Description
Product Description
Rory MacLeod is a bold and powerful Highland Chief with only one allegiance–to his clan. He vows revenge against the rival MacDonald clan, though duty demands a handfast marriage to Isabel MacDonald–a bride he does not want and has no intention of keeping. But Rory couldn’t have anticipated the captivating woman who challenges his steely control, and unleashes the untamed passion simmering beneath his fierce exterior.
Blessed with incomparable beauty, Isabel MacDonald is prepared to use every means possible–including seduction–to uncover her husband’s most guarded secrets. Instead Rory awakens Isabel’s deepest desires and her sweetest fantasies. Now Isabel has found the happiness she’s always dreamed of with the very man she must betray, and discovers that passion can be far more dangerous than revenge.
About the Author
Monica McCarty’s interest in the Scottish clan system began in the most unlikely of places: a comparative legal history course at Stanford Law School. After a short but enjoyable stint practicing law, she realized that her legal vocation and her husband’s transitory career as a professional baseball player were not exactly a match made in heaven. So she traded in her legal briefs for Scottish historical romances with sexy alpha heroes. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and their two young children. Visit the author’s website at www.MonicaMcCarty.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
That mighty stronghold of the west In lonely grandeur reigns supreme; A monument of feudal power, And fitting haven for a king. —M. C. MacLeod
Loch Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, July 1601
Isabel MacDonald had never thought of herself as lacking in courage, but over the past few days she’d begun to reconsider. The long hours of travel, with little to do but think, had tested her mettle. What had seemed in Edinburgh a well-conceived plan to help her clan, now, as they neared their final destination in the farthest outreaches of Scotland, felt more like a virgin being led to the sacrifice. An analogy, she feared, that was disturbingly close to the truth.
Huddled among her MacDonald clansmen on the small birlinn, Isabel felt strangely alone. Like her, the other occupants of the boat remained both watchful and silent as they approached their enemy’s keep. Only the droning sound of the oars, plunging into the black depths beneath them, pierced the eerie quiet. Somewhere ahead of her in the loch beyond lay Castle Dunvegan, the impregnable stronghold of Clan MacLeod.
An icy wind swept over the loch, sending a chill deep into her bones. Eilean a Cheo, she recalled the Erse name for Skye. The “Isle of Mist”—what a prodigious understatement. Cursing her inappropriate traveling attire, Isabel wrapped her fur-trimmed cloak—the only warm garment she was wearing—tighter across her body in a futile attempt to warm herself. But her garments provided such scant protection from the elements, she might as well have been sitting here in a sark.
Given her perilous task, the foul weather seemed somehow fitting.
Isabel had been promised in handfast to the powerful MacLeod chief. Ostensibly, the handfast was a union brokered by the king to end two long and bitter years of feuding between the MacLeods and the MacDonalds. In reality, it was a ruse to gain her access to their enemy’s keep and, if all went according to plan, his heart.
No wedding would follow this handfast. When Isabel found what she came for, she would repudiate the handfast and return to her life at court as lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne as if nothing had happened, secure in the knowledge that she had helped her clan.
Assuming, of course, she wasn’t discovered.
In retrospect, passing the days by thinking of the different ways a spy could be punished probably had not been the most efficient use of her time.
Sensing Isabel’s unease, her cherished nursemaid, Bessie, reached down and g
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