The Highland Ghost’s Virgin (The Lost Highland Lairds #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The heat in the ballroom tasted of melted tallow, stale lavender water, and the sour breath of three hundred people trying too hard to look amused.

Grisselle Hunter pinned her elbows to her ribs, hoping the gesture hid the gap where her gloves stopped short of her sleeves.

The silk was tight across her knuckles, dyed a shade of green that had been fashionable the previous winter but now looked merely old.

Behind her ear, a hairpin gave way with a tiny ping, letting a thick, rust-colored curl drop heavily onto her neck. She didn't bother to tuck it back.

"If she stares any harder at the chandelier, she’ll go blind," Clara Doyle whispered, her shoulder pressed tight against Grisselle’s.

Clara was twisting her own dance card between two fingers until the pasteboard buckled.

"Do not look to the left, Gris. The Asquith girl has been circling like a gull over a herring boat. "

"Let her circle," Grisselle muttered, her jaw locked so tight her teeth ached.

She looked straight ahead at the swirl of white satin and black wool moving across the floor.

The musicians were playing a quadrille, the rhythm fast and precise.

"Her feathers are too bright for her to do any real damage. "

"They say her people came down from the hills," a sharp, high voice drifted over the scrape of the violins.

Miss Penelope Asquith stopped three paces away, her fan snapping shut against her palm with a crack.

She leaned into the arm of Mr. Hartley, whose waistcoat was so stiffly embroidered he could barely turn his chin.

"One can always tell, can one not? You can take the girl out of the bog... "

Hartley let out a wet, whistling chuckle, his eyes sliding over Grisselle’s faded green silk before settling on his own polished shoes.

"Three years and not one offer. There’s a wager on it now at White’s, you know. Five hundred pieces says the man who would take her does not exist on God’s green earth."

Penelope turned fully then, her fan snapping open again, no longer pretending the words were meant for anyone but Grisselle. "Don't you agree, Miss Hunter? Surely a girl ought to know her own odds better than anyone."

Hartley recovered enough to add his own small bow in her direction. "Unless the wager itself frightens off what's left of the field."

"Come," Penelope said, tapping her closed fan against her lips as though the thought had only just struck her. "Give us a name. One gentleman who's asked you to dance this Season, and we'll call the whole wager settled and leave you in peace."

"Just the one," Hartley added, grinning. "Surely you can produce a single name, Miss Hunter."

Clara's hand found Grisselle's within the deep, heavy folds of her skirt.

Grisselle's ribs expanded. The tight, small knot in her chest didn't break; it went cold and hard as flint. She didn't drop her gaze. She turned her head slowly, letting her green eyes rest full on Penelope's face until the other girl's smirk twitched at the corner.

"I do hope you find what you are looking for, Penelope," Grisselle said, her voice dropping into a low, even cadence that cut straight through the music. She didn't raise her chin; she simply held the girl’s eyes. "We all deserve to be happy."

Penelope’s fan rattled against her stays.

Her mouth opened, shut, and her face went the dark, ugly color of a bruised turnip.

She wrenched her arm out of Hartley’s grasp and turned on her heel, her skirts hissing loudly against the floorboards as she hurried toward the refreshment tables.

Hartley blinked, hesitated, then trotted after her.

"Oh, that was cruel," Clara whispered, her grip loosening on Grisselle’s wrist. "She’ll spend three days trying to find the insult in that, and she’ll hate you twice as much when she realizes there was not one."

"She’ll hate me regardless," Grisselle said. She uncurled her fingers from her skirt, her palms damp against the cheap silk. "And the air in here is thick enough to choke a horse. I am going to find my mother before she attempts to barter me for a third-cousin’s annuity."

The carriage ride back to Mayfair was four miles of absolute silence, broken only by the dry rattle of the iron wheels against the cobblestones.

Inside the narrow townhouse, the smell of cabbage and wet coal met them at the door.

Her father took off his hat, his shoulders slumping until his coat looked two sizes too large for him.

He didn't look at Grisselle as he walked toward the small library; he kept his eyes on the threadbare carpet near the sideboard.

"You might try, Grisselle," he said, his voice grey with the weight of twenty years of bad harvests and London taxes. He stopped with his hand on the brass doorknob, his back to her. "Just... try. A smile costs nothing."

"A smile costs a great deal when you are offering it to a man who smells of gin and wagers on your maidenhood," Grisselle said, her fingers unhooking the cloak at her throat with a sharp jerk.

"We did not come all this way for you to make enemies of every family that might have you," her mother snapped, her stays creaking as she turned on the bottom stair.

She had her handkerchief clenched in her fist, biting the linen corner between her teeth.

"Your sister had three offers before her first season ended.

Your brother has his commission. And you stand there like a wild thing from the heather, looking down your nose at men who have three thousand a year. "

"They have three thousand a year and the brains of a boiled turnip, Mother."

"They have roofs, Grisselle!" Her mother’s voice went thin, cracking against the low ceiling of the hall.

"They have names that do not cause the tea-tables to go quiet when you enter the room.

If we do not settle you by the winter, your father must sell the timber at the old border house.

Is that what you want? To leave us with nothing but the mud? "

Grisselle's shoulders dropped on a long breath. "I am sorry, Mother." She meant it; she always did, standing in this hallway. "I will try harder. Truly, I will."

Her mother's mouth pressed into a thin, doubting line, but she said nothing more. Her father only looked at his boots.

Grisselle turned toward the dark service stairs, her slippers striking the bare wood with a quick, hard beat.

She didn't tell them that she would give her right hand to be covered in that mud right now. She didn't tell them that her lungs felt as though they were lined with wool every time she breathed the yellow London fog.

She wanted the cold, black water of the glen; she wanted the wind that smelled of peat and wet stone; she wanted the heavy, rumbling weight of her grandfather’s voice in the dark before the fire went out.

Her father was English through and through, a son of a viscount who'd never once set foot north of Carlisle before he married.

It was her mother's side that had put the mud in her blood. Her mother's father had been a Highland Laird once, before he gave the title over and settled the family in the English countryside, near enough to the border that Grisselle grew up half on one side of it and half on the other.

London hadn't been the plan at all. It was only after her English grandfather died, and her father was forced south to take up the viscountcy, that the whole family had been dragged into rooms like this one.

In her small bedroom at the top of the house, she didn't light the tallow stub. She pulled the faded green dress over her head, letting it fall in a heap on the floor, and kicked her tight shoes into the corner.

In her shift, she climbed onto the wide stone sill of the narrow window, pushing the small glass panes outward. The city below her was a dark grid of roofs, grease-smoke, and the distant, ugly shouting of coal-heavers by the river.

She pressed her forehead against the cold iron frame and let her eyes close.

"The sea took him fighting, lass," she whispered into the dark, her voice a low imitation of the old man’s burr. "They never found so much as a plank. The best of them go that way."

She had been seven when her grandfather first told her the stories of Alpin Herston.

She had sat on the sheepskin rug by his knees, her fingers tangled in his coarse wool coat, while he conjured up the image of the giant who had ruled the northern rocks.

A man who didn't care about wagers at White’s or the shade of a silk ribbon.

A man who had looked at the black bulk of the great bull whale and gone out into the grey foam with nothing but an iron hook and his own broad shoulders to feed his people.

Grisselle slid off the sill. Her feet were cold against the bare boards.

"If they want a name," she muttered, her fingers searching through the dark desk drawer until they found her father’s old iron ink-horn and a single scrap of heavy, unruled paper. "I will give them one they cannot touch."

She scraped the flint until a single small spark caught the linen wick of her candle. The yellow light flickered, casting her long, wild shadow against the white plaster wall.

She sat down, dipped the goose quill deep into the black ink, and wrote without stopping to let her fingers shake.

My dear Alpin,

The name on the paper looked large, clean, and real.

I think of your courage often. I think of you rowing out alone against the sea no other man would face...

The nib of the pen bit deep into the paper, scratching loudly in the small, silent room.

It wasn't a letter for a lawyer or a suitor from the ton.

It was a love song written to a ghost, a fierce, angry declaration that she would rather belong to a dead man in the grey water than any living thing in London.

She filled the page with his strength, with the wild hills of her childhood, with the dark waves that had taken him before the world could turn him small and polite.

When the ink dried, she folded the sheet twice, her thumbs pressing the creases until they were sharp as knives. She took the stick of red wax, held it over the flame until a heavy, dark drop fell onto the seam, and stamped it with her grandfather’s old silver seal, the one with the broken crest.

On the front, she wrote the words clearly, her hand steady now:

To Laird Alpin Herston,

Herston Castle,

The Highlands.

"There," she whispered to the empty room, her thumb tracing the red wax. "Let Penelope wager on that."

In the morning, she would take two pennies from her tea-money and drop them at the post office by the cross.

It would go north on the mail-coach, shaking in a leather sack for a week, until it reached the edge of the world where the roads turned to stone and water.

A clerk with ink on his cuffs would look at the name, shake his head, and throw it into the dead-letter box behind the counter.

Alpin Herston was twenty years in his grave, after all.

She blew out the candle, the smell of burnt tallow filling the dark. She climbed into her bed, pulling the rough blanket up to her chin, her heart beating with a strange, sharp rhythm she hadn't felt since she left the border.

I’m betrothed to a legend. I’m safe.