Some Like It Scot Read Free Page A

they must have all along, that he wouldn’t go down without a fight. To that end, Graham turned on his heel, determined to do whatever it was going to take to set the proceedings in motion. His hand was on the knob, when Roan hooted.
    â€œWhat do ye know. I think I’ve found her!”
    Graham turned, knowing he had to at least ask. “Found who?”
    â€œYour wife.”
    â€œRoan—”
    â€œI expanded my search to the mainland, and, well…I had to search a wee bit more widely, but I plugged the McAuley name into Facebook, then backtracked the names to the tree list that Shay has drawn up, and”—he turned his laptop around and gestured with a flourish—“voila! A connection to our own McAuley tree, albeit a wee bit distant one. But it only matters that the connection is there.”
    Graham wasn’t about to take a single step closer, much less look at the poor woman Roan had targeted. He already felt trapped, bound, and tethered by an archaic clan law…and he’d grown up knowing about it. He couldn’t fathom broaching the subject with someone who knew nothing of him, nothing of Kinloch, much less of the ridiculous MacLeod-McAuley marriage pact.
    Roan looked at him triumphantly. “It just took a little determination.”
    â€œHow do you know she’s linked with our McAuleys? Just becaue her surname—”
    â€œThat’s the beauty of Facebook, my friend. Her whole family history is documented, mostly as it pertains to their family industry, but there it is,” he added with a bit of dramatic flair, squinting back at the screen, tapping some keys, and scrolling some more. “Shay and I already drew up a lineage of everyone on Kinloch, going back several generations, so all I had to do was extend the branches out on those who have left the island over the past, say, fifty years. He spun the laptop back around again so the monitor faced Graham. “There’s a direct link. She’s the veritable needle in a haystack.” He grinned, quite self-satisfied. “And we found her.”
    A knot fisted tightly in Graham’s gut. It felt a lot like a noose, tightening around his neck. “Even if I was willing to remotely consider the idiotic idea of pursuing the poor lass—and I’m most emphatically not—what on earth could I say to her that wouldn’t make me sound like an utter loon? I mean, consider it, Roan. Truly. I approach a total stranger, and propose marriage, and if that same well-documented family of hers has even the slightest bit of protectiveness, they’d have me in a white jacket, locked in the nearest tower. And I could hardly blame them.”
    He turned to Shay, needing the voice of reason he would surely provide. “Tell him this is utter lunacy.”
    Shay didn’t so much as glance at Roan. “You should at least consider it,” he said, leaving Graham momentarily speechless. He lifted his hand before Graham could regroup and lecture them both on the rest of the vast and varied reasons why considering it was the very last thing he was about to do. “Think of it as a contract, of sorts. In fact,” Shay said, his aristocratic features lighting up in a way they rarely did, “I’ll gladly draw up a legal agreement that you can propose with. Approach it like a business deal.”
    â€œBecause every woman dreams of being proposed to with a legal document,” Graham said darkly, unable to truly believe he was even having this conversation. “You two canno’ be serious.”
    But it only took looking at them to prove that they couldn’t be more serious.
    â€œYou have to at least try,” Roan said. “I mean, we did find a candidate. That’s a start—more of a solution to all this than we had before.”
    â€œYou’ve both gone stark ravers. Mad as hatters.”
    â€œIf you don’t at least try,” Shay said, “there