The Runaway and the Highlander

On the night she is to be given away to a man she has never chosen, Clara Winlock climbs out of a conservatory window and into a hired chaise, bound for her great aunt's door three hundred miles north. She expects mud, and hunger, and fear. She does not expect to be hauled from a flooded ford by a huge, dark-eyed stranger in a plaid, who calls himself nobody's sir and asks nothing for his trouble but a single pearl earring. Ewan Blackwood has his own reasons for the road. He is fleeing a marriage of his mother's arranging, disguised as a drover, and the last thing a man in hiding needs is a runaway heiress with a hatpin and a talent for seeing straight through him. But an overturned gig, a flooded river, and a magistrate's suspicious eye leave them no choice but to declare themselves husband and wife, and what begins as a shield against scandal becomes something neither of them know how to call by any smaller name. With a baronet's fury on the road behind them and a border still ahead, Clara and Ewan race for Gretna Green and the only roof in Scotland that might keep her safe, trading a cold bargain for a chance at the one thing neither of them believed they would ever be permitted to choose for themselves.