Page 2 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

Her father was English through and through, a son of a viscount who'd never once set foot north of Carlisle before he married.

It was her mother's side that had put the mud in her blood. Her mother's father had been a Highland Laird once, before he gave the title over and settled the family in the English countryside, near enough to the border that Grisselle grew up half on one side of it and half on the other.

London hadn't been the plan at all. It was only after her English grandfather died, and her father was forced south to take up the viscountcy, that the whole family had been dragged into rooms like this one.

In her small bedroom at the top of the house, she didn't light the tallow stub. She pulled the faded green dress over her head, letting it fall in a heap on the floor, and kicked her tight shoes into the corner.

In her shift, she climbed onto the wide stone sill of the narrow window, pushing the small glass panes outward. The city below her was a dark grid of roofs, grease-smoke, and the distant, ugly shouting of coal-heavers by the river.

She pressed her forehead against the cold iron frame and let her eyes close.

"The sea took him fighting, lass," she whispered into the dark, her voice a low imitation of the old man’s burr. "They never found so much as a plank. The best of them go that way."

She had been seven when her grandfather first told her the stories of Alpin Herston. She had sat on the sheepskin rug by his knees, her fingers tangled in his coarse wool coat, while he conjured up the image of the giant who had ruled the northern rocks. A man who didn't care about wagers at White’s or the shade of a silk ribbon. A man who had looked at the black bulk of the great bull whale and gone out into the grey foam with nothing but an iron hook and his own broad shoulders to feed his people.

Grisselle slid off the sill. Her feet were cold against the bare boards.

"If they want a name," she muttered, her fingers searching through the dark desk drawer until they found her father’s old iron ink-horn and a single scrap of heavy, unruled paper. "I will give them one they cannot touch."

She scraped the flint until a single small spark caught the linen wick of her candle. The yellow light flickered, casting her long, wild shadow against the white plaster wall.

She sat down, dipped the goose quill deep into the black ink, and wrote without stopping to let her fingers shake.

My dear Alpin,

The name on the paper looked large, clean, and real.

I think of your courage often. I think of you rowing out alone against the sea no other man would face...

The nib of the pen bit deep into the paper, scratching loudly in the small, silent room.

It wasn't a letter for a lawyer or a suitor from the ton. It was a love song written to a ghost, a fierce, angry declaration that she would rather belong to a dead man in the grey water than any living thing in London. She filled the page with his strength, with the wild hills of her childhood, with the dark waves that had taken him before the world could turn him small and polite.

When the ink dried, she folded the sheet twice, her thumbs pressing the creases until they were sharp as knives. She took the stick of red wax, held it over the flame until a heavy, dark drop fell onto the seam, and stamped it with her grandfather’s old silver seal, the one with the broken crest.

On the front, she wrote the words clearly, her hand steady now:

To Laird Alpin Herston,

Herston Castle,

The Highlands.

"There," she whispered to the empty room, her thumb tracing the red wax. "Let Penelope wager on that."

In the morning, she would take two pennies from her tea-money and drop them at the post office by the cross. It would go north on the mail-coach, shaking in a leather sack for a week, until it reached the edge of the world where the roads turned to stone and water. A clerk with ink on his cuffs would look at the name, shake his head, and throw it into the dead-letter box behind the counter.

Alpin Herston was twenty years in his grave, after all.

She blew out the candle, the smell of burnt tallow filling the dark. She climbed into her bed, pulling the rough blanket up to her chin, her heart beating with a strange, sharp rhythm she hadn't felt since she left the border.

I’m betrothed to a legend. I’m safe.

CHAPTER TWO

The wool of Alpin’s trews was stiff with frozen brine, grazing his skin with every step up the rocky track from the shore. The first grey light of morning was just cutting through the mist, turning the stone walls of Herston Castle the color of iron. He stopped at the postern gate, his thumb tracing the thick line of the scar under his jaw where the cold salt always settled first, aching in the bone.

The heavy oak door swung inward before his boot touched the threshold.