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too? Who was she?”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter. It’s all over and done with, Robbie. She was already in love with another man. I wish her every happiness with her husband.”
    â€œHow long has it been since she married somebody else? A month? A year?”
    â€œA few months.”
    Months that had seemed like years, until he’d met Moira MacMurdaugh up in a tree.
    Ever since then, he’d been realizing just how different his feelings for Catriona had been, even from the start. She had been more like a pretty doll he wanted to have in the drawing room to admire than a woman with whom he could build a life.
    Moira MacMurdaugh was very much a woman, and he could easily imagine tackling life’s woes as well as its joys with her by his side.
    â€œYou’ll have to tell me the cure, because by God, Gordo, I’ve never been more wretched in my life!”
    Robbie actually sounded serious.
    How could he explain that the cure for a broken heart was the realization that you were never truly inlove before? “Getting on with your life,” he offered instead.
    â€œWell, then, let’s get started!” Robbie cried enthusiastically. “Tomorrow’s market day in Dunbrachie. To be sure, it’s nothing like London in the Season, or even Bath, but there’s always some sort of traveling entertainers and plenty of pretty girls, too.”
    Gordon could foresee one possible fly in the ointment, for both of them. “Will Lady Moira be there?”
    Robbie waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t give a damn if she is, and neither should you. Besides, she’ll steer clear of us if she is, I’m sure. Come on, Gordo! Say you’ll go!”
    They probably shouldn’t. Robbie might get drunk, or try to seduce a barmaid or some other woman. He might do something else that would be embarrassing. And he really didn’t want to see Lady Moira again. She was making his life so…complicated.
    On the other hand, she might not be there, and raising Robbie’s spirits might be one way to convince him to drop the suit. “All right, Robbie. I’ll go.”

Chapter Six
    D ressed in a gown of green-and-blue-stripped muslin, with a blue velvet Spencer jacket and straw bonnet with matching ribbon on her head, her reticule slung over her arm and wearing her second-best kid gloves, Moira strolled down the main street of Dunbrachie toward the green. At one end of the street was the church, with its square belfry. At the other was the tavern and livery stable.
    Between the church and tavern were several stone buildings whitewashed or not, with slate roofs and smoke curling from their chimneys. She passed the baker’s and the bookseller’s, separated by a narrow lane leading to yards in the back, the milliner’s, the tea shop and the candle maker’s.
    Since it was market day, temporary stalls surrounded the green. Some were no more than the open back of awagon and some, belonging to traveling peddlers, were more elaborate.
    It was pleasantly warm and sunny, and the delicious scent of bread and pastries from the baker’s drifted on the breeze. Small children and dogs chased each other around the stalls, or stood and watched the puppet show that had been set up near the middle of the green.
    None of the dogs she could see were as big or as black or as ugly and vicious as the one that had chased her up the tree.
    Perhaps that had been a stray or a wild dog, abandoned or lost by its owner.
    Indeed, today Dunbrachie was like a rustic idyll, far removed from the teeming, bustling, aggressive market in Glasgow where she’d shopped before her father had become prosperous enough to have food and other goods delivered to their home. In some ways, she missed that market, for there she would be relatively anonymous except to those merchants whose stalls she frequented.
    In Dunbrachie, everybody knew who she was, as well as the story of her father’s