Claimed by the Laird Read Free

unsympathetically.
    “Hmm. Who else?”
    “Lachlan.” Jack grinned. “The younger brother. He is an utter waste of space. His wife left him some months ago and he has taken to drink for comfort.”
    Lucas gave a soundless whistle. “Never a good solution.” He raised his glass in ironic toast. “Is there anyone else?”
    “No,” Jack said. “Yes.” He corrected himself quickly. “There’s Christina, the eldest daughter.” He frowned slightly. “We always forget Christina.”
    “Why?” Lucas said.
    “Because...” Jack paused. “She’s easy to overlook,” he said after a moment. He sounded slightly shamefaced. “Christina’s self-effacing, the old spinsterish sister. No one notices her.”
    Lucas found that hard to believe when both Lucy and her sister Mairi MacMorlan, Jack’s wife, were stunningly pretty, diamonds of the first order. He felt an odd, protective pang of pity for the colorless Lady Christina, living in their shadow, the duke’s unmarried daughter.
    He let the playing card slip from between his fingers and it glided down to rest on the carpet.
    There was a discreet knock at the door, and Lucas’s manager, Duncan Liddell, stuck his head around.
    “Table four,” Duncan said. “Lord Ainsley. Can’t pay his debts. Or won’t pay. Not sure which.” He was a man of few words.
    Lucas nodded and got to his feet. It happened occasionally when sprigs of the nobility had a little too much to drink and felt they were entitled to play for free. A few discreet words in the gentleman’s ear usually sorted the matter out.
    “I’ll leave you to it,” Jack said. He stood up, too, and shook Lucas’s hand. “Best of luck. I hope you find out the truth.” He hesitated. “I don’t care what happens to the rest of them,” he said, “but don’t hurt Christina, or Mairi will have my balls for helping you.”
    Lucas grinned. “I know your wife is a crack shot. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.” He sobered. “You have my word, Jack. I’ve no quarrel with any of Forres clan. I doubt I will have much to do with them. All I want is to infiltrate the whisky gang and find out what really happened to Peter.”
    As he followed Duncan into the salon, Lucas caught sight of the playing card resting under the table. He bent to pick it up. It was the jack of diamonds. He laid it on top of the pack. It seemed appropriate for the bastard son of a laird and a princess who had made his own fortune and was as hard as the diamonds themselves.

CHAPTER ONE
    Ardnamurchan, Scottish Highlands, May 1817
    I T WAS NOT the way Lucas was meant to die, blindfolded, tied up, on his knees in a smugglers’ cave, with the pungent smell of rotting fish in his nose and the roar of the sea in his ears as it crashed onto the rocks several hundred feet below.
    One minute he had been strolling along the cliffs in the evening twilight to stretch his legs after an interminable journey from Edinburgh, the next this nightmare of ambush and capture. He had heard that the Highlands in May were very pleasant, but he had been mistaken in that. The Highlands in May was no place to be if there was a knife at your throat.
    He had been careless. The thought made him angry. Lord Sidmouth would be so proud of him, he thought savagely. His spy caught by the very men he had come to investigate. But he had been tired and the last thing he had been expecting was to stumble on the whisky smugglers moving their cargo. He wondered if this was why Peter had died. He wondered if his brother, too, had seen something he should not, had stumbled disastrously into a situation he could not control. The irony would be if he discovered the truth so quickly, so easily, and then did not live to prove it.
    The smugglers were arguing. Their Scots accents were so thick Lucas found it hard to understand some of them, but the general thrust of the conversation was not in the least difficult to follow.
    “I say we throw him over the cliff, no