She snorted. “I’m glad to see that I’ve risen from ‘lad’ to ‘little girl’ in your estimation.
But I’ll have you know that I’ll be sixteen only next month. And you needn’t pretend there’s anything mysterious about making love. The male simply bites the back of the female’s neck to hold her still while he mounts her from behind.”
It took Simon several dazed blinks to absorb that extraordinary assertion. He had to clear his throat twice before he could choke out a word. “Although the idea has merit, I had hoped to demonstrate considerably more finesse. May I assume your previous intelligence efforts consisted solely of spying on your uncle’s stallions?”
“And tomcats,” she confessed. “Robert the Bruce’s papa fancied himself quite the rake.”
Simon’s confusion was relieved when she reached down and scooped up the kitten butting its head against her dusty ankles. He studied her, piecing together her reference to an obscure Scottish hero, the faded plaid he’d mistaken for a blanket and the intriguing lilt in her voice.
“Are you Scots?”
“Aye, that I am.” She tossed back her head and Simon’s breath caught as pride transformed her shabby figure. Buried beneath the layers of dust, tartan and the painful awkwardness of youth was an enticing promise of beauty. “All the Kincaids are Scots, although many, like my uncle Ross, have spent the last fifty years denying it. After our parents were murdered for daring to defend the Kincaid lands against the English when I was but a wee lass, my brother Connor packed me off to live here. ’Tis the curse, you know.”
“And what curse might that be?” he inquired gently, suspecting that the girl was cursed only with an overactive imagination.
“Why, the curse of the Kincaids, of course!” Straightening her shoulders, she recited by rote, “The Kincaids are doomed to wander the earth until they’re united once again beneath the banner of their one true chieftain. ’Twas pronounced by old Ewan Kincaid himself as he lay dying with an English sword through his breast.”
“Why would anyone levy such a frightful fate on their own kin?”
“Because my grandfather—Ewan’s son—sold out the clan at Culloden for an earldom and thirty pieces of English silver.”
Simon shrugged. “People do what they must to survive.”
Her eyes blazed. “I’d rather be dead than survive without honor!”
Her words sent a chill of shame down Simon’s spine. He’d never defended any principle with such conviction unless it involved the pursuit of his own pleasures. Or an opportunity to infuriate his father.
He shook off the unfamiliar sensation. Regardless of her claims, she was only a child. A starry-eyed child who’d seized on a romantic obsession to ease her longing for a home and family she most likely would never see again. Her uncle was a very wealthy and influential earl. In time she would grow out of her silly fancies and find herself concerned with nothing more pressing than choosing the sprigged muslin for her latest ball gown or comparing the size of her suitors’ inheritances. Simon felt an odd pang of loss at the thought.
“I gather your uncle doesn’t share your sympathies for the Scottish cause?”
She ducked her head. “Uncle Ross says I’m as much a fool as my father—always dreaming about castles in the clouds when I should be keeping my feet planted firmly on the ground. Something that’s very hard to do in those ridiculous slippers my aunt expects me to wear.”
Simon couldn’t bear to see her in defeat. He wanted to see her standing tall and proud again, her eyes glittering with courage and defiance.
He reached down to brush the bangs from those extraordinary eyes. “Had he lived, I’m sure your father would be very proud of you.”
Catriona had to summon her last shred of pride to keep from turning her cheek into his hand. No man had ever looked at her in such a manner. As if she were the only girl who existed in his world. But hadn’t he favored Alice with just such a look only minutes before? She hid her miserable flush of jealousy by ducking beneath his arm and out of his reach.
“If you intend to court my cousin,” she said brusquely, “you’ll have need of a steady income. Since he has no sons, my uncle is set on making solid matches for both Alice and Georgina. Alice’s dowry should support the two of you until you make commander.
Provided, of course, that—”
“Whoa!” Simon caught her arm, keeping his fingers well out of reach of Robert the Bruce’s teeth. “Before you start planning my nuptials, you might want to know that I’m shipping out on the
Belleisle
tomorrow.”
“The
Belleisle
? Why, that’s one of the ships under Admiral Nelson’s command!”
Her awed response made Simon chafe a bit beneath his starched collar. He’d always worn the blue and white of His Majesty’s Navy with the same casual disregard as the rest of his wardrobe.
“Nelson’s a true hero and a bonny fine fellow, he is! For an Englishman, of course,” she hastily added.
She cast him another shy glance and Simon recognized instinctively that the hero worship simmering in her eyes wasn’t for Nelson, however bonny she might think him.
But Simon had done nothing to earn her regard. His half-brother Richard had always been the hero in the family. The legitimate heir and the apple of their father’s eye. He was nothing but the unfortunate result of a few drunken nights his father had spent in the arms of a pretty young opera dancer.
He was seized by a strange desperation to wipe that moon-eyed look off her face, to make her see him for the man he was, not the man she believed he could be. “Nelson is indeed a ‘bonny fine fellow,’ but the army is the province of heroes. The navy is for common-born blokes like Nelson and expendable second sons like me.” He leaned against the stall door, folding his arms over his chest. “I’ll be at sea for several months. As long as your cousin expects nothing from me, she won’t be disappointed.”
The girl buried her nose in the kitten’s fur. “Alice will wait for you if you ask, although I can’t promise that she’ll be faithful. She’s always been a bit fickle.”
Simon grinned. Ah, now, here was a game he understood! He had played the delicate rivalries between women to his advantage more than once.
He cupped the girl’s cheek in his hand. Startled by its downy softness, he tilted her face up for his tender perusal. “What about you, Miss Kincaid? How long would you wait for the man you loved?”
“Forever,” she whispered.
Her vow seemed to tremble in the air between them, binding and irrevocable. A shudder of unexpected yearning passed through him. He had asked the question in jest only to find himself the butt of his own joke. As she gazed up at him, her moist lips parted in a disarming blend of innocence and invitation.
He lowered his hand, suddenly frantic to escape this dangerous flirtation with a child.
Avoiding her eyes, he shrugged on his coat, then rescued his bicorne hat from where Alice had raked it off his head in a moment of passion, and slapped it against his thigh.
“Any woman who waits for me is wasting her time. I learned long ago the folly of making promises when you have no intention of keeping them.”
The girl cradled the kitten beneath the challenging tilt of her chin. “I suppose that would make you an honorable man.”
Donning his hat, Simon gave her his cockiest grin—the one he saved for displaying his winning hand over the whist tables at Boodle’s. “On the contrary, Miss Kincaid. That would make me Lieutenant Simon Wescott, a bastard in both birth and deed.”
He left her haloed by a crown of shimmering dust motes—a bedraggled Celtic princess without a kingdom, a kitten her sole subject. It was only as he flung himself onto his saddle and kicked his horse into a furious canter that he realized he had never learned her Christian name.
Catriona ran to the stable door, gazing after the brash young lieutenant until nothing remained of him but the clouds of dust stirred up by his mount’s hooves. When even those had drifted away on the wind, she sank against the splintery doorframe, still clutching the kitten.
“What say you, Robert?” she whispered, burying her wistful smile in the kitten’s downy fur. “Perhaps our Lieutenant Wescott is more honorable than he realizes. If he’s brave enough to throw himself in front of Alice on my behalf, facing down Napoleon’s cannons should be no more taxing than a stroll through Hyde Park.”
Robert the Bruce butted his small head against her chin, purring in assent.
C
atriona Kincaid ducked as a silver hairbrush went sailing past her head.
It was hardly the first object her cousin had hurled at her head during the ten years of their acquaintance and she doubted it would be the last. Fortunately, Alice’s normally keen aim had been weakened by the wrenching sobs buffeting her slender frame. Her weeping was so piteous it had stirred even Catriona’s sympathy, but it was Catriona’s cautious offer of comfort that had resulted in the flying hairbrush.
She backed toward the doorway of Alice’s bedchamber, prepared to beat a hasty retreat should any more items come winging her way.
Alice was sprawled full-length across the elegant four-poster. She submitted to her older sister’s ministrations with slightly more grace, allowing Georgina to pat her heaving shoulder and murmur, “There, there, pet,” in soothing tones.
Alice’s tear-streaked face briefly emerged from the nest of pillows to glare daggers at Georgina. “You can’t possibly know how much I’m suffering. You
have
a husband.” Her voice rose to a wail. “Oh, how could a fat cow like you snare a husband when I can’t?”
She rolled over and dove back beneath the pillows, punctuating each sob by driving a fist into the feather tick.
Georgina may have been a little on the placid and plump side compared to the temperamental and sylphlike Alice, but she was hardly bovine. Patting with just a fraction more force, she cast Catriona a helpless look over her shoulder. They both knew Alice and Georgina’s mother would be of little assistance. Aunt Margaret was huddled in the wing chair by the hearth, weeping copiously, if silently, into her lace handkerchief.
She hadn’t budged since drawing all of the damask drapes in the bedchamber as if her daughter were suffering from a fatal illness rather than a broken engagement.
“What did you do, Alice?” Catriona asked softly. From the abrupt silence that fell over the room, she knew no one else had dared to ask. “A man like the Marquess of Eddingham isn’t going to stir up the scandal broth of a broken betrothal for naught.”
Alice rolled back over, her disheveled blond head reemerging from the pillows. She sniffled sullenly. “I only allowed him one kiss.”
Catriona drifted closer to the bed, frowning in puzzlement. “Virtue is a quality highly prized by most gentlemen. Surely the marquess wouldn’t be so cruel as to end your engagement just because you refused to allow him a second kiss.”
Alice sat up, plucking fretfully at the satin counterpane. Her eyes were swollen, her fair skin mottled and grubby with tear tracks. “It wasn’t the marquess I kissed.” Despite a visible effort to sustain her pout, a dreamy smile curved her lips. “It was the other fellow in the garden. Lord Melbourne’s cousin.”
Georgina’s pale blue eyes widened with shock. The soggy handkerchief Aunt Margaret pressed to her lips failed to muffle her dismayed cry.
Catriona folded her arms over her chest, her worst suspicions confirmed. Her cousin had always had a weakness for pretty boys. Despite her best efforts, Catriona had never forgotten the prettiest of them all—a young naval officer with an angel’s smile and the devil’s eyes whose touch had made her shiver with a yearning she had been too young to understand. She had hoped it would fade with time, not sharpen.
“And I suppose the marquess caught you kissing this fellow in the garden?” she asked her cousin.
Alice nodded. Her lower lip began to quiver anew. “He humiliated me in front of my friends and refused to speak to me all the way home in the carriage. I had no idea he had such a cruel and jealous streak. Perhaps it’s just as well I discovered it before we were wed.”
“Just as well for him, you mean,” Catriona muttered.
Alice’s eyes narrowed. “Catriona’s being hateful to me, Mama. Make her go away.”
Drawing breath for a fresh wail, she snatched up a Meissen shepherdess from the table beside the bed. Catriona didn’t wait for her aunt’s dismissal. She slammed the bedchamber door an instant before the delicate porcelain shattered against the other side of it. Her cousin’s strident sobs followed her down the corridor.
Catriona hastened down the long curving staircase of the stately Palladian mansion she had called home since she was ten years old. Despite its tasteful combination of elegance and grandeur, there were times when Wideacre Park felt more like a prison than a palace.
The graceful arched windows and her uncle’s expectations caged her far more effectively than any iron bars. Although she had striven to reward him for his charity by becoming the proper young English lady he had always longed for her to be, there was still a wild and rebellious part of her that yearned to throw on her old plaid and scamper barefoot over the freshly cut grass.
But on this afternoon she had no choice but to heed the demands of duty. Uncle Ross had best learn the truth about what had transpired between Alice and her fiancé before he called the marquess out for publicly humiliating his eldest daughter. From the gossip she’d heard, Eddingham—a devout hunter—possessed both a steady hand and deadly aim.