Midnight Honor

“JOHN MACGILLIVRAY AND I HAVE KNOWN EACH OTHER ALL OUR LIVES.”

“Yes,” he said, tracing his fingers along the soft skin of her forearm. “And I have envied him that privilege before.”

Anne felt the heat of his breath against her wrist. “You have?”

“I have envied every man who has known you longer than I have.”

His lips were on her wrist again, and now they were following the tingling path already conquered by his fingertips. The cuff of her sleeve had fallen below her elbow, and when he reached the chenille barrier, he turned and pressed his lips into the curve of her neck.

His mouth was warm, his tongue hot and moist where it swirled up to flirt with her earlobe, then scrolled a provocative path down to the collar of her robe. Anne could barely hold her head steady. The seduction would end before it had even begun.

“Jealousy,” he murmured, “can be a terrible thing. Almost as terrible as pride.”

She might have had the wit to think of a response but for the thrill of his lips on her.

“Stop,” she gasped. “You must stop. I cannot bear it.”

“You can. And you will, for I have not even begun.”

PRAISE FOR MARSHA CANHAM
AND HER PREVIOUS NOVELS

Swept Away

“EXCITING, SEXY AND FUN…filled with spies, intrigue, danger, swordplay and a grand passion… a writer whose talents know no bounds.”—
Romantic Times

Pale Moon Rider

“CAPTIVATING…Lush and sensually explicit… Canham has written a grand adventure full of heroic men and dastardly villains, and with a beautiful heroine who has spirit and determination, and even saves the hero on more than one occasion.”
—Booklist

“This gripping tale kept me up well into the morning. Tyrone will steal hearts and haunt dreams. Renee is enchanting and full of fire. Don't miss this new arrival by Marsha Canham.”
—Affaire de Coeur

The Blood of Roses

“Completely enthralling!…A powerful love story… Written like a well-played chess game, the reader is everywhere and becomes one with the scenes.”
—Heartland Critiques

“Marsha Canham sweeps you into Catherine's love story with characters that leap from the pages.… She completely captures the essence of this era with an emotional intensity that will stun and thrill readers.”

—Romantic Times

The Pride of Lions

“AN ELECTRIFYING LOVE STORY with characters that leap from the pages, breathtaking descriptions of Scotland's awesome beauty, superb dialogue and fascinating details.”
—Romantic Times

“A TENSE, HIGHLY EXCITING ROMANCE… [that] travels from the opulent ballrooms of England to the Scottish highlands.”
—Affaire de Coeur

The Last Arrow

“ROUSING ACTION, A STRONG SENSE OF MEDIEVAL LIFE, A SATISFYING LOVE STORY and intriguing spins on historical events as well as the familiar Robin Hood characters should bring readers back for more.”
—Publishers Weekly

“FABULOUS… Her version of the legendary Prince of Thieves and his Merry Men is as unique as her writing.… Ms. Canham's skill at recreating legend is unparalleled.”
—Romantic Times

Dell Books by Marsha Canham

The Blood of Roses
The Pride of Lions
Across a Moonlit Sea
In the Shadow of Midnight
Straight for the Heart
Through a Dark Mist
Under the Desert Moon
The Last Arrow
Pale Moon Rider
Swept Away

This is for my husband, Peter, who, after twenty-eight years of marriage, has learned to tread lightly and duck fast during those heady days and nights known as Deadline Hell. For my son, Jeffrey, my daughter-in-law, Michelle, and my Munchkin, Austin: Even though there are no palm trees in town, the days are warmer when you are around
.

To the Intrepids, the Loopies, and the readers/cyber-friends at A2R and RBL, my thanks for keeping me company at two and three in the morning when my characters keep me awake and pounding at the keys
.

Special thanks to Ruth Mounts for giving me a title that inspired so much more angst than just “Book Three.” And to Adrienne Ball, friend and publicist, who threatened to pout for another year if I did not mention her
somewhere
in this book
.

Author's Note

The phrase “labor of love” has been used so often, I think it sometimes loses its meaning, but in this case, with
Midnight Honor
, there is no other way to describe it. I actually started writing the story ten years ago, right after I had finished
The Pride of Lions
and
The Blood of Roses
. I had met Colonel Anne while doing research on the Jacobite Rebellion and knew she was a strong enough character to carry a story of her own. No, she
deserved
a story of her own. I started it, but put it aside after a hundred pages or so because I knew I had been in Scotland too long and needed to distance myself from Culloden for a while in order to do Anne justice. Nearly every year after that, I took out the folder and leafed through the pages I had written, but each time I put them back again knowing I wasn't ready, that I still retained too much from the first two books to enable me to look at Anne's story with a fresh eye. Okay, I'll admit it: I was more than a little afraid I had used up all the emotion and impact of the rebellion in the pages of
The Blood of Roses
.

Three years ago, Marjorie Braman offered me the chance to revise and update both
The Pride of Lions
and
The Blood of Roses
for reissued editions. I had just finished writing one Regency,
Pale Moon Rider
, and was contracted for a second,
Swept Away
, but retyping the two Scottish books in the computer made all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The story was there in my mind, the characters kept nudging their way into my thoughts even as I was chasing coaches through the streets of London. The only question remained: How do I write a story about a woman in love with two vastly different but inherently similar men? How do I make the challenges and sacrifices of all three characters as believable and as heart-rending for the reader as they are for the characters themselves? And how do I make the gentle readers who lambasted me at the end of
The Blood of Roses
understand that the real tragedy isn't in the loss, it is in the forgetting?

Anne and Angus Moy, John MacGillivray, Gillies MacBean, even Fearchar Farquharson, were real, living, breathing people; heroic figures out of the past who, I hope, will allow me my poetic license in weaving my story around them. I have been warmly rewarded by correspondence from the descendants of Lochiel and Alexander Cameron; I can only hope the MacKintoshes will be as kind.

“T
hese deeds, these plots, this ill-conceived folly born of midnight honor …”

—UNKNOWN

Prologue

Inverness, May 1746

T
he fear was like a blanket, smothering her. Having witnessed and survived the obscene terror of Culloden, Anne Farquharson Moy thought she could never be truly frightened again, yet there were times her heart pounded so violently in her chest, she thought it might explode. Her mouth was dry; her hands shook like those of a palsied old woman. The slimy stone walls of her cell seemed to be shrinking around her, closer each day, and the air was so thin and sour she had to pant to ease the pressure in her lungs.

And then there were the sounds….

They were as bone-chilling and piercing as the screams that haunted her dreams day and night. She had watched the prince's army die on the blood-soaked moor at Culloden, had seen the rounds of grapeshot fired by the English ranks spray into the charging Highlanders and cut them down like the pins in a child's game of bowls. She had heard the dreadful, unimaginable agony of fathers cradling fallen sons, brothers dragging themselves on mangled limbs to die beside brothers. And she had heard their cries for mercy as the English completed the slaughter by stabbing and mutilating those wounded souls they found alive on the erstwhile field of honor.

The sounds she heard in her gaol cell were the soft, barely audible groans of a dying faith, of crushed pride, and of the utter, complete hopelessness that permeated the walls of the old stone courthouse in Inverness.