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came close once, but it didn’t work out.”
    “What happened?” The minute I asked the question I wished it back. “I’m sorry. Please don’t feel you have to answer that.”
    “I don’t mind at all,” he assured me. “I took her to America with me while I earned my degree at Cornell. She refused to come back.”
    “Why didn’t you stay?”
    He shrugged, a beautiful fluid lifting of his shoulders. “This is my home. I’ve spent my entire life preparing to take over the land. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
    I agreed with him. “Scotland is a wonderful place to raise children. Much better, I think, than America.”
    “Thank God children were never an issue.”
    “Do you dislike children, Ian?”
    “Not at all,” he replied promptly. “But I do believe that every child deserves two devoted parents. I deplore the current trend of selfishness that puts children’s needs last in a relationship.”
    He spoke with such feeling. I wondered if it came from personal experience. Curiosity prevailed. “You can’t actually believe that people should endure a miserable existence for the sake of their children?”
    “Of course not.” He set his empty glass on the table. “But people’s definitions of miserable are varied. Most of the time, problems can be worked out with a bit of effort. There are few things important enough to break up a marriage.”
    What about infertility, I wanted to cry out. What if a man wants children so desperately that nothing else will satisfy him, not even the woman he promised to love, honor, and cherish fifteen years before? Of course I didn’t say it. It was ridiculous to even think it. No one would believe me. This was the twentieth century. A woman’s worth was no longer measured by the number of children she brought into the world. Or was it?
    I closed my eyes and remembered the hands. I could still feel those hands, sterile, competent, cold, sure, precise, sliding across my skin, probing, prodding, inspecting every inch of flesh, examining over, under, inside, the tests inconclusive and never ending, until that night when I couldn’t tell my husband’s hands from the hands of the hundred specialists I’d seen, and the very thought of exploring fingers inching their way across my body was like the exploding pain of brilliant light against eyes that had been too long in dark places. I simply couldn’t bear it, and in the end it cost me my life as I’d planned it.
    Deliberately, with great effort, I pushed the memories aside and opened my eyes. Ian was staring at me again. Why did I feel as if he knew exactly what I was thinking?
    Just then, the proprietor walked through the door to the dining room. “Please follow me,” he said. “Dinner will be served shortly.”
    Over a bottle of wine and the best salmon I’d ever tasted, Ian brought up the real subject of our dinner conversation. “What do you know about your family history, Christina?”
    “If you mean my personal family line, not much. But I know a great deal about the Murrays.”
    “Did you know that the widow of the last Murray of Bothwell married the third earl of Douglas?”
    Pausing, with my fork halfway to my mouth, I stared at him. Ian was a Douglas and I, a Murray. “Are you telling me we’re related?”
    He laughed. “In a manner of speaking. I don’t believe we’re close enough to worry about genetic defects in our children.”
    Even before he saw the stricken expression on my face, he realized what he’d done. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, horror at his faux pas evident on his face.
    “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I assured him and quickly changed the subject. “My family is descended from the Atholl Murrays. George Murray, leader of the Jacobite troops at Culloden, is my direct ancestor.”
    “A good man,” Ian acknowledged, cutting off another piece of salmon. “When you made that comment this afternoon, I remembered something.”
    Somehow I knew this was it, the