Bridegroom Wore Plaid (18 page)

“We don’t call it great Saxland or Great England.”

“Hold still.” He forced his fingers to pin up her braid, when what they wanted to do was unravel the thing entirely. Admitting his attraction to her should have made restraint easier—not next to impossible. “You have to concede England certainly has a greater hand in Scottish matters than Scotland does in English matters.”

She turned her head to peer at him while Ian was trying to pin up her braid. “One has the impression Scotland would consider taking a hand in English matters boring, a waste of time, and beneath the notice of most Scotsmen.”

“Certainly thankless.” He finished with her braid and stepped back, adjusting himself in his clothes while her gaze was on the valley spreading out below them.

“You have a very beautiful home, Ian. I can see why you’re so protective of it.”

“Proud of it. So many of the clans lost everything. Their holdings in the mountains are mostly ruins, their lands overrun by sheep, their people gone across the waters never to return. What the Clearances and the famine didn’t take from us, emigration and the Highland regiments have. The MacGregors have been lucky.”

She turned to regard him, her violet eyes showing the keen intelligence he’d noted even in his first impression of her. “How were you lucky?”

Eight

The cloud passed from before the sun. Ian focused on answering Augusta’s last question in its least metaphorical sense. How had his branch of the clan been
lucky
?

“The earldom was a stroke of luck, another one of Charles II’s generous impulses with a fellow willing to ignore royal interest in his lady. I’ve often thought most peers never recall another man’s given name if he has a title, and thus, we weren’t tarred with quite the same brush as the rest of the clan. And our land here is among the best in the shire, mostly because we have an enormous bat cave to the south, which we guard more jealously than a mother wolf guards her cubs.”

“A bat cave?”

“The droppings are among the best fertilizer you’ll ever find. The local soil is thin at best, but a hundred fifty years of proper management and care, and our land has improved enough to produce a good crop of oats, though wheat still remains a challenge. Others are following suit, but it’s a painstaking process.”

“You sell this fertilizer?”

“Very dearly, but yes. We also make a present of some to our royal neighbor each year.”

“You’re paying her back, aren’t you? Making reparation to the royal coffers for the earldom bestowed on your family all those years ago.”

She would understand that. “It’s more a token. If Charles hadn’t had such a wandering eye, there would have been no need to bestow placatory titles.”

She wrinkled her nose in thought. “Except many a monarch has the wandering eye and doesn’t bestow the titles in gratitude, so you feel indebted. Being Scots, and MacGregors, you repay the debt with your most precious coin.”

“Perhaps.” Being Scots, they also enjoyed the profound irony of gifting the monarch with bat manure. “Are you ready to move on?”

“Another moment. The view is lovely.”

She
was lovely. Her complexion had bloomed since she’d arrived in Scotland, and her hair shone with glossy highlights. She sat in the morning sunshine, face turned up to the breeze, eyes closed, the picture of a woman awaiting her lover’s kiss.

She was clothed in a high-waisted old-fashioned dress that the breeze molded to her figure without interference from hoops or crinolines.

He’d felt that figure against his body, could attest to the generosity of its curves. His intended had been in his arms as well, when she’d turned her ankle, but for some reason, Ian had formed no impression of Genie’s feminine attributes.

Bad enough when a man wanted to touch but could only look. Worse yet when he’d touched and not even noticed.

Augusta rose and smiled at him. “Shall we continue?”

“This way.” He took her hand in his and led her up the track. The way became narrower and steeper—it was a trail used to herd livestock to higher elevations in summer—but she could have navigated the path without his aid.

“How is it you’re accustomed to walking like this, Augusta?”

“I occupy a small manor home in Oxfordshire with an elderly widowed cousin. I’m two miles from town, and unless I’m hauling a load to or from market in my pony cart, I usually walk the distance. Then too, tending to one’s animals and one’s garden properly requires diligent effort.”

He tried to both savor and ignore the feel of her hand in his—which would soon drive him daft. “You have no servants?”

“We have a housekeeper and maid-of-all-work living in, and a day man in most seasons. My cousin has a lady’s maid nearly as old as she is. Why?”

“I heard you speaking with Mary Fran the other morning, describing your ramblings as a child.”

She glanced over at him and dropped his hand, ostensibly to smooth back an errant strand of hair, though she didn’t take his hand again. “I’m not sure which conversation you refer to.”

Just like that, she was English to the teeth. Chilly, proper, and punctiliously civil. It made him want to warm her up again, to mess with her hair, to see her bare… feet.

Bloody damn, he hadn’t been this far gone since adolescence.

“I refer to the conversation where you told Mary Fran you were acquainted with everybody on your father’s estate, from the goose girl to the beekeeper.”

“And your point?”

“An estate with a goose girl, a beekeeper, and all those other positions is a big place, Augusta. Your parents were wealthy.”

“Quite.” She smoothed the lock of hair back again, though it hadn’t come loose from behind her ear. “Or I assumed they were.”

“So why are you living like shabby gentry now? Even if your father suspected you were illegitimate, he would have made provision for you. Your uncle certainly has coin to spare, so much coin he can buy his daughter a relatively well-respected title.”

She remained silent while scrambling over a rockslide blocking the path, then waited for Ian to catch up to her.

“This is not a polite topic of conversation, my lord.”

He smiled at her attempt to reestablish the lines. “Augusta, I am
worried
about you. How do you go on? Have you coin of your own? Did you choose this obscurity, or does it chafe? For a single woman to live virtually alone…”

She was marching forth again, her back to him because the way was too narrow to walk side by side. She was making an assault on the summit now, no longer out ambling through a Scottish summer morning, and clearly, he had offended her.

“Augusta, forget I asked, please.”

She nodded without turning, which suggested Ian hadn’t only offended her dignity, he’d also hurt her feelings.

They continued on in silence until near the rocky tor itself, where the way opened up enough that he could take her hand again. She allowed it, which relieved him inordinately.

“Oh…
my
.” She stopped abruptly right beside him as they gained the base of the tor. At their backs, rocks soared up another thirty feet from the hilltop, and before them lay a vista clear across the shire.

“We haven’t views like this in Oxford.” She swung her gaze off to the west, where a rugged line of purple mountains created the horizon. “I have never seen… It’s beautiful, Ian. Breathtaking. Thank you for showing me this. And you’re right, I do want to sketch it. I want to sit here until fall and sketch it as the birches turn golden, and then watch as the snow covers those peaks and the beasts huddle in the hollows. I want to see spring take over the land from up here…”

She turned, maybe to make sure he wasn’t laughing at her.

“And you want to watch as it blooms into summer,” he finished for her. “As a boy, I understood God better once I’d seen the world from up here, and I wondered how so much of my family could leave beauty such as this behind them. The property with all the new construction is Balmoral, and my own home is back that way, to the southwest, near the base of the mountain that looks like a saddle.”

“Your home?”

He dropped her hand and shifted behind her, raising his arm over her shoulder. “Just there. On the slope of that mountain. The name of the place translates to something like ‘heart’s refuge.’ The Scots are romantic about the most prosaic things.”

And he was inhaling the fragrance of her hair, helpless not to.

“Ian?” She turned her face, exposing her nape. “Before, when you asked about my circumstances? I don’t have the answers.”

“I ought not to have been prying.”

“But you ought to know this.” She paced off a few steps, and he should have thanked her for putting space between them. Instead, he resented that space, resented that she hadn’t sunk back against him and at least let him hold her as a man holds a woman he desires.

No, it was worse than that: he didn’t merely desire her, he
cared
for her.

“What should I know, Augusta?”

She paced off even farther to sit on the rock best suited for viewing the panorama before them. He moved closer but didn’t allow himself to sit beside her.

“When I was growing up,” she began, “I knew we were wealthy. It was there in obvious ways—you couldn’t ride all of our holdings in a day, the house had fifty-some rooms, the stables were gorgeous, and the tenants wanted for nothing. Kent is good land.”

“It has that reputation.”

“And because I was the only child, I tagged after my papa shamelessly, and he and my mother indulged me. He’d tell me the land would all be mine one day, and I needed to understand how to go on with it. He’d warn me to choose my husband wisely, because any man I married would have to be my partner as well as my spouse. I was a girl. I paid him no mind.”

“You’re not a girl any longer.”

“I grew up quite precipitously when my parents died. One day I was laughing with Mama over which invitation to accept, and the next I was wearing black and dependent on my uncle for my very bread.”

“So your father failed to make provision for you?”

“Uncle said Papa’s will was invalid, and what little Papa had in coin had gone to pay enormous debts. I never knew if my mother even had a will. I don’t understand, because we had money. I saw the account books, saw the strongbox, saw the contents of the safe in my father’s study. My involvement in the estate business never struck me as unconventional, though in hindsight, it must have been.

“Then too, Uncle was not related to Papa. I never met my father’s family. I think they emigrated like your relations did. I tried writing to the solicitors, but Uncle saw the letter in the mail and asked why I’d do such a thing.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth: that I did not want to be a burden to him and felt my presence cast a pall over the household.”

Despite the lust and mischief coursing through his body, Ian’s brain concluded Augusta’s story wasn’t adding up. The lawyer in him tried to make sense of Augusta’s recitation, but no matter how he parsed it, the reality of her childhood didn’t mesh with her present circumstances one bit.

“So you withdrew to Oxfordshire voluntarily?”

“They were in
my
home
, Ian. Genie chose my bedroom for her own, and I couldn’t say anything. She was just a girl. She didn’t realize at the time she was dispossessing me, but her parents surely did.”

He settled beside her, resisting the urge to take her hand. “It always seemed to me that the worst thing about the Clearances was that they were done with the full backing of the law. They were acts of war, really, to cast people from their homes, to burn their belongings, to force them to flee or starve, but the king’s man would read the bills of ejectment time after time, and there was nothing to be done. Your uncle had the law on his side, apparently.”

“I cannot fathom how there was any great debt, Ian. Papa was a favorite with the trades because he paid at the time service was rendered. He didn’t wait until the end of the year or until he was being dunned. He was a tradesman himself at heart. And he was shrewd and clever and he worked hard… where would the debt have come from?”

“Gambling?”

She shook her head. “His mother was a Methodist. We gambled for farthing points over whist, nothing more.”

“Women?”

“He was devoted to my mother.”

“Taxes?”

“The land wasn’t entailed. The taxes had to be paid each year, or the Crown would have intervened. And I saw the books. Papa delighted in explaining them to me and showing me how to keep them. We made money each year—pots of it.”

“Books can be manipulated, and it seems whatever the case, when your parents died, your uncle must have somehow inherited through your mother, who would have been his older sister. And he’s wealthy now. Quite wealthy.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, but I can hardly question my own uncle about his finances now, can I?”

Ian stared out over the dramatic, rolling terrain of his family seat to the mountains to the west. He realized he was in a position to further Augusta’s interests, to champion her situation when she couldn’t take on the challenge herself.