Heather and Velvet

To the Romance Writers of America and all my sisters and brothers-in-arms who have spilled their hearts, ink and tears to keep me sane: Emily Alward, Elizabeth Bevarly, Melissa Bregenzer, Norma Brown, Gwen Duzenberry, Elizabeth Lynn Gray, Kristin Hannah, Karen Harper, Mary Hooper, Lori and Tony Karayianni, Rebecca Lee, Stephanie Spearman, Shirley Turner and Jean Marie Willett.

For Andrea, who reminded me that some things were worth fighting for.

And for Michael, always.

About the Author

Preview of A Kiss to Remember

T
he bastard looked dead. Sebastian nudged him with his foot, waiting for the callused paw to reach out and jerk his thin leg out from under him, bracing himself for a roar of laughter. Ale trickled from the corner of his mouth. Sebastian dared to poke him harder, digging his bare toe into the fleshy abdomen. Nothing. Not even a drunken snore. The bastard
was
dead.

Sebastian squatted beside him. How had he gone so quietly? Sebastian had always imagined him going out in a bellowing, raging frenzy, the livid veins in his temple pulsing to a final snap. It hadn’t been like that at all. Just a slump and a thump and he was gone.

Sebastian brushed a dirty hank of hair from his brow, and his gaze flicked upward to the carved rafters of the hall. He held his breath in the silence. It was as if all the bells in the world had stopped ringing at once, leaving only their
echoes hanging in the air. Other sounds came to him then, untarnished by the smashing of pottery or the thud of a fist against his ear: the whisper of the swallows in the rafters, the rustle of a pine, the blurred hum of the wind across the moor. He bowed his head. It was the silence of a cathedral and it made him want to weep.

There was no time for weeping, though. MacKay would come for him now. His father’s enemy would come to take Dunkirk as his father had always warned he would. Sebastian’s lips tightened. MacKay might take the castle, but he would never take him.

He hooked his hands under his father’s boots. Brendan Kerr didn’t smell any worse dead than alive, but that would soon change if he was left long in the summer heat. Sebastian tugged. His gangly arms hadn’t caught up with the growing breadth of his shoulders, but through sheer determination he soon had his father’s body scooting through the pheasant bones that littered the stone floor.

When he reached the grass, Sebastian stopped, shaking with exertion, his stomach a hard knot of hunger. Sweat sifted through his long, dark eyelashes. He wiped it away.

Ye’ve the eyes of a lass, boy, and the puny spirit of one as well
.

Sebastian stumbled backward, flinching from long habit. His thin legs sprawled beneath him, and he bit back a cry. But his father did not rise. Brendan Kerr lay humped on the grass; a fly buzzed around his temple.

The boy’s teeth clenched against a savage urge to shove his father’s body over the cliff, to send it tumbling and spinning to the moor below. But no. His mama would not have wanted that. He would give his father a proper Christian burial. He would bury him so deep and pile so many stones on him that his voice would never rise to haunt him again.

The afternoon sun was sinking when Sebastian cast the last rock on his father’s grave. The clack echoed in the silence. A cooling breeze ruffled his hair and stiffened his sweat-drenched tunic against his skin. The moment seemed to call for something more. Awkwardly, his dirt-encrusted fingers signed the cross against his breast. It was his
mother’s symbol, his mother’s religion, only half remembered and fuzzy from disuse.

A golden eagle soared over the moor, buffeting Sebastian with a giddy sense of freedom. He bounded up the stairs of Dunkirk to its tower. It took him only minutes to stuff his meager belongings into a knapsack—a ragged tunic, two shriveled potatoes, a silver filigree brooch that had belonged to his mother. He turned to go, then paused, standing motionless for a moment in a slant of sunlight.

Slipping to his knees beside the bed, he threw a guilty glance over his shoulder. The last time he had dared touch his father’s coffer, he had received a cuffing that left his ears ringing for days.

Sebastian’s hands trembled as he lifted the lid. The rich tartan lay as he remembered it, folded by his father’s hands with a tenderness that had made Sebastian’s heart ache with jealousy. The plaid was the last memory of a past when the Kerrs and the MacKays had fought side by side, united under one chieftain, one clan. He ran a grubby finger over the green and black squares, dreaming of a time when claymores had clashed and the skirl of bagpipes had haunted the misty hills.

Sebastian stood, draping the plaid around him. The luxuriant wool enveloped his thin body and tried to slide away. He pawed through his knapsack, digging out his mother’s brooch to pin the garment at his shoulder.

The setting sun flushed the sky to orange as Sebastian scaled the low, crumbling wall and clambered down the cliff.

As the wind rippled the grasses of the moor into a patchwork of fading gold, Sebastian ran, exulting in the clean bend and stretch of his young muscles, the richness of the earth beneath his toughened soles. The plaid whipped around his thighs.

Midway across the moor he stumbled to a halt and turned to see Dunkirk silhouetted against the darkening sky.

He would return someday, he vowed. Not to skulk away like a thief in the night, but to ride up his own road in a fine carriage with a full purse and a fuller stomach. He would be so powerful, no one and nothing would dare stop him. Not
the law. Not MacKay. Not even the taunting echo of his father’s voice.

He would stand on that hill, arrayed in finery, and spit on his father’s grave.

Someday.

Sebastian tightened his knapsack with a jerk and loped into the deepening night without another backward glance.

P
rudence plunged through the slick underbrush. The coil of hair at the nape of her neck unrolled and fell around her shoulders in sodden ropes. She paused in her mad flight to pluck out pearl-tipped hairpins with methodical fingers. She tucked them in her deep pocket with a tidy pat so none would be lost, though she suspected the caution was unwarranted. Although her aunt would never admit it, she would not waste genuine pearls on her homely niece.

Prudence wrung out her velvet skirts before pushing on. Wet leaves slapped at her face. Lightning flooded the night sky, and stark boughs whipped against that canvas of white. Prudence opened her mouth to yell again, but the sound was snatched by a gust of wind, then drowned by a jarring crack of thunder. Torrents of rain drenched the forest, rendering even the cone-laden pine trees an ineffectual umbrella against the wind-lashed deluge. Prudence wrapped her arm
around a tree and cocked her head, straining to hear any hint of a desperate cry over the steady roar of the storm.

Turning her face up to the rain, she longed to give herself over to the exhilaration of the night—the pounding of thunder, the flash of lightning, the pelting of the summer rain against her skin. How different it was from being curled in the cozy cushions of her window seat, book in hand, watching raindrops stream down the leaded glass window. A primitive thirst opened her mouth wide to catch the rain on her tongue. This was no time for musing, though. Her hesitation could mean the death of one who was dear to her.