A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,27
pray that I can live up to your example, for it is one I shall always worship.
What I should have told you in life, I will tell you in death. If you do not wait for me in heaven, I shall be very angry, for it will be my greatest honor to tell you how much I love you the moment I see you again. How much I have always loved you, my brother. I am sorry I wished worms in your eyeballs. I did not mean it.
Much.
Until we meet again,
James
* THE END *
About Kathryn Le Veque
KATHRYN LE VEQUE is a USA TODAY Bestselling author, an Amazon All-Star author, and a #1 bestselling, award-winning, multi-published author in Medieval Historical Romance and Historical Fiction. She has been featured in the NEW YORK TIMES and on USA TODAY’s HEA blog.
Kathryn’s Medieval Romance novels have been called “detailed”, “highly romantic”, and “character-rich”. She crafts great adventures of love, battles, passion, and romance in the High Middle Ages. More than that, she writes for both women AND men – an unusual crossover for a romance author – and Kathryn has many male readers who enjoy her stories because of the male perspective, the action, the passion, and the adventure.
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
The Earl of Christmas Past
A solstice blizzard drives Victorian photographer, Vanessa Latimer, to a crowded Highland Inn where the only available room is haunted by the ghost of a fallen warrior unwilling to give up his side of the bed.
Chapter One
Calvine Village, Highlands, Scotland – 1891
Winter Solstice
Fate had been Vanessa Latimer’s foe since she could remember.
She was the most unlucky, ungainly person of her acquaintance, and had resigned herself to an early death. However, she always imagined said death would be glorious, as well.
Or at least memorable.
Something like tripping and accidentally sacrificing herself to a volcano in the Pacific Islands. Or perhaps becoming the unfortunate snack of a Nile crocodile or a tiger in Calcutta.
Meeting her end as a human icicle in the Scottish Highlands had never made it on the list.
Not until the angry blizzard turned the road to Inverness treacherous, and something had spooked the horse, sending the carriage careening into a boulder the size of a small cottage.
The driver informed her that the wheel was irreparably damaged, and that she must stay in the carriage while he went for help.
That had been hours ago.
When the dark of the storm became the dark of the late afternoon on this, the shortest day of the year, the temperatures plummeted alarmingly. Even though Vanessa had been left with furs and blankets, she worried she wouldn’t survive the night, and set off along the road with a lantern and the most important of her luggage.
Now, huddled on the landing beneath the creaking shingle of Balthazar’s Inn, she clutched her increasingly heavy case to her chest, shielding the precious contents with her body.
The surly innkeeper’s impossibly thick eyebrows came together in a scowl as he wedged his bulk into the crack of the open door to effectively block any attempt at entry. Even the gale forces didn’t save her nostrils from being singed by his flammable scotch-soaked breath. “As ye can see, lass, ye’re not the only traveler stranded in this bollocks storm, and I let our last remaining room to the other rank idiot not clever enough to seek shelter before the storm fell upon us. So, nay. Ye’ll have to try elsewhere.”
“Was that rank idiot a shifty-eyed man in his fifties named McMurray?” she asked, forcing the words out of her lungs like a stubborn bellows to be heard over the din. The wind buffeted her skirts this way and that, plastering them to her trembling legs.
“Aye,” he said with a self-satisfied smirk as he also managed to leer. “But