A Lady's Agreement

Unexpected Heirs of Scotland series

In Regency Scotland, an explorer and a dispossessed lady find themselves the beneficiaries of unexpected inheritances taking them from gentry to noble or gaining wealth almost overnight. Everything they know in life won’t help them as they enter Edinburgh’s, and Scotland’s, highest levels of society and industry and must find their way in their new positions. If only there was someone who could help them. . . .

Iain Buchanan fought his way up from the filthy and dangerous streets of Glasgow to become a wealthy and powerful man in the industrial world of Edinburgh. He’s even been knighted by the king. Success is in hand and he lives by the two rules that created the man he is now: no one stands in his way when he wants something and trust no one, for that is the way to danger, loss and poverty. So, Iain is determined that he will never look back and never stop moving forward. A good plan until one woman seems to thwart it

Lady Clare Logan, an earl’s estranged daughter was abandoned by her family when she made the choice to marry for love. Now she is a widow without heirs who decides to use the wealth and buildings she’s inherited for a good purpose—starting schools to educate poor children and the unfortunates of Edinburgh’s mean streets. Then Sir Iain Buchanan shows up claiming an existing gentleman’s agreement with her late husband with plans to gather her properties into his growing empire—the very ones she needs for her schools. The ones needed to fulfill the dreams she spun with her late husband.

Iain misinterprets Clare’s ladylike behavior and appearance and finds an intelligent, beguiling, stunningly beautiful woman with a spine of steel and the means to make his life miserable. But as they battle for possession of these critical properties, he cannot resist her wit and her fresh approach to life or the way her lips curl when she’s about to tell him no. Soon, the battle is less about the buildings and land and more about Iain’s desire and need to claim the woman who owns them. But, in gaining one he may lose the other—something he cannot allow. What will it take to convince the infuriating woman to accept his offer and him in her life and walk away from her plans?

When they were just lasses and growing up together, there had been times when she and Caro fought. Not just with words or insults, but also with hands and a fist once or twice. For years now, feeling the responsibility to be a lady and to behave as one, she had not engaged in such behavior.

For the first time in years, she wanted to slug her beloved sister.

“Lady Nairn! Please.” Clare could not help the tinge of discomfort in her tone.

“Lady Clare,” Sir Iain said, his voice deeper than usual as though he was going to chastise her. “If the marchioness wants to hear it, how can a simple knight refuse her request?”

A shiver tracked down her spine as he met her gaze with his own and only his left eyebrow and the left corner of his mouth lifted the tiniest of bits. Was he teasing her? Where did this charming, flirting version of the angry, overbearing, insulting man who’d stormed her office come from? Her true dilemma was how could she continue to protest and not look unhospitable in her sister’s home? A tilt of her head signaled her acquiescence.

“As Lord Nairn knows I am expanding my facilities near the waterfront in Leith and buying unused warehouses and the like,” he said, glancing at Caro’s husband before turning his attention to Caro herself. “Lady Nairn, I am not known to be a patient man when it comes to my businesses and I fear I was not the day I met Lady Clare.”

“That sounds interesting,” Caro said. Clare would have to wait to let her sister know exactly what she thought of Caro’s clear and plain and unseemly curiosity about a matter better left private. But when Sir Iain laughed at her sister’s comment, Clare lost her breath.

The laugh came from the depths of his being and changed his entire countenance and bearing. She’d seen overbearing. She’d witnessed charming. But this laugh, it was something so authentic and real that Clare knew she was seeing a part of this enigmatic man that few saw. Her blood heated at the sound of it. It was the sound of pure passion and her body ached at both the memory of such feelings and their absence in so long.

“Forgive me, Lady Clare,” he said with a nod. “I laugh at my own behavior and not yours that day.”

“Which was what, Sir Iain?” Caro asked with the focused attention of a dog with a juicy bone. Truly, there was nothing to be discovered but for an embarrassing moment or two of mistaken identity. He waited as the footmen removed the serving plates and replaced them with the next dishes and she could see Caro’s interest grow in those moments.

“I have been trying for months and months to get an answer about my offer for two properties previously owned by the late Mr. Logan. I’d been stymied in another business arrangement and let my impatience overrule my usual method of handling such matters.”

What or who else had said no to this man? She suspected that he was not accustomed to refusal.

“Over my man of business and my secretaries’ recommendations, I discovered the location of the new owner and went there to. . . negotiate.” He winked at her then.

He winked at her.

That small expression made her insides feel like warm treacle. Clare waited on the rest of his explanation and description of the chaos that ensued in their tumultuous first encounter.

“I burst in and did not allow anyone to stop me,” he said as he turned his gaze to her sister. “Pushing into the office there, demanding to see the owner and encountering a woman I assumed was a maidservant.”

“Oh, Clare!” Caro said. “Pray tell me you were not wearing that apron.”

“I’m afraid Lady Clare was indeed wearing an apron.”

The heat of a blush crept up her neck and filled her cheeks at his declaration. Clare grabbed her glass of wine and drank some, hoping to cool her embarrassment.

“And one of those frilly, white caps that most household servants wear.” Though he turned his dark gaze to her, she did not see any sign of mockery or derision in his eyes. Instead, humor shone there, sending a shiver down her spine.

“I was working, Sir Iain,” she said in her defense.

“Oh, Lady Clare, ‘twas my mistake. I expected to find the one I wanted to speak to about my interest and found someone completely different. Then, compounding my error and being so single-minded on my own matters, I did not see the woman before me.” He lifted his glass in salute to her, shocking Clare into silence. “I hope you can forgive my rash actions?”

No one had ever taken her feelings into account and yet this enigmatic, attractive, somehow dangerous stranger did. And as brash and overbearing as he’d been in that first encounter, here he was admitting his fault before her sister and her brother-by-marriage with whom he was in some business endeavor.

Iain Buchanan was not the man she expected him to be.

Clare smiled and nodded. “Apology accepted, Sir Iain.”

“To Lady Clare,” he said as he lifted his glass higher and nodded at her. The others repeated his words, leaving Clare unable to breathe.

Seeing Caro’s smile and meeting the marquess’s gaze warmed her heart. No matter that her father and mother had shunned her, Caro and Nairn had never joined in their cruelty. Her parents’ deletion of their eldest daughter from their lives and family had been complete and utterly clear to their extended relatives and acquaintances and friends in society. Early in her marriage Jonathan had been enough to see her through, but in the few years since losing him, they had been the one link to her past that had not been severed.

The kind act of this man had unnerved her. She could eat and drink only by rote after that. Her wits had fled at his words and his gesture, and it took some time to gather her thoughts. How she managed to say the correct words when needed to reply to a question or how she continued to function at all was a mystery to her. But she did.

Until Nairn’s butler entered the room as the table was being cleared.

His usually impeccable manners faltered when he allowed his gaze to meet hers for just a moment. Placing her cutlery on her plate, Clare waited as the footman removed it before studying the whispered exchange. The butler left and Clare held her breath, knowing somehow that she was directly involved.

“Lord Heath is joining us for our final course this evening,” Nairn announced.

A glance at Caro revealed she was surprised in this as well. The only one who did not tense at such a declaration, she noticed, was Sir Iain. But then why or how would he know the situation in her family?