Now Izzy’s given up yearning for romance. She’ll settle for a roof over her head. What fairy tales are left over for an impoverished twenty-six year-old woman who’s never even been kissed?
The driver pocketed her offering
and touched his cap. “What was yer name again, miss?”
“Goodnight. Miss Izzy Goodnight.”
She waited to see if he would
recognize it. Most of the literate people in England would, and a great many of
their domestic servants, besides.
The driver only grunted. “Jes’
wanted to know it, in case someone comes around asking. If you’re never heard
from again.”
Izzy laughed. She waited for him
to laugh, too.
He didn’t.
Soon driver, team, and carriage
were nothing more than the fading crunch of wheels on the road.
Izzy picked up her valise and
walked through the barbican. A stone bridge carried her over what once had been
a moat but now was only a slimy green trickle.
She’d done a bit of research in advance
of her journey. There wasn’t much to read. Only that Gostley Castle had once
been the seat of the Rothbury dukedom, in Norman times.
It didn’t look inhabited now.
There was no glass in many of the windows. No lights in them, either. There
should have been a portcullis that dropped to bar the entrance—but there was
nothing there. No door, no gate.
She walked through the archway
and into the central, open courtyard.
“Lord Archer?” Her voice died in
the air. She tried again. “Lord Archer, are you here?” This time, her call got
a respectable echo off the flagstones. But no answer.
She was alone.
Dizzied from her strange
surroundings and weak with hunger, Izzy closed her eyes. She coerced air into
her lungs.
You cannot faint. Only ninnies
and consumptive ladies swoon, and you are neither.
It started to rain. Fat, heavy
drops of summer rain—the kind that always struck her as vaguely lewd and
debauched. Little potbellied drunkards, those summer raindrops, chortling on
their way to earth and crashing open with glee.
She was getting wet, but the
alternative—seeking shelter inside one of the darkened arches—was less
appealing by far.
A rustling sound made her jump
and wheel. Just a raven taking wing. She watched it fly over the castle wall
and away.
She laughed a little. Really. It
was too much. A vast, uninhabited castle, rain, and now ravens, too? Someone
was playing her a cruel trick.
Then she glimpsed a man across
the courtyard, standing in a darkened archway.
And if he was a trick, he wasn’t
a cruel one.
There were things in nature that
took their beauty from delicate structure and intricate symmetry. Flowers.
Seashells. Butterfly wings. And then there were things that were beautiful for their
wild power and their refusal to be tamed. Snowcapped mountains. Churning
thunderclouds. Shaggy, sharp-toothed lions.
This man silhouetted before her?
He belonged, quite solidly, in the latter category.
So did the wolf sitting at his
heel.
It couldn’t be a wolf, she told
herself. It had to be some sort of dog. Wolves had long been hunted to extinction.
The last one in England died ages ago.
But then . . . she would have
thought they’d stopped making men like this, too.
He shifted his weight, and a
slant of weak light revealed the bottom half of his face. She glimpsed a wide,
sensual slash of a mouth. A squared jaw, dark with whiskers. Overlong hair
brushed his collar. Or it would have, if he had a collar. He wore only an
open-necked linen shirt beneath his coat. Buckskin breeches hugged him from
slim hips to muscled thighs . . . and from there, his legs disappeared into a
pair of weathered, dusty Hessians.
Oh, dear. She did have such a
weakness for a pair of well-traveled boots. They made her desperate to know
everywhere they’d been.
Her heart beat faster. This
didn’t help with her lightheadedness problem.
“Are you Lord Archer?” she asked.
“No.” The word was low,
unforgiving.
The beast at his heel growled.
“Oh. I-is Lord Archer here?”
“No.”
“Are you the caretaker?” she
asked. “Are you expecting him soon?”
“No. And no.”
Was that amusement in his voice?
She swallowed hard. “I received a
letter. From Lord Archer. He asked me to meet him here on this date regarding
some business with the late Earl of Lynforth’s estate. Apparently he left me some
sort of bequest.” She extended the letter with a shaking hand. “Here. Would you
care to read it for yourself?”
That wide mouth quirked at one
corner. “No.”
Izzy retracted the letter as
calmly as she could manage and replaced it in her pocket.
He leaned one shoulder against the
archway. “Aren’t we going to continue?”
“Continue what?”
“This game.” His voice was so low
it seemed to crawl to her over the flagstones, then shiver up through the soles
of her feet. “Am I a Russian prince? No. Is my favorite color yellow? No. Would
I object if you were to come inside and remove every stitch of your damp
clothing?” His voice did the impossible. It sank lower. “No.”
He was just making sport of her
now.
Izzy clutched her valise to her
chest. She didn’t want Snowdrop getting wet. “Do you treat all your visitors
this way?”
Idiot. She cursed herself
and braced for another low, mocking “no.”
He said, “Only the pretty ones.”
Oh, Lord. She ought to have
guessed it earlier. The fatigue and hunger had done something to her brain. She
could almost believe the castle, the ravens, the sudden appearance of a tall,
dark, handsome man. But now he was flirting with her?
She had to be hallucinating.
The rain beat down, impatient to
get from the clouds to the earth. Izzy watched drops pinging off the
flagstones. Each one seemed to chisel a bit more strength from her knees.
The castle walls began to spin.
Her vision went dark at the edges.
“I . . . Forgive me, I . . .”
Her valise dropped to the ground.
The beast snarled at it.
The man moved out from the
shadows.
And Izzy fainted dead away.
Series: Bad Boys of the Highlands #1
Victoria Roberts writes sexy, award-winning Scottish historical romances about kilted heroes and warriors from the past. Prior to ever picking up a single romance novel, she penned her first young adult novella at 16 years old. Who knew her leather-studded motorcycle hero would trade in his ride and emerge as a kilt wearing Highlander wielding a broadsword? Victoria lives with her husband and their two beautiful children in western Pennsylvania. 
