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peeling off her gloves, andshrugging away her woolen cloak as she took in everything around them like a child on a first visit to the fair.
    “Bess, if Father even suspected we were in a place like this, alone with a man we’ve scarcely met, he would—he would run positively mad!”
    Elizabeth arched a brow. “Oh, and how is it any different than his having sent me into Scotland with a mind to marry me off to a man I’ve scarcely met? ’Tis a simple matter of which stranger appeals more, Bella, and for the moment, I’m choosing the Highlander.”
    Isabella could not honestly disagree. Still she sat forward, taking her sister’s hand. “I know you’re angry, and it is deplorable what Father did. I know in his heart he had his own good intentions, and I know though he might threaten it, he would not ever make you do something you truly didn’t wish to do. But really, Bess,”—she glanced about at the dimly lit taproom, at the shadowy figures hunched over their respective tankards of ale—“do you honestly think this is wise?”
    Elizabeth was oblivious to her sister’s question. The dirt, the stench, the underlying threat of danger fascinated her in a way she couldn’t even begin to describe. All her life she had been waiting for something like this to happen—some dark, precarious adventure that would take her places she’d never before seen. And now that it had, her heart drummed excitedly in her chest, and her spirits took wing. It was as if she’d been living her life until then inside one of her mother’s glass-panelled display cases, where she kept the porcelain figurines she was so fond of collecting. Only this particular little figurine had just escaped.
    “Bess, are you listening to me?”
    But Elizabeth scarcely heard her sister. She was far too mesmerized by the vast amount of bosom being displayed by the serving girl who had just come to greet them. It was a remarkable bosom, really. She simply couldn’t grasp how a girl could be trussed up in such a fashion while serving numerous tankards of ale and not fall out of her gown.
    “What’ll ye like?” the girl asked, tucking her tray against her hip and pushing a straggling wisp of brown hair from her eyes, eyes that drank in every detail of the two ladies’ fine gowns.
    Elizabeth rubbed her arms. “Have you anything that will warm us? The weather has taken a chill turn tonight. I swear I can feel it all the way to my bones.”
    The girl smiled, displaying her lack of one front tooth. Rather than make her look unattractive, it gave her an appealingly mischievous quality. “ Och, but a wee dram o’ the uisge-beatha will chase away yer chill, my lady.”
    “Oosh-ke vah?” Elizabeth attempted to repeat.
    “Aye, ’tis the ‘water of life,’ it is. Will warm yer belly up right quick.”
    It certainly wasn’t something the ladies in her mother’s parlor had ever sampled. “That sounds perfect, I—”
    “Effie, I think tea would be more suitable for the lady,” MacKinnon interrupted.
    “Tea? Why can I not have this uisge-beatha ?”
    He looked at her. “ ’Tis potent, is all. A man’s brew.”
    A man’s brew? Elizabeth turned to the bosomy serving girl. “Miss Effie, have you yourself ever partaken of this uisge-beatha? ”
    “Oh, indeed, my lady. All m’ life. In fact my da usedto rub it on my gums when I were a wee bairn cutting teeth. And my grannam is nearly ninety and swears by it to cure her cough. ’Tis nothing like it to chase away whatever it is that ails you.”
    Elizabeth glanced across the table at Douglas as if to say, So much for your man’s brew . . .
    He simply shrugged. “So then ’tis simply a drink more suited to a Scot than a Sassenach.”
    That had done it. There was no earthly way she was not going to drink the stuff now.
    “A dram of this uisge-beatha , if you please, Effie.” She glanced at the mule-headed MacKinnon and smiled. “In fact, why don’t you make that two drams?”
    “Oh, no,