His Ferocious Little Factor

Rabbie MacIver's glen band is nine hundred pounds in debt and the books look like a bad dream. Bell Rennie arrives in a cart, sits down with his ledgers, and tells him within twenty minutes that he has been robbed for three years — by his own quartermaster, whose brother happens to be the sheriff. Rabbie says prove it. Bell does, on paper, twice. Now it is her pen against the sheriff's writs and his riders against the sheriff's men, and the only problem is that he cannot stop noticing the way she sits a horse. And then the quartermaster accuses her of forgery, and the assizes happen in eleven days. Bell has a plan, a clerk she has been charming for two months, and one question for Rabbie that he keeps failing to answer: what exactly is she to him?