Arran did not come back in until it was pitch-dark. Margot was in bed, lying on her side, her back to the door, when he loudly entered the room. She’d built the fire tonight, and he wordlessly shed his clothes before it, then climbed in beside her. He pulled her to his body, kissing her neck, his hands roaming her flesh, sliding in between her legs.

“Once,” she whispered into the hair at the top of his head as he kissed her breast, “I was a silly girl. I thought only of arranged marriages and fortunes, of what I would wear and who esteemed me and what things I might have around me. But I’m different now, Arran. I don’t even know myself any longer.”

He grunted his response, moved down her body, spread her legs apart and sank between them, as if to say he knew her. And that she was part of him.

* * *

THE DAYS BEGAN to grow shorter and the nights colder. Two hares and a grouse hung in the barn. Late-blooming flowers were growing around the lodge. Margot was in the garden one afternoon, taking cuttings of the flowers, when she heard a sound that didn’t quite register. She paused, listening...and slowly understood that what she was hearing were riders.

She felt a swoon of apprehension as she slowly lifted her head and looked over her shoulder. There, down the narrow glen, cantering alongside the loch, were four riders. They were coming to the lodge.

Everything seemed to suddenly grow too bright. Margot dropped the flowers and ran around the corner of the lodge to the outbuildings, flinging open the door where Arran was working.

“Christ in his heaven, what is it?” Arran asked when she burst through the door. He caught her with one arm and held her still. “What is it, Margot?”

“Horsemen.”

Arran pushed her aside, grabbed his gun from the wooden table and strode outside. Margot looked wildly about for something to defend herself with. She spotted the little knife he often carried in his boot, grabbed it and ran after him. She caught up to him just in front of the lodge. But his gun was pointed at the ground. “Aye, that’s Jock,” he said. “There is only one man who sits a horse like that.”

He strode out to greet his cousin.

But as the riders drew closer, Margot saw someone else that made tears spring to her eyes. Knox was with him. She raced to her brother, leaping up to hug him before he’d had time to come down from his horse.

Knox laughed into her embrace. “You’ll break my fool neck, Margot. Come,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist. “There is much to tell you and Mackenzie.”

They gathered inside the lodge, and after the party from Balhaire was assured that Margot and Arran were indeed quite well, Jock told them what had happened.