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and J OHN F LETCHER ,
Wit at Several Weapons, v:i
    Isabel knew she was taking too long to get ready. But she was nervous. Needing some time to collect her thoughts, she’d sent Bessie on another frivolous errand as she finished preparing for the ceremony that would bind her to the MacLeod—for a year.
    A year to slip under his defenses and discover his secrets. A task made all the more challenging after meeting him.
    The MacLeod was a hard man forged of muscled steel. Clearly, he would not easily be duped. Nor did his authoritative and forbidding temperament bode well for leniency if she were caught. He possessed a daunting ability to mask his reactions. Although she’d sensed his attraction to her last night, he covered it up so quickly that she wondered whether she’d only imagined it. Otherwise, his expression was inscrutable.
    Never had she met a man who seemed less inclined to “blindly” do anything—especially fall in love. Getting under his armor was going to be a challenge indeed.
    She bit her lip. Though she sensed no animosity, his conversation had been a disappointment of brusque, cool politeness. Clearly, her uncle had misled her. Rory MacLeod was not eager for this match.
    At least her fears of brutish barbarity did not seem warranted. She sensed an inherent civility in him. Although not as polished as a Lowlander, he would stand out at court not for his rough manners, but for his impressive size and the raw dignity of his bearing.
    Although the MacLeod demonstrated many qualities that she admired, they were nonetheless obstacles to her goal. Earning his trust was going to be that much more difficult.
    Gazing in the looking glass, she carefully pinned her hair at the crown and adjusted the diamond-encrusted wreath atop her head. She could not shake the unease, the feeling that she was doing something wrong. But what choice did she have? Without her help, her clan was doomed.
    But Isabel knew it wasn’t just the fate of her clan that had brought her here.
    For as long as she could remember, she’d shadowed her older brothers, traipsing after them as they hunted, gamed, and practiced their sword skills. Jumping at the opportunity to participate whenever they tolerated her, hiding and spying on them whenever they excluded her.
    More often than not, they had ignored her.
    Desperate to be included, she’d tried anything to get them to notice her. But no matter how accomplished she became, neither her challenges nor her feats of bravery brought her any closer to her brothers or father. Instead, she was treated as an afterthought. An outsider. Irrelevant and unimportant. Her chest tightened as the familiar emptiness settled in her stomach.
    That unhappy realization had come years ago, but it still pained her. Her childhood tears had long since dried. She rarely allowed herself to wallow in such self-pity. But somehow she realized that these painful memories weren’t really memories at all, they were the fractured remains of her childhood dreams. She still craved their love and respect. That craving had brought her to Dunvegan.
    For the first time in her life, they needed her.
    Without this handfast, her uncle refused to support her father in his feud with the Mackenzies over Castle Strome, her childhood home. Her clan needed the strength of her uncle to survive. And Sleat needed a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman to entice the MacLeod into sharing the clan secrets. Secrets that would enable her uncle to destroy the MacLeods for good and further his quest to reclaim the ancient fiefdom of the Lordship of the Isles.
    Sleat had charged her with two tasks: to find a secret entrance into the impregnable castle and to steal their precious magical talisman—the Fairy Flag. If the legends were to be believed, it was the mystical source of their strength and had twice previously saved the MacLeods from destruction.
    Even now her stomach churned uncomfortably when she thought of what had been left unsaid, but what