The MacGregor's Lady (21 page)

Asher gave up watching Hannah to greet one of the three English sisters-in-law his brothers had acquired for him. “Augusta, good morning. I smile at Miss Cooper all the time.”

“In the ballrooms, you grimace.” Augusta pulled her lips back in an expression that might have graced the features of a berserker charging into battle.

“That bad?”

Her eyes were sympathetic, while the pat she gave his hand was brisk. “When one thinks one might look but shouldn’t touch, it’s trying.”

Hannah bent over her paper, her pen moving in a steady rhythm across the page, just as her hands had moved—“We’ve touched.”

The murmured words were not carried away on an obliging zephyr. If anything, the sympathy in Augusta’s violet-blue eyes deepened. “You don’t mean you’ve handed her in and out of carriages.”

From an Englishwoman, this was an offer to accept confidences, but Asher wasn’t about to step into that snare. “I’ve done plenty of that. Tell me how my other sisters-in-law go on.”

“You could ask them. You could even ask your brothers.”

Reproof underlay her reply, or perhaps… pity. Augusta was a pretty woman, tall, dark-haired, and dignified with a smile that belied all her primness and English starch—when she aimed that smile at Ian or their infant son.

“I prefer to ask a woman. My guess is, the womenfolk are sparing their fellows all the less delicate aspects of carrying a child, and my brothers, being new husbands, don’t know how to ask what needs asking. Ian stands around pouring the whiskey and looking sympathetic, but he isn’t going to stir… the pot.”

She subjected him to reciprocal scrutiny, long enough that he knew what she was about; then she patted his hand again. “It’s early days for Genie and Julia, and Mary Fran has carried a child before. They seem to be bearing up well. They’re loosening their stays and napping when the mood strikes them.”

Asher’s gaze drifted back to Hannah, who was folding her first missive. She would write a second to one of her brothers, a third to her old governess.

“Tell Genie, Mary Fran, and Julia to consume red meat daily and to drink milk too, if they can. Pregnancy can be hard on a lady’s teeth, among other things, and organ meats are of greatest benefit.”

He hadn’t learned that from the medical college. He’d learned it from Monique, who had learned from her mother.

“Anything else?”

Hannah paused between letters, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes, probably the better to enjoy the rare fragrant day in Mayfair.

“Augusta, I am not fooled. You are the scout. If I provide you detailed medical information, then Mary Fran will be the next emissary, because she’s my baby sister, and I cannot deny her what knowledge I have. My money’s on Julia next, because she’s a widow, and they develop a certain formidability. When they’ve both interrogated me to their satisfaction, dear Genie will likely come swanning into the estate office asking all manner of indelicate questions, though she’ll manage to ask them delicately.”

He fell silent because he was trying to scold his sister-in-law into submission, and it was not working. Her smile, a beaming, toothy, mischievous version of the tenderness she aimed at Ian was turning his scold into a… pout.

“Don’t forget your brothers, Balfour. Ian will send them straight to you, claiming his involvement in the baby’s arrival was limited to events surrounding conception.”

Ian, who held his son every chance he got, confided in the boy about all manner of things, and fretted over the child’s every smile and burp.

Asher would have stomped into the house, except that would have meant leaving Hannah alone with her letters. He tried for a smile. “Go away. I will provide the names of competent accoucheurs to any sister-in-law who asks, and I will provide whiskey to brothers showing signs of excessive anxiety. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to seek the company of a woman who is not given to ambushing a helpless man in his very own garden.”
Though
she
wasn’t above sneak attacks in his kitchen.

Augusta didn’t pat his hand this time; she kissed his cheek, a soft, fragrant buss that mercifully heralded her departure back into the house.

Asher spent another moment drinking in the sight of Hannah Cooper at her leisure, eyes closed, her face turned up to the sun slanting into the gazebo from the east. She
ought
to be worried about getting freckles.

He ought to be worried about finding a woman who didn’t regard his marriage proposals as misguided courtesy even as she straightened the folds of his kilt.

Knowing Augusta was probably watching from a convenient window, a sister-in-law stationed at each elbow—and knowing some considerate gardener had planted a thriving trellis of pink roses on the side of the gazebo facing the house—Asher crossed the grass, leaned down, pressed a kiss to Hannah’s cheek, and laid a sprig of lilacs by her correspondence.

“I’ve been keeping you out too late if you must steal a nap here in the garden.”

She opened her eyes slowly and smiled at him—for which he might have been grateful had her gaze not been so sad. He appropriated the seat beside her without asking, and cocked his head to study her epistle.

“You never write to your mother, and she has yet to write to you.”

Whatever tenderness had lingered in Hannah’s gaze guttered and died. “I have little to say that can’t be conveyed by my brothers. I am well. I am meeting eligibles. I am coming home in a few weeks.”

He might catch her napping in the sun, but he’d never catch her wavering from her self-appointed itinerary. “You could marry Malcolm. He’d be happy for a chance to start over in a new world.”

Asher tossed out that bait only because Malcolm’s appreciation for the company of women was rumored to stop at the bedroom door, though it was rumor only.

Hannah wiped a spot of ink from her third finger with a linen handkerchief, probably ruining the fabric in the process. “What exactly does Malcolm
do
?”

Because Asher had spent years traveling in the former Colonies, he understood the inquiry for the blunt question it was.

“He is a gentleman at leisure, his welfare sustained by our semi-mutual relation, the Baron Fenimore. Do you like Malcolm?”

Hannah drew the lilacs under her nose, though her expression suggested their fragrance was lacking. “A remittance man, then. Malcolm asked me if I liked you. He wants me to like you.”

A pronouncement such as that might presage Hannah’s intent to flee the gazebo, so Asher took possession of her bare hand and brushed his thumb across her knuckles. “Did you dissemble prettily and tell him you found me very agreeable?”

She regarded his thumb, the motion of it back and forth across the smooth skin of her hand. He’d touched her for his own pleasure, and because he needed to, but with her acquiescence in the contact, it became something else entirely.

“I told him I both like and respect you. I also desire you. I didn’t tell him that.”

He dropped her hand then wished he hadn’t. “You are going to harangue me now about your lack of virginity, about your need to be thoroughly ruined, et cetera, et cetera. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a man who finds ruining ladies a worthy pursuit.”

She sat back, looking like a cat disgruntled to have been removed from the toastiest patch of sunlight. “I don’t need a major scandal. A tidy indiscretion would do.”

He was disappointed that she’d cling to her scheme with such tenacity, and pleased that he’d divined her plans so easily. “In these surrounds, no scandal is minor, Hannah Cooper. If you are ruined while I am hosting your visit, then my reputation will suffer significantly.”

“You’re a man.” She might have said “You’re a toad,” for all the
respect
and
liking
in her tone. “I could misstep at some ball, and you could pack me off on the next ship, a host victimized by my colonial vulgarity. You’d earn the sympathy of every mama for ten blocks in any direction.”

This was a recitation, not a sudden inspiration. All the evenings Hannah had been smiling and swilling champagne punch, she had been mulling over her tactics. Refining some plan that would end in social disaster, could she but manage it.

“How would this go for your aunt, Hannah? You sail home head held high, triumphant in your disgrace, and she—dependent on her brother’s charity—must pay the price for having let your fortune slip away from her brother’s control.”

“It wouldn’t be like that.”

“She would fall into a permanent medicinal haze, her hope of any sort of dignity and joy blighted for the rest of her days.”

Hannah stared at the correspondence spread on the small table in the center of the gazebo, at the lilacs already beginning to wilt for lack of water. While Asher admired the curve of her jaw and the freckles sprinkled across her cheek, a tear slipped down that cheek.

What
in
blazes?

“You are not to cry.” His handkerchief was out, and he was dabbing at her cheek even as he spoke. “Crying is low and female and it isn’t…
please
don’t cry, Hannah.” He fell silent lest he start begging. To see his Boston adrift like this, cast down by tears…

“Aunt is doing m-much better.”

“Hush.” He tucked an arm around her and pushed her head to his shoulder. “Of course she’s doing better. She’s chaperoning the wealthiest heiress to be seen here in five years, my brothers are standing up with her almost every evening, and my sisters are distracting her from her potions by day.
Stop
crying.
”

And that campaign had ensued after little more than hints from Asher that it would be appreciated.

Hannah turned her face into his shoulder and nigh broke his heart. She hated to lean, hated to show weakness, and while he relished that she’d allow him to comfort her, he hurt for her, too.

And for himself.

“You are the most stubborn woman I know, Hannah Cooper. Too stubborn—” Insight struck, and relief with it. “Are your monthlies plaguing you?”

A physician might have asked that question—had asked it, fairly often, in fact—and a husband might have asked it, but an earl would not.

She harrumphed against his shoulder. “Damn you, Asher MacGregor. I get the weeps as they approach, and I worry more easily. I doubt—” She pulled back abruptly to regard him with a glittery gaze. “What did Augusta want?”

The female mind was even more complicated and worthy of study than the female body—particularly Hannah’s female mind. He palmed the back of her head and drew her back to his shoulder lest she gain insights in her study of him. “I am trained as a physician.”

An innocuous place to start. Common knowledge. He fell silent, and Hannah prodded him verbally. “So you have informed me.”

On the occasion of taking liberties with her foot. Why hadn’t he heeded that warning, and why didn’t he wave a servant out from the house to put the poor lilacs in water?

“I have not practiced medicine for several years.” Also common knowledge. “I cannot foresee that a belted earl will have need of a profession at which he never particularly excelled.”

“You were a good doctor, Asher. You could not be else.” She offered this rebuke patiently, even sleepily.

“I was a good student of medicine, but I was not a good doctor. The physicians of the previous age knew something we modern fellows have forgotten: much of effective medicine has to do with interviewing the patient. Not examining him or her like a laboratory specimen, but earning the patient’s confidences.”

“You pluck confidences from me.” Her admission was an unhappy one. He stole a kiss to her temple in reward and left his mouth close enough to her crown to feel the silky pleasure of her hair brushing his lips.

“You toss out the occasional admission as a distraction, Hannah. I do not consider myself in your confidence.”

“Confidences are supposed to be shared, not hoarded by one party for use in negotiating with another. Why did you stop practicing medicine?”

“I’m not sure.”

Even Hannah, in all her brightness, would not understand that he’d just parted with a confidence, much less one that surprised even him. He’d started turning away from medicine to the more lucrative business of the fur trade even before he’d lost Monique, but her death had also signaled the death of his medical interests.

Or had it?

“That is not a confidence, Asher, and neither is this: I want to go home, but I can’t go home until I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish.”

He tucked her closer, not having foreseen that homesickness was part of her burden. “It’s different here,” he conceded. “That’s hard. Wearying.”

Another damned confidence.

She smoothed a hand over the wool of his kilt, her touch so distracted, it was as if she’d failed to notice that his thigh was one layer of fabric away from her bare hand. “People are polite here, but they aren’t nice. People in Boston aren’t so polite, but they’re genuinely nice.”

Well said. “Marry me, Hannah. We’ll live in Scotland, where people are both polite and nice, if a bit gruff. You’d love Balfour.” And he’d love showing it to her.

“You are a plague, Asher MacGregor. I cannot marry you of all men.”

Given the height of the sides of the gazebo, their hands at least had privacy from every direction. When she stroked her hand over his kilt this time, he wrapped his fingers around hers and brought her palm to rest over the growing bulge beneath the wool. “I’ll swive you silly if we marry, swive you often and enthusiastically, but only if we marry.”

He
felt
her smile. She patted his cock. “I’d swive you silly too.”

She said nothing for quite a spell as the morning breeze wafted through the roses, and Asher wondered what it meant, that Hannah would ask him to ruin her publicly, pat his cock in private, and then… fall asleep in his arms.

To distract himself from the pleasure of her bodily trust, Asher turned his mind to her ferocious determination to get back to Boston, and what might be motivating it. His gaze fell on the unfinished letter, this one to Allen, the oldest of the three brothers.