Chapter 1
London, England
Winter 1821
The McQuoid clan had not always been hopeless romantics.
They’d once been a surly, violent lot given to fighting—with enemies and one another.
Everything for the McQuoids changed in the 16th century.
In the Year of Our Lord, 1543, to be precise.
Descendants of clan McQuoid’s romantic roots traced the familial vines to Lady Dorothea’s forbidden love affair with John Wemyss of Pittencrieff of a rival Scottish clan. The young lovers met by chance at the Fairy Pools dividing their clans’ ancestral homes in a relationship destined for doom. Though blood and clan allegiance made them enemies, Lady Dorothea and Lord John insisted their hearts and fates were written in the stars. One cool summer’s day, lass and her love met at Loch Coruisk at the foot of Black Cuillin to join in a handfasting. Only to discover themselves surrounded with stubborn—and enraged—McQuoids. In large part because Laird Johnwasa Pittencrieff, but also in large part due to their propensity for a good brawl.
His fate sealed, poor Pittencrieff was carted back to Dunmorin Castle—his McQuoid almost-bride cursing her kin to perdition—and imprisoned within a castle tower, where he’d await a painful death.
Too stubborn to allow either man or castle walls to defeat their love, Lady Dorothea leapt from her tower to John Wemyss’s.
Some said the lass jumped three meters. Others four. Accounts written of the McQuoid history had the distance as long as five!
Either way, Lady Dorothea’s feat that day, as great as her defiance, was met with begrudging admiration and a softening of previously hardened hearts.
Their love proved greater than hate, and from that John made free to marry his lass and the McQuoid motto sprung.
The cantankerous McQuoids became a whimsical lot.
The previous clan motto,Buaidh no bàs—Victory or Death—which was stitched upon all tapestries and hangings, was replaced.
Thig crìoch air an t-saoghal, ach mairidh gaol is ceòl—The end of the world will come, but love and music will endure—became the new motto.
From then on, every marriage a McQuoid entered into was driven not by titles and power and wealth, but by love.
The same held true all the many years later for Miss Meghan McQuoid Smith’s own family.
Her late da, God rest his soul, had faced an even greater hurdle in his courtship of Meghan’s ma—he possessed a healthy amount of English blood. Their union, cut short not long ago, had yielded six healthy, happy—and stubborn, of course, since they were McQuoids—children.
Meghan’s eccentric Scot uncle, the Earl of Abington, landed another unlikely pairing with an English lady of the most distinguished member of the ton.
From his long-ago marriage to Aunt Catherine, six children were born.
And the history of love matches continued through Meghan’s siblings and cousins alike.
Meghan’s elder brother fell in love in the same romantic and fraught way as the others before him.
Brone, a mere mister, had fallen for a duke’s daughter, who also had the bad fortune of being betrothed to a duke.
In the end, Brone eloped with his Lady Cora and lived in love and joy.
Cousin Dallin, Viscount Crichton and future Earl of Abington, in his attempts to stop Brone’s elopement, partnered with the lady’s sister, a woman he despised, to stop the wedding.
Naturally, they fell in love on the road to Gretna Green.
The eldest daughter, Meghan’s cousin, Cassia, fell for a powerful shipping captain—who was expected to marry another.
The middle daughter, Meghan’s younger cousin, Myrtle, got left behind in London one Christmastide season and fell for a brooding duke—who no longer brooded.
At least not for his wife and children.
