Chapter 1

June 1792
Edinburgh, Scotland

Douglas MacRae had no idea, when he prepared for the evening, that in one moment ten years would be swept away and he would feel as lost and distraught as a young man. He had no intimation and no foreboding, when leaving his house a few hours earlier, that he might see her.

He stared at the woman standing in the doorway, limned by the light. An icy coldness encapsulated him, as well as a sensation of being instantly catapulted into some otherworldly place.

She was supposed to be dead.

Attired in a dark blue dress with only a hint of white at the collar and cuffs to soften the severe hue, she stood immobile, her face expressionless, holding on to the hand of a little boy. The child, his hair curling in brown ringlets, wore a suit of clothes identical to his father's down to the lace at his neck and wrists.

Douglas had two immediate thoughts—that Hartley's wife was a ghost from his past, and that she wasn't, evidently, still bedridden as the man had said.

The little boy rubbed at his eyes and the woman spoke to him in hushed tones. A gentle smile changed her face, lit her eyes, and softened her lips.

Suddenly it was two years ago and he was standing in the captain's cabin of his brother's ship, a scrap of a handwritten notice in his hand. Hamish had brought the news from France and he'd read it three times before making sense of the words.

"The Comte du Marchand is dead," he said aloud, the words not having the weight he expected. "And Vallans is destroyed."

"What about his daughter?" his brother had asked.

"It doesn't say." He'd laid the notice down on the table in his brother's cabin, stunned and disagreeably affected by the realization that Jeanne du Marchand must be dead as well. But it seemed that she wasn't, was she?

"Bid your father goodnight," she said tenderly to the little boy. At the sound of her voice, Douglas was immediately reminded of Paris, a shadowed garden, and the sound of summer.

The child looked timorously at the man seated next to Douglas.

"Goodnight, Papa," he said, not relinquishing Jeanne's hand. The child didn't move from his stance by the door. Nor did his host bid him come closer.

"Goodnight, Davis," Hartley said, smiling absently at his son. He managed a longer look at Jeanne.

Her auburn hair was held at the back of her head in a serviceable bun. Over it she wore an arrangement of lace and dark blue ribbon. But it was her face Douglas studied as she stood with eyes downcast, her gaze fixed on the floor.

A lovely face, one he'd kissed enough times to know the texture of her skin, to measure the distance from the corner of her full lips across her high cheekbones to fluttering eyelashes. He'd traced the line of each winged brow with his fingertips. He'd seen a Roman coin once and the perfection of the profile had reminded him of her.

Thick spectacles now shielded her soft gray eyes, a shade that reminded him of fog and storms, and smoke from a peak fire. A voice from his memory, a laughing teasing taunt, whispered in his ear.

"I fear that I'm vain, Douglas. I could see you better if I wore them, but they are so ugly."

"Nothing you could do," he'd said, "could ever make you less beautiful in my eyes, Jeanne." His own voice had been laden with lust and youthful exuberance. But he had been in love, so desperately in love that he didn't see her as less than perfect.

She'd linked her arms around his neck and kissed him sweetly, gently.

Copyright © 2007 by Karen Ranney.