The Lady Most Willing

“I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,” Robin said. “This part of the castle has been uninhabited for generations. Anything worth keeping was removed long ago.”

“Drat.”

He grinned at this small imprecation. “Exactly. I’m sorry.”

“No matter. I’ll just look elsewhere. There must be something somewhere.”

He doubted it, but why dampen her spirits when she was so obviously enjoying her treasure hunt?

“Did you have in mind somewhere particular to look?” he asked.

“Not really. I’ve already been in every room in this corridor.”

“Then perhaps you’d allow me to escort you back to a more likely hunting ground? Finovair might not be very large but it can be confusing. Purposely so.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s all part of our national heritage. All those Jacobites and Hanoverians littering the countryside, plotting and counterplotting, ferreting out secrets and squirreling others away. Small wonder Scottish castles tend to be warrens of secret passages and blind ends, priest bolts and lovers’ cupboards. And the Fergusons were the worst of the lot. As such it only stands to reason their stronghold would be one of the most abstruse. Yes. You really had best let me accompany you—”

She held up her hand, laughing. “Have done, Robin! I am convinced.”

Had he sounded so eager? He must indeed be bewitched. His sangfroid was legendary.

“And by all means, I accept,” she went on. “I should hate to end up lost in these walls for eternity. Take me where you will. I am yours!”

His heart lurched at her words and he glanced at her to see if she understood what she’d offered, but not a bit of caution clouded her face. She smiled sunnily up at him, sovereign in her consequence. No one would dare assail her. After all, she was an earl’s daughter.

Foolish girl, she was far too lovely to make such assumptions. After all, she’d been abducted, hadn’t she? Kidnapped and dragged through a storm to a heathenish, frozen castle for the express purpose of becoming its heir’s bride.

His bride.

The thought hovered with tantalizing effect in the foreground of his imagination. What if he stayed and wooed her? Seduced her? Used all his much-vaunted skill to try to win her for his own? Would she succumb?

Would he?

She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, unaware of the profligate impulses shivering through him.

“I admit,” she said, “the idea of being lost here does conjure an amusing image: my poor spirit moaning dolefully through the walls at your descendants, only to have them shout back that I deserve my fate for not accepting your escort. ” She peeked up at him through sooty lashes. “At least I assume that any descendants of yours would have scant pity for fools who don’t know enough to take what was offered.”

He checked, startled by an interpretation of her words that she could not possibly have meant. She gazed at him, all innocence and trust. He swallowed. “You think you know me well enough to predict my unborn descendants’ dispositions?” he asked, discovering that he liked the idea that she knew him; he even liked the idea that she thought she knew him. Though, of course she couldn’t. His lovers had often complained that his laughter and wit deflected any hope of achieving any intimacy that didn’t involve the flesh.

But here, at this moment, with this girl in her oversized dress and bed-hanging shawl, looking like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe to play dress-up, walking along a hall where frost rimed the windows and crept like silvery lichen along the ceiling as their breath made little shrouds in the air, in this strange fairy-tale land of predawn glitter and soft, frosted sheen, Cecily’s assumption of familiarity felt warm and companionable and . . . right.

Perhaps he needn’t avoid her after all. Perhaps they really could just be friends . . .

But then he glanced at her, just a glance, and noted the way the angled light limned her full lower lip, the elegant line of her nose, the glossy sheen of her rich dark locks, and the small shadowed vale just visible above where she’d tucked the velvet material into her bodice and realized, no, they could not just be friends.

“Am I presumptuous?” she asked, not looking the least abashed. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” he said easily. “I am just appalled that my predictability is so blatant you can foretell what traits my descendants will inherit.”

“You are kind, Robin,” she said, studying him.

Her words made him uneasy. He was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. And a pauper. She must know that.

He drew her back to his side and they proceeded at a leisurely pace, as if they were strolling in St. James Park during the height of the season, not a frozen corridor in a ruined castle in the dead of winter.

“You might well be correct about my presumed offspring,” he said. “If future Comtes de Rocheforte were to be found lounging about the castle. But I doubt