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
