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.”
