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there instead, with his gun pointed at her face.
    “There’s a turnaround just some ten feet ahead.” He pointed down the drive into the uncompromising darkness.
    “Thank you,” she said again, hanging her head in embarrassment as she reached for the door to close it. She just wanted to get away, and she prayed she would never see him again.
    Libby pulled the car forward and swung into the turning place, switching into reverse so quickly that she didn’t even notice the hulking towers that loomed in the glow of her headlights. She didn’t see the gate with its emblem of two thistles intertwined. Nor did she see the sign, nearly obscured by ivy on the pillar beside it.
    A sign that read, CASTLE WRATH.

Chapter Three
    Graeme Mackenzie stood watching as the Vauxhall Astra and its weepy American occupant vanished into the night.
    It wasn’t until the red of the car’s taillights had faded into the night that he turned and headed back down the drive. His black-and-white collie, Murphy, blinked at him with his one blue eye and one brown eye, then walked quietly along beside him.
    It was a dark night, unfathomably, impenetrably dark, and so he’d mounted a light onto the sight of his shotgun to help him find his way. He’d been out doing a little target shooting and had just been heading back to the house for the night when the unexpected beam of a headlamp had blinked from up the drive.
    Of course he’d immediately assumed she was just another one of
them.
Why the hell wouldn’t she be? So he’d turned his light onto the figure of the car, lifting the shotgun as if to scare her, to teach her a lesson for all the others who had come before her—and all those who would no doubt come after her, too.
    What he hadn’t counted on was finding that she was some wayward American tourist lost in the Highlands, and a wayward American who had burst out crying the moment she’d seen him.
    Graeme didn’t know what to believe. If she was just another one of
them,
it certainly wouldn’t be the most inventive excuse he’d come across in the past eight months. That distinction would have to go to the lass who had hidden herself away in his shower stall, complete with a big red bow tied around her—
    —package.
    He’d come across virtually every ruse there could be since he, Graeme Arthur Frederick Mackenzie, had been endowed with, in a tragic twist of fate, on the very same day, the titles of Viscount Kintail and the Marquess of Waltham. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, he’d become the unanticipated heir to both his mother, a countess in her own right, and his uncle, the very illustrious Duke of Gransborough.
    It should never have happened. For the first thirty-five years of his life, Graeme had been perfectly content filling the role of the youngest son’s youngest son. As such, he’d had it pretty easy. He was connected to one of the most highly regarded families in the United Kingdom without really having to face any of the obligation of it, save the odd appearance at the Chelsea Flower Show or the Queen’s Regatta whenever his mother asked him to attend with her. Otherwise, he had been virtually overlooked.
The spare.
Not considered worthy of the rest of the world’s attention, which had suited him just fine.
    Until February 12 of that year.
    Before that date, there had been three reasons why Graeme had never dreamed he would find himself in the position he was now in. They were his cousin, Winston, his father, Maxwell, and his older brother, Thaddeus.
    Fate had snatched two of them, Teddy and Wins, in a tragic bit of skiing high jinks at the Klosters in Switzerland. Three weeks later, on February 12, Fate saw fit to take his father, too, by the delivery of an aortic aneurysm in his sleep.
    “You’ll be the heir now,” Graeme’s mother, Gemma, the Countess of Abermuir, had said to him. They had been walking together from the family burial ground at Gransborough House, the ducal estate in Durham. Until she’d