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yard and little gate. He paused tolatch it and glanced back—Mrs. Dillingham had her firmly by the elbow, but Fiona was looking at him. Looking, he thought, a little worried for him. It was a strange thing to see—no one worried about him. Quite the opposite.
    He continued walking up the hill, resisting the urge to look back. He had the horses to rest and water, and a space in the stables to sleep for which he’d paid a small fortune. If there was one thing he agreed upon with Fiona, it was that the stew smelled divine. It made his cold scones rather disappointing fare, but they would reach Blackwood tomorrow evening, God willing, and he would feast then.
    Duncan went about the business of unharnessing the horses and bedding them down with a sack of oats, then made a bed for himself in straw near a small fire that another driver had made. With his greatcoat and a pair of furs taken from the wagon, he was warm. He stretched long on his makeshift bed, his head propped up on a saddlebag, and chewed cold bread while he thought of a pair of beautiful golden eyes.
    It had been a long time since he’d beheld a woman’s eyes and the sparkle of happiness in them. Since the fire, his associations with women were confined to inns like the one here, with women he did not know and would never know, and in darkness so that they did not see the burns that had marred his left shoulder and arm.
    How ironic that there had been a time when women like Fiona Haines had flocked to him, their parents desperate for a match. He’d once been the most sought-after bachelor in all the Highlands, vain and proud and arrogant. He might have had his pick of any number of them, but he’d been more intent on sampling their wares than wedding himself to one of them for all eternity.
    And then, three years ago, on the eve of his twenty-seventhbirthday, a fire had swept through Blackwood.
    Duncan rarely thought of that horrendous night—it was too painful to recall the event that had precipitated so much loss in his life—but he’d been at Blackwood with his usual coterie of friends: Devon MacCauley, Brian Grant, and Richard Macafee. There had been a pair of women from the village with them, as well as two of his cousins. His mother was in Paris, where she spent most of her time, and his cousins had retired early to another wing of the house, having lost their enthusiasm for the antics of four drunken men and two loose women.
    Aye, the four of them, notoriously fond of drink and women, had fallen well into their cups that night as they were wont to do, drinking from what seemed an endless vat of Scottish whisky.
    Duncan could remember very little of the events before the fire other than crying off when another bawdy parlor game was proposed. He remembered seeing Brian and Richard with the girls they’d brought up from the village, and supposed Devon must have been somewhere within the room, but for the life of him, he could never recall seeing him.
    Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective—Duncan never made it to his suite of rooms in the east wing. He’d been obliged by the amount of whisky he’d consumed to take refuge on a divan in the study just down the corridor from where they’d been engaged in adult games. Given his state of inebriation, it was nothing short of a miracle that he was awakened by an awful crash and the smell of smoke. After a moment of gaining his bearings, he’d rushed into the corridor—and into a wall of smoke. It was billowing out of the salon, where he’d left the lads.
    Brian and one of the lasses stumbled out of the room,coughing. Duncan had rushed to help them, but Brian had waved him off, urging him to save himself, they were all out.
    But they weren’t all out. As servants rushed past them toward the fire, and Duncan and his guests gathered in the front lawn, he realized Devon was missing. Brian and Richard could not say where he was. Duncan had felt a surge of sickening panic unlike