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it?”
    Then she laughed. “More?”
    “Aye, please,” he answered her, looking up as she poured the whiskey from a decanter. Her hand was delicate, and he thought her skin very fair.
    His eyes were gray, Elizabeth noted. Gray beneath the thickest eyelashes and bushiest black brows she had ever seen. “I’ll leave the decanter,” she said, setting it down on the little table. Your bed space is ready, and the fire will burn all night.” Looking even briefly into those gray eyes had made her nervous, and she was surprised by her reaction.
    “Good night, sir.” She curtsied to him and then departed the hall.
    He watched her go, her nut-brown wool skirts swaying gracefully as she walked. When her glance had met his he had found himself startled, and his heart had jumped. Her eyes were hazel-green. The eyes, he had heard, were a mirror to the soul, and hers were certainly beautiful. But she was not for him, Baen MacColl knew. She was a lady with her own lands. He was the bastard of the master of Gray haven. He didn’t even bear his father’s surname. MacColl meant son of Colin.
    His mother, Tora, had been fifteen when she had met the twenty-year-old Colin Hay, the master of Grayhaven. She was to marry an older cousin, a widower with two half-grown daughters. It was a good match for a cotter’s daughter, but Tora knew her cousin wanted a housekeeper, a cook, and someone to mother his children. She was foolish enough to want love. She was angry to have her life planned, and over before it had really begun. And then she had met Colin Hay while herding her father’s two cows out on the moor. He had looked down on her from his horse and smiled a slow smile.
    Colin Hay, a man whose charm was already legend in the region.
    Tora was easily seduced at that single meeting. But he had been tender and passionate, and afterwards she was ready to accept her fate because now she knew what love was. Then she had found herself with child from the brief encounter. Her father had beaten her severely, and her mother had wept with shame. But strangely Parlan Gunn, her blacksmith betrothed, had said he would have her anyway, but now there was a condition. Relieved, her family would have agreed to anything. Parlan Gunn was a hard man. He dictated that the child Tora carried must bear its father’s name, and its mother’s shame. He might have only daughters, but he would not give a stranger’s bastard his name. Tora, who well knew her seducer, would say only that her lover’s name was Colin. And so her son when born was called Baen MacColl. Baen meant fair. MacColl, son of Colin.
    It had not been an easy childhood. His mother had never conceived another bairn, and Parlan Gunn grew to hate her for it. He had wanted his own son. And he hated the handsome, healthy Baen. And the more he did, the more Tora protected and lavished all her love upon her lad. Baen’s stepsisters, taking their cue from their father, were mean and spiteful to the boy. He learned to evade them in order to avoid their vicious words—words he at first did not understand  and to elude their slaps and pinches. And then when he was twelve his mother grew very ill and was unable to leave her bed.
    Calling him to her side, she told him, “I hae ne’er told any who yer da is, my fair laddie, but now I must tell ye. Dinna remain here. When  I am buried go to Grayhaven. Colin Hay, its master, is yer da, and ye look just like him but for yer eyes. Tell him my dying request was that he acknowledge ye and take ye in. He is a guid man, laddie. He never knew what his passion wi’ me bore.” And several hours later she had died.
    They had buried Tora Gunn on a hillside near their village. And early the next morning before any in the village were awake, Baen MacColl had slipped from away from the only home he had ever known and made his way to Grayhaven. Seeking out Colin Hay, he told him exactly what his mother had told him to say. The master of Grayhaven had looked at the