The Lady and the Laird. Nicola Cornick

to her than the other half of the apple.

      She placed the pieces of pot carefully back on the shelf and slipped into bed, burrowing into the warmth and falling asleep. She dreamed of the sickle moon shining over the sea and of strong magic and of Robert Methven’s kisses. She knew he would not give her away. They were bound together now.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Forres Castle, Scotland, February 1812

      “LUCY, I NEED you to do me a favor.”

      Lady Lucy MacMorlan’s quill stuttered on the paper, leaving a large blob of ink. She had been in the middle of a particularly complex mathematical calculation when her brother Lachlan burst into the library. A gust of bitter winter air accompanied him, lifting the tapestries from the walls and sending the dust scurrying along the stone floor. The fire crackled and hissed as more sleet tumbled down the chimney. Lucy’s precious calculations flew from the desk to skate along the floor.

      “Please close the door, Lachlan,” Lucy said politely.

      Her brother did as he was bid, cutting off the vicious draught up the stone spiral stair. He threw himself down, long and lanky, in one of the ancient armchairs before the fire.

      “I need your help,” he said again.

      Lucy smothered her instinctive irritation. It seemed unfair that Lachlan, two years older than she at six and twenty, always needed her to pull him out of trouble. Lachlan had a careless charm and a conviction that someone else would sort out the trouble he caused. That someone always seemed to be Lucy.

      They all had their roles in the family. Angus, the son and heir, was stodgy and dull. Christina, Lucy’s eldest sister, was an on-the-shelf spinster who had devoted her life to raising her siblings after their mother had died and now acted as hostess for their father. Mairi, Lucy’s other sister, was a widow. Lachlan ran wild. Lucy had always been the good child, the perfect child in fact.

      What a perfect baby, people had said, leaning over her crib to admire her. Later she had been called a perfect young lady, then a perfect debutante. She had even made the perfect betrothal, straight from the schoolroom, to an older gentleman who was a nobleman and a scholar. When he had died before they married, she had become perfectly unobtainable.

      Once upon a time she had been a perfect sister and friend too. She had had a twin with whom she shared everything. She had thought her life was safe and secure, but she had been wrong. But here Lucy closed her mind, like the slamming shut of an oaken door. It did no good to think about the past.

      “Lucy?” Lachlan was impatient for her attention. He looped one booted leg carelessly over the arm of the chair and sat smiling at her. Lucy looked at him suspiciously.

      “What are you working on?” he asked, gesturing to the papers that were scattered across the desk.

      “I was trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem,” Lucy said.

      Lachlan looked baffled. “Why would you do that?”

      “Because I enjoy the challenge,” Lucy said.

      Lachlan shook his head. “I wouldn’t choose to do mathematics unless I absolutely had to,” he said.

      “You wouldn’t choose to do anything unless you had to,” Lucy pointed out.

      Lachlan’s smiled widened. He looked as though he thought she had paid him a compliment. “That’s true,” he said. He fixed her with his bright hazel eyes. “How is your writing progressing?”

      “I am working on a lady’s guide to finding the perfect gentleman,” Lucy said. She spoke with dignity. She knew that Lachlan was laughing at her. He thought her writing was ridiculous, a mystifying hobby. All the Duke of Forres’s daughters wrote; it was an interest they had inherited from their mother, who had been a notable bluestocking. The sons, in contrast, were not bookish. Lucy loved her brothers—well, she loved Lachlan even though he exasperated her, and she tried to love stuffy Angus—but intellectual they were not.

      As if to prove it, Lachlan gave a hoot of laughter. “A guide to finding the perfect gentleman? What do you know of the subject?”

      “I was betrothed to such a man,” Lucy said sharply. “Of course I know.”

      The light died from Lachlan’s eyes. “Duncan MacGillivray was hardly the perfect gentleman,” he said. “Nor was he the perfect match for you. He was too old.”

      Lucy experienced a tight, trapped feeling in her chest. “You are so rude,” she said crossly.

      “No,” Lachlan said. “I tell the truth. You only agreed to marry him because Papa wanted you to wed and you were still grieving for Alice and you weren’t thinking straight.”

      Alice...

      Another cold draught slid under the door and tickled its way down Lucy’s spine. She shivered and drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders. Alice had been dead for eight years, but not a day passed when Lucy did not think of her twin. There was a hollow, Alice-shaped space inside her. She wondered if she would always feel like this, so empty, as though a part of her had been cut out, leaving nothing but darkness in its place. Alice’s absence was like a constant ache, a shadow on the heart, and a missed step in the dark. Even after all this time, it hurt so sharply it could sometimes make her catch her breath. Her childhood had ended the day Alice died.

      She pushed the thought away, as she always did. She was not going to talk about Alice.

      “The point,” she said, “is that I know what constitutes gentlemanly behavior, and more importantly—” she looked down her nose at her brother “—what does not.”

      “You know what constitutes French and Italian pornography, as well,” Lachlan said with a grin, “and your erotic writings have been far more successful and profitable than your other writing. I wonder why you do not write more of them.”

      Lucy frowned at him fiercely. “You know full well why I do not! We don’t talk about that, Lachlan. Remember? It’s all in the past and no one is to know. Do you want me to be ruined?”

      Lachlan scowled back at her, the two of them reduced to their nursery squabbling for a brief moment. “Of course not. And I haven’t told a soul.”

      Lucy sighed. She supposed it was unfair to pin all of the blame on her brother when she had been so recklessly stupid and naive, but there was no doubt that he was untrustworthy. A year ago Lachlan had come to her and begged a favor, much as he was doing now. He needed her help with writing a letter, he had said. It had to be extremely romantic, very sensual, and sufficient to seduce the lady of his dreams into his arms.

      Lucy had desperately needed to earn some money, and since she was more articulate than her brother, she had agreed. She had culled some lines from Shakespeare for him and added some poetry of her own. Lachlan had laughed and had said he needed something rather more exciting.

      It was then that Lucy had remembered the erotic writings in the castle library. The library had always been a treasure trove for her, and she had scoured its shelves from the time she could read, devouring the vast collection that her grandfather had brought back from the Grand Tour. Then one day, among the weighty tomes of political history and the works of the classical scholars, she had found something a great deal more inflammatory than dry politics: several folios of drawings and sketches of men and women in the most extraordinary erotic poses. Some of the sketches had seemed anatomically impossible to Lucy, but it had been both educational and interesting to see them and she had viewed the pictures with intense intellectual curiosity, even turning the books upside down and sideways at various points to check that she had understood the details correctly.

      Alongside the drawing had also been writings, vivid and sensual, equally interesting to the curious academic mind. It was these that Lucy remembered when Lachlan asked for something rather more arousing than Shakespeare. She had used the writings as inspiration. Perhaps she had overdone it. She was not sure. But certainly her brother had had no complaints. He had even