Chapter One
Edinburgh
August 20, 1822

Dear Cousin,
I worry about Venetia's trip to Scotland. Yes, I know what the papers reported—that the Scottish Scourge was killed three months ago in a fight with Sir Lachlan Ross that left both men dead. Still, considering the Scourge's mysterious grievance against the earl, I'd feel easier if someone could produce the villain's body.
Your anxious relation,
Charlotte

Mama would have loved this," Venetia said wistfully to her aunt, Maggie Douglas, the Viscountess Kerr. They stood in line waiting to be announced at the True Highlander Celtic Society's masquerade ball, now near enough to hear bagpipes skirling from inside the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms. "Don't you just adore the tartans and strathspeys and costumes and—"

"—packed streets and wretched food and ghastly accommodations?" Aunt Maggie rolled her green eyes, the same shade as her niece's. "Not a bit. Unlike you—and my sister, when she was alive—I prefer the comforts of London. Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep since we arrived."

"So the snoring I hear nightly comes from our baggage?" Venetia teased.

"Mind your tongue, or I'll make you take the lumpy side of the mattress."

Venetia laughed. "Forgive me. You've been very good to put up with it."

Their lodgings truly were awful, but they'd been lucky even to find them. Every spare bedroom, garret, and cellar had been spoken for by the hordes that had descended upon Edinburgh to witness the first visit of a reigning English monarch to Scotland in nearly two centuries.

But Venetia didn't mind their miserable inn room. She'd waited sixteen years to return to Scotland, and she wouldn't let a flat pillow and a lumpy mattress—or a grousing chaperone—dampen her pleasure.

Venetia squeezed her aunt's hand as the line moved forward. "You can't know how much I appreciate your accompanying me. Otherwise, I would never have convinced Papa to let me come."

"I'm rather shocked that you did. However did you manage it?"

"Oh, Papa is easy enough to handle. I only had to make one tiny promise."

"And what was that?"

She cast her aunt a game smile. "To accept a proposal of marriage in the next year."

"That isn't exactly a tiny promise, my dear. And who is the lucky fellow?"

"Lord, I don't know. Anyone I can endure, I suppose." And anyone passing the inspection of Mrs. Charlotte Harris and the mysterious Cousin Michael, who routinely provided information about men in society to Venetia's schoolmistress.

"Papa worries I'll never find a husband," Venetia explained. In truth, she'd begun to worry the same thing.

"A lady like you will always have proposals," her aunt said with a dismissive wave of her jeweled fingers.

"It's not a dearth of proposals that worries him. It's my lack of interest in any of them." She'd promised her mother never to marry any man who didn't rouse her senses, whatever that meant. When Mama had elicited the promise, she hadn't said it was because of Papa, but Venetia often wondered…

"So have you any particular men in mind?" her aunt asked.

She blew out a long breath. "No, but I hope to find someone in Scotland, away from the fortune hunters and dull-witted English lords. I want a Scottish laird with a venerable old name, who lives and breathes the Highlands—"

"Like the fellows in those ballads you love to collect, I suppose."

Copyright © 2007 by Deborah Gonzales.