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- Herausgeber: Take The Leap Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Arranged marriages are so three centuries ago. But that doesn't stop Afton Lennox from being bound by one. All her life she's been pledged to wed Connor MacKean. It's the only way to save both their families' estates, and they're friends, after all, so it won't be that bad. Right?
Hamish Colquhoun has spent his entire adult life trying to find a way to liberate his best friend from a marriage he doesn't want. If it also spares the woman he's secretly loved for years, it's of no mind to him. He's already got a wife and family of his own. Freeing them both is just the right thing to do.
But with the wedding just days away, time is running short. Afton and Connor are prepared to do their duty, fulfilling the pact made by their long-dead ancestors. There's one option Hamish hasn't mentioned. It would only buy some time at best and risk everything at worst. But as Afton begins to question everything, Hamish finds he can't stay silent.
God save them all.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Jilting The Kilt
A Runaway Bride Marriage Pact Prequel
Kilted Hearts
Kait Nolan
Copyright © 2022 by Kait Nolan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Invite
A Letter to Readers
Jilting The Kilt
Other Books By Kait Nolan
About Kait
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A Letter to Readers
Dear Reader,
If you’re coming to me from any of my other series, you might be a little confused about my jump to Scotland as the setting for the Kilted Hearts series. Scotland has always held a special place in my heart, as that’s where my forebears hail from, and I absolutely adored the time I spent there studying abroad in college. I always planned to go back in fiction and in life. The Kilted Hearts series is that fictional trip. I hope you fall in love with the village of Glenlaig and my cast of characters who are all impacted by the three-hundred-year-old marriage pact mentioned in this prequel.
As this is a prequel story, it necessarily ends on a massive cliffhanger that sets up for Book 1, Cowboy in a Kilt , which releases January 13th. You’ll note that particular book doesn’t follow Afton and Hamish. Rest assured, their time is coming, but there are a LOOOOOOT of other pieces that have to fall into place before they get their happily ever after. In the meantime, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Happy reading!
Kait
Jilting The Kilt
“…publish the banns of marriage between Connor MacKean and Afton Lennox, both of this parish. If any of you know cause of just impediment why these two persons should not be joining together in holy matrimony, you are to declare it.”
I’m not in love with him.
But Afton didn’t give voice to the declaration. Not during the first reading of the banns weeks ago. Not after the second. This was the third and final reading. And still, she stayed silent in her seat on the hard wooden pew a few respectful inches away from her groom, hands folded neatly in her lap as she stared unseeing at the vicar.
Love had nothing to do with her marriage to Connor.
The clearing of a throat jerked her attention to the other side of the aisle. Hamish Colquhoun shifted in his seat, looking grim and resolute, like he wished he were anywhere but here. But as Connor’s best mate, there was nowhere else he’d be. Not when he’d devoted much of his legal career to finding a loophole to free them from the marriage pact that had been struck between their families centuries before to put an end to generations of feuding and bloodshed. Their ancestors had believed so much in the necessity of the pact that they’d put both family estates and all the lands that went with them up as collateral with the Crown. A failsafe to see that neither side backed out. Which would have been all well and good if the damned thing had been executed in the early eighteenth century, as intended.
But, as fate or curse would have it, by way of illnesses and accidents and multiple generations of births of all boys or all girls, three hundred years had passed without eligible heirs to fulfill the pact. Afton and Connor had been born into the hot seat, as it were, and raised that this was their duty. Never mind that it was the twenty-first century and such things simply shouldn’t be done. Without it, ownership of the only homes they’d ever known would revert to the Crown, because the powers that be weren’t particularly interested in amending an agreement that might see thousands of acres of prime Highland forests and glens reclaimed for the government if it wasn’t upheld.
Despite years of effort, Hamish hadn’t found that loophole.
Well, there was the obvious solution of marrying and promptly divorcing, but her intended didn’t actually believe in the institution of divorce. He planned to marry once and once only. Oh, she could flout his wishes. Scotland had means of granting divorces to those whose partners didn’t agree. But she did truly care for Connor, and she didn’t want to damage a lifelong friendship by hurting him like that.
So she and her intended were here for the observance of yet another outdated formality to satisfy the terms of the pact. They’d head down the street to The Stag’s Head for an informal ceilidh/engagement party once the service was wrapped. Not that Connor was any more inclined to celebrate than she, but neither of them had the heart to say no to his great uncle, Angus, and it seemed everyone in the village was excited by the prospect of next week’s wedding and wanted to pay their respects.
At least there’d be whisky.
Afton traced a thumb along the band of the ring that weighed heavy on her left hand. It had been passed down in the MacKean family and ultimately resized for her. Connor had presented it before the first reading of the banns, and it still felt alien. Wrong.
There’d been no proposal. None of the usual trappings that went along with merging two lives. They’d never dated, never even kissed beyond one tipsy effort when she’d turned eighteen. It hadn’t been terrible, but it hadn’t set her on fire either. Given his approach to being bound for an arranged marriage had been to sow his oats as widely and often as possible until being legally bound in matrimony, presumably he’d developed skill in that arena since then that she’d benefit from.
