The MacGregor's Lady (36 page)

“Hardly.” Royal Stewart deserved better treatment than Ian was giving it. “He castigates me for having ruined a good man by allowing him to become distracted by the charms of the weaker sex.”

Ian paused in the middle of working a soft, dirty cloth down the gun barrel. His fingers were dirty too. “Which good man?”

Ian would get the letter dirty as well, so Asher didn’t pass it to him. “In his peregrinations about the realm on Fenimore’s business, Evan Draper made the acquaintance of one Enid Cooper, late of Boston. Draper treated the lady to a recitation of the ills and indignities suffered on his travels, and she was the soul of sympathy and solicitude—had a remedy for all of the man’s trials, including his loneliness.”

Ian glanced up. “Aunt Enid?
That
Enid Cooper? She’s little more than a fading sot herself.”

“A fading sot marginally revived by the attention of an old flame from her youth, though Draper appears to have routed the competition.”

Which would be downright funny if Asher himself were drunk.

“What else does Fenimore say?”

“He demands we set a date.” Nobody else had had the temerity.

“There isn’t going to be a wedding, is there?” Ian pulled the cloth through the tube of metal and began reassembling the parts.

Rather than face his brother’s questions, Asher folded the letter and set it on the journal that had accompanied it, rose and crossed to the rack of cue sticks on the opposite wall. “Care for a game?”

“Thank ye, no. The baby will going down for his nap soon, and I’ll be taking tea with my wife.”

Taking tea. Oh, of course. Behind the locked door of their bedroom, Ian and his lady would be taking tea, with his
pinky
finger
extended just so. Asher envied his brother and sister-in-law their frequent
cups
of
tea
almost as much as he envied them the way each knew the other’s schedule and whereabouts without even thinking about it.

More, they both knew the child’s schedule, and to some extent, organized their lives around it.

Asher racked the balls, broke, and studied the possibilities. “Whether there’s a wedding or not hardly matters. Hannah has to leave. I have to stay.”

Ian screwed the barrel into its fitting. “You could go with her. I’ve held the reins here before. I can do it again.”

So offhand, and yet the offer was sincere. Asher sank two balls in a single shot, one into each corner pocket. “You have not asked Augusta her thoughts on the matter.”

“I have. We do not agree. She thinks Hannah should stay here. I think you should go to Boston.”

The next shot wasn’t lining up—the price one paid for succumbing to the lure of sinking two balls at once. “I have not been invited to Boston. I have, in fact, been refused entry to the port. Hannah would protect even me.”

Ian swore, ostensibly at the gun. “Then I can go to bloody Boston, or Gil or Con can go.”

“You all have children to raise, or on the way, and you’d have no more authority in Boston over Hannah’s mother or half brothers than I would, and therein lies the difficulty.”

Ian threaded screws through the inlays on the gun’s handle and tightened them in alternate applications of a small screwdriver. “You can’t just reive her family out from under the man’s bloody nose? He’d not wrest them away from an earl’s keep if you could get them here in one piece.”

On the next shot the cue ball rolled slowly, slowly across the table, tipping into a pocket by a whisker, which at least allowed a man to do a little swearing of his own.

“It’s good to hear you using the Gaelic,” Ian said, finishing with the screwdriver.

“Gaelic is a good language for cursing in. I’ve considered inviting Hannah’s family here, asked my man for his thoughts on the matter, and received no response. Now I doubt my message even got through.”

“Inviting. Such an earl you’ve become.” Ian’s taunt was without heat, and all the more annoying as a result.

“One doesn’t force a woman to marry against her will without becoming the very thing that woman loathes most in the world. Why do you bother cleaning that old pistol when the servants could do it?”

The gun was back in one piece, looking substantial and well cared for in Ian’s hand. He wiped it down with the dirty cloth, which somehow did in fact polish the metal. “The woman loves you. A little loathing won’t change that, particularly when you’ve given her a child or two.”

“And I love you, Ian, but I would rather not leaven my fraternal affection with loathing. If you can’t leave this topic alone, then my preferences will not carry the day.”

Ian smiled and sighted down the gun barrel at a portrait of some old fellow in tartan and hunting boots. “You love her too. A sorrier pair I have never seen.”

Yes, Asher did love Hannah. The knowledge was unassailable, a fact of Asher’s bones and organs and his very mind. “You’d stand up with me, if there were a wedding? Even if there were a wedding merely to give her my name?”

Ian set the gun aside and rose, coming to study the arrangement of balls on the table. “Why’d you set the cue ball down there? It leaves you not one decent shot.”

“I’m not playing a game. One needs to practice the impossible shots.”

“I’ll stand up with you, and so will Gil, Con, Mary Fran, and even that snippy English bastard Spathfoy. If you love Hannah Cooper, then we’re standing up with her too.” He set the cue ball down two inches from its original location, then scooped up his antique gun and left.

One did need to practice the impossible shots, except, by moving the ball two inches, Ian had changed the entire field of play, such that the impossible had become, in several different ways, the possible.

Twenty

“If grief had a landscape, it would be these Highlands.”

Hannah tucked herself more snugly to Asher’s side and tried to pretend the sun was not sinking closer to the rugged hills around them. This was no more successful than pretending a week had not already passed since her arrival at Balfour House, a week in which she’d made many such fanciful pronouncements.

Asher shifted, as if eluding a pebble beneath a triple thickness of tartan wool. “Why do you say that?”

“Many reasons. These are not high mountains, not compared to what you’ve seen in Canada, but they have a forbidding quality. And yet, we’ve walked them.” She shaded her eyes and pointed to the highest summit. “We ate scones and drank whiskey up there, three days ago.”

They’d eaten scones and drank whiskey on many a blanket, making more picnic memories in a week than most couples collected in two decades of marriage. They’d ridden out together, fished the River Dee, tramped the woods, and stayed up late playing cards as an excuse to talk far into the night.

Ian and Augusta made no pretense of chaperoning them, which was fortunate. In the wee hours of the morning, and on the high hills and in the forests, Asher had told Hannah of his years in Canada, and he’d told her his family knew little of what had happened there. She’d argued with him over that, until that argument, like so many others, had ended in a spate of kissing.

Lying on the wool blankets under the afternoon sun, he laced their fingers and laid Hannah’s palm over his heart. “Your point is that grief can be surmounted.”

She’d been trying to say that the sadness she felt when she stared at the calendar had a wildness to it, a passion that had certainly eluded her before her journey across the ocean.

“I don’t know if it can be surmounted, but people dwell here, and they love it. You love it, despite the winters, the cold, the loneliness. People have died for this land.”

He shifted again, turning her, too, so they were spooned together beneath the wide blue sky, his chest blanketing her back. “There will be no dying of broken hearts, Hannah. You and I are not that kind of people. We will be dignified, like these mountains. We will endure.”

They hadn’t made love, not since they’d arrived in Edinburgh, and that had broken Hannah’s heart more than anything else. And yet, it was good that she could not see his face, or he hers. “I’m not carrying.”

He petted her hair and gathered her closer. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. The day before I start my monthly, I get twinges, warning shots, so to speak, and they’ve started. I consider it a kindness that my body alerts me this way to impending inconvenience. We’ll not be tramping up here again tomorrow.”

They wouldn’t be tramping much of anywhere for the next several days, which meant they had likely scaled their last peak together.

“I am sorry, my heart. I am sorry we are not to have a child. I sense, though, that a child would have complicated matters for you, not simplified them.”

He knew her so well. She could not have loved him more, not if they’d had eighty years together on earth. Hannah turned so she could wrap herself against Asher’s body. Their situation was too blessed simple. “Nothing can fix our situation. Nothing.”

Nothing made it easier; nothing made it less painful. They would endure, as Asher had said. Dignity was far less certain.

He kissed her, probably for comfort, but Hannah was incapable of being consoled by a mere brush of lips. What raged through her was as implacable as the high barren hills, as deep and unrelenting as the winter that scoured the summits of their trees.

“Asher, I am uncertain of many things. I am uncertain that my decisions have been wise, uncertain of my reception in Boston, uncertain of… much, but I know I want to make love with you right now, right here.”

He sighed against her mouth, something about a simple exhalation conveying a stubborn intent to apply reason. “Hannah, there is nothing I would deny you, but you might be mistaken in these twinges and warning shots. You’ve never carried a child, never conceived before that you—”

“Damn you, Asher MacGregor. I am not asking for your permission, I am asking for your passion.”

She pushed him by one meaty shoulder onto his back, and he went. When she straddled him—no dignity there—and unfastened his kilt, he sank his fingers into her hair and extracted one pin after another.

His complicity gradually cleared the fog of desperation choking her, until Hannah could sit back and admire the man whose kilt, waistcoat, and shirt she had nearly torn from his body.

Asher brushed her hair back over her shoulder. “Is it my turn, then? Shall I unwrap m’ treasure the way ye’ve unwrapped yours?”

When a man was blessed with a burr, the inflection in his questions lifted not the end of an inquiry, as was common in Boston, but rather, gave the entire question a lilt.

“Yes. Unwrap your treasure.”

He started by framing her jaw in his hands, ensuring that Hannah’s gaze collided with his and stayed trapped in what he promised with his eyes. Slowly, slowly, he worked his way down the buttons of her shirtwaist.

Never had a lady’s attire had so many buttons. Hannah dragged in one breath after another, while beneath her, Asher’s arousal became more and more firm against her sex.

For
the
last
time…

Weeks had gone by while she’d pushed, wrestled, and blasted that sentiment away from her, moment by moment. Through their journey from London, their wandering in Edinburgh, their engagement ball, their travel to Balfour, and every day since.

She let the reality of their parting take over, let the horror and terror of it fill her being, the wrongness of it, the inevitability, and the permanence.

Asher peeled back her blouse but didn’t push it off her arms. “Are you sure, Hannah?”

She was ready to deliver a lecture to him that could be heard from one peak to the next until it occurred to her he wasn’t doubting her desire for him, but rather, her conclusion regarding conception.

“I am sure. There will be no baby for us.” He closed his eyes, as if a great wave of pain had risen up to seize him from within. “I’m sorry, Asher, but there will be no child.”

A man who’d buried his family in the Canadian woods would regard their childless state with particular regret, and also with relief. The relief would be trifling compared to the regret.

The need to comfort him flooded past impending loss and tangled with desire, making it nigh impossible for Hannah to hold still while Asher untied her laces.

He patted her bottom. “Your skirts, too, love.”

Skirts and petticoats, then drawers and stays, were gathered in a growing pile of clothing at the edge of the blankets, until Hannah lay on her back in nothing but her stockings and garters, and Asher wore not one stitch.

“I’m glad we are not in some darkened bedroom,” Hannah said, running a hand down his ribs one by one. “Glad I can see you. See all of you.”

The stroke of his hands, warm against her upraised knees, paused. She should have been mortified, but she liked the look of him kneeling naked and aroused between her legs, silhouetted against the white clouds and blue sky.

“You are so fair, and I am so dark. Not every woman would regard the sight of me with welcome.”

What
would
children
of
such
a
union
look
like?

“You will please stop chattering, Asher MacGregor.”

He came forward to brace himself above her on his hands. “There’s no hurry, Hannah of my heart. The sun will be up for hours yet.”

And yet, her skin was already growing chilled, though the sunshine was warm and afternoon wasn’t over. At this altitude, at this latitude, nights were short but never quite warm, not like they would be in the middle of a Boston summer. There was every reason to hurry. “Make love to me, Asher. Please.”

She reached for him, and he obliged by settling his weight close. “Shall I teach you some Gaelic? Just a few words to pass the time?” He whispered this to her and punctuated his offer by kissing the curve of her jaw.

“I don’t want a grammar lesson, you dratted, miserable—”

His arousal, blunt and warm, nudged at her sex.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it, Hannah? It’s what I want, too. What I’ll go to my grave wanting. With you.”