Sarah Gabriel Read Online Free

married a woman who can claim fairy blood in her family. As for the rest of us—”
    “May we be half so lucky. Fiona, I intend to oppose the will, if you and James and William will agree that we have a case. Then you need not go searching under flower petals and rocks for fairy creatures.”
    “Either way, I must stay here. I have agreed to teach at the glen school. The Edinburgh Ladies’ Society is relying on me. No one else could take this teaching assignment.”
    “No one else wanted to come up here, Fiona.”
    “But it is a lovely place,” she murmured, glancing around at the misted hills and the long, rock-studded slopes that ran toward the loch. “Sometimes I think I cannot bear to exist as another spinster in Edinburgh, attending charitable meetings and social gatherings, gossiping, netting purses, and finding silly ways to fill time. This charitable work is interesting, even adventurous, and I do need to make something of my life,” she added passionately. “Something that does not involve netting purses and pouring tea!”
    “We have all seen that the Edinburgh Ladies’ Society for—what is it?—oh aye, for the Education and Betterment of the Gaels, has been good for you these past few years.”
    “True, and they are genuinely dedicated to helping Highlanders. I care very much about that cause,” she murmured.
    “They were genuinely delighted to find a lady who is not only fluent in Gaelic, but willing to travel to the back of beyond.”
    “If not for those opportunities, I might have given in to grief…after Archie’s death,” she said.
    “Not you,” he said. “You are a hardy soul.”
    Fiona shook her head in gentle denial. Not even her family knew how close she had come to succumbing to perpetual near-widowhood; she had been so young, and Archie had seemed to be everything to her. But now she knew better, and she would not make the mistake again of giving herself over so completely to someone, only to be abandoned when death took him, as it had taken both her parents when she and her siblings were all quite young.
    “I’ve had marvelous opportunities to travel the Highlands to do my teaching, and have a wonderful hobby in the fossils—oh, Patrick, it is getting late,” she added. “Go! I promise to return to Edinburgh by summer, with or without the fairy drawings.”
    “Or the required wealthy Highland husband?” Patrick lifted a brow.
    “I can hardly find one of those here, or anywhere in the Highlands. I am a few years older than most, a spinster with dull academic interests—not much of a catch. Nor are there many wealthy Highlanders left, with what Scotland has suffered over the last century.”
    “You are a lovely girl, and you have rejected every suitor who has been interested.”
    “They are interested in what I might inherit. Otherwise, I am the sister of a viscount and the niece of a viscountess, and lack a fortune without that inheritance. Being no one in particular, I am unlikely to find a wealthy husband at all. Nor do I care about it particularly.” She lifted her chin.
    “You refused a marriage offer just last Christmas.”
    “I felt no spark toward the man,” she said. “Nor was Sir Walter impressed with him, either. You know Sir Walter is convinced that we can all do what Grandmother asked of us. He was such an excellent friend to her, and to us. She truly believed that the old MacCarran traditions of fairy magic can be restored if we marry spouses with fairy blood.”
    “Nonsense, however well meant,” Patrick said, “is still nonsense.”
    Fiona nodded and looked out over the hills, the breeze stirring her bonnet ribbons. “It is beautiful here. So mystical. Here, I could believe any legend.”
    “So could I,” he said. “Well, I had best go, while you go on looking for fairies under rocks.”
    “Or at least fossils in rock. They will help prove the new theory that a catastrophic flood brought primeval waters as high as the level of these