Read The Secret Gift for Free Online Page A

said it, Graeme hadn’t really considered it. He could have no inkling of the consequences this chain of events would bring him almost immediately later.
    It had begun with only a small item in the tabloids announcing his assumption of the hereditary lesser titles of viscount and marquess. Soon after, there appeared a snapshot of him buying a latté at the Starbucks in Leicester Square. Unfortunately, it had attracted the attention of a more notorious London talk show host, who had proclaimed him across the BBC television waves as “rather dishy.”
    Very soon, he couldn’t stop for a copy of
The Times
at the corner newsstand without a camera lens pointing and clicking his way. Next, one of the other city publications came out with its annual “Most Eligible Bachelor” feature. Topping the list had been Graeme’s name, with a description of his family connections, his occupation and place of work, even his favorite city haunts. A veritable fortune hunter’s shopping list.
    At the Ascot Races, one of those events he’d attended with his mother each year, Graeme had been leaning to tell the woman beside him the time, and the image of them, her face discreetly hidden beneath the deep brim of her hat, appeared in the tabloids the following week, under the headline
     
    GRANSBOROUGH HEIR
ALREADY LOOKING FOR LADY RIGHT?
     
    After that, young British women began “turning up” wherever Graeme went. In the park when he walked Murphy, when he’d been buying groceries at Mark’s and Spencer’s, he’d once been out with a group of business associates during which the meal had been constantly interrupted by the constant stream of drinks being bought for him by young women at the bar. That had been bad enough. The paparazzi, however, became positively rabid in their bid to get the latest snapshot of the heir to the dukedom of Gransborough, the young,
eligible,
thirty-six-year-old heir to a title that combined, among other things, prestige, wealth, history, a town house in London, and forty-five thousand acres of prime British real estate.
    Graeme had eventually left London because of it, retreating to the ducal country seat. But that hadn’t deterred them. They’d simply followed him there, watching from behind the topiary or “happening upon” him in the local village.
    So he’d left Durham and taken a flat in Hampstead Garden outside London. Eventually they’d found him there.
    They’d found him in Surrey.
    They’d found him in Edinburgh.
    They’d found him on holiday in Spain.
    Everywhere he turned, there were young, single women wanting him to cure them of their singleness—and with them, the paparazzi, hoping to catch him on celluloid with someone,
anyone
they could allude to a connection with.
    Once, he’d been helping his housekeeper, a woman of fifty-two years who was married and had grandchildren, to bring in groceries. The image of them had appeared on the front page of
The Buzz
tabloid the following week, above the caption “Waltham Setting Up House With Mystery Woman.”
    His own mother had called asking when the wedding was.
    So when Graeme had learned from a colleague of the proposed sale of a remote Highland castle that had been standing vacant for the past three decades, he’d jumped on it.
    Perched on a steep cliffside hundreds of feet above the North Sea, Castle Wrath stood at the very northwestern tip of the Scottish mainland. It was surrounded on three sides by the sea, on the other by miles and miles of empty, abandoned moorland. Except for the local village, there wasn’t a settlement for a dozen miles.
    It was paradise.
    Thus far, he’d managed to remain anonymous. He dressed casually, making himself as unassuming as possible whenever he had to go into the village for supplies. There they knew him only as Graeme Mackenzie, resident caretaker of the castle. Its new owner was officially the Countess of Abermuir, his mother, so that no record of the sale could be traced to him by the more