She racked her brain for a suitable excuse. Anything would do—anything that wouldn’t hurt any finer feelings or seem ungrateful. Anything.

A sound came from without—the jangle of harness and the creak of cartwheels on the rutted track running up to the cottage.

“Someone’s in the lane.” Which was both a mercy and a true diversion—normally no carriages stopped at Dove Cottage. But Elspeth meant to make the most of the distraction, even if it were just a drover who had lost his way.

Anything to put off the inevitable.

She pushed the lace cap deep into the pocket of her practical quilted skirts and bolted for the door. “I’ll just have a wee look, shall I?”

“Elspeth!” Aunt Isla remonstrated. “Have a care!”

This was Elspeth’s task in life—to have a care. To never call attention to herself, nor give up her guard against her tainted blood. To keep vigilant against all manner of mischief or mischance lurking within and without. To keep safe, and quiet, and not—under any circumstances—to be herself.

“Don’t rush,” Aunt Isla continued to instruct. “Why must you always rush?”

Elspeth rushed because a clarty, mud-splattered dray was drawing up beside their gate, and the driver was looking meaningfully at their cottage.

She was down the path in a trice, despite the dreich, dripping June weather. The Aunts came hard behind, hovering in the doorway to listen to every word, so Elspeth was rather more careful of her diction—no scaffy, vulgar Scots cant for the genteel sisters Murray—than her skirts. “May I help you?”

“Deliv’ry fer Miss Otis,” bawled the driver over the chitter of the rain, shooting his thumb over his shoulder at the large tarpaulin-covered mound in the muddy well of his dray.

“There must be a mistake. We’re expecting no deliveries.” Aunt Molly came out of the doorway only far enough to wave her arm to shoo the nuisance of a mon away from the gate, as if he were a nothing more than a large, mud-splattered midge.

But the dray mon was stout of heart as well as of girth, and assessed the situation with one squinted eye. His gaze pegged square on Elspeth. “Ye be Miss Otis?”

“Aye. I am.” Elspeth stepped forward through the rain not caring if she did get soaking drookit—she was as stout-hearted as any other Scots lass, and she was far more curious than she was afraid of catching cold. “What is it you’re delivering?” She went on tiptoe to peer over the side. “From whom is it sent?”

The driver heaved his bulk down onto the lane. “Frae Edinburgh,” was his terse answer. “Sn’ Andrew’s Square.”

His words doused her aunts more effectively than any downpour—they shrank back into the doorway, as if the dray might contain some great calamity instead of what was undoubtedly some commonplace item—for nothing outside of commonplace ever occurred in their village.

“Nay!” Aunt Isla gasped.

The driver barely raised a bushy brow. “A trunk, it be,” he said as he began untying ropes and peeling back the tarpaulin to reveal the most battered, unprepossessing, commonplace old trunk Elspeth had ever seen. “Where d’ye want it?”

“I’m not sure.” Besides the fact that Elspeth could not imagine how or why she should be sent a trunk from Edinburgh, her aunts’ reactions told her they would be loath to allow the thing into the cottage. “D’you know what it contains?”

“Iniquity!” Aunt Isla’s thin voice was sharp with frantic accusation. “She needs nothing from that huzzy. Nothing, I tell you! Take it back, take it back.”

Elspeth had rarely heard such language from her aunt. “What huzzy?”

The Aunts exchanged one of their long moments of silent communication before it was somehow tacitly decided that Aunt Molly would answer. “That Wastrel’s sister,” she said at last, pursing her thin lips in distaste. “She has a house, so we are told, on St. Andrew Square in Edinburgh.”

That Wastrel being her late, unlamented father. Of whom Elspeth was never to speak.

“Den of vipers,” Isla added in a fervent whisper. “All of a piece.”

A piece of what, Elspeth did not ask. She was too busy overcoming the curious shock of learning she had any other kin in the world besides the two elderly relations in front of her, let alone a woman who lived so close as Edinburgh. The metropolis was a little over twelve miles to the north and east, but for Elspeth, who had never been allowed to venture farther than the next wee village, it might as well have been the farthest reaches of the heathen Americas.

“Why did you never tell me?” She would have reckoned at the advanced age of four and twenty she might finally be judged safe from becoming a huzzy merely by association.

“Because a more scandalous, scarlet woman of Babylon never lived,” was Isla’s fervent opinion.

“We thought it best,” was Molly’s more decorous judgment.

“But she, this scarlet woman”—and if a lass was to have an unknown relation, how intriguing, and somehow inevitable, that she should be a scarlet woman—“has known of me? Well, clearly she has”— Elspeth answered her own question—“for she has sent me a present. On my birthday. But how strange that she should never have written me before.”

Another fraught, stony-faced look passed silently between the two elderly sisters.

“Aunt Molly?” Elspeth faced the eldest of the two. “Do you mean to tell me she has written to me previously?”

“We thought it best,” Molly repeated, “to keep you from the influence—”

“The iniquitous influence,” Isla amended.

“—of That Wastrel’s family.”

Elspeth braced herself for the lecture she knew would be coming following the mention of her long-dead father. John Otis had done three things to earn the sobriquet of “That Wastrel”. First, he had fallen in love with her mother, the Aunts’ lovely youngest sister, Fiona, which had led to pregnancy, Elspeth’s birth, and shortly thereafter, her mother’s untimely death. Secondly, he had written a book so scandalous, licentious and popular that it had subsequently been banned from publication. And lastly, he had, in his grief over his young wife’s death, slowly drunk himself to death, leaving his only daughter to the tender care of the only family she had left in the world—her devoted, but strict, spinster aunts.

“We wanted to wait until you were older,” Aunt Molly tried to explain.

“Old enough to know better,” Isla added.

Well. She was certainly old enough now, wasn’t she, now that she was a dashed spinster?

“Aye, there be a letter, too.” The dray mon slapped into her palm a thick, expensively papered letter with Elspeth’s own name in an elegant scrawl across the front.

“Michty me.” Elspeth gave vent to her frustration with forbidden Scots cant. “What else have ye twa been keeping frae me?”

Chapter 2

“I’m sure you know why I’ve called you here, Hamish.”

Hamish Cathcart, third, last legitimate, and nearly forgotten son of the Earl Cathcart, did not know why his father had summoned him to the dark-paneled book room of his Edinburgh townhouse. Nor did he particularly care. His father’s summons only ever amounted to one thing—Hamish was to shut his smart mouth and do as he was bid.

Which he did do. Sometimes.

Sometimes he played the dutiful third son, and obeyed. And sometimes he only gave the appearance of obeisance, and quietly found a way to do what he wanted without ruffling the earl’s carefully preened feathers.

Today, however, was not going to be one of those times. Because today he had a very strong hunch he knew exactly what the auld mon was working himself into a fine lather to say—Hamish was going to be cut off.

“You can’t think I intend to finance you all of your days. And you can’t expect that after I’m gone, your brother, William, will simply pay you an allowance indefinitely.”

On this point, Hamish did agree with the tightfisted auld bean. He did not think his allowance—indifferently given and indifferently received—would continue indefinitely. Which was why he had never spent the money his father doled out to him as the auld mon assumed, on cheap wine, cheaper women and off-key song. Hamish had, instead, invested it. But with investment came risk. And although risk had its rewards, it also had its downfalls.

And at the moment, Hamish had rather fallen down.

Yet he was more than sure that he could revive himself, just as he always had, and make another modest fortune. An idea was poised at the back of his brain—poised and not entirely formed. Not without—

“—a wife.”

Ye gods. Hamish’s wayward attention snapped back to the auld badger. “I beg your pardon?”

“Did you hear nothing I said?” the earl snorted.

“I distinctly heard you say the word ‘wife’.” Hamish pronounced the word with the same wariness one might speak the words “serpent” or “debutante” or “debt collector”.

“Indeed.” The Earl Cathcart slapped the flat of his palm against the desktop, as if that explained everything. “You need a wife. With a suitable fortune. Luckily, you’ve got your hair and your teeth, if not a great deal of ambition, or steadiness of character, so we ought to be able to take a good pick of the available heiresses. I’ve drawn up a list—”

“We?” Hamish didn’t care if his tone was swimming in sarcasm.

A sarcasm his father willfully ignored. “Of course your mother will have her candidates as well, but I should think I know far better what a young man of your character requires, eh?” The earl allowed himself a chuckle. “I’ve my eye on a few fillies that should take your fancy enough to make it no chore to get an heir off her.”

Hamish shoved the distasteful idea of equating a lass to a brood mare out of his mind, consigning it to the rubbish heap that was the only suitable receptacle for his father’s crude, patronizing view of the world. “As I am not the heir, I’ve no need to get myself one.”

When that pleasantly snide observation elicited no discernible reaction, Hamish tried the prick of a more pointed probe. “And need I remind you of the unhappy state of your own arranged marriage? You’re hardly a recommendation for such an arrangement.”

His father looked down his impressively long nose. “Don’t be crass.”

“And arranging to take a lass to wife with the same callous calculation as if she were a mare at a fair is not? I am not being crass, but factual.” Even if Hamish and his siblings had not been witness to years and years of continuous marital sniping and discord, Hamish’s illegitimate half-brother, Rory, was proof enough of their father’s infidelity.

And yet his father called Hamish unsteady.

His father was not best pleased at this display of logic. “And what, you fancy yourself in love?” This time it was his father’s voice that dripped with sarcasm.

“Heaven forfend,” Hamish laughed off the idea—he was unsteady, not unhinged. “Not at all, sir.” He was too busy for anything so time-consuming as love. “I have other plans to secure my future than shackling myself to some unknown lass.”

“Better someone unknown,” his father advised darkly, “than someone for whom you’ve too much regard.”

Though he was no poetry-spouting romantic, Hamish immediately rejected such a dismal view. He had friends enough with good marriages—the aforementioned half-brother, Rory, and his lovely French wife, Mignon, came immediately to mind—to know that regard for one’s partner in life was not only preferable, it was positively necessary. “That is your opinion, sir. I, myself, will not contemplate marriage without it.”

But the sad truth of the matter was that there was no lass for whom he felt such regard. No one at all.

“So be it.” His father stood. “From this day forward, I am done with you. The ledger”—he clapped the account book open before him shut—“is closed. If you care not for the benefit of my advice and counsel on the matter of getting a wife, I will leave you to the dubious pleasure of your mother’s tender”—his tone carried all the weight of his distaste for his wife of thirty years—“cares. Good luck with any wife she might find for you. Prim, priggish lasses like she’s made your sisters—so missish they could curdle milk with their sour looks.”

As Hamish would rather be made to walk naked down Edinburgh’s High Street than spend two minutes with any such woman, he softened his tone. “Forgive me, Father, if I appeared ungrateful. But I simply don’t share your urgency for my marriage. I am not so done up without your money that I don’t have a feather to fly by. Far from it. I am not so frivolous or imprudent as that.”

Indeed, he had not been frivolous at all—he had just had a run of bad luck, was all. Yet he was sure he could revive his fortunes sufficiently to make marrying for money entirely unnecessary.