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Meanwhile, her victim . . . er, that is, her patient, showed no signs of reviving.

She scooted closer to him and pressed her ear to his lips. He was breathing, thank goodness, and a trifle easier than he had been before, but his skin was still deathly pale, and his eyes remained closed.

She brushed his coat aside and pressed her palm to his chest.

Still beating. Was it steadier, or was that wishful thinking on her part?

For that matter, did she even wish for him to recover? It would be a great deal easier for her if he died, although it would leave her with rather a large body to dispose of.

There’d be no hiding that from her sisters.

She held her breath, listening, her hand still pressed to his chest. One beat, two, and another . . . no, she wasn’t imagining it. The irregular, frantic beats seemed to have evened out a bit, but he didn’t show any signs of waking, and meanwhile, the rain went on.

At this rate, she’d expire from the cold before her neck got anywhere near a noose.

He was as soaked as she was, with a mass of dark, wet curls plastered to his forehead. He was quite a young man, certainly no older than his twenties.

Young for a murderer, at any rate. Because he must be a murderer, or something equally as unsavory, mustn’t he? Proper gentlemen didn’t chase young ladies through the woods and knock them to the ground.

If he did die of monkshood poisoning, it wouldn’t be anyone’s fault but his own. She’d only done what she must—what anyone else would have done in such a situation. He’d grabbed her, for pity’s sake! He hadn’t left her any other choice but to defend herself.

Her righteous anger carried her through the next half hour, but as the sky continued to darken and the rain became a downpour, her courage deserted her.

In the end, it came down to one simple, essential truth.

She couldn’t simply leave him here. It would be as good as condemning him to death, and she was no murderer.

Which was a very great pity, really. It would have been much easier if she had been.

But here they were.

She turned her face up to the sky, blinking against the raindrops falling into her eyes. There were dozens—no hundreds—of ways in which this could all go wrong, but whether he deserved her help or not, she couldn’t bring herself to leave him out here to die.

She stumbled to her feet and made her way through the castle door and into the dusty cellars, the skirts of her wet day dress clinging to her legs.

How in the world was she going to explain herself to Freya and Sorcha?

No doubt they were already going mad, wondering where she was. She’d sworn she’d return within a few hours. Another broken promise. It was becoming quite a habit of hers, making promises that in the end turned out to be lies.

Although, in her defense, she hadn’t anticipated she’d accidentally poison someone.

As for him . . . well, if he’d meant her harm before—and he must have done, as there was no innocent reason for a man to chase a lady through the woods—wasn’t he likely to be even more determined to harm her, now that she’d poisoned him?

If he did wake, perhaps he wouldn’t remember any of this.

Those unlucky enough to experience monkshood poisoning tended to wake up foggy-headed and confused. With any luck, he’d suffer no lasting ill effects from the poison but would have convenient gaps in his memory.

It was the best she could hope for.

Until then, she’d simply have to pray that when the sun rose tomorrow morning, he was still breathing, and not a large, handsome corpse.

* * *

Hamish swam back to consciousness slowly, like rising from the murky depths of a pond to the surface, then wished at once that he hadn’t.

Something was very, very wrong.

Everything, from the pounding ache in his skull to the knots in his stomach to the bitter taste at the back of his throat, was wrong .

What the devil had happened to him, and where the devil was he?

The questions chased each other through his mind, but he didn’t open his eyes. No, he’d been in enough tight spots to know that when you woke without having the least recollection of the hours before you lost consciousness, the best course of action was no action at all.

But as he gradually regained his senses, a few things permeated the haze. Candlelight flickered against his eyelids, and the edge of a soft cotton sheet was tucked under his chin.

He was indoors, in a bed, and it was nighttime.

That was all well enough, but why did he feel as if a spike had been embedded in his skull? And who’d pulled his stomach from his body, turned it inside out, then stuffed it back inside him again?

Had someone attacked him? Or had he drunk too much whisky and was suffering the consequences of his foolishness?

It wouldn’t be the first time either had happened, but this felt different somehow, like he’d been bludgeoned half to death, and with the way his head was spinning, he could fall back into senselessness at any moment.

Given that he felt closer to death than life, it couldn’t have been the vigorousness of perfect health that had woken him from his stupor.

But something had. Some sound. A voice speaking?

He listened, but at first, all he heard was silence. Gradually, however, he became aware of the faint hiss of a dying fire, the soft patter of rain against a window, and, so quiet he almost believed he’d imagined it, the rustle of a lady’s skirts—

Wait. Skirts? Whose bloody skirts?

“He’s rather a young man, isn’t he?”

The voice was soft, and the hand that smoothed the sheet more firmly under his chin was gentle. He remained as still as possible, taking care to keep his chest moving up and down in the slow, steady breaths of sleep as he listened for any useful tidbits of information.

“My dearest girl, he’s not a gentleman at all,” a second voice said, an unmistakable thread of brittleness underlying the smooth cadence of it, like a skeletal hand inside a velvet glove.

The fog shrouding his brain was near impenetrable, but he groped about in the shadowy darkness of his mind until slowly it all started to come back to him in fragmented bits and pieces.

The Merry Maiden Inn, which was neither merry nor maidenly. The High Street, which was neither high nor much of a street. Ah, yes. He was in Dunvegan, a remote little village on the outside edge of nowhere.

But how had he ended up here? More to the point, where was here?

There’d certainly been a bottle of whisky somewhere along the way. Baird’s Pub? Yes, that was it. He’d shared a dusty bottle of whisky with his new friend. Munro was the last person he remembered speaking to, but that didn’t explain the rustle of skirts.

Munro was more of a shirt, breeches, and leather waistcoat sort of man.

Something must have happened after that.

There’d been something about a castle, and a cauldron, and hordes of attack birds, hadn’t there? The closed door of the apothecary’s shop, and a lady wearing a deep hood that hid her face, and a lock of red—

“Handsome, though,” the first voice said. “You can’t deny he’s handsome.”

“He’s unconscious ,” said the second voice. “All men are more handsome when they’re unconscious,” she added with a dismissive snort.

“Really, Sorcha, you might show a bit more compassion. The poor man’s been poisoned.”

Poisoned! What the devil? Who would have poisoned him?

He went back over what he could remember of the past day and a half. It was all a bit muddled, but he didn’t recall a poisoning.

Surely, if someone had poisoned him, he’d remember.

“Hush, Freya! He may be able to hear you,” the second woman hissed. “And I’ll save my compassion for men who don’t chase Cat through the woods, thank you very much.”

Cat, Freya, and Sorcha . . .

He’d heard the names before some—

God above, he was at Castle Cairncross! Cat, Freya, and Sorcha couldn’t be anyone other than Catriona, Freya, and Sorcha MacLeod. Somehow, he’d landed right where he wanted to be, although how he’d ended up here was still shrouded in mystery.

No, wait. The woods. He’d been chasing a redheaded witch through the woods, and—

No, not a witch. He’d been chasing Catriona MacLeod.

Catriona MacLeod, who’d turned out to be every bit as wily as Munro had warned she was, otherwise he wouldn’t be sprawled on his back with his head threatening to explode and his tongue too big for his mouth.

But why had he been chasing the MacLeod girl through the woods? He might not be as proper a gentleman as one might expect of a marquess, but he wasn’t in the habit of chasing young ladies.

That is, not unless they asked him to.

Except, no . . . no, he remembered the thump of his footsteps over the soft ground, the curses he’d uttered as the heels of his boots sank into the mud with every step he took, his ragged breaths echoing in his ears as he ran, and in front of him, a slender figure, the hems of her dark brown cloak flying out behind her, his hand reaching out—

He had chased her! But it was worse than that, wasn’t it?

He’d grabbed her, too.

What had come over him? It wasn’t like him to behave in such a savage manner, yet he distinctly recalled chasing Catriona MacLeod through the woods, snatching a fold of her cloak, and jerking her backward into his chest.

Dear God. Of all the times he’d behaved with a touch less decorum than a gentleman should—and there had been more than one—this had to be the worst of them.

The least gentlemanliest.

Or something like that.

But what happened after that? Because none of this explained why he was now in a bed with the sour taste of vomit burning the back of his throat and his entire body aching as if he’d been in a brawl with a dozen footpads.

A dozen footpads, or one very small, very cunning young woman.

No, surely not. It was impossible that Catriona MacLeod, a young lady the size of a hummingbird, could have reduced him to this .

But she’d bloody well done something to him. He wouldn’t be lying here otherwise.