Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (20 page)

 
He didn’t like to hear her talk, or even think about about herself like that. “You are lady enough for me. And to prove it, I’m going to see my lady home.” Alasdair, like Falstaff, let discretion be the better part of valor, and kept his peace, simply leading her down lesser-used closes behind the Register Office toward Calton Hill.
 

He would have liked to pull her close, and walk with his arm around her, as several other couples—albeit working class couples—were doing. He would have liked to wrap his arm around the trim span of her un-corseted waist—and oh, God, best not to think of that—and inhale the warm scent of roses and orange blossoms from her damp hair one last time. But they were neither working class, nor a couple.

They were two very different people who were, due to no reason either of them could seem to fathom, unaccountably attracted to one another. At least he was. In her inexperience, she was probably less so.

She turned up a long empty close that ran alongside her father’s property, and stopped halfway up the incline. “Well, here we are.”

“Here?” To either side of the narrow cobbles were nothing but six-foot-high brick walls. “There’s no gate.”

“Don’t need one,” she assured him. “And this spot is closer to the house. Just do this”—she cupped her hands together to show him—“and give me a leg up.”

He did so, mostly to show her he knew well enough how to leg someone up, but as soon as he cupped his fingers, the blighty lass promptly stepped right into the stirrup he had made of his hands. And before he could stop her, she had legged it over the top of the wall.

Which she sat astride, giving him a gratifyingly unimpeded view of her bare legs atop her mannish riding boots. And from what he could see in the silver moonlight, her thighs were every bit as milky as he had dreamed. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to touch the soft skin above her knee.

She instantly laid her hand over his. “I don’t suppose I’ll see you for a good long while?”

“I don’t know,” he said with all honesty. It was going to take a great deal of effort on his part to clear his name—effort he meant to exert immediately. His experience in government had taught him that things almost never “blew over” unless they were given a solid push.

And then there was the inconvenient fact that his attentions to wee, mischievous, inappropriate Lady Quince Winthrop had been both noted and remarked upon. He would have to be a vast deal more circumspect. “I fear I’m going to be entirely at the Lord Provost’s disposal for the next few days.”

“I suppose it can’t be helped.” She patted his hand consolingly. “Thank you for seeing me home. Clear your name quickly, if you please, Strathcairn. I’ve grown rather fond of these little trysts of ours.”

“Only fond?”

“Oh, aye. Very fond.” She smiled at him in her strange older-and-wiser-than-she-looked way. “But you needn’t worry, Strathcairn, that I’m more. I’m no romantic.”

“Of course not, wee cynical, realistic Quince Winthrop. I’m surprised you’ve let yourself grow so sentimental as to admit to being
fond
of a person.”

“Let’s just say that I’ve grown fond of kissing,” she hedged. But she was giving him that full, mischievous smile.

“Clever lass, then.” He turned his palm upward to hold her hand. “But it’s no use alone, is it? To have any fun, you have to kiss another person.”

Her smile turned warm and mischievous. “And they have to kiss you back.”

“Oh, aye.” He interlaced his fingers with hers. “Kissing back is the best fun. Especially when you’re fond of each other.”

“And are you grown fond of me, Strathcairn?”

“Oh, aye. You’ve grown on me, lass. Even if you do talk too much.” He tugged on her hand, and just as he had hoped, she leaned down, bending at the waist to meet his lips with hers.

What started as a bittersweet last taste of her lips quickly became something more. Something hungry and wrenching and desperate. Something that made him cup his hand around the back of her neck, and hold her so he could give her a kiss she would not soon forget. A kiss that would tide her over until he could resume their lessons in kissing.

But the truth was that he was the one who wanted tiding over. He was trying to subsume her, as if he might take every last bit of joy, mischief and larkiness she could give, and store it up to see him through his current difficulties. “You’re a terrible vixen, wee Quince Winthrop,” he whispered against her skin. “But I like you all the more for it.”

That was not what he had meant to say, but now that he had said it, he wasn’t sorry. Because it was the truth. He did like her.

Quince’s face shone like the moon in the thin silver light. “Do you really like me, Strathcairn?”

“I wouldn’t be going to so much trouble to kiss you otherwise.”

His other hand stole along the fine line of her jaw, his fingers fanning across her high cheekbones, and stealing into her hair. Anything to stop the aching fist of regret tightening in his chest. Anything so he might bind her to him.

Because that was what he wanted. He wanted her even when he shouldn’t. He wanted her to wait for him to sort out the ugly mess he had created through carelessness and inattention. He wanted her to wait through whatever carelessness and inattention he might have to serve to her in order to do so. He wanted her to be more than fond of him. He wanted her to like him. Enough to let him come back one day to finish the lessons they had started.

And perhaps she wanted to, too, because she was fisting her hands in his hair, holding him just as close as he was holding her. Kissing him with as much hunger as he was kissing her.
 

It was everything he could do not to tumble her off the wall and into his arms. Everything to let her hold herself to him as long as she wanted, and not a moment longer.
 

Which was a moment before he was ready.

“Oh, by jimble, Strathcairn. I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m already missing you.” It was the most honest thing he had ever told her. And he was a scrupulously honest man.

“You poor mon.” She smiled down at him. “It’ll all come right, Strathcairn. See if it doesn’t.”
 

He wished he could believe her. But it wasn’t that simple. “Are you counseling me to patience, wee Quince?”

She have him a strangely solemn smile. “I am. Be patient, and remember that whatever I am—and I ken I’m a vixen and not good—I’m loyal and sincere.”

The relief and pleasure that swamped his chest were dangerous, not least because he could not seem to stop himself from basking—however briefly—in her admiration. “Does that mean you like me, too?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but liking someone is difficult. Liking someone implies a certain sameness of spirit. Fellow-feeling, if you will. I’m not sure exactly what it is we share, but it’s not quite fellow-feeling, is it?”

“Nay.” Because what he felt for her was nothing like he had ever felt for any fellow. Because what he felt for her—and what he was sure now they felt for each other—was pure animal attraction. “Quince, we don’t have to like each other to be attracted to each other.” Although it seemed to help him enormously.

“I ken.” She looked unhappy, but determined to put on an unconcerned face. “So there you have it.”

But what exactly, did he have? He had a bloody great problem that he wasn’t going to solve kissing wee Quince Winthrop.
 

And he wasn’t going to kiss her anymore that night. Because she was already gone from him, over the wall, and blending into the dark, enveloping night.

Chapter Twelve

Quince Winthrop knew exactly what she had to do—she had to ride out as
Monsieur Minuit
, and put paid to the accusations against Strathcairn. She would strike quickly, before their iron was hot, and Strathcairn and the Lord Provost ordered a troop of horse to patrol the roads.

It was easy enough to get out of the next evening’s scheduled entertainment—all she had to do was hint that she had rather not go to that particular musical soiree, as the Marquess of Cairn might be attending, and her mother immediately left her to her own devices. That her own devices would include finding a coach to hold up, she kept entirely to herself.

Actually, she didn’t even need to hold up a coach—all she had to do was be
seen
as the highwayman, while Strathcairn was being seen as himself. He was more important than any money. But if she should happen upon a likely coach while she was at it, so much the better.

This evening, she didn’t rush headlong onto the roads, but took her time preparing, knowing it was more important than ever that she get it right. Once her parents were out for the evening, she poked through the dusty bottom of her father’s cabinets until she found a beautiful presentation set of flintlocks to replace Strathcairn’s heavy patent pistols. The elaborately engraved pistols looked so perfectly polished she doubted they had ever been out of their felt-lined case. But they would glint and shine menacingly in the moonlight, and no one would ever know they had never even been fired.

She gathered all of her accoutrements—black velvet suit, plumed hat, rapier and tartan sash, as well as an assortment of other disguising bits and bobs—away from the house and the prying eyes of sisters and servants alike. In the quiet privacy of her father’s glasshouse, where the moonlight shone brightly enough, she could powder and disguise herself without the need for a light that might give her away.
 

The musical soiree her parents were attending was to be up in the New Town, where the elegant houses and wide, precisely laid-out squares contrasted so perfectly with the twisty, narrow closes of the Auld Town along the spine of the High Street. Quince ducked her mare into the low vale between the two halves of the city, along the seam of the old Nor Loch, which had been drained and manicured into a public garden below the cliffs of the Castle. She knew the way well from her trips out to the West Kirk of Saint Cuthbert’s, and hugged the shadow of the high battlements, until she reached the fields where the town gave way to the countryside, and she could ride unobstructed to the north, skirting around the tollbar at Kirkbraehead.

Actually— Quince reined Piper into the shadows of a copse to strategize. As her purpose was only to be seen as
Monsieur Minuit
, perhaps the tollbar was exactly where she ought to go. There was always a keeper on duty that could assuredly be counted upon to report a sighting of a highwayman to the authorities. She had only to make herself memorable without actually robbing the tollgate keeper, who would most certainly be armed—which certainly made it an entirely different proposition than robbing an old coach with an elderly couple and an even more elderly driver in the woods.
 

But if she were fast, and if she took the toll keeper by surprise—

If she dared.

She would. She had to—Strathcairn’s reputation was at stake. And even if she had no care for her own reputation, she was sincere and loyal enough to have a care with his. And she wasn’t going to get any lessons in kissing until he was free of suspicion, so she would do all she could to hasten that end.

Quince made her way slowly through the field until she was at the crest of the hill, hard against the Queen’s Ferry Road, and took another look, determined for once not to be hasty.
 

From her vantage point she could see the tollbar across the roadway two furlongs away. All was quiet—smoke wafted intermittently from the tollhouse, where the keeper sat idly with his pipe. If she went at the tollbar at a run—

Quince didn’t allow herself to complete the thought, but dug her heels into Piper’s flank, and set them to it before she changed her mind. She urged the mare into an easy canter, while she grasped the reins firmly in her left hand, and gripped a pistol with her right. Her pulse quickened in time with Piper’s hoof beats, but her heart clutched up in her throat, and she nearly pulled up, when a hired coach—the driver being attired in the well-known livery of the local carriage jobber Thornton’s—rumbled out of St. George’s mews onto the roadway in front of her.
 

But in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Quince decided to take advantage of the fact that the coach would draw the keeper from his house—away from whatever gun he might be armed with—and gave the mare her head.

The pounding in her blood rose to a veritable tattoo of drumbeats as Piper charged ahead at a gallop, and Quince set the mare to jump the high gate.