Highlander in Her Bed Read Online Free PDF Page A

constant posturings of the hoity-toity as each one vied to outdo the others' nonchalance.
    Though she'd definitely been at home in such circles, Lady Warfield would have taken wry amusement in the long-nosed looks still aimed at Mara's table.
    "Is that why she did this?" Mara fixed her most direct gaze on the solicitor. "Because we shared a few worldviews?"
    "Among other things." Percival Combe angled his head, his expression as serious as her own.
    Enough so to give her a jolt of apprehension. "What kind of other things ?"
    "Nothing unpleasant, I assure you."
    Mara lifted a brow. "Maybe I'd prefer to judge that myself," she said, shivering in reaction.
    She knew what was coming.
    The catch.
    There had to be one. Nothing came without strings. And she smelled a stipulation as surely as she'd known her mushy vegetables would taste like boiled cardboard even before she'd tried them.
    "So what do I have to do?" She sat back to wait for the blow. "What's the real reason I am a beneficiary?"
    Percival Combe sighed. "Lady Warfield liked you. There was, however, more to her decision. It was your name, Miss McDougall. Quite simply your name."
    "My name?"
    "Were you aware Lady Warfield was a Scotswoman?" he asked, peering intently at her.
    Mara's eyes widened. "I had no idea." She shook her head, genuinely bewildered. "She never once mentioned Scotland and she spoke with such an English accent."
    "A cultivated accent," the solicitor said, watching her over the rim of his wineglass. "She came from Oban in the West Highlands, though not many knew. She was born a MacDou—"
    " MacDougall ?" Mara near choked on her astonishment.
    Percival Combe set down his glass and nodded.
    Mara's face grew hot. Now she knew why the name Ravenscraig had bothered her.
    It was the ancestral home of her clan.
    Leastways the seat of the lesser chieftain her branch of the MacDougalls hailed from.
    Her father even kept a faded photo of the castle framed above his desk. A photo carefully clipped from a Scottish magazine, not one he'd snapped himself, much to Hugh McDougall's regret. No one in her family had ever been able to afford to make the trip, and in recent years her father's health had proved too poor to risk the transatlantic flight.
    The closest they'd come was buying a house, albeit humble, at One Cairn Avenue. And even with such a Scottish-sounding name, the street was in a blue-collar corner of Philadelphia, not Scotland.
    "Sadly," the solicitor was saying, "Lady Warfield's husband, Lord Basil, did not share her great love for her homeland. Out of devotion to him, she allowed him to anglicize her. A decision she regretted in later years."
    Mara shifted uncomfortably. She didn't harbor any great affection for tartan and pipes either, preferring London with all its fascinations to peat bogs and sheep.
    Her nerves began to tighten. "Surely she didn't think we were related?" she asked, her voice sounding a shade higher than usual. "My father spends all his time researching our ancestry. He would swoon over a direct blood tie to the MacDougalls of Ravenscraig, but our line goes back to John the Immigrant, an impoverished crofter who left Scotland in the mid-eighteen hundreds."
    "Lady Warfield knew that," the solicitor admitted, looking slightly chagrined. "We did a background investigation on you, hoping to discover a connection, however remote. Yet when our efforts failed, she still wanted you to have Ravenscraig."
    "But why?" Mara puzzled. "There had to be a deeper reason."
    The solicitor let out a sigh. "If you were as familiar with Scotland as your father appears to be, you would know family is everything to a Scot," he said, his expression bitter earnest again. "The clan system is generous, accepting a wide variety of name spellings. Each clan has members scattered across the globe, yet the bond remains powerful."
    "I know," Mara agreed, for a moment seeing her father bent over his papers and books, a plaid across his knees and zeal in his eye. "The