Katharine Ashe: How to Marry a Highlander

Eleanor crossed her arms and became noticeably interested in the treetops.

The boy scowled.

“Look, Tali.” Ravenna shoved the puppy beneath his chin. “Papa gave him to me for my birthday.”

The boy scratched the little creature behind a floppy ear. “What’ll you call him?”

“Beast, perhaps?” Eleanor mumbled. “Oh, but that name is already claimed here.”

The boy’s hand dropped and his square shoulders went rigid. “Reverend sent me to fetch you home for supper.” Without another word he turned about and walked toward the horse corral.

Eleanor’s gaze followed him reluctantly, her brow pinched. “He looks like he does not eat.”

“Perhaps he hasn’t enough food. He has no mama or papa,” Ravenna said.

“Whoever Taliesin’s mama and papa were, they must have been very handsome,” Arabella said, fingering her hair. She remembered little of their mother except her hair, the same golden-red as Arabella’s, her soft, tight embrace, and her scent of cane sugar and rum. Eleanor remembered little more, and only a hazy image of their father—tall, golden-haired, and wearing a uniform.

The fortune-teller had not told her everything, Arabella was certain. Out there was a man who had no idea his three daughters were still alive. A man who could tell them why the mother of his children had sent them away.

The answer was hidden with a prince.

Arabella’s teeth worried the inside of her lip but her eyes flashed with purpose. “One of us will wed a prince someday. It must be so.”

“Eleanor should marry him because she is the eldest.” Ravenna upended the puppy and rubbed its belly. “Then you can marry Tali, Bella. He brings me frogs from the pond and I wish he were our brother.”

“No,” Arabella said. “Taliesin loves Eleanor—”

“He does not. He hates me and I think he is odious.”

“—and I aim to marry high.” Her jaw set firmly like any man’s twice her age.

“A gentleman?” Ravenna said.

“Higher.”

“A duke ?”

“A duke is insufficient.” She drew the ring from her pocket anew, its weight making a dent in her palm. “I will marry a prince. I will take us home.”

Plymouth August 1817Lucien Westfall, former commander of the HMS Victory , Comte de Rallis, and heir to the Duchy of Lycombe, sat in the corner of the tavern because long ago he had learned that with a corner at his back he could detect danger approaching from any direction. Now the corner provided the additional benefit of a limited landscape to study.

On this occasion the landscape especially intrigued.

“Ye’ve got the air o’ a hawk about ye, lad.” Gavin Stewart, ship’s physician and chaplain, hefted his tankard of ale. “Is she still looking at ye?”

“No. She is looking at you. Glaring, rather.” Luc took up from the table the letter from his uncle’s land steward, folded the pages and tucked them into his waistcoat pocket. “I think she wants you gone.”

“Wants to get at ye. They all do. ’Tis the scar.” Gavin lounged back in his chair and scratched his whiskers, salty black and scant. “Wimmen like dangerous men.”

“Then you are doomed to a lonely life, old friend. But you were already, I suppose.”

“Hazard o’ the vows,” the priest chortled. “Bonnie lass?”

“Possibly.” Pretty eyes, bright even across the lamp-lit tavern, and keenly assessing him. Pretty nose and pretty mouth too. “Though possibly a schoolteacher.” A cloth cinched around her head covered her hair entirely, and her cloak was fastened up to her neck. Beneath it her collar was white and high. “Trussed up as tight as a virgin.”

“The mither o’ our Lord was a virgin, lad,” Gavin admonished. Then: “An’ what’s the fun if a man’s no’ got to work for the treasure?”

Luc lifted a brow. “Those were the days, hm, Father?”

Gavin laughed aloud. “Those were the days.” He was broad in the chest like his Scottish forebears, and his laughter had always been a balm to Luc.

“But since when do ye be knowing a thing about schoolteachers?”

Since the age of eleven when Luc had escaped the estate where their guardian kept him and his younger brother and blundered onto the grounds of a finishing school for gentlewomen. With a soft reprimand, the headmistress had returned him home to a punishment he could not have invented in his worst nightmares.

Luc had not believed his guardian’s rants about the evils of temptation found in female flesh. Of course, he hadn’t believed anything the Reverend Absalom Fletcher said after the first few months. Bad men often lied. So he escaped the following day and ran to the school, hoping to find the headmistress out walking again, and again the following day, and again, seeking an ally. Or merely a haven. Each time the footmen dragged him back to his guardian’s house, his punishment for the disobedience was more severe.

He had borne it all with silent tears of defiance upon his cheeks. Until Absalom discovered his true weakness. Then Luc stopped disobeying. Then he became the model ward.

“I know about women,” Luc grumbled. “And that one is trouble.” He took a swallow of whiskey. It burned, and he liked that it burned. Every time she looked at him he got an awfully bad feeling.

Her movements were both confident and compact as she surveyed the crowded dockside tavern with an upward tilt of her chin as though she were the queen and this a royal inspection. Clearly she did not belong here.

Gavin set his empty tankard on the table. “I’ll be leaving ye to the leddy’s pleasure.” He dragged his weathered body from the chair. Not a day over fifty, the Scot was weary of the sea that he had taken to for Luc’s sake eleven years earlier. “Don’t suppose ye’ll be wanting to have a wee bit o’ holiday at that castle o’ yours after we leave the crew off at Saint-Nazaire? Visit yer rascally brother?”

“No time. The grain won’t ship itself to Portugal.” Luc tried to shrug it off, but Gavin understood. The famine of the previous year was lingering. People were starving. They could not halt their work for a holiday.

And, quite simply, he needed to be at sea.

“Grain. Aye,” Gavin only said, and made his way out of the tavern.

Luc swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and waited. He did know women, of all varieties, and this one wasn’t even trying to feign disinterest.

She wove her way through the rowdy crowd, taking care nevertheless to touch no one in her approach. Only when she stood before him on the other side of the table could he make out her eyes—blue, bright, and wary. The hand clutching the cloak close over her bosom was slender, but the veins beneath the pale skin were strong.

“You are the man they call the Pirate.” It was not a question. Of course it wasn’t .

“Am I?”

A single winged brow tilted upward. “They said that I was to look for the dark-haired man with a scar cutting across his eye on the right, a black-

banded kerchief, and a green left eye. As you are sitting in shadow, the color of your eye is not clear to me. But you bear a scar and you cover your right eye.”

“Perhaps I am not the only man in Plymouth that answers to such a description.”

Now both brows rose. The slope of her nose was pristine, her skin without blemish and glowing in the fading sunlight slanting through the window at Luc’s back. “There aren’t any pirates now,” she said, “only poor sailors with peg legs and patched up faces from the war. It is very silly and probably disrespectful of you to call yourself that.”

“I don’t call myself much of anything at all.” Not Captain Westfall, and not the Duke of Lycombe’s heir. The latter was an unstable business in any case.