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read and write, and in general perform any other menial errand that it pleases me to request.”
    “This is rather presumptuous, my lord. You have yet to be officially sworn in as chieftain of the clan to be ordering me about. By ancient law, you have to stand on the white stone by the sea to take the oath.”
    “It is no less presumptuous, Marsali, than to have a wild young woman assaulting innocents on the moor.”
    He straightened his shoulders; against her will Marsali watched the subtle interplay of powerful muscle and sinew beneath his weather-browned skin. His face reminded her of one of the medieval knights carved into the cold stone of the castle crypts. Beautiful but impas sive. Angular, aristocratic… unfeeling. Only the intense blue of his eyes and the laugh lines etched around his mouth hinted he ever allowed any emotion to show. She wondered what it would take to crack the iron bands of his self-control.
    “As to the matter of my chieftainship,” Duncan continued, focusing a level look around him, “is there a man here who would challenge me, or assume the responsibility?
    The utter silence almost made him smile.
    “Hell’s bells,” Marsali said in astonishment, craning her neck to glance around. “Isn’t anyone going to stop him?”
    Lachlan gave her a somber if sympathetic look. “No, lass, we are not. He might be dressed like a jackanapes Sassenach—well, he might have been dressed like one, I should say. And he might have left a load of ill feelin’s behind when his dad sent him off to war, but it appears he is our laird and chieftain, and we’ll obey him, until he’s proven otherwise.”
    “Well,” Duncan said with a self-assured nod, “that appears to be the end of it, doesn’t it?”
    “It appears to be,” Marsali said crisply. And she couldn’t entirely fault her companions. To her annoyance, some primitive instinct deep inside her was also responding to the raw power that characterized Duncan’s every movement, the spell he had cast over his ragged clan.
    Duncan allowed himself to relax, having expected anything but this pleasant acquiescence. “I could have made it much worse for you, you realize. I could have turned you over to the authorities.”
    He thought he saw the shadow of a smile flit across her bewitching face. “I’m very afraid you’re going to wish you had turned me over, my lord,” she said, adding softly, “after I’m through with you.”
     
     
    M arsali Hay had lived on MacElgin land all her life. She was four years old when the late laird and chieftain, the sixteenth marquess of Portmuir, Kenneth MacElgin, had bought his incorrigible only son, Duncan, a commission in the British army. It had been an act of desperation. Kenneth had hoped that fighting wars would provide a safe channel for the anger and hostility that had characterized Duncan’s tempestuous youth. The lad was beyond his control.
    She remembered her father telling Mama more than once that Duncan probably could not help his wildness; it had been beaten into him by the cruel fisherman who had raised him. But Marsali could recall little beyond that, except Mama retorting that even if Duncan could not help his wildness, someone still had to stop him from terrorizing the village with his drunken, wenching ways.
    And then there had been a scandal, a hushed-up affair involving a doctor’s young wife and a baby, and Duncan had disappeared like a puff of smoke, banished by the laird for his misconduct.
    Occasionally, over the years, the old laird would read from a tattered newspaper at a clan meeting or local gathering, recounting his son’s military exploits in the cavalry. By then, of course, the reports were several months old, and Duncan had scored another military victory, or received another promotion or charmed another foreign princess. His talent for warring and winning hearts apparently knew no bounds.
    Everyone pretended to be pleased. But in reality, Duncan had left behind too many raw