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In 1920s Scotland, even ghosts wear plaid.
Welcome to a sexy, spooky new paranormal
historical series from debut author Ella Stainton.

Keep reading for an excerpt from
Best Laid Plaids,
book one of the Kilty Pleasures series.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the entire Carina team for giving Cooper and Park such a supportive home.

To my consistently wonderful editor Mackenzie Walton. This series would not be the same without her patience, care and talent.

And to my family. They know who they are.

About the Author

Charlie Adhara writes contemporary, mystery, paranormal, queer romance. Or some assortment of that, anyway. Whatever the genre, her stories feature imperfect people stumbling around, tripping over trouble and falling in love. Charlie has done a fair amount of stumbling around herself, but tends to find her way back to the northeast US. When she’s not writing, Charlie is reading, hiking, exploring flea markets and acting as an amateur cobbler for her collection of weird shoes.

To learn more and stay updated, follow Charlie on the usual suspects!

Best Laid Plaids

by Ella Stainton

Chapter One

Joachim

Fifeshire, Scotland, 1928

Joachim kept a brisk pace up the interminably long path to Rosethorne House, no matter that his ankle might give out before he got there. The steel tip of his walking stick twanged, punctuating each step in the way he’d grown accustomed in the ten years since the end of the Great War. Gravel drives like this were the worst; bloody slippery underfoot and hard to catch purchase. He mopped his brow once he stopped on the wide sandstone steps that led to a front door of oak that could have graced a medieval castle.

Rosethorne House, my arse.

It was an estate and a rather formidable one. Sixteenth-century foundation, though a storybook façade had been added sometime in the past two hundred years. Ivy and some sort of flowering vine trailed between small diamond-paned windows, which glittered in the sunshine.

After traveling for three hours on the train up from the university town of Durham in the north of England, and another hour and a half on the bus from Edinburgh, Joachim’s resolve flagged. He was much too shabby to be a guest in a place like this.

Bollocks. When he’d concocted the scheme to venture into the lowlands of Scotland to gather research for his PhD, Stuart Graham, his mentor and friend who made the arrangements, could have at least warned that he belonged to a wealthy family. But Joachim had never been a coward—had he? He pressed the doorbell before he answered that question.

Less than thirty seconds later, the door opened wide. A smart black-suited man—the butler?—looked the weary traveler over with such liveliness that Joachim’s ears pinked. Really, Stuart, you could have warned me to buy a new blazer at the least.