Nicola Cornick - Kidnapped: His Innocent Mistress

I drew a deep breath. My heart was hammering. “Are you, by any chance, asking me to be your mistress, Mr. Sinclair?”

A disturbingly sensuous smile curled Neil Sinclair’s lips. “Would that be so very bad, Miss Balfour? I am offering you a comfortable home instead of a ruin in the back of beyond with relatives who do not want you.”

“You are not offering it for nothing!”

His smile deepened. He put out a hand and touched my cheek gently. I was so shocked at the physical contact that I jumped.

“All I ask in return,” he said, “is something that should be intensely pleasurable for both of us.”

Once again I felt that jolt deep inside me. I swallowed hard and pushed away the heated images of lust and loving.

“I thought,” I said, “that you did not even like me very much.”

I saw something primitive and strong flare in his eyes, scorching me.

“Then you know little of men, Miss Balfour,” he said. His tone had roughened. “I wanted you from the first moment I saw you.”

Kidnapped: His Innocent Mistress

Harlequin ®Historical

To Elspeth and Sheila, the original Miss Bennies and

so much nicer than their fictional counterparts!

A few years ago my mother-in-law gave me an ancient copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Kidnapped as a birthday present. I had read and enjoyed the book many years before and now I picked it up again and was plunged into a world of romance and intrigue and adventure. When I finished it I thought how exciting it would be to write my own version, inspired by the original, and so the idea of Kidnapped: His Innocent Mistress was born. My husband’s family are Scots and we visit the Scottish Highlands every year, so I used all the places I know and love as the setting for my book. Writing a book set in Scotland was such a thrill that I definitely plan to write a sequel!

I hope that you enjoy Kidnapped: His Innocent Mistress, which is a homage to both Robert Louis Stevenson’s wonderful story and to Scotland, one of the most beautiful countries on earth.

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Also available from

HQN™ Books

Christmas Keepsakes

“The Season for Suitors”

Deceived

Lord of Scandal

Unmasked

All’s fair in love and matrimony in Nicola Cornick’s wildly romantic new series Brides of Fortune. Meet the ladies of Fortune’s Folly—spirited heiresses who are more than a match for society’s most dashing rogues!

Coming this summer from HQN Books!

THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUCHESS

THE SCANDALS OF AN INNOCENT

THE UNDOING OF A LADY

“A beguiling blend of danger and desire.”

—Booklist on Unmasked

“Cornick expertly spices her latest Regency historical with danger, while the sizzle she cooks up between her sinfully sexy hero and delightfully resourceful heroine is simply spectacular.”

—Booklist on Lord of Scandal

“Nicola Cornick creates a glittering, sensual world of historical romance that I never want to leave.”

—bestselling author Anna Campbell

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

In which I meet the hero, as all good heroines should.

My name is Catriona Balfour and this is the story of my adventures. I will begin on a certain afternoon early in the month of July in the year 1802, when I buried my father in the graveyard at Applecross, beside the sea. I was eighteen years old.

A melancholy beginning, perhaps. Truth is, it had been a melancholy year. My mother had been taken a bare two months before, carried off by a fever brought to the village by a travelling peddler who came selling ribbons and buckles, gloves and scarves. My mother had bought a length of muslin for a new summer gown. When she died the pattern was only half made.

I stood by my father’s fresh-turned grave and thought that at the least he had a fine view. The curve of the bay was before us, in all its harebell-blue beauty. Beyond it, across the shining water, were the jagged tops of the mountains of Skye. The air was soft that summer morning, and smelled of salt and seaweed. The sun was warm on my back and my best black bombazine dress—dreadfully disfiguring—crackled when I moved, the material so stiff that the gown would have stood up on its own. I admit it—even as I stood there, hazy with grief, I was aware of the ugliness of that dress and I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed that on the day of my father’s funeral I could be thinking of fashion and wishing for a silver gauze scarf from Edinburgh, perhaps, or a pair of soft kid slippers.

‘The child is vain, madam,’ Mrs Mansell, the housekeeper, had said to my mother all those years ago, when I was eight and she had found me standing before the mirror trying my mother’s Sunday best bonnet. ‘Take the rod to her before it is too late.’

But my mother liked pretty things herself and instead of beating me she wrapped me in a scented hug and whispered that I looked very fine. I remember smiling triumphantly at Mrs Mansell over my mother’s shoulder. Her thin mouth turned down at the corners and she muttered that I would come to a bad end. But perhaps she was only envious because she had a face like a prune and no one to love her since Mr Mansell had passed away, and possibly he had not loved her anyway.

My mother was warm and loving, and my father too, doting on her and on me, their only child. He was the schoolmaster at Applecross and had taught me my lessons from the age of three. As a result I was the only young lady in the Highlands who could plot a mathematical course by the stars, or who knew the botanical names of all the plants that grew thick by the burn. The squire’s daughters, Miss Bennie and Miss Henrietta Bennie, giggled and said that such knowledge would not help me catch a husband. They spent their days playing the spinet or painting in water-colours, whilst I grew sunburnt red helping Old Davie set his crab pots, or walking by the sea without my parasol.

The Miss Bennies were present at the funeral that morning, standing with the squire and his wife a little apart from the rest of us. Of the other mourners present, we were split into a group of villagers and a separate small enclave of my father’s academic colleagues, who had travelled from Edinburgh to pay their respects. I was touched that they had held Papa in such high esteem as to make the journey. Sir Compton Bennie’s face was grave as he looked down at the coffin. He and my father had shared the occasional glass of malt whisky and game of cards. That had been to the disapproval of his wife. Lady Bennie was a woman very conscious of rank and consequence, and she had not considered the poor schoolmaster worth cultivating. I once heard her refer to me as ‘that fey, ill-favoured child’ when I was about six years of age, and it was true that I had been thin as a rake then, with tangled red-golden hair and a challenging expression in my blue eyes that my father had always commented was fierce enough to scare the wolves away.

There had not been wolves at Applecross for more than a half century now, and I hoped that time had also filled out my figure a little, smoothed the wayward curl of my hair and softened the fierceness in my expression. I was no longer as ill favoured as I had been as a child, although there was nothing I could do about the firm, determined lines of my cheek and chin, the fairness of my eyelashes or the unfashionable freckles that were not only scattered across my face but also sprinkled over the rest of my body. My hair was as thick and springy as the heather, and grief had turned me gaunt. I knew I was no beauty. I did not need the pink and gold prettiness of the Miss Bennies to point it out to me.

I noticed that today Lady Bennie was wearing her second best black gown, thereby conferring on the event precisely the right degree of importance; as first lady of the district it was her duty to attend, but despite the fact that she dabbed her eyes most prettily with her black-edged kerchief I knew it was all for display. The Miss Bennies had not the skill of their mother. Their boredom was plain to see as they fretted and fidgeted and even whispered under cover of the minister’s words.

‘Ashes to ashes…’

I threw a handful of earth onto the coffin and it rattled on the top. Tears made my throat ache.

‘Dust to dust…’

Poor Papa. There had been so many things that he had still wanted to do. I felt so angry that he had been denied the chance. Someone, somewhere in the congregation, stifled a sob. Applecross folk were not the sort to cry, but my father, David Balfour, had been well loved. I had not needed to pay way mourners to attend his funeral, as Sir Compton Bennie was rumoured to have done when his father had passed away. But then Sir Compton’s father had sided with the English in the harrying of the Highlands fifty years before, and people here had long memories…

‘Come, Catriona…’ The service was over and Mr Campbell, the minister, took my arm to guide me down the path to the lych gate. I paused for a moment, gazing at the raw scar of the grave. Douglas, the gravedigger, was leaning on his spade, impatient to be finished there. I looked down on my father’s coffin and for a moment felt a desolation so vast, so terrifying, that I had to push it away, because I was afraid my mind would disintegrate under the pain of it.

I was an orphan.

I had no money.

I had no home.

Mr and Mrs Campbell had broken this news to me the previous night, gently, over a beaker of milk laced with whisky to help me sleep. Since my father’s death I had been staying at the manse because it had not been seemly for me, a young woman, to continue to live alone in the schoolmaster’s house. What I had not realised, though, was that I was never to return there. The house belonged to the Charity of St Barnabas, which had employed my father. The trustees had already arranged for a new schoolmaster to come from Inverness to fill the vacancy. He and his wife and young family were expected any day soon. It seemed like unseemly haste to me, but then the charity were efficient, and did not wish the children of Applecross to have an unofficial holiday for longer than need be.