How to Marry a Highlander

in her belly.

“No,” she replied. “I have a fortnight yet.” Mr. Baker-Frye had taken tea with Moira, each morning for three days in a row she had encountered him in the park, and he had accepted the invitation to dinner tonight with enthusiasm. It could not be long before an alliance happened there. One accomplished, one in the making, and only five to go. In a fortnight. “I will do it. Mark my words.”

“’Tis a struggle to mark them when I canna think o’ anything but the pretty lips that’ve spoken them.”

Her mouth fell open. He made no pretense of looking elsewhere.

“I canna get yer flavor outta ma head, Miss Teresa Finch-Freeworth.”

“Then kiss me again,” she whispered. “Right now. There’s an empty parlor just on the other side of that door.”

“Ye like to drive a man as mad as yerself, dinna ye?” His voice was smiling and ever so slightly husky.

“Not intentionally.” She held her breath. “What I would really like is to know more about you.” She craned her neck to look into his face.

He was no longer smiling. “Ye must make an end to this wager.”

“I shall. In a fortnight.”

He moved away. She put on a genial face and laughed and chatted with everybody. But that night when Diantha and Wyn had gone to bed and the house was again dark, she stole down to the parlor and wrote a little piece she titled “The Maid Milliner of Harpers Crest Cove and the Trouble With Desire: A Story of Seed Cakes.”

When she was finished she sanded it and tucked it into the drawer. The pile of pages seemed thinner than before. But she was weary and discouraged and not thinking perfectly straight. In the morning she would pull out all the stories and send a few to Freddie. He would laugh himself to pieces.

She went to bed telling herself that would be enough. It must be enough.

It was all the real happiness she would ever have.

Duncan read the London journals. He knew as well as anybody that scandal was afoot at one of the town’s rag sheets. The editor had hired a lady journalist and he was giving her a byline. Gossip was flying, but the column was already wildly popular.

It seemed to him that the London public would also enjoy satirical snippets of life in a provincial town written by a lady humorist. It so happened that he had several such stories in his possession now. So, after he spent the morning riding in the park with his sisters and the lady from Cheshire that made him forget his past, he paid a call on the offices of TheLondon Weekly.

A woman with a rich fantasy life should have an outlet for it that did not involve ruining her future.

The weather grew warm and fine, and for a single day Teresa wanted nothing to do with searching fruitlessly for suitors. It seemed that everywhere Lord Eads escorted them, no eligible gentlemen were to be found anyway.

She almost believed he was trying to sabotage his sisters’ chances.

But if they were to engage in gentleman-scarce outings, one may as well be of her own creation. She made plans and called at the hotel to invite her friends.

“Lily’s no been herself since the ball, an Effie’s itching to make trouble again.” Una took Teresa’s arm as they went into the parlor. The same ancient little grey lady draped in black wool sat staring out the window.

“Good day, ma’am,” Teresa said, then to Una: “I have something planned that should put both Lily and Effie to rights. I came to tell you.”

“I’ve news first. Mr. Baker-Frye asked ma brither for Moira’s hand this morn.”

“But that was very quick!”

“She’s verra beautiful.” Una winked. “But I think he cares for her. For all that he’s worth twenty thousand a year, he’s a kind man. Moira says they agree on everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“How remarkably dull and wonderful for them.”

Una laughed.

With a light step, Teresa went around telling the sisters about her planned outing at week’s end and bidding them all dress suitably for the outdoors.

Moira’s cheeks glowed.

“May I invite Mr. Baker-Frye, Teresa? He’s fond o’ growing things.”

“Of course. What a merry party we will be.”

Only Abigail and Lily could not be found, but Teresa suspected where to search for at least one of the missing sisters.

In the kitchen, quiet in the lull between breakfast and lunch preparations, Lily was arranging sprigs of fresh herbs about the edges of two dozen little chicken carcasses laid out on a roasting pan.

“Abby’s gone back to the bookstore.” She offered a game smile.

“Dearest Lily, you must pull yourself out of this brown study and—”

“Qu’est-ceque—What are you doing?” Monsieur Le Coq rushed forward from the doorway, throwing off his hat as he came.

“Dressing these capons,” Lily said. “They look so much prettier this way.

And they will taste divine.”

“Mais, vous—” Then he looked up and his dark eyes opened in wonder.

“Mon ange,” he whispered.

Lily cocked her head. “What does that mean?”

And so Hotel King Harry’s exclusive French chef was obliged to translate for the seventeen-year-old Scottish angel who had appeared in his kitchen days earlier for so brief a moment that he thought he’d imagined her, though she’d left behind the most miraculous cakes he had ever tasted. He not only translated but he rhapsodized in a manner only the French could affect, with such mellifluous praise that Lily’s eyes were shining by the time he finished.

“Monsieur, yer a poet,” she said brightly. Then more hesitantly: “Might I make cakes again today? Or mebbe a pudding?”

“I would be honored, mademoiselle!” he said with a flourishing bow that encompassed the entirety of his realm.

Lily beamed.

Disconcerted, Teresa left them to their cakes and chickens. She did not recall ever seeing Lily’s eyes shine at Tobias quite like they had at the fastidious little French chef. Bemused and not liking where her thoughts brought her, she set off on foot for her brother’s flat four blocks away.

“Walk aboot wi’ yer head in the clouds, lass, an yer likely to take a tumble.”

She snapped her cloudy head up to see Lord Eads astride his beautiful big roan stallion on the street beside her.

“Good day, my lord. My head was not in the clouds but in the hotel with your sisters. Congratulations on your acquisition of another brother-in-law.”

“Will ye claim ye’d no hand in that one too?” The shadow cast by the brim of his hat fell across his eyes and she could not tell if he was smiling.

“No, for I did. Although they might have encountered each other in the corridor any day, it’s true.”

“Do ye niver have a maid wi’ ye, Miss Finch-Freeworth?”

“Annie walked with me to the hotel but she was distracted by a footman, I think. I could not find her when I departed.”

He dismounted and drew his horse toward her. “’Tis no way for a leddy to go aboot town. Alone.”

“I am always alone, my lord.” Even with Annie. Painfully alone. The only real friend she’d ever had in Harrows Court Crossing had gone away to school when she was only ten years old and then to war when she was fifteen, and until he inherited Brennon Manor from their father he was unlikely to return. Her three years at the Bailey Academy for Young Ladies had afforded her the dear friendship of Diantha, and lately she had grown deeply fond of Lady Una. But at home in Cheshire she had no one with whom to share her stories and dreams. “And I hardly see how a man who has committed crimes and kissed a lady in a foyer after