as she grabbed her candle and opened the door a bare few inches, enough to slide out. She stole silently along the corridor to the tower stair. It was not that Forres Castle frightened her. She had grown up here and she knew every nook and cranny of the ancient building, all its secrets and all its ghosts. It was flesh and blood she feared, not the supernatural. She could not afford to get caught. She never got into trouble, never did anything wrong. Alice was the impetuous one, tumbling from one scrape into another. Lucy was good.
Nevertheless when she had drawn the bolt on the heavy door at the base of the stairs and pushed it gently open, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy the night. The breeze was soft on her face, laced with the scents of the sea and the soapy smell of the gorse. The sound of the distant waves mingled with the sighing of the pines. The moon was sickle-sharp and golden in a sky of deep velvet. For a moment Lucy had the mad idea to go running across the lawns and down to the sea, to feel the cool sand between her toes and the lap of the cold water on her bare legs.
Of course she would never do it. She was far too well behaved.
With a little sigh she bent to collect the shattered pieces of the blue-and-white pot. The maids would notice the loss and would no doubt report it. Her father would be upset, for it had been one of the late duchess’s favorite pieces. There would be questions and explanations; lies. She and Alice would have to admit that they had broken it, just not that it had happened when they had been leaning out of the window to ogle young men. She hoped her papa would not be too disappointed in her.
“Can I help you with that?”
Lucy jumped and spun around, the shards falling for a second time from her fingers. Robert Methven was standing facing her, his back to the sea. Up close he was as tall, as broad as he had seemed from her vantage point above.
“I didn’t know anyone was there,” Lucy blurted out.
She saw him smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He bent down and picked up the pieces, handing them to her gravely.
“Why don’t you put them down on the balustrade,” he suggested, “before you drop them again?”
“Oh no,” Lucy said. “I have to go. I mean...” But she made no move to scuttle back to the tower door. “What are you doing out here in the dark?” she asked, after a moment.
He shrugged, a quick, dismissive movement. “The company isn’t really to my taste.”
“Wilfred, I suppose,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry, he’s quite horrible.”
“I don’t particularly mind,” Robert Methven said. “But I would not choose to spend time with him.”
“Neither would I,” Lucy said, “and he’s my cousin.”
“Oh, bad luck,” Methven said. “That means you must be—”
“Lucy,” Lucy said. “Lucy MacMorlan.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Lady Lucy.”
“And you are Robert Methven,” Lucy said.
He bowed.
“You’re nice,” Lucy said.
He smiled at the note of surprise in her voice. “Thank you.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be enemies?” Lucy said.
His smile broadened. “Do you want us to be?”
“Oh no,” Lucy said. “It’s old history.”
“Old history has a tight grip sometimes,” Robert Methven said. “Our families have hated each other for generations.”
“Papa thinks feuds are foolish,” Lucy said. She watched the play of moonlight across his face, the way it accentuated the planes and hollows, emphasizing some features and hiding others. It was oddly compelling. She felt a strange tug of emotion deep inside.
“That’s why I am here tonight,” Robert Methven said. “To put history behind us.” He nodded toward the pot in her hands. “How did that happen?”
“Oh...” Lucy blushed. “The window was open and the curtain caught it and knocked it over.”
Methven laughed. “My brother, Gregor, and I are always getting into trouble for stuff like that.”
“I don’t believe you,” Lucy said. She looked up at his tall silhouette against the deep blue of the night sky. “You are far too grown-up to get into trouble.”
Robert Methven laughed. “You might think so, but my grandfather is a tyrant. We are always falling foul of his rules.”
Lucy became aware that the sharp corners of the broken pottery were digging into her palms and that her bare toes were beginning to chill within her thin silk slippers. She wondered what on earth she was doing standing here in her nightclothes talking to Robert Methven, of all people.
“I must go,” she said again.
He made no effort to detain her. But he did smile. “Good night, then, Lady Lucy,” he said.
At the door Lucy paused and turned. “You won’t give me away, will you?” she asked carefully. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”
He laughed. “I’d never give you away.”
“Promise?” Lucy said.
He came right up to her. She could smell the smoke and fresh air on him and see the white slash of his teeth as he smiled. It made her feel a little bit dizzy and she had no notion why.
“I promise,” he said.
He bent and kissed her. It was light and brief, but still it left her so breathless and shaken that for a moment she stayed quite motionless with the surprise, the shards of the pot forgotten in her hands.
“Was that your first kiss?” Robert asked. She could hear a smile in his voice.
“Yes.” She spoke without thinking, too honest and innocent for artifice.
“Did you like it?”
Lucy frowned. The sensations inside her were too new and confusing to be easily described, but she did know that what she felt was very different from simple liking.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He laughed. “Would you like to do it again so you can decide?”
Sudden, wicked excitement curled inside Lucy, giving her the answer. “Yes,” she whispered.
He took the pieces of the pot very carefully from her hands and laid them down on the stone balustrade. He put his arms around her and drew her closer to him so that her hands were resting against his chest. The texture of his jacket felt smooth under her palms. She felt extraordinarily shy all of a sudden and might have pulled away, but then he kissed her and the shyness fled, lost in a sensation of sweetness and a warmth that made her tingle with excitement. Her head spinning, she dug her fingers into his jacket to steady herself. Her heart was beating a fierce drumbeat. She felt fragile and could not stop herself from trembling.
Then, too soon, it was over and he stepped back, releasing her gently. For a second the moonlight illuminated his expression, surprise, puzzlement perhaps, the flicker of something she could not read or understand in his eyes. Yet when he spoke he sounded exactly the same.
“Thank you,” he said.
Lucy did not know what you were supposed to do after you had kissed someone, and now she felt very shy all over again, so she grabbed the pieces of the pot, mumbled a good-night and hurried away so quickly that she almost tripped over the hem of her robe. She sped up the dark spiral of the stair without really noticing the stone steps beneath her flying feet. Her mind was too full of Robert Methven’s kiss for her to be able to think of anything else.
Alice was asleep when she got back to their bedroom. Looking at her serene face, Lucy could not help smiling. She could not feel cross with her twin for long. She loved her too much, the sister who was different from her in so many ways and yet closer to her than the other half of the apple.
She placed the pieces of pot carefully back on the shelf and slipped into bed, burrowing into the warmth and falling asleep. She dreamed of the sickle moon shining over the sea and of strong magic and of Robert Methven’s kisses. She knew he would not give her away. They were bound together now.
CHAPTER ONE
Forres Castle, Scotland, February 1812
“LUCY, I NEED you to do me a favor.”
Lady Lucy MacMorlan’s quill stuttered on the paper, leaving a large blob of ink. She had been in the middle of a particularly complex mathematical calculation when her brother Lachlan burst into the library. A gust of bitter winter air accompanied him, lifting the tapestries from the walls and sending the dust scurrying along the stone floor. The fire crackled and hissed as more sleet tumbled down the chimney. Lucy’s precious calculations flew from the desk to skate along the floor.
“Please close the door, Lachlan,” Lucy said politely.
Her brother did as he was bid, cutting off the vicious draught up the stone spiral stair. He threw himself down, long and lanky, in one of the ancient armchairs before the fire.
“I need your help,” he said again.
Lucy smothered her instinctive irritation. It seemed unfair that Lachlan, two years older than she at six and twenty, always needed her to pull him out of trouble. Lachlan had a careless charm and a conviction that someone else would sort out the trouble he caused. That someone always seemed to be Lucy.
They all had their roles in the family. Angus, the son and heir, was stodgy and dull. Christina, Lucy’s eldest sister, was an on-the-shelf spinster who had devoted her life to raising her siblings after their mother had died and now acted as hostess for their father. Mairi, Lucy’s other sister, was a widow. Lachlan ran wild. Lucy had always been the good child, the perfect child in fact.
What a perfect baby, people had said, leaning over her crib to admire her. Later she had been called a perfect young lady, then a perfect debutante. She had even made the perfect betrothal, straight from the schoolroom, to an older gentleman who was a nobleman and a scholar. When he had died before they married, she had become perfectly unobtainable.
Once upon a time she had been a perfect sister and friend too. She had had a twin with whom she shared everything. She had thought her life was safe and secure, but she had been wrong. But here Lucy closed her mind, like the slamming shut of an oaken door. It did no good to think about the past.
“Lucy?” Lachlan was impatient for her attention. He looped one booted leg carelessly over the arm of the chair and sat smiling at her. Lucy looked at him suspiciously.
“What are you working on?” he asked, gesturing to the papers that were scattered across the desk.
“I was trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem,” Lucy said.
Lachlan looked baffled. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I enjoy the challenge,” Lucy said.
Lachlan shook his head. “I wouldn’t choose to do mathematics unless I absolutely had to,” he said.
“You wouldn’t choose to do anything unless you had to,” Lucy pointed out.
Lachlan’s smiled widened. He looked as though he thought she had paid him a compliment. “That’s true,” he said. He fixed her with his bright hazel eyes. “How is your writing progressing?”
“I am working on a lady’s guide to finding the perfect gentleman,” Lucy said. She spoke with dignity. She knew that Lachlan was laughing at her. He thought her writing was ridiculous, a mystifying hobby. All the Duke of Forres’s daughters wrote; it was an interest they had inherited from their mother, who had been a notable bluestocking. The sons, in contrast, were not bookish. Lucy loved her brothers—well, she loved Lachlan even though he exasperated her, and she tried to love stuffy Angus—but intellectual they were not.
As if to prove it, Lachlan gave a hoot of laughter. “A guide to finding the perfect gentleman? What do you know of the subject?”
“I was betrothed to such a man,” Lucy said sharply. “Of course I know.”
The light died from Lachlan’s eyes. “Duncan MacGillivray was hardly the perfect gentleman,” he said. “Nor was he the perfect match for you. He was too old.”
Lucy experienced a tight, trapped feeling in her chest. “You are so rude,” she said crossly.
“No,” Lachlan said. “I tell the truth. You only agreed to marry him because Papa wanted you to wed and you were still grieving for Alice and you weren’t thinking straight.”
Alice...
Another cold draught slid under the door and tickled its way down Lucy’s spine. She shivered and drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders. Alice had been dead for eight years, but not a day passed when Lucy did not think of her twin. There was a hollow, Alice-shaped space inside her. She wondered if she would always feel like this, so empty, as though a part of her had been cut out, leaving nothing but darkness in its place. Alice’s absence was like a constant ache, a shadow on the heart, and a missed step in the dark. Even after all this time, it hurt so sharply it could sometimes make her catch her breath. Her childhood had ended the day Alice died.
She pushed the thought away, as she always did. She was not going to talk about Alice.
“The point,” she said, “is that I know what constitutes gentlemanly behavior, and more importantly—” she looked down her nose at her brother “—what does not.”
“You know what constitutes French and Italian pornography, as well,” Lachlan said with a grin, “and your erotic writings have been far more successful and profitable than your other writing. I wonder why you do not write more of them.”
Lucy frowned at him fiercely. “You know full well why I do not! We don’t talk about that, Lachlan. Remember? It’s all in the past and no one is to know. Do you want me to be ruined?”
Lachlan scowled back at her, the two of them reduced to their nursery squabbling for a brief moment. “Of course not. And I haven’t told a soul.”
Lucy sighed. She supposed it was unfair to pin all of the blame on her brother when she had been so recklessly stupid and naive, but there was no doubt that he was untrustworthy. A year ago Lachlan had come to her and begged a favor, much as he was doing now. He needed her help with writing a letter, he had said. It had to be extremely romantic, very sensual, and sufficient to seduce the lady of his dreams into his arms.
Lucy had desperately needed to earn some money, and since she was more articulate than her brother, she had agreed. She had culled some lines from Shakespeare for him and added some poetry of her own. Lachlan had laughed and had said he needed something rather more exciting.
It was then that Lucy had remembered the erotic writings in the castle library. The library had always been a treasure trove for her, and she had scoured its shelves from the time she could read, devouring the vast collection that her grandfather had brought back from the Grand Tour. Then one day, among the weighty tomes of political history and the works of the classical scholars, she had found something a great deal more inflammatory than dry politics: several folios of drawings and sketches of men and women in the most extraordinary erotic poses. Some of the sketches had seemed anatomically impossible to Lucy, but it had been both educational and interesting to see them and she had viewed the pictures with intense intellectual curiosity, even turning the books upside down and sideways at various points to check that she had understood the details correctly.
Alongside the drawing had also been writings, vivid and sensual, equally interesting to the curious academic mind. It was these that Lucy remembered when Lachlan asked for something rather more arousing than Shakespeare. She had used the writings as inspiration. Perhaps she had overdone it. She was not sure. But certainly her brother had had no complaints. He had even told his friends and several of them had come forward to ask for similar assistance in their wooing. Lucy had obliged.
Then it had all gone horribly wrong. The first Lucy had heard of the scandal was at a meeting of the Highland Ladies Bluestocking Society. Everyone was talking about a mysterious letter writer who helped the young bucks of Edinburgh seduce the women of their acquaintance. Lachlan was apparently locked in a torrid affair with an opera dancer while his friends were likewise setting the town alight with their licentious behavior. One had impregnated and abandoned an innkeeper’s daughter and another had eloped with the wife of the governor of Edinburgh Castle. In all cases the ladies had been wooed into bed with false promises and erotic prose.
Lucy had felt horribly guilty and dreadfully naive that she had not questioned Lachlan’s motives before she had written the letters, nor had she foreseen what the outcome of them might be. Her need for the money had blinded her and she had thought of nothing but that. She could only hope that no one discovered that she had been the letter writer, because if they did, she would be ruined. She had promised herself that there would be no more provocative poetry. It was not the sort of behavior that a well-bred heiress should indulge in, and in the future she would have to make her money from other sources.
Lachlan was watching her. There was a decidedly calculating expression in his hazel eyes. It made Lucy suspicious.
“Anyway,” Lachlan said, smiling winningly, “let’s forget all about that and talk about me.” He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it. It made him look charmingly rakish. Lucy thought it a pity that none of her friends were there to be impressed. They all thought Lachlan was delightful, despite the fact that the words selfish and lightweight could have been invented to describe him.
“I’ve fallen in love,” Lachlan said, with the air of someone making a grand announcement.
“Again!” Lucy said. “Who is the fortunate lady this time?”
“It is Dulcibella Brodrie,” Lachlan said. “I love her and she loves me and we want to marry.”
Lucy paused. Miss Dulcibella Brodrie would not have been her first choice as a sister-in-law. Dulcibella was beautiful, but she was also utterly helpless in a completely irritating manner. No doubt that was what had attracted Lachlan to her, but since he was fairly helpless himself, the combination of the two of them would be a recipe for disaster.
“Dulcibella is...very sweet natured,” Lucy said carefully. She prided herself on being polite and she was glad she could find something positive to say. Dulcibella might be a little spoiled and self-centered, and she was drawn to a mirror as a bee was drawn to clover, but she did have her good qualities if one looked hard enough.
Lachlan’s open face suddenly looked as tragic as a rejected spaniel’s. “She’s not free, though,” he said. “She is already contracted to marry Robert Methven. The settlements are all drawn up.”
Robert Methven.
The papers slipped from Lucy’s hand again. She made a grab for them, then straightened up slowly. “Are you sure?” she said. She could feel an unnerving flutter in the pit of her stomach. Her fingers trembled. Her cheeks felt hot. She smoothed the paper automatically.
Fortunately for her, Lachlan was the most unobservant of men and was far too concerned with his own feelings to notice hers. “Of course I’m sure,” he said. “It’s a disaster, Lucy. I love Dulcibella. I was going to make her an offer myself. I just hadn’t got around to it, and now Methven has got in first.”
“Lord Brodrie probably wants more for his only child than a younger son,” Lucy said. She kept her gaze averted from Lachlan’s while she steadied herself, while she drew breath.
“But I’m the younger son of a duke!” Lachlan protested.
“And Lord Methven is a marquis,” Lucy said. “He is a better catch.” Her voice was quite steady now even if her pulse still tripped and her body felt heated and disturbed.
Robert Methven was getting married.
She felt light-headed and shocked, and she had no notion why. It was not as though she knew Lord Methven well. Shortly after the night eight years ago when they had met on the terrace at Forres, he had suffered a terrible rift with his family and had left Scotland. He had gone to Canada and was rumored to have made a fortune trading in timber. It had been shortly before Alice had died and Lucy had not paid much attention. She remembered very little from that time other than the smothering sense of grief and the empty ache of loss.
Then Robert Methven’s grandfather had died and he had inherited the title and returned to Scotland. Lucy had seen him a few times recently at the winter assemblies in Edinburgh, but the easy companionship she had found with him that night at Forres had vanished. They had exchanged no more than a few words on the most trivial of topics.
Lucy found Robert Methven physically intimidating, as well. The men in her family were all tall and lean, but Lord Methven was powerfully built as well as tall. His body was hard-muscled, the line of his jaw was hard and the expression in his sapphire-blue eyes was hard. He was overwhelmingly male. That masculinity was so blatant that it was like a slap in the face. Lucy had known nothing like it.
He had changed in other ways too. He was somber and the light had gone from his eyes. All the power and authority Lucy had sensed in him that night was still there, but it felt stronger and darker. Tragedy had a way of draining the light from people. Lucy knew that. She wondered what had happened to Methven to change him.
They had nothing in common now. And yet...Lucy’s fingers clenched. She felt the smooth paper crumple beneath her touch. There was something about Robert Methven. Her awareness of him was acute and uncomfortable. She did not want to think about it because doing so made her feel hot and breathless and prickly all over. It was odd, very odd.
She sat down at her desk, smoothing her papers with fingers that were shaking a little. She was aware of an unfamiliar emotion, a curious sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that felt like jealousy.
I am not jealous, Lucy thought crossly. I cannot be jealous. I am never jealous of anything or anybody. Jealousy is neither appropriate nor ladylike.
But she was. She was jealous of Dulcibella.
Lucy pressed her fingers to her temples. It made no sense. She could not be jealous of Dulcibella. Dulcibella had nothing she wanted. Lucy did not want to marry, and even if she did, Lord Methven in no way constituted her idea of a perfect husband. He was too intimidating and far too much of a man. He was just too much of everything.
“What am I to do, Lucy?” Lachlan asked, reclaiming her attention, holding up both his hands in a gesture of appeal. “Dulcibella would not dare go against her father’s wishes. She is far too delicate to oppose him.”
Delicate was not the word that Lucy would have chosen. Dulcibella was feeble. She had no steel in her backbone. In fact, Lucy had sometimes wondered if Dulcibella had a backbone at all.
“There’s nothing you can do,” she said briskly. “I am sorry, Lachlan.” But you will be in love with another lady in the blink of an eye.
“I need you to write one of your letters,” Lachlan said, sitting forward, suddenly urgent. “I need you to help me persuade her. Please, Lucy.”
“Oh no,” Lucy said. “No and no and no again. Have you been listening to a word I said, Lachlan?”
“I’m sorry about last time.” Lachlan did at least have the grace to look a little shamefaced.
“I don’t expect you are,” Lucy said.
Lachlan shrugged, admitting the lie. “All right. But my intentions are honorable this time, Lucy. I love Dulcibella and I know you would want us to be happy. I want to marry her, Lucy. Please...” He let his words trail away as though he were brokenhearted. Most artistic, Lucy thought.
“No,” she said again. “Apart from anything else, I hardly think that Dulcibella would be persuaded by that sort of letter. She is a very sheltered lady.”
“Well,” Lachlan said, grinning, “you may need to tone it down just a little.”
“No,” Lucy said for the sixth time. She was thinking of Robert Methven. “They are betrothed, Lachlan. It would be wrong.”
“Please, Lucy,” Lachlan repeated, with more pleading in his tone this time. “I really do love Dulcibella.” He threw out a hand. “How can she be happy married to Methven? The man’s a savage! He’s not like me.”
“No,” Lucy said. “He most certainly is not like you.” Robert Methven had none of Lachlan’s refinement. He had rough edges, a roughness that had been rubbing against Lucy’s senses for the past three months like steel against silk. Once again she felt that shiver of awareness tingle along her nerves.
“I can’t help you, Lachlan,” she said. “You should leave well enough alone.”
Lachlan’s face took on the mulish expression Lucy remembered from when he was a small boy who was not getting his own way.
“I don’t know why you would refuse,” he said. “No one would know.”
“Because it’s wrong,” Lucy said sharply. A little shiver rippled over her skin. She knew she had to refuse even if Lachlan’s feelings were genuinely engaged. It was not fair in any way to sabotage Robert Methven’s betrothal. Besides, more practically, Methven was not a man to cross. He was hard and dangerous, and she would be foolish to do anything to antagonize him. If he found out, she would be in a very great deal of trouble.
“You need the money,” Lachlan said suddenly. “I know you do. I heard you telling your maid the other day that your quarterly allowance was already spent.”
Lucy hesitated. It was true that her allowance was already gone, given away to the Greyfriars Orphanage and the Foundling Hospital as soon as it was paid to her. Lachlan did not know, of course. He thought she was as extravagant as he was and saw no shame in that. He had no notion that her remorse over Alice’s death prompted her to give every penny she had to try to make up for a guilt that could never be assuaged.
“I’ll buy you the bonnet with the green ribbons you were admiring in Princes Street yesterday,” Lachlan said, leaning forward.
“I’d rather have the cash, thank you,” Lucy said. For a moment she allowed herself to think of all that she might buy: new clothes and shoes for the children, books and toys, as well.
There was a sliding sensation of guilt in her stomach as she realized that she was going to do as Lachlan asked. She tried to ignore the feeling. She told herself that there could be no danger of Lord Methven discovering what she had done because Lachlan’s name would be on the letters and as long as he held his tongue, no one would suspect her. She told herself that she would be able to buy more medicines for the children at the hospital, as well. The bronchitis was particularly bad this winter.
“How much?” Lachlan asked. He uncoiled his long length from the chair and stood up.
“Ten shillings per letter,” Lucy said briskly.
Lachlan glared. “I’ll write them myself,” he said.
“Good luck with that,” Lucy said, smiling at him.
Lachlan stared at her. She looked directly back and did not waver. She knew Lachlan would cave in. Her will was much stronger than his.
“You could do it out of love,” he grumbled.
Lucy turned her face away. Love was not a currency she dealt in. “Hard cash works best for me,” she said.
“Five shillings, then,” Lachlan said. “And for that they had better be good.”
“Seven,” Lucy said. “And they will be.”
While Lachlan went to fetch the money, Lucy opened the desk drawer to extract a new quill, sharpened it expertly and refilled her ink pot. She would tell Lachlan to copy out the letters in green ink, she thought. The writing had to look as romantic as it sounded.
A shower of sleet pelted the window. The frame rattled. The wind howled down the chimney. Lucy shivered. She could not quite banish the sense of trepidation that had settled like a weight inside her. She could see Lord Methven in her mind’s eye, his face as hard as rock, the dark blue eyes as chill as a mountain stream.
It was wrong of her to help Lachlan take Dulcibella away from him. She knew that. Not only was it morally wrong, but it would also ratchet up the tension between the two clans, a tension that had never really died. She knew that there was some sort of ongoing lawsuit between the Marquis of Methven and her cousin Wilfred, Earl of Cardross. If Lachlan stole Methven’s bride, that would only throw fuel on the fire.
She knew she should throw the quill down and walk away now, but she desperately wanted more money to help the Foundling Hospital. Picking up the quill, she started to write. Everything would be fine, she told herself. She would not get into trouble. She was quite safe. Robert Methven would never find out what she had done.
CHAPTER TWO
Two months later, April 1812
THE BRIDE WAS LATE.
Robert, Marquis of Methven, surreptitiously eased his neck cloth. It felt very tight. So did the pristine white shirt that strained across his broad shoulders. The little Highland church was full and hot, and the heavy fragrance of lilies permeated the air. Robert had thought lilies were a flower of funerals.
Appropriate.
The wedding guests were growing restive. The time had long passed for Dulcibella to be fashionably tardy. The only excuse for such a delay could be a malfunction in her wardrobe or perhaps the sudden and inconvenient death of a family member. Robert doubted that either of those had occurred.
Dulcibella. It was a hell of a name. During the two months of his engagement, Robert had not been sure he could live with it. It looked as though he would not get the chance to try.
He turned. The church was packed with guests, for this was the wedding of the social season. Two hundred members of the Scottish nobility had made the journey northward to this tiny church on the Brodrie Estate to see the daughter of the laird married to the man who had rejoined their ranks as scandalously as he had left them eight years earlier.
“I think you’ve been jilted, my friend.” His groomsman and cousin Jack Rutherford spoke out of the side of his mouth. Jack was actually grinning, damn him. Robert scowled. He was indifferent to the public humiliation, but he had not wanted to lose Dulcibella. She had been the key to his inheritance.
A lady sitting near the back of the church caught his eye.
Lady Lucy MacMorlan.
He felt his blood heat and quicken as it always did when he looked at Lucy. Just the looking made Robert feel as though he had selected his wedding breeches two sizes too small, a most inappropriate physical reaction in a church, when he was marrying another lady.
He was not quite sure how this damnably inconvenient attraction to Lady Lucy had happened. He suspected that, lowering as it was to admit it, he had developed some sort of tendre for her when they were both in their teens, and he had never quite grown out of it. When he had kissed her years before at Forres Castle, it had been no more than an impulse. His reaction to the kiss, to her, had been so strong and unexpected that he had immediately backed off, knowing that if he did not, they would both be in deep trouble. Time and tragedy had then intervened to take him a long way from Scotland both in mind and spirit, but when he had returned and seen Lucy at one of the Edinburgh assemblies, it was as though a dormant spark was kindled in him, catching alight, burning into a flame.
He had changed, but she had changed too, he thought. The artless, open girl he had known had become a great deal more guarded. She was still charming, but with the town bronze of the sophisticate now. Robert had been surprised to feel an urgent curiosity to know what was under that facade.
He had other equally urgent impulses toward Lady Lucy, as well. They were destined to be unfulfilled.
Today Lucy was sitting near the back of the church between her elder sisters and her father, the Duke of Forres, and her cousin, the ghastly Wilfred, Earl of Cardross, whom Robert simply could not stand. She looked tiny, exquisite and voluptuous, all defiant red hair and lavender-blue eyes that were bright and alive. It was the hair that had been Robert’s final undoing. He wanted to know if it felt as sensual between his fingers as it looked. Lady Lucy also had a heart-shaped face and rosy red lips, porcelain skin and endearing freckles. Robert wanted to know how those lips tasted and how far down those freckles went.
Lucy was perfection. Everyone said so. She was a perfect daughter, a perfect lady and she would one day make a perfect wife. Robert had heard that she had been betrothed straight from the schoolroom to some ancient nobleman who had keeled over before they wed. Since then Lady Lucy had rejected all offers because apparently no one could live up to the perfection of her fiancé. Robert found that odd, but there was no accounting for taste.
He stole another look at Lady Lucy’s perfect profile. It was a great pity that he could not make her an offer, but he was completely hamstrung by the terms of his inheritance. Dulcibella Brodrie was one of the few women, if not the only woman, who fit his criteria.
He realized that he was still staring at Lucy. He was not much of a gentleman, but he did know that it was bad form on his wedding day to stare at a lady who was not his bride.
“Eyes front, Methven,” barked his grandmother in the tones of a parade ground sergeant major. The Dowager Marchioness of Methven sat alone in the front pew, a small stately figure in red silk and diamonds. When his grandfather had cut him off with no word, she had been the only member of Robert’s family to keep the faith with him during his time abroad. She had done it in defiance of her husband and she had sent his cousin Jack to him in Canada when the young man had wanted to see something of the world. Robert adored her, though he would never tell her as much. The two of them, Jack and his grandmother, were all the family he had left.
The door of the church crashed open. The organ swelled into “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.” Robert could sense the minister’s relief. There was an anticipatory creak and shuffle as the congregation craned their necks for their first glimpse of the bride.
The music stuttered to a halt. Lord Brodrie, Dulcibella’s father, was striding down the aisle. Alone. There was no bride on his arm.
Robert had previously observed that Lord Brodrie was a man in an almost constant state of anger, and his rage was quite apparent now. His face was bright red with fury, his white hair stood up in livid spikes and his blue eyes flashed with ire. In his hand he was brandishing several sheets of paper. One of them fluttered to the floor at Robert’s feet.
“She’s run off!” Brodrie announced.
“Congratulations on your perspicacity, Jack,” Robert murmured.
The shock that had held the congregation mute splintered into a riot of sound. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, gesticulating, turning to his or her neighbor to dissect the scandalous news.
Robert bent to retrieve the page. It was not, as he had first imagined, a letter of explanation or even an apology. It was part of a love letter.
“I can bear it no longer. I am tormented night and day. I cannot speak. I cannot eat. The thought of you in another man’s arms, in another man’s bed, is intolerable to me. The thought of Methven making love to you when you are mine... You are the very breath of life to me! Come away with me before it is too late....”
There was a great deal more in the same vein, but Robert skipped over it. He had read quite enough for it to turn his stomach. It seemed, however, that Dulcibella had liked that sort of thing given that the letter writer had persuaded her to elope.
“Who wrote this stuff?” Jack asked. He was trying to read over Robert’s shoulder.
“It’s signed Lachlan,” Robert said.
“That must be Lachlan MacMorlan,” Jack said, squinting at the signature. “He was completely besotted with Miss Brodrie. I didn’t think he would do anything about it, though. Thought he was too lazy.”
“I’ll string his guts from the castle battlements,” Brodrie said violently. His face was a mottled red and white now. He looked as though he was about to burst a blood vessel. He was shaking his fist, in which he clutched several more handwritten sheets. “Debauching my daughter with romantic poetry!” he roared. “The craven coward! If he wanted her, why could he not fight for her like a man?”
Robert crumpled the letter in his hand. “Presumably because this approach worked better,” he said. “I was not aware that Miss Brodrie was of a romantic disposition.”
He had not, he realized, known much about Dulcibella at all. It was a little late to realize that now, but he had not been interested in her except as a way to unlock his inheritance. He needed a wife—and an heir—urgently. He had proposed to Dulcibella for that reason alone. He had noticed that she was pretty. He had found her laughter grating and her helplessness irritating. That was the sum total of their relationship.
“Daft girl was always reading,” Brodrie said. “Took after her mother that way. I never paid it much attention. She liked those soppy novels, Pamela and the like.”
It was all starting to make a great deal more sense to Robert. He tapped the crumpled letter impatiently against the palm of his hand.
“I don’t believe MacMorlan wrote that,” Jack said suddenly. “I was at school with him. He’s no scholar.”
“Perhaps he was too shy to share his poetry with you all,” Robert said sarcastically. He scanned a few more lines. “He has quite a talent.”
“If Lachlan MacMorlan is shy,” Jack said, “I’m the pope.”
“Gentlemen...” The minister was hovering, anxiety writ large on his plump face. “Is the service to go ahead?”
“Evidently not,” Robert said. “If only Miss Brodrie had confided her feelings in me, she and Lord Lachlan could have had the booking instead.”
Both Lord Brodrie and the minister were looking at him in perplexity. Robert realized that they were wondering if he could possibly be as cold and indifferent as he sounded. He had not cared a jot about Dulcibella, but he did care very much about losing his inheritance. The congregation was shifting and shuffling now as everyone tried to overhear what was going on and pass word to his or her neighbor. Their expressions were shocked, scandalized, amused, depending on the guests and their disposition. Wilfred of Cardross was making no attempt to hide his glee. He, more than anyone, would welcome the ruin of Robert’s plans and the opportunity it gave him to claim back Methven land.
Robert clenched his fists. He was not going to give Cardross the chance to take Golden Isle and his northern estates. They were the most ancient part of his patrimony, and he would hold them by force if he had to do so.
His eyes met those of Lucy MacMorlan. She was looking directly at him. She did not look shocked or scandalized or amused.
Lucy looked guilty.
Robert felt a leap of interest. He knew that Lady Lucy was close to her brother. He had observed them together at various social events and knew they had an easy friendship. It seemed Lachlan might have confided in Lucy about the elopement. Certainly she knew something.
For a long moment Robert held her gaze. Faint pink color came into her cheeks. He saw her bite her lip. Then she broke the contact with him very deliberately, turned to pick up the little green-beaded reticule that matched the ribbon on her bonnet and touched her father gently on the arm to indicate that she wanted to leave. The guests were spilling out of the pews now, milling around uncertainly in the aisles while they waited for someone to tell them what was happening.
“Well?” Brodrie demanded. “What’s to do? Aren’t you going after them, my lord?”
“Sir,” Robert drawled, “your daughter has gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid marrying me. It would be churlish of me to go after her and bring her back.” He pushed the letter into Jack’s hands. “Tell everyone that they are welcome at the wedding breakfast, Jack,” he said. “A pity to waste a good party.” It was he who had paid for the celebrations, Brodrie being too strapped for cash.
“Party?” Brodrie was boggling. “You would celebrate my daughter running off with another man, sir?”
“We have already given the gossips more than enough cause for conjecture,” Robert said. “I refuse to play the heartbroken jilt.” He laughed. “Besides, the wedding is bought and paid for. And you have a daughter married and off your hands. One hopes. Celebrate it.” He sketched Lord Brodrie a bow. “Excuse me. I will join you shortly, but first there is something I must do.”
“By God, sir, he is a coldhearted bastard,” he heard Brodrie say to Jack as he walked away. The man sounded torn between admiration and disbelief.
He did not hear Jack’s reply. But he did not disagree with Brodrie’s assessment.
* * *
LACHLAN HAD RUN off with Dulcibella Brodrie.
The gossip rippled down the pews like the incoming tide. Lucy, sitting at the back of the church between her father and her two sisters, was almost the last to hear it.
“Run away to Gretna Green... Gone this morning... Eloped with Lachlan MacMorlan...”
Lucy felt apprehension tiptoe along her spine. Damn Lachlan. Could he not have sorted this out sooner? It had taken two months and almost twenty love letters to persuade Dulcibella to jilt Robert Methven, and she had to do it now, leaving the man standing alone in front of all his wedding guests.
Lucy felt horribly guilty. She had not really expected to feel so bad. Up until this very moment, she had in fact felt rather pleased with herself. Dulcibella’s surprisingly staunch refusal to succumb to Lachlan’s wooing had meant a big profit on the letters. Lucy had been able to give so much to her charities: warm blankets and medicines and new clothes for the children. But of course there was always a price to pay. And Lord Methven was paying it now. Lucy felt as though she had let him down in some obscure way, as though she had owed him her loyalty and had betrayed him. Perhaps it was because all those years ago he had kept his word and never revealed that he had seen her on the terrace at Forres that night. She had not thought about that in eight years. Yet now she thought that he had kept faith with her while she had repaid him in deceit.
“Papa.” Lucy touched her father’s arm, leaned toward Mairi and Christina. “I fear we are about to become as popular as a fox in a hen coop,” she whispered. “Lachlan has eloped with the bride.”
The Duke of Forres pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He looked perplexed. It was his natural state; he was a scholar and a recluse who always gave the impression that half his mind was still in his books. “Lachlan?” he said vaguely. “Has he? I wondered where he was.”
“Halfway to Gretna by now, by the sound of it,” Mairi said. “Typical Lachlan. He always wants what belongs to someone else.”
Lucy looked up. Over the heads of the congregation, she could see Robert Methven talking to his groomsman and to Lord Brodrie. He turned slightly toward her and she saw that there were some sheets of paper in his hand. She felt a clutch of fear ripple through the pit of her stomach. Those sheets looked suspiciously like the letters Lachlan had sent Dulcibella.
Suddenly, without warning, Methven looked up and directly at her. His dark blue gaze was intent. It felt as though there were an invisible thread pulled tight between them. Lucy felt the jolt of that contact down to her toes.
He knows.
Her heart started to batter her bodice, slamming in hard beats. She could feel panic rising in her throat, cutting off her breath. How Robert Methven could possibly know that she had had a hand in this was a mystery, and yet she did not doubt it for a second.
She saw Methven’s gaze drop to the letters in his hand and then rise again to pin her very deliberately in its full blue blaze. He made some comment to his groomsman and took a purposeful step in Lucy’s direction.
She had to get out of there.
“Papa,” she said. “Excuse me. I need some fresh air. I will see you out at the carriage.”
“Of course, my dear,” the duke murmured. “Dear, oh dear, I am not at all sure what to say to Methven. Such appallingly bad behavior on Lachlan’s part.”
“Excuse me,” Lucy said again, hastily. She started to squeeze out of the pew. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Robert Methven advancing down the nave of the church toward them. She had a sudden vision of him throwing down his gauntlet on the floor of the church and challenging the duke to combat for the dishonor done to his name and his family. A hundred years before, such an idea might not have been so outrageous. It did not in fact seem that outlandish now, especially as Wilfred Cardross was smiling broadly and making his delight at Methven’s humiliation all too plain.
“It could not have happened to a more deserving fellow,” Cardross said. “I must stand Lachlan a whisky next time I see him.”
“Oh, do be quiet, Wilfred,” Lucy said crossly, venting her guilt on someone else. “You always have to crow.”
“When it is a case of seeing a Methven brought low,” Wilfred said, smoothing his lacy cuffs, “of course I do. Besides...” He beamed again. “If Methven cannot fulfill the terms of his inheritance, then half his estates are forfeit. To me.”
Lucy looked at him with deep dislike. Wilfred had been making mysterious pronouncements along these lines over the past few months, ever since he had come back from London. She knew there was some sort of ongoing lawsuit between him and Robert Methven, but since the case was still sub judice, Wilfred could not discuss it. Instead he dropped these irritating and self-satisfied hints. But if Wilfred was right and Methven’s inheritance depended on his marriage, then he would be even more furious to be jilted. Suddenly Lucy felt so nervous that she could not draw breath.
She was in big trouble.
She squeezed past her cousin and out into the aisle. It was now packed with wedding guests, all milling around and chattering. “Excuse me,” Lucy said rapidly for a third time, trying to carve a path through the congregation toward the nearest door.
She threw a look back over her shoulder. Several people had ambushed Robert Methven on his way down the aisle, presumably to ask him what was going on. He was answering courteously enough, but his eyes were still fixed on her, fierce and focused. As he caught her gaze, Lucy saw a flash of grim amusement light the deep blue depths. He knew she was running from him and he was coming after her.
It was only as she reached the church door, out of breath and with her heart pounding, that she realized her tactical mistake. She should have stayed inside, surrounded by people. Robert Methven could not have interrogated her there. She would have been safe. Except she suspected that he was the sort of man who would simply have picked her up and carried her out of the church had he wanted to speak to her in private. He would not care if he outraged convention.
Galvanized by the thought, Lucy started to hurry down the uneven path toward the lych-gate. The road beyond was blocked with carriages. The little village of Brodrie had seen nothing on the scale of this wedding since the laird had married thirty years before.
“Lady Lucy.” There was a step behind her on the path. Lucy froze. She wanted to run, but that would be undignified. It would also end badly. She could not run in her silk slippers and Robert Methven would be faster than she was.
She turned slowly.
“Lord Methven.” The moment of confrontation had arrived too soon. She felt completely unprepared. “I am sorry,” she said. “Sorry for your...” She paused.
“Loss?” Robert Methven suggested ironically. “Or sorry that your brother is such a blackguard that he elopes with another man’s bride?”
His voice was rough edged, rubbing against Lucy’s senses like skates on ice. No educated man, no gentleman, spoke with a Scots accent, but there was a trace of something in Robert Methven’s voice that was as abrasive as he was. Perhaps it was the time he had spent abroad that had rubbed off the patina of civilization in him. Whatever it was, it made Lucy shiver.
He was blocking the path in front of her and he did not move. As always, his height and the breadth of his shoulders, the sheer solid masculine strength of him, overwhelmed her. This time, though, Lucy knew she could not allow herself to be intimidated.
“Lord Methven.” She tried again. She smiled her special smile. It was composed and sympathetic and it gave—she hoped—no indication at all of the way in which her heart thumped and her breath trapped in her chest. “I know that Lachlan has behaved badly—”
“Damn right he has,” Robert Methven said. “He is a scoundrel.”
Well, that was true, if a little direct from a gentleman to a lady. But then Methven was nothing if not direct. Lucy could feel the hot color stinging her cheeks. Generally she had far too much poise for any gentleman to be able to put her to the blush. Perhaps it was because Robert Methven was so blunt that she felt so ill at ease in his company. On a positive note, however, he was blaming Lachlan for the letters so she was perfectly safe. He had no idea she had been involved.
“You look very guilty,” Methven said conversationally. “Why is that?”
Suddenly Lucy felt as though she was on shaky ground after all.
“I apologize for that too,” she said shortly. “It is just the way I look.”
Methven’s firm lips tilted up in a mocking smile. Lucy felt mortified. She never lost her temper and was certainly never rude to anyone. It simply was not good behavior. Yet Robert Methven always seemed able to get under her skin.
“I like the way you look,” Methven said, shocking her all the more. He raised one hand and brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. The constricted feeling in Lucy’s chest increased. It felt as though her bodice had been buttoned so tight she was unable to draw in her breath at all. The skin beneath his fingers burned.
“I thought you looked guilty because you knew about the elopement,” Methven said. His hand fell to his side. “I thought that you might even have helped the happy couple?”
Lucy felt the breath catch in her throat. Under his gaze she felt exposed, her emotions dangerously unprotected, her reactions impossible to hide.
“I...” She realized that she did not know what she was going to say. Methven’s cool blue gaze seemed to pin her to the spot like a butterfly on a slide. She felt helpless.
She took a deep breath and pressed one hand to her ribs to ease the rapid pound of her heart. Her mind steadied. She hated to lie. It was wrong. But she told herself that she had not played any part in the elopement. Not directly.
“I had nothing to do with it,” she said. She could feel her blush deepening, guilty flags in her hot cheeks. “That is—” She scrambled for further speech. Methven was watching her silently. His stillness was quite terrifying, like that of a predatory cat.
“I knew that Lachlan was in love with Miss Brodrie,” she said. Already it felt as though she had said too much, as though she were on the edge of a slippery slope. “That is all. I didn’t know about the elopement, or the love letters—” She stopped, feeling her stomach drop like a stone as she realized what she had said, what she had done. A wave of heat started at her toes and rose upward to engulf her whole body.
“I did not mention any love letters,” Robert Methven said. His tone was very gentle but the look in his eyes had sharpened.
Once again there was silence, acute in its intensity. Lucy could hear the soft hush of the breeze in the grass. She could smell the cherry blossom. She was captured by the look in Robert Methven’s eyes, pinned beneath that direct blue stare.
“I...” Her mind was a terrifying blank. She could think of no way out.
“I hear your brother is no scholar,” Methven said. There was a harder undertone to his voice now. “But you, Lady Lucy...you are a noted authoress, are you not?”
Panic tightened in Lucy’s chest. She could hear the anger hot beneath his words.
“I...”
“So very inarticulate all of a sudden,” Methven mocked.
“Methven, my dear fellow.” The Duke of Forres was hurrying toward them down the path, Lucy’s sisters behind him. The rest of the wedding guests were spilling out of the church now. “My dear chap,” the duke said again. “I don’t know what to say. I do apologize for the incivility of my son in running off with your future wife. Frightful bad manners.”
The moment was broken. Lucy drew a sharp breath and drew closer to Mairi’s side for comfort and support. She could feel herself shaking.
Robert Methven’s gaze remained fixed on her face. “Pray do not give the matter another thought, Your Grace,” he said. “I am sure I shall find a way to claim recompense.” He bowed to Lucy. “We shall continue our conversation later, madam.”
Not if she could help it.
Lucy watched him walk away. His stride was long and he did not look back.
“Very civil,” the duke said. He sounded surprised. Evidently, Lucy thought, he had missed the implied threat in Robert Methven’s words.
Lucy knew better. There was nothing remotely civil about Robert Methven, nor would there be in his revenge. It was not over.
CHAPTER THREE
LUCY HAD NOT wanted to attend the wedding breakfast, but her father had, for once, been adamant.
“Methven has invited us,” he said firmly. “The least that we can do is support him. This way we minimize the scandal of your brother’s appalling behavior and ensure that there is no more bad blood between our families.”
So that was that. Lucy sat through the banquet fidgeting as though her seat were covered in pine needles. She had no appetite. The food and drink turned to ashes in her mouth. She could barely swallow. She endured the gossip about Lachlan and the stares and the whispers with a bright and entirely artificial smile pinned on her face while inside, her stomach was curling with apprehension. She was seated a long way down the table from Robert Methven, but she could feel him looking at her, feel the heat of his gaze and sense the way he was studying her. Yet when she risked a glance in his direction, he was always looking the other way and paying her no attention at all. It could only be her guilt that was making her feel so on edge.
The meal ended and the dancing began. By now the wedding guests were extremely merry because the wine had circulated lavishly. Dulcibella’s elopement with the wrong bridegroom had almost been forgotten.
“Damned fine celebration,” Lucy heard one inebriated peer slur to another. “Best wedding of the year.”
Lucy sat with her godmother and the other chaperones, awkward and alone on one of the rout chairs at the side of the great hall of Brodrie Castle. Lucy hated the fact that at four and twenty she was still required to have a chaperone simply because she was not married. It was ridiculous. She knew it was society’s rule, but nevertheless it made her feel as though she were still a child. And since she had no intention of marrying, she could foresee the dismal prospect of being chaperoned until she was old enough to be a fully fledged spinster of thirty-five years at least.
She was desperate for this interminable party to end, but it seemed she was the only one who felt that way. Everyone else was having a marvelous time. She could see her sister Mairi twirling enthusiastically through the reel. Mairi always danced. She was an extrovert by nature. Some said she was a flifrt. No one said that of Lucy. She was considered too serious, too well behaved, and the tragedy of her dead fiancé had added a touch of melancholy to her reputation.
Her sister Christina was also dancing. Christina was not a flirt. She was firmly on the shelf, companion to their father, housekeeper and hostess, destined never to wed. Yet despite that, she was dancing while Lucy sat alone with the other wallflowers. It was a state of affairs that happened with increasing frequency over the past couple of years. Lucy knew she had a reputation for being fastidious because she had rejected so many suitors. The gentlemen had given up trying, swearing they could not live up to the memory of the late, sainted Lord MacGillivray. If only they knew. If only they knew that no one could measure up because no other bridegroom would accept a marriage in name only.
Intimacy with a man was out of the question for Lucy. She was not going to make the same mistake as Alice. She had to protect herself. That was why Duncan MacGillivray had been her ideal; he had had absolutely no desire to bed her. He had an heir, he had a spare and he had no interest in sex.
Lucy’s gaze wandered back to the dance. Mairi was spinning down the set of a country dance, passing from hand to hand, slender, smiling, a bright dazzling figure. Lucy felt a curious ache in her chest. Sometimes Mairi reminded her of Alice, radiant, charming, glowing with happiness. Lucy’s twin had had an exasperating habit of hearing only what she wanted to hear, of ignoring trouble with a blithe indifference and of charming her way out of difficulties. But in the end the trouble was so deep there was no way out. Lucy shivered. The stone pillars and baronial grandness of the great hall dissolved into another time, another place, and Alice was clinging to her hands, her face wet with tears:
“Help me, Lucy! I’m so afraid....”
Lucy had wanted to help, but she had not known what to do. She had been sixteen years old, shocked, terrified, helpless. Alice had held her so tightly it had hurt, words pouring from her in a broken whisper:
“I love him so much... I would do anything for him...” At the end she had called out for the man she loved, but he had not been there for her. Instead it had been Lucy who had held Alice as she had slipped away, as she had whispered how she was sorry, how she wished she had confided in Lucy before.
“I never told because I was afraid I would be in trouble. Please don’t tell anyone, Lucy! Help me....”
By then it had been far, far too late to help Alice. Lucy had thought that they had had no secrets, but that was not true. On the terrible night that Alice had died, Lucy had found out just how much her twin had kept a secret from her and just how high was the price paid for love.
Lucy gave a violent shiver and the great hall came back into focus and the music was playing and the dancers still dancing and nothing had changed, but in her heart was the cold emptiness that always filled her when she remembered Alice.
Her godmother, Lady Kenton, was addressing her.
“We shall never get you a husband, Lucy, if no one even asks you to dance,” Lady Kenton said. “It is most frustrating.”
Unfortunately Lady Kenton deemed it her duty as Lucy’s godmother and the dearest friend of her late mother to find Lucy a man. Lucy had asked her not to bother, but Lady Kenton was keen, all the keener as the years slipped past.
“I shall speak to your father about your marriage,” her godmother was saying. “He has been most remiss in letting matters slide since Lord MacGillivray’s death. It is time we found you another suitor.”
Lucy took a deep breath. Her father was indulgent toward her and she was certain that he would never force her to wed against her will. Seven years ago he had been so anxious for her to marry, straight from the schoolroom, as though in doing so she might wipe out the horrific memory of Alice’s fall from grace, her shame, her death. Now, though, the duke had fallen into a scholastic melancholy and locked himself away most of the time with his books.
Lady Kenton straightened suddenly in her rout chair. She touched Lucy’s arm. “I do believe Lord Methven is going to ask you to dance.” She sounded excited. “How singular. He has not danced all evening.”
“Perhaps he felt it was inappropriate when his bride has run off,” Lucy said. Her throat was suddenly dry and her heart felt as though it was about to leap into her throat as Methven’s tall figure cut through the crowd toward her. There was something about his approach that definitely suggested unfinished business. He did not want to dance. She was certain of it. He wanted to question her about the love letters just as he had threatened to do.
A man superimposed himself between Lucy and Robert Methven, blocking her view.
“Cousin Lucy.”
A shiver of a completely different sort touched Lucy’s spine. She had no desire at all to dance with Wilfred. He was bowing in front of her with what he no doubt fondly hoped was London style, all frothing lace at his neck and cuffs, with diamonds on his fingers and in the folds of his cravat. Lucy thought he looked like an overstuffed turkey. He had evidently been drinking freely, for he smelled of brandy, and he had flakes of snuff dusting the lapels of his jacket.
Wilfred’s smile was pure vulpine greeting, showing uneven yellow teeth and with a very predatory gleam in his eye.
“Dearest coz.” He took her hand, brushing the back of it with his lips. “Did I tell you how divine you are looking today? Will you honor me with your hand in the strathspey?”
Lucy could think of little she would like less, but everyone was looking at her and Lady Kenton was making little encouraging shooing motions with her hands toward the dance floor. Besides, she could use Wilfred as a shield against Lord Methven. He was definitely the lesser of two evils.
After twenty minutes she was reconsidering her opinion. Throughout the long, slow and stately dance, Wilfred kept up a dismaying flow of chatter that seemed to presume on a closer relationship between them than the one that existed. Yes, they were distant cousins and had known each other since childhood, but there had never been anything remotely romantic in their relationship. Now, however, Wilfred lost no opportunity to whisper in Lucy’s ear how divine she was looking—simply divine—over and over again until she could have screamed. He squeezed her fingers meaningfully and allowed his hand to linger on her arm or in the small of her back in a most unpleasant proprietary manner. She was at a loss to explain the extraordinary change in his behavior. He had always been obsequious, but never before had he given the impression that there was some sort of understanding between them.
“Dearest coz,” he said when the dance had at last wound its way to the end, “I do hope we may spend so much more time in each other’s company from now on.”
Lucy could think of little that she would like less, and she was beginning to suspect that it was her fortune Wilfred wanted to spend more time with. The rumor was that his pockets were to let, and her father had commented over breakfast only a few days before that he expected Cardross to make a rich match, and soon, to mollify his creditors. Lucy had not expected that she would be that rich match, however.
“It would be no bad thing for you to wed your cousin Wilfred,” Lady Kenton said, after Lucy had turned down Wilfred’s request for another dance and he had rather sulkily escorted her back to her chaperone. “He is a most suitable match and it would strengthen the ties between your two families. I will mention it to your papa.”
“Please do not, Aunt Emily,” Lucy said. “I cannot bear Wilfred. In fact, I very nearly hate him.”
Lady Kenton did not reply, but Lucy felt a chill in the air, a chill that implied that beggars could not afford to be choosers. No more gentlemen came to ask her to dance. Time ticked by. A reel followed the strathspey, then another set of country dances. After a half hour she could feel the dagger-sharp glances of the other girls and sense the covert triumph of their chaperones. She might be pretty, she might be a duke’s daughter and an heiress, but no one wanted to dance with her. Robert Methven had vanished again. Lucy knew she should have felt reassured, but instead she felt tense and tired, desperate to retire to the inn at Glendale where they were staying the night before returning to Edinburgh.
She stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, ma’am,” she said to Lady Kenton. “I must have a word with Lord Dalrymple. He will be speaking on the topic of political economy in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks, and I have promised to attend the lecture.”
Lady Kenton sighed heavily. “Well, do not let anyone hear you discussing it, my dear, or your reputation may be damaged. You know that I encourage your studies, but not everyone admires a bluestocking.”
After Lucy had spoken to Lord Dalrymple, she slipped away to the room set aside for the ladies to withdraw. It was empty but for a maid yawning on an upright chair. Lucy washed her hands and face, frowning at her wan expression in the pier glass. No wonder she frightened the dance partners away.
As she came out of the room, she saw Robert Methven’s tall figure striding across the hall, deep in conversation with the handsome man who had stood as his groomsman. Lucy froze, drawing back into the shadows behind a huge medieval suit of armor. Although she was sure she had made no sound, she saw Methven’s head come up. His blue gaze swept the hall and came to rest unerringly on the spot where she was hiding. Lucy saw him exchange a quick word with the other man before he started to move toward her as purposefully as he had done in the church.
Panic gripped Lucy. She did not stop to think. She groped behind her for the handle on the first door she came to and tumbled backward through it. It was a service corridor of some sort, stone floored and dimly lit. She was halfway along it and regretting her impulsive attempt to escape when she heard the stealthy sound of the door at the end opening and shutting again. Robert Methven was behind her. She was certain it was he. Now there was no way back.
She scurried along, her slippers pattering on the floor. Behind her she could hear the measured tread of Methven’s boots. Her heart raced too, an unsteady beat that only served to fuel her panic. It was too late now to turn and face him. She felt foolish for running away and gripped by hot embarrassment, awkward and nervous. She could have brazened it out before; now it was impossible.
The corridor turned an abrupt corner and for one terrible moment Lucy thought she was trapped down a dead end before she saw the small spiral stair in the corner. She wrenched the door open and shot up the steps like a squirrel up a tree trunk, panting, round and round and up and up, until the stair ended in a studded wooden door. It was locked. Lucy almost sprained her wrist turning the huge heavy iron key and ran out onto the castle battlements.
The wind caught her as soon as she stepped outside, tugging at her hair, setting her shivering in her thin silk gown. Darkness had fallen and the sky was clear, the moon bright. Any heat there had been in the day had gone. It was only April and the brisk breeze had a chill edge.
Lucy hurried along the battlement walk to the door in the opposite turret. She turned the handle. The door remained obstinately closed. She pulled hard. It did not budge. Locked. She realized that the key must be on the inside just as it had been on the door she had come through.
She spun around. She could see Methven’s silhouette moving toward her along the battlements. He was not moving quickly, but there was something about him, something about the absolute predatory certainty of a man who had his target in his sights. Lucy pressed her palms hard against the cold oak of the door—and almost fell over as it opened abruptly and she stumbled inside. Down the stairs, along the maze of shadowy corridors with the flickering torchlight, back through the door into the great hall, running, panting now, her heart pounding...
She paused for breath behind the spread of a large arrangement of ferns, leaning one hand against the cold hard flank of the suit of armor for support as her breathing steadied and her heartbeat started to slow down. Five minutes of chasing around Brodrie Castle, but at least she had shaken off Robert Methven.
“It’s a cold night for a stroll on the battlements, Lady Lucy.”
Lucy spun around. The suit of armor clattered as she jumped almost out of her skin.
Methven was standing directly behind her, a look of sardonic amusement on his face.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” Lucy said.
In silence he held out his hand. Nestling on his palm were several of her pearl-headed hairpins.
“Oh!” Lucy’s hand went to tuck the wayward strands of hair back behind her ears. She had not realized the wind had done quite so much damage. “Thank you,” she said. “I... Yes, I...I was out on the battlements. I have always been interested in fifteenth-century architecture.”
“A curious time to pursue your hobby,” Methven said. “If only I had known, I could have arranged a tour for you. In the daylight.” He shifted. “And there was I, thinking you were out there because you were running away from me.”
“I wasn’t—” Lucy started to deny it, saw the amused cynicism deepen in his eyes as he waited for her to lie and stopped abruptly.
“All right,” she said crossly. “I was running away from you.”
“That’s better,” Methven said. “Why?”
“Because I don’t like you,” Lucy said, “and I did not wish to speak with you.”
Methven laughed. “Much better,” he approved. “Who knew you possessed the gift of such plain speaking?”
“Generally I try to be polite rather than hurtfully blunt,” Lucy said.
“Well, don’t bother with me,” Methven said. “I prefer frankness.”
“I cannot imagine that we shall have much opportunity for conversation of any sort,” Lucy said frigidly, “frank or otherwise.”
“Then you are not as intelligent as you are given credit for,” Methven said. “We start now.”
He put out a hand as though to take her arm, but in that moment a slightly shambolic figure stumbled toward them, almost upsetting the suit of armor.
“Lady Lucy! How splendid!”
A flicker of annoyance crossed Methven’s face at the interruption. Lucy recognized Lord Prestonpans, one of Lachlan’s ne’er-do-well friends. Prestonpans looked more than a little the worse for wear; his color was high, his fair hair rumpled and a distinct smell of alcohol hung about his person. He leaned confidingly toward Lucy, and she drew back sharply, trying to edge away.
“Been looking for you the entire evening, ma’am,” he said. “Need your help. Need you to write one of your letters for me.”
Lucy went very still. She could feel Robert Methven’s gaze riveted on her face in polite and amused inquiry.
“One of your letters?” he repeated gently.
Disaster. Lucy felt cold all over. How could she silence Prestonpans or steer him away from danger? How could she keep Methven from overhearing? She could feel cool sweat prickling her back, could feel her whole reputation unraveling.
“Of course, my lord,” she said quickly, taking Lord Prestonpans’s arm to draw him away. “A letter to the Lord Advocate? I would be delighted to help. Come and see me next week in Edinburgh.”
She smiled at him and started to walk away, hoping that Prestonpans would take the hint, but he did not. Instead he followed, nipping at her heels like a terrier. Lucy sped up, heading for the ballroom door. Prestonpans galloped after her, raising his voice with disastrous clarity.
“Not one of your legal letters,” Prestonpans bellowed. He was trying to keep up with her, slipping slightly on the highly polished floor. “One of y’r other sorts of letters. Your brother told me you write special letters, emotic—” he slurred “—erotic ones—”
“You must excuse me, my lord.” Lucy spoke quickly and loudly, trying to drown him out, desperately hoping that Robert Methven had not heard his last words, despite the fact that they had echoed to the rafters. “My chaperone will be wondering where I am—”
“I’ll call on you!” Prestonpans said, waving gaily as he staggered away toward the refreshment room. “I’ll pay good money!”
There was a long silence. Lucy was aware of nothing but the thunder of her heartbeat in her ears and the tightening of her nerves as Robert Methven walked slowly toward her. He let the silence between them spin out. And then:
“Erotic letters?” he queried in the same deceptively gentle tone.
“You misheard,” Lucy said desperately. “Lord Prestonpans said exotic letters. Unusual letters, written in...”
“Green ink?” Methven suggested. “That would be exotic.”
Green ink. Lucy remembered recommending to Lachlan that he copy out the letters to Dulcibella in green ink to make them look more romantic.
“Or perhaps,” Methven continued, “Lord Prestonpans meant letters written in exotic language? Poetic letters, love letters...” His expression was impassive as he waited politely for the next lie she would spin. Through the half-open door of the ballroom, Lucy could see another set of Scottish country dances forming. The orchestra was tuning up. People brushed past them to take their places on the floor. It felt like another world and one she would not be rejoining anytime soon, especially not since Robert Methven had put out a hand and taken her arm, not too tightly but certainly in a grip she could not have broken without making a scene.
“I think it’s about time you and I had a proper talk,” Methven said.
“We cannot talk here,” Lucy said. She pinned a special smile on her face to ward off the curious looks of passing guests. Beneath the pretense her heart was hammering. There was only one thing worse than Robert Methven knowing of her letter-writing skills and that was everyone knowing. She would be utterly ruined, perfect Lady Lucy MacMorlan who was not so perfect after all.
“Then we’ll go somewhere else,” Methven said. “At your convenience,” he added, and it was not an invitation but a command.
Lucy’s throat felt dry. “It would be most improper to be alone with you—” she started to say, but his laughter cut her off.
“You write erotic love poetry, Lady Lucy, and yet you think it would be inappropriate to be alone with me? You have a strange sense of what constitutes proper behavior.”
He was steering Lucy toward one of the doors leading from the great hall. Lucy tried to resist, but her slippers slid across the polished wood as though it were ice. She tried to dig her heels in, but there was nothing to dig them into.
“I could carry you,” Methven said, on an undertone, “if you prefer.” There was a dark, wicked thread of amusement in his voice now.
“No,” Lucy said. She grabbed some shreds of composure. She must not let him see how nervous she was. “Thank you,” she said, “but I have always considered carrying to be overrated.”
Her mind scrambled back and forth over various possibilities. She had to get away. Perhaps she could tell him she needed to visit the ladies’ withdrawing room and then climb out of the window and take a carriage back to the inn....
“Don’t even think about running away again,” Methven said, making her jump by the accuracy with which he had read her mind. He sounded grim. “We can run around the battlements as much as you please, but in the end the outcome will be the same.”
Damn. There really was no escape. She was going to have to confront him, try to explain about the letters and beg for his silence. Lucy was frankly terrified at the thought. Robert Methven did not strike her as the understanding type.
“Take my arm if you do not wish to make a scene,” Methven said. “We can talk in the library. Lord Brodrie never goes there. I don’t believe he has opened a book in his life.”
Lucy hesitated, her hand hovering an inch above his sleeve. She did not want to touch him at all. It felt as though it would be dangerous to do so, but at the same time she was annoyed with herself for being so aware of him. Her face burning, she rested her hand very lightly on his proffered arm, too lightly to feel the muscle beneath his jacket. She maintained sufficient distance from him that their bodies did not touch at all. There was no brushing of her skirts against his leg or her hair against his shoulder. Yet despite her perfect regard for physical distance, it was as though there were a current running between them, deep and dark and turbulent. She wanted to ignore it, but she could not. She could not ignore him.
He ushered her into the library. Evidently he knew his way around Brodrie Castle, no doubt from the time of his courtship of Dulcibella—a courtship she had so skillfully sabotaged.
Lucy’s heart sank lower than her silk slippers. No, he was not going to be sympathetic. It did not take any great intellectual deduction to work that out. She had helped to ruin his betrothal and with it whatever plans he had had to secure his inheritance. He would not be in a forgiving mood.
Methven closed the door behind them. It shut with the softest of clicks, cutting off the distant sounds of the ball, the voices and the music, and cocooning them in a sudden silence that made Lucy’s awareness of him all the more acute. He moved closer to her; she could hear his breath above the hiss and spit of the fire in the grate. She could catch the faint scent of his cologne above the pine from the logs that smoldered in the hearth.
“It was you who wrote the letters your brother used to seduce Miss Brodrie away from me,” Methven said. Then, when Lucy did not answer: “Well?”
The sharpness of his tone made Lucy jump.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was not aware that it was a question.” She paused, took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said. “I did write them. I wrote Lachlan’s letters.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCY SAW SATISFACTION ease into Methven’s eyes at her admission of guilt. Her heart was beating hard and fast now. She wondered if she looked as scared as she felt. She would be the talk of Edinburgh for months. Lucy’s stomach clenched. She hated the thought of being a byword for scandal.
But he would not betray her. Surely he would not. No gentleman would betray a lady’s trust.
“Do you know what you have done?” Methven asked. His gaze was fixed on her and she could feel the anger in him, held under the tightest control but nevertheless a hot thread beneath his words. “Do you understand the consequences of your actions, Lady Lucy?” The contempt in his blue eyes was blistering. “You have destroyed my betrothal.”
“Well,” Lucy corrected, “that is not strictly accurate. Dulcibella destroyed your betrothal in running off with Lachlan. I did not make her elope. It was her choice. Perhaps,” she added, “she did not want to wed you.”
Methven looked supremely unimpressed by her logic. He brought his hand down so hard on the flat top of the mantel that Lucy flinched.
“Will you accept no responsibility?” he demanded. “Do you consider yourself blameless?”
“I wrote the letters,” Lucy said steadily. “I do take responsibility for that.” She was aware that her words were hardly conciliatory, that she was hardly going in the right direction to appease him. When she had set out to justify herself, she had not intended to provoke him, but there was something about Robert Methven that got under her skin.
“Why?” He growled the word at her, his eyes impossibly blue, impossibly angry. “Why did you do it?”
“I did it because Lachlan paid me,” Lucy said defiantly.
She saw Methven’s eyes widen in surprise.
“So you did it for the money?” he said, and the contempt in his tone was like a whip.
“You make me sound like a courtesan,” Lucy complained. “It wasn’t like that.”
Methven smiled suddenly. Lucy noticed the way the smile ran a crease down one of his lean, tanned cheeks and deepened the lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. She felt a sudden sweet, sliding feeling in her stomach and trembled a little. “In your own way you are for sale,” he pointed out gently. “I beg your pardon, but I think it is exactly like that.”
Lucy said nothing. She certainly was not going to tell a man so cynical that the money from the letters had gone to charity. That would come too close, expose too much of what really mattered to her. She could not discuss it, not even to exonerate herself. She never spoke of Alice. It was too painful. Besides, Robert Methven would only laugh at her. And probably disbelieve her.
“I have no money,” she said. “I need to earn it.”
“You are an heiress,” Methven said.
“The definition of an heiress,” Lucy said, “is someone who will inherit money, not someone who currently possesses it. An heiress could be penniless.”
“A nice justification,” Methven conceded, “but still no excuse.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I thought you might claim to have helped him because you believe in love.”
A chill settled in Lucy’s blood. “I have no time for love,” she said.
His eyes searched her face. “Then we have something in common.” A bitter smile twisted the corner of his mouth. “I loved what Miss Brodrie would have brought me, though.” He sighed, straightened. “Did you know that your cousin Wilfred Cardross and I are involved in a legal battle?” His tone was conversational, but the look in his eyes was very acute and suddenly Lucy had the feeling that the answer to this mattered far more than anything that had gone before.
“Yes,” she said truthfully, and saw the scorn and dislike sweep back into his eyes.
“So you did it to help your cousin too,” Methven said. “You wanted to help him cheat me of my patrimony.” He turned away from her. The line of his shoulders and back, his entire stance, was rigid with repressed fury, yet Lucy sensed something else in him: a frustration, a powerful protective spirit that was somehow thwarted as though there was something he longed for yet could not gain. She felt it so instinctively that she reached out a hand to touch him, then realized what she was doing and let her hand fall.
“You mistake me,” she said, and her voice was a little husky. “I did nothing to help my cousin Wilfred. I would not give him the time of day, let alone my assistance. If what I have done in any way was to his benefit, then I am sorry.”
Methven turned sharply and caught her by the shoulders, his touch burning her through the evening gown. “Is that true?” he demanded. There was a blaze of heat in his eyes that made her shiver. He felt it and released her, his hands falling away.
“You were dancing with him earlier,” he said, and his tone was cool now, as though that flash of heat had never been.
“Not for pleasure,” Lucy said. “I cannot bear him. Ever since we were children—” She stopped. Childhood reminiscences were probably out of place here.
Methven’s gaze searched her face as probing as a physical touch. “So you really do not know,” he said. His voice was flat. “You have done Cardross the greatest service imaginable in breaking my betrothal and you did not know.”
Apprehension slid down Lucy’s spine. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.
Methven did not answer immediately. Instead he walked over to the table and poured two glasses of wine from the decanter. He passed her a glass; their fingers brushed, distracting Lucy momentarily. She realized that he was gesturing her to sit. She took a battered-looking velvet armchair. Methven sat opposite, resting his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, his glass cradled in his hands.
“Wilfred Cardross and I are involved in a dispute over clan lands,” he said. “It goes back centuries to the time of King James the Fourth.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “You know that the Methvens and the Cardrosses have always been enemies?”
“And the MacMorlans,” Lucy said. “We talked about this eight years ago, you and I.”
A smile slid briefly into Robert Methven’s eyes like sunlight on water. “So we did,” he said softly.
Lucy suddenly felt very hot. She broke the contact between them looking down, smoothing her skirts.
“Cardross holds to the old enmities,” Robert Methven said. “He and I—” He shrugged. “Suffice it to say, he has been waiting for an opportunity to claim back the lands he believes to be his. When my grandfather died I was in Canada and so was slow to return and claim my inheritance. That gave him the chance he needed.”
“I don’t quite see how I am involved in this—” Lucy started to say, but Methven cut in, his incisive tone reminding her that his patience with her was wafer thin.
“You will,” he said. “Under the terms of the original treaty, the Methvens were given lands carved out from the earldom of Cardross. Those lands constitute half my estate.”
There was a hollow feeling in Lucy’s stomach now. “I can see why Wilfred might not like that,” she said.
Methven’s smile held no warmth. “Indeed. The agreement was originally reached because the Methven clan had bested Cardross men in battle. King James the Fourth imposed the ruling on both sides back in the fifteenth century, but it still stands today.”
The fire roared and cracked as a sudden gust of wind curled down the chimney.
“The only proviso,” Methven said softly, holding Lucy’s eyes, “was that if any future marquis took more than twelve months to claim his inheritance, he would have to fulfill certain criteria or forfeit his lands. I took thirteen months.”
“Why did it take you so long to return?” Lucy asked. “Why were you, the Methven heir, in Canada at all?”
She saw something flicker in his eyes, something of pain and dark, long-held secrets.
“That does not concern you,” he said, and the words were like a door slamming shut in her face. “I was late claiming my lands and title and so Cardross had his chance to invoke the old treaty. Under its terms I am required to wed within a year and produce an heir within two.” He paused for a heartbeat. “Now you will see what you have done in disposing of my bride.”
Lucy did. She had destroyed everything he had worked to safeguard. She had put the safety of his lands and his clan at risk. For a moment the disastrous consequences of her meddling made her feel quite faint.
“I did not know.... Surely you can find another bride...” she stammered, then fell silent beneath the searing contempt in his gaze.
“That is the delightful twist,” Methven said politely. “King James, in his desire to force sworn enemies to bed down together, made it a requirement that I wed a descendent of the earls of Cardross.”
“Oh.” Lucy frantically tried to remember Wilfred’s family tree. He had no sisters—and would no doubt have forbidden them to marry Robert Methven if he had. Dulcibella had been a distant cousin. So was she, of course, but on the female side. There was no one else she could recall. Wilfred was almost devoid of relatives. Which was bad news for Lord Methven.
“I am sorry,” she said. She knew the words were inadequate. She had felt guilty enough before, but now that the full extent of the damage was revealed she felt quite wretched.
“You may imagine,” Methven said cuttingly, “how your regret moves me.” He got up abruptly and placed his untouched glass of claret on the table.
“There is no need to be so sarcastic,” Lucy protested. She could feel the guilty color stinging her cheeks. “I truly am sorry. I did not know—”
“Ignorance is no excuse,” Methven said roughly. “It is not as though your letters on behalf of your brother are unprecedented.”
Apprehension breathed gooseflesh along Lucy’s skin. Wrapped up in the tale of the Methven inheritance, stifled by guilt, she had forgotten for a moment that Lord Prestonpans had dropped her well and truly in trouble with his ill-considered ramblings earlier.
“You do not deny it,” Methven said after a moment. “So it must be true. You wrote the erotic letters that scandalized society last year.”
He strode across to the fireplace and laid one arm along the mantel. Every action spoke of latent power and authority. Lucy felt completely intimidated and was equally determined not to show the fact. She stood up, because being seated when he was standing made her feel at an acute disadvantage.
Her palms were damp. She rubbed them on her skirts. “I did not realize how Lachlan’s friends would use those letters,” she said. “I had no notion.”
“Ignorance is an excuse you have already tried this evening,” Methven said pleasantly. “It wears thin. Your gullibility has been fairly extensive, hasn’t it, Lady Lucy? How did you expect people would use erotic letters?”
Lucy’s face was burning. “I agree that my naïveté has been extensive,” she said, between shut teeth.
Methven stepped away from the fireplace and came toward her. He took her gently by the upper arms, turning her so the candlelight fell on her face. He did not let her go; his hands were warm on her bare skin above the edge of her gloves, and his gaze on her face made her feel mercilessly exposed.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked.
“My lord!” Lucy was genuinely shocked. She could feel even hotter color stinging her cheeks now.
“It’s a fair question,” Methven said, “under the circumstances.” He looked unmoved by her outrage, amused even. “The erotic letters hint at an experience far greater than that of the average debutante. Not—” he appraised her thoughtfully “—that you are average, precisely. Far from it.”
“My experience or lack thereof is no business of yours, my lord,” Lucy said. “That is a scandalous question. No gentleman would ask it.”
Methven inclined his head ironically. “Then I am no gentleman. And I would still like to know the answer. Could one write like that without knowing what it truly felt like to make love? I think not.”
“There was no personal experience in my writing,” Lucy said. She was feeling strange; her head felt too heavy and too light at the same time, as though she had been drinking champagne. She was suddenly aware that Methven’s hands had slid down her arms to hold her lightly by the elbows. She wanted to tell him to let her go because it felt disturbing, far more so than a simple touch should. And then he stroked the tender skin in the hollow of one elbow with his thumb, such a sweet caress that it made her catch her breath and made the blood flow heavy like honey in her veins.
“You must have an extremely vivid imagination,” Methven said softly.
“I have no imagination at all,” Lucy said, trying to concentrate. “Writing is purely an academic exercise for me.”
She saw her words had surprised him. His hands stilled on her. There was curiosity and speculation in his eyes.
“Pure is not really the right word to describe your writing,” he said. His gaze narrowed on her face. “Are you telling the truth? Such provocative words did not affect you in any way?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Lucy said impatiently. She gave a little dismissive shrug. “Lachlan wanted love letters, so I researched what a love letter should be and wrote some. I do understand that some people find them stimulating to the senses, but I—” She stopped. She was not going to tell him that she had locked any and all desires away long ago in order to spare herself pain.
“You?” Methven prompted.
“I don’t find them remotely arousing,” Lucy said truthfully.
Methven nodded slowly. She did not understand the expression in his eyes. “How interesting,” he said. “So the letters were not drawn from personal experience at all.”
“Certainly not,” Lucy said. “They were drawn from my grandfather’s library.”
That made him smile and in that moment she saw her chance. His attitude seemed to have softened toward her a little. She would have to take a risk.
“Are you going to give me away?” she asked. She thought it was better to be direct than to prevaricate. Or beg. Begging was out of the question. She was not that feeble even if she was desperate.
For once he did not answer her immediately. His face was pensive. After a moment he said, “Perhaps you should have considered the consequences of your actions, Lady Lucy.”
He was right, of course. She should have done so. She wondered now if rather than being naive she had been deliberately reckless. In her deepest heart she had known the trouble that would be caused if the truth about the letters came out, and yet she had written them. She had no explanation as to why she would do such a thing. Except that the letters had been a small rebellion, exciting, dangerous. She had challenged all the stifling rules that bound her, and it had been exhilarating.
Besides, she had thought herself safe. She had thought no one would ever unmask her.
“You are right,” she admitted grudgingly. “It was stupid of me.”
“It was foolhardy and dangerous.” He sounded unyielding and unsympathetic. “You have interfered in several people’s lives and done a great deal of damage.”
Lucy felt like a chastened schoolgirl. “I realize that it was wrong,” she offered. She tried her special smile again, the one without guile, the one that generally made men melt like butter. “I have apologized.”
It did not work. Methven smiled too. Grimly. “You are trying to manipulate me,” he said. “I am not so susceptible, Lady Lucy, I assure you. I think...” He paused. “I think the people you deceived should be told.”
“No!” The stark, black panic was on Lucy now, threatening to swallow her whole. Perhaps begging was not out of the question after all. She struggled to stay calm.
“You could not prove I wrote them,” she said defiantly.
His smile deepened. “I could have a damned good go at trying, and it would please me to do so.”
Just the hint of impropriety would be sufficient. Lucy knew that.
“Please—” She heard the entreaty in her own voice, and this time there was no guile at all. “I know I deserve—”
“To be punished?”
His words, hot and dark, tugged something deep inside her. It was a sensation Lucy had never felt before and it was so swift and so fierce that she gasped. A shocking bloom of warmth and pleasure spread low through her body. Her eyes jerked up to his face, to meet the turbulent heat in his eyes. He gave a low exclamation and the next moment she was in his arms and he was kissing her.
Lucy had not been kissed since that night at Forres Castle. It was not the sort of thing that she invited gentlemen to do. She had never even thought about what it might feel like to kiss someone again, not even out of intellectual curiosity.
This kiss was not like the one she had shared with Robert Methven years before. It felt fierce, heated and complicated, with no concessions to her inexperience. She felt his tongue tease her lips apart and she opened to him and he took her mouth completely. His tongue swept across hers, tasting her as though she were honey, and a powerful heat washed through her, scalding her, shocking her. Immediately she was lost and out of her depth. There was too much here, too much of dark pleasure, too much carnal promise, overwhelming, impossible to understand. It had happened far too fast and now the shock and the fear caught her equally quickly. She was shocked that after what had happened to Alice she could even feel like this, feel such passion, such desire. Then, a heartbeat later, guilt caught her too, and the familiar terror, and she froze in his arms.
He felt it and drew back from her. She heard him mutter a curse. She wanted to run away, frightened at emotions she could not begin to comprehend, but he held her close, her cheek against his shoulder, his lips on her hair, and gradually the fear faded. Within the circle of his arms she felt safe and protected; she felt sixteen again holding his promise against her heart. It was so unexpected a sensation that she relaxed, her breath leaving her in a sigh and her body softening. Only then did he speak.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His tone was rougher than she had heard from him before, but it did not frighten her. She knew his anger was not for her. He released her. She could not look at him, gripped as she was by a sudden shyness that paralyzed her. So he put his hand under her chin and made her meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I went too far, too fast.” There was regret and gentleness in his eyes and Lucy felt the floor shift beneath her feet and felt her stomach slide.
He released her. Confusion swept through Lucy then because she was remembering that no matter how she had felt before, this was now, and she had betrayed him and he did not like her for it. Yet despite that, something had happened between them, something dangerous, something she did not understand.
“I think,” she said—and her voice was a thread of sound—“that you should go.”
He looked at her for a long, long moment and his eyes were dark, his expression opaque, and she had no idea what he was thinking. Then he nodded abruptly.
He bowed and went out. Lucy heard the library door close.
She sank down onto one of the spindly cherrywood chairs, then got up again straightaway and went over to the sideboard, where she poured herself another glass of Lord Brodrie’s best claret. She needed a drink. The burn of the liquid against her throat steadied her. She drained the glass and filled it again.
The fire felt too hot. She moved away to a window seat, pressing her fingers against the cold diamond panes. It was as though her body was too heated, sensitive and on edge, wanting something.
“Lucy?”
She had not heard the library door open, but she saw that Mairi was standing on the edge of the Turkish rug, watching her. The candlelight glittered on the silver thread in her gown. Mairi’s gaze went to the glass in Lucy’s hand. Her eyebrows shot up.
“I saw Lord Methven leaving,” she said.
“We were discussing literature,” Lucy said. She drank some more claret and felt it slip through her veins, soothing her.
“Of course you were, Lucy,” Mairi said dryly. “I always find literary discussions so exciting they leave me looking as dazed as you do now.”
“It’s the drink,” Lucy said.
“And the kissing,” Mairi said. “You should see yourself.”
Lucy looked up at her reflection in the big mirror that hung above the fireplace. Her eyes looked a hazy dark blue. Her lips were stung red and slightly swollen. She pressed her fingers to them and felt an echo of sensation through her body. Her hair had come undone from its remaining pins. She had no notion how that had happened. She had no notion how any of it had happened. She was not sure what disturbed her more: the kiss or those sweet moments after in Methven’s arms when she had felt protected and safe.
Now you know how Alice felt.
Immediately Lucy felt the cold fear take her. It was impossible. She had never felt physical desire, not when she had read the erotic tales, not even when she had written her own sensual poetry. Yet one minute in Lord Methven’s arms had awakened emotions in her that she had never known, feelings that terrified her because she knew where they could lead.
She did not want to feel any of them.
Lucy shrank in on herself, the cold lapping around her again. Alice had given herself up to love and passion, given her heart, given her whole self, body and soul. It had ended in shame and misery and pain, and Lucy would never, ever make the same mistake as her twin had done.
“It mustn’t happen again,” she said aloud.
There was a mixture of amusement and cynicism in Mairi’s eyes.
“How naive you are,” she said gently, taking Lucy’s arm and steering her toward the door. “Once it has happened once, of course it will happen again. The only real question is when.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“ROBERT NEEDS TO find another bride now that his first choice has fled.” The Dowager Marchioness of Methven, radiating energy and disapproval, seated herself with orderly care on the upright chair Robert held for her. She had a habit of speaking about people as though they were not present. Certainly it felt to Robert as though his input into the conversation was not required.
It was a week after the wedding and they were in the library at Methven Castle. Mr. Kirkward, the family lawyer, had traveled up from Edinburgh to advise them. He was sitting on a lumpy gilt-and-cream sofa and looking most uncomfortable. Lady Methven was seated opposite and Jack drew up a chair to one side. Robert preferred to stand. He crossed to the window and looked out; a soaking gray haze hung over the far mountains, damping the day down and casting dark shadows across the glen.
This was how he remembered his grandfather’s castle, as a dripping, mournful edifice that had been barren of pleasure. In those days it had been his older brother, Gregor, who had brought light and laughter to the old place, but now Gregor was gone. As always, Robert felt the profound ache in his chest that memories of Gregor brought with them. Gregor’s death had changed his life and his future. He had been the second son, the spare. Methven should never have been his. His grandfather had told him so, that fierce old man who had made no secret of the fact that Robert was a poor substitute for his brother.
“It is indeed most unfortunate that Miss Brodrie eloped,” Mr. Kirkward agreed, his dry, precise tones recalling Robert to the room with its sterile shelves of uncut books and its uncomfortable furniture. “Such volatility in a bride quite ruins one’s plans.”
“Better before the wedding than afterward,” Robert said laconically.
He saw Kirkward’s pale gray eyes blink rapidly behind his bottle bottom spectacles. Like Lord Brodrie and the minister before him, the lawyer was evidently thinking him a cold fish.
“Quite so.” Mr. Kirkward shuffled the papers he had taken from his document case. Robert noted his discomfort. He had seen it in other men who had been uncertain how to deal with him. His brusque manner, his lack of warmth, intimidated many people. He knew that. It could be useful; he had never seen the need to change. Charm was a concept that was alien to him.
“Any preferences for your next choice, Rob?” Jack asked. He threw Robert a glance laced with malicious amusement. Jack was one man who was most certainly not intimidated by him. But his cousin knew him better than most men.
“I don’t have the luxury of choice,” Robert said tersely. “As I understand it, there is no one suitable. I have to wed a descendant of the first Earl of Cardross, and sadly his line was not very fecund. Only Miss Brodrie and one other cousin are eligible.”
“That would be Lady Annabel Channing,” Lady Methven said, nodding. “Pretty girl, but a complete lightskirt. You would never know if your heir was yours or someone else’s.”
Mr. Kirkward made a choking noise. He took off his glasses and polished them feverishly on a white handkerchief.
Jack laughed. “I wouldn’t mind a brazen bride,” he said. “That might have its benefits.”
Robert did mind, but there was little he could do about it. “My attempts to find a suitable wife have foundered,” he said. “I might as well choose an unsuitable one since she is the only eligible woman left.”
If only he had not kissed Lucy MacMorlan. One kiss had made him ache to take Lady Lucy to his bed when what he was obliged to do was take another woman as his bride. He did not like Lucy very much. Her meddling had cost him dearly. He certainly did not trust her. But liking had little to do with wanting, and he wanted her badly.
“You will do nothing so unbecoming to the name of Methven as marry a lightskirt, Robert,” his grandmother corrected him.
“I’ll do what I have to do,” Robert said bleakly. “Grandmama, there is no alternative.” He would marry an entire brothel of lightskirts if that were the price he had to pay to keep his lands.
“I regret to inform you that Lady Annabel wed last month in London,” Mr. Kirkward said primly.
“Then we are in some difficulty,” Robert said. He felt a violent fury to be so hamstrung by fate. All his life he had taken control, wrested it to him when he had none, fought for it. To be outmaneuvered by a royal decree three centuries old, to be able to do nothing to secure his estates and the future of his clan was intolerable.
“We simply cannot allow ghastly Wilfred Cardross to take Methven land,” Lady Methven said. There was a plaintive note in her voice, as though she suspected Robert of backing off from the fight. “He is a horrible man and he will clear the people from the estate and destroy their communities and sell off everything that he can and squander it all on the cards.”
“I have no intention of allowing Cardross to take the Methven estates,” Robert said. The earl was a hard landlord who Robert knew would force the crofters from their traditional homes and livelihoods. Many of the families of men who had fought for the Methven clan for generations would be turned off, abandoned into poverty, families divided and their strong community spirit extinguished. Those on the far-flung northern islands that were part of his patrimony would simply starve in these hard economic times.
He could never allow it. It was his duty as laird to protect the welfare of his people, and he was not going to fall at this, the very first hurdle. It was his fault that they were in this position in the first place. If he had not turned his back on Methven and on his duty as heir all those years ago, he would not have been in Canada when his grandfather had died and would not have taken so long to claim his inheritance. He realized that his fists were clenched tightly. Tension seeped through every muscle in his body. It was impossible to allow Wilfred Cardross to triumph. Yet how to prevent it...
Mr. Kirkward cleared his throat. “My lord, if I might mention...” He sounded timid. Robert wondered if the lawyer genuinely was afraid of him. Surely his reputation was not that bad.
“Of course, Mr. Kirkward,” he said.
“There is one other family line we have not previously explored,” Kirkward said. He searched through the sheaf of papers in his case with agitated fingers, and Robert saw he was holding a family tree. “We discovered it a number of weeks ago, but as you were already betrothed to Miss Brodrie it seemed irrelevant....” He placed the parchment on the table and smoothed it with his hand. “There is a slight problem, my lord, but perhaps, as you are—forgive me—desperate...”
Robert felt a prickle of irritation. He preferred directness to all this circumlocution.
“Spit it out, Kirkward,” he advised.
“You would be obliged to be brother-in-law to the man who stole your bride,” Kirkward murmured. “A sacrifice, but a small one perhaps, given that half of the Methven estates is at stake—”
Robert cut him off with a chopping motion. “Kirkward,” he said, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Mr. Kirkward flapped the genealogical list in his hand. “We had been interpreting the terms of the royal decree very strictly by looking for direct descendants of the Cardross earldom in the male line,” he said. “However, when we looked in the female line we found another line of descent.”
Robert thrust the hair back from his forehead in a quick, impatient gesture. “Would that meet the terms of the original treaty?” he asked swiftly.
Mr. Kirkward sighed with the air of a man at the end of his tether. “All the legal advice I have taken suggests it would meet the terms, my lord.”
Robert felt a flash of hope. Then he remembered the lawyer’s previous words. “When you said I would be obliged to be brother-in-law to the man who stole my bride...”
“Mr. Kirkward is referring to Lachlan MacMorlan,” Lady Methven said. She was squinting upside down at the family tree, head on one side. “The Duke of Forres’s daughters are kin to Cardross.”
Robert looked up sharply. “I know the Forres are kinsmen,” he said, “but I thought it was too distant a connection.”
Mr. Kirkward was shaking his head. “Straight down the line from the youngest daughter of the first Earl of Cardross.” His eyes darted from Robert’s face to Lady Methven to Jack. “There is, however, an impediment.”
“Naturally,” Robert said ironically. “When was it ever easy?”
“You may not wed any lady over the age of thirty or a widow,” Jack murmured, quoting from the original royal treaty. “No lady under the age of seventeen, no foreigners, especially no lady with English blood—”
“I need no reminders,” Robert said dryly. He could not quite believe that when he and Jack had first heard the ridiculously tight terms of the royal treaty they had actually laughed at it.
“Lady Christina MacMorlan is one and thirty,” Lady Methven said. “And Lady Mairi is a widow, so they are both ineligible.”
That left only Lady Lucy.
Lady Lucy MacMorlan was his only chance.
Lady Lucy who wrote erotic love letters like a wanton and kissed like an innocent. Lady Lucy who had ruined his betrothal, lied to him, caused scandal after scandal, was deceitful and manipulative and had done it all for the money.
Lady Lucy whom he wanted with a fierce lust that was quite inexplicable.
Jack shifted in his chair. “And suddenly it’s your birthday, Rob,” he said dryly.
There was an abrupt silence in the room. Everyone looked at Robert.
“Whatever can you mean, Jack?” Lady Methven said.
“Only that Rob likes Lady Lucy MacMorlan rather a lot,” Jack said, his grin broadening.
“Thank you, Jack,” Robert said dryly. “A helpful intervention, as always.” He stood up. “You mistake. I do not like Lady Lucy at all and I do not trust her an inch.”
Lady Methven looked scandalized. “Robert! She is a sweet girl.”

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