PREORDER - Fool Me Once: Reluctant Brides Book 7

*Note: This is a PREORDER - Release date is 28 February 2027.

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The first rule of running away from a murderous fiancé: DO NOT stop for anybody.

Eleyne Armstrong broke it before she'd cleared the border, and took a blade in her side for her trouble. All because she has never once managed to ride past trouble. Now she's stuck recovering in a stranger's hall with a grumpy laird who wants her gone.

His children have other plans.

But the longer she stays in this silent keep, the more certain she becomes that something in it is badly broken, and that nobody is allowed to say so.

Struan Sinclair buried his wife three years ago, along with the secret she confessed on her deathbed. What he did not bury was his temper, and the half-dead stranger bleeding in his hall is testing it sorely. The reckless woman threw herself between his children and four English blades and took a knife for the privilege. He owes her a debt. He does not have to like it.

But the man she jilted has not given up.

Can two stubborn souls learn to trust one another before her past rides through his gates?

TROPES: Single Dad, Grumpy Sunshine, Runaway Bride, Forced Proximity, Matchmaking Children, Found Family, Scottish Medieval Highland Romance.

Mature Content. NO cheating. NO cliffhangers. HEA.

***

PREVIEW: Fool Me Once: Reluctant Brides Book 7 ©2026 Elina Emerald

Prologue - Three years earlier

The rain came down in a deluge, turning the road to the Keep into a thick river of mud that clung to the horses' hooves. Struan Sinclair rode at the head of what remained of his men, and every jolt of the saddle burnished fiery pain through his ribs. They had won the battle, and yet it had cost him dearly.

Across his saddle lay Garrick. His second in command. His oldest friend. The man who had saved his life when they were boys and who had stood by his side through every battle since. Now he lay limp and grey, his breath coming in shallow, wet rattles, a festering wound in his gut. Struan had carried him from the bloody battlefield and through the treacherous journey home, hoping against all odds that he could keep his lifelong friend alive.

Hold on, ye stubborn bastard. We're almost home. He chanted it silently with every passing mile.

Finally, the gates to his Keep groaned open. Torches guttered in the wet. Struan swung down, biting back a groan as his own wound pulled, and gathered Garrick into his arms, half carrying, half dragging his dead weight before he shouldered through the doors of his own hall. Water streamed from him, and blood ran down his forearms. He made his way to the small antechamber used by the healers and laid his burden on the trestle table.

Struan was thinking of his bairns, warm in their beds. He was thinking of his wife, Clara, of how eager he was to see her, of how he wanted to fix whatever was broken in their marriage. For five long months on campaign, she was all he had thought about.

Then she was there, on the stairs, one hand at her rounded belly. He froze. She was with child? But how? They had not coupled for some time, even before he'd been called away to battle.

For a heartbeat their eyes met, and something in him paused, some knot that had been drawn tight since he'd ridden out on campaign.

Then Clara ran toward him.

No, not to him.

She ran past him.

She struck her knees beside the man Struan had laid on the table, and the sound that tore out of her was something raw, something that did not belong in the space between his second and his own wife. Screaming. She was screaming Garrick's name.

The antechamber dissolved into noise and motion. The healer came running, another behind her, hands and voices bending toward the dying man on the table. Struan stood in the middle of it, dripping wet, forgotten, his own hurts unseen. He reached for Clara. Someone was giving orders. He thought perhaps it was him.

Clara shoved him back. Her hands, small and fierce, pushed at his chest, and then she folded down beside Garrick and paid Struan no more mind than she would a stranger. She took Garrick's hand and pressed it to her cheek, and she wept over it. Then she placed his hand on her belly and whispered to him urgently, and Struan watched as if he were an outsider looking in, his mind denying what he was seeing.

Garrick's eyes fluttered open. Delirious, half-gone, he turned his face toward Clara.

"Mo leannan," he breathed. "Dinnae cry. Think of our babe."

The words felt strange. Struan heard them yet set them aside, because they could not mean what they seemed to mean.

Garrick's gaze found him then, glassy and sinking. "Forgive me, Struan." A wet, failing breath escaped his lips. "Clara was always meant to be mine."

And then Garrick was gone.

Clara screamed and wailed, demanding Garrick open his eyes while knowing, as everyone else in that room knew, that he never would again. Then another scream escaped her lips, and it was not grief alone. Her body bowed over, her arms wrapping her belly, and Struan saw the dark stain blooming through her skirts.

He moved. Instinct, nothing else. He caught Clara as she pitched sideways, gathered her against him, and the wet warmth of her soaked through his sleeve.

"Healer!" His voice cracked the length of the chamber. "Save her, God's blood, save her and the babe."

The healers reached for Clara, but she fought them off.

She turned her face up to his. Her eyes were hollowed out with grief. Her voice was thin as thread. "The babe is Garrick's."

The words cut through him like a blade, and still he refused to accept it.

"No!" Struan shouted. "Clara, let the healers see to ye," he cried against her hair as he held her.

But she shook her head and rasped, "I stayed loyal at first. Bore ye two bairns. But I could not stop loving him, and then I stopped trying."

Her eyes were closing and Struan knew he was losing her.

"I wanted Garrick to have this one. A babe that was just ours." Her voice was a ghost of a whisper. "Now the three of us can be together."

"I dinnae care!" Struan roared. "I will raise this one as our own, with as much love. I'll fix this, Clara—"

Her fingers went slack in his as she weakly shook her head. "My heart is broken. Let me go to him. Let me have in death what I could not in life."

And with those final, devastating words, Struan's beloved wife of seven years died in his arms.

In the middle of the chamber, with the rain still hammering the roof and his best friend cooling on the table an arm's length away, Struan broke down and wept.

He did not move for a long time. The healers had to pry his dead wife from his arms.

"Not a word of what happened leaves this room," he whispered.

"Aye, Laird," the two healers replied.

In a single hour Struan had lost his most trusted friend, his beloved wife, and a babe that had never been his and that he would have loved regardless. It cracked something deep inside him. Grief, betrayal, guilt, and regret for revelations that had come too late to make amends.

And slowly, rising up cold and sure beneath all of it, was anger. At her, and at Garrick, but mostly at himself.

***

The day they buried Clara Sinclair, the rain had finally stopped.

Struan stood over an open grave and watched his men lower a plain wooden box into the earth. The box was empty. He alone knew it. Clara was already in the ground, laid in the quiet dark beside Garrick, the two of them together at last. It was a decision he had made, it was a bitter sweet act of kindness to a best friend and a beloved wife who had both betrayed him. But with that final act, all soft emotions died.

The funeral and the empty box were for the clan. For the mourners, and for his children, who stood ashen-faced and small at his side. They did not need to carry their mother's truth as well as her death. And Garrick's family did not need to remember him as anything other than a loyal vassal. Struan would go through the motions. He would give them a grave to weep at, and a name carved in stone, and if a lie was all the peace he had left to give anyone, then he would give it and be damned.

The earth went in. His son slipped a cold hand into his. His daughter pressed her tear-filled face against his side.

Whatever emotions he felt, he would bury them deep, because his children needed him and his clan needed him. So, he squared his shoulders, and he turned from the grave, and he endured.

But something in Struan Sinclair set like mortar that day, hard and grey and cold. The world was not a fair place. It did not reward a faithful heart, and a man was a fool to hand his whole self to another and trust it would be handled with care. He had learned that lesson at the cost of everything, and he did not intend to learn it twice.

***