The MacGregor's Lady (9 page)

“I’ve fetched the bread and cheese,” Miss Cooper said when he approached the fire. Even when she’d been half seas over, she had not invited him to use more familiar address. “I think the air is warmer than yesterday.”

“Which suggests it might snow again,” he said. “We’re going to have to break camp.”

“Break camp? And wait in the coach? It’s at a rather precarious angle.”

For an instant Asher considered not telling her about the farmhouse just out of sight around that bend. Consequences would arise, serious consequences for both of them if he held his silence. What made him speak was an instinctive repugnance for manipulating the lady’s circumstances, even for her own good—perhaps especially for her own good.

And yet, she needed a husband, he needed a wife, and they could both be spared the farce and folderol of a London Season.

“We’ll be sheltering at a smallholding around that turn and through some trees. It ought to be the first place anyone from the village looks for us.”

“A smallholding?”

“If we break camp quickly, we can credibly claim we spent the night there, but not if it looks like we stayed here for any length of time.”

“I… see.”

Her thoughtful expression said she saw what his lies would gain her, and she assented. She rose from the fire, which was blazing merrily, and began to kick snow into it without another word.

And a faint, lingering, what-if in Asher’s mind was snuffed out as effectively as the fire, leaving him in an unaccountably surly mood. They folded blankets with equal dispatch and stuffed them back into the boot of the coach. Asher tossed the saplings into the ditch, and except for the way the snow had been trampled all around, there was shortly no evidence of any overnight camping.

Nor of any near-compromises, nor any ill-advised proposals of marriage that might have followed.

They were lucky. They were sitting around a cozy kitchen table, swilling tea and munching on brown bread and butter when a sleigh pulled up in the barnyard, Asher’s coachy at the reins. A short while later, Asher handed Miss Cooper into the sleigh, tied Dusty behind, and climbed in after her.

He was all the way back to the village before he swiped a glove over his mouth and found a memory swamping him in the frigid air.

Hannah Cooper had slept soundly, but not soundlessly. She had stirred shortly after dropping off, making the kind of noises that signaled a troubling dream. Half-asleep himself, Asher had kissed her hair, the way he’d once kissed any random, available part of Monique when she’d had the same sorts of dreams—her hair, her ear, her shoulder, it mattered not which part. Not the kiss of a lover, but the kiss of a husband and protector, for comfort—his and hers.

He begrudged Hannah Cooper that kiss, half-stolen as it was from his past. And yet, what he’d felt when Hannah had kicked the snow over the fire was not relief that she’d accommodate a handy subterfuge, but rather, anger that she should so easily reject him as a potential mate, without question, without pause, without thanks, without anything—when in the care of any other man, she might well have perished from the cold.

Five

“Well, if you are sure you were not compromised…?” Aunt Enid sighed gustily, her tweezered eyebrows raised in hope. Hannah kept silent, though this was not the first portentous pause in the conversation. “Then we must consider your misadventure merely that. Lord Balfour holds an earldom, though, my dear, and in case I didn’t mention it, earls fall only below marquesses and dukes in the order of precedence.”

“You did mention that, Aunt.”

Hannah tried to focus on her embroidery—her borrowed novels were still in the coach—but making a tidy series of satin stitches was difficult when her mind kept wandering to the bone-deep warmth she’d enjoyed cuddled up with Lord Balfour. The whiskey had something to do with it, but whiskey alone didn’t explain the sense of safety, the comfort she’d felt in Balfour’s arms.

“What do you suppose Lord Balfour is about?” Enid asked, eyeing her own hoop of fabric.

“I expect he’s seeing to the repair of the coach wheel.”

“One would think the household of an earl would at least boast safe conveyances.”

“The moors boast rocks,” Hannah said, stabbing her needle up through the middle of a French knot.

Enid put down her hoop and studied Hannah by the meager light of the fire burning in the raised hearth of their little parlor.

“If you had been compromised… I’m not saying you were, but
if
you had been, you’d be a countess and wealthy. Your step-papa told me in no uncertain terms we were to be escorted about London by an eligible fellow with a substantial fortune. Some old cousin of a cousin owed him a favor, Hannah. My brother does not squander the favors he’s owed.”

He squandered the happiness of all in his ambit instead.

“I’m wealthy now, Aunt, and a titled husband will take over my fortune every bit as readily as a plain mister.”

Though for all her wealth, Hannah had felt a greater sense of well-being out on the moors with Balfour than she’d ever felt in Boston’s finest neighborhood. Did the man have to be so clever at avoiding social ruin?

Not that Hannah would have married him, of course.

Enid put aside her hoop, her expression as animated as if a new patent remedy were under discussion. “My dear, you forget your pin money. The pin money will be spelled out in the settlements, all completely legal, and your pin money will be yours to spend as you wish.”

They’d had this discussion on board ship at least a dozen times.

“I believe I’ll step out for a bit of air.”

Before Enid could flutter in protest or assign Hannah a half-dozen errands to tend to first, Hannah was out of the parlor and on her way upstairs to their rooms. Thank a merciful God, the inn was as Lord Balfour had suggested, commodious and clean. Hannah shared a small suite with Enid; Balfour’s room was across the hall.

The day had become brilliantly sunny, and the eaves were again dripping. By night, all would freeze, which meant moving around in the milder air held even greater appeal.

The village of Steeth was an old market town, complete with a common, a church, and the usual variety of shops. Hannah walked a shoveled path encircling the common, and as she came back toward the inn, saw their traveling coach in the yard on the same side as a smithy’s shop.

Men loitered about, two holding horses, while boys scampered around underfoot. A wainwright inspected the coach wheels, peering into the undercarriage and trading insults with the blacksmith.

Except it wasn’t the smith. The man emerging from the gloom of the smithy, standing there without his shirt, naked to the waist and bulging with muscles was none other than Lord Balfour.

God in heaven, no wonder he’d been able to keep the chill off her. Hannah scooted around to watch as Balfour braced the coach, then hoisted it so the wainwright—no delicate flower himself—could wrestle the wheel back onto the axle. The two men continued taunting each other, with Balfour’s tone—
and
his
physique
—suggesting he could hold up a wagon all day if need be.

And all the while, his chest, arms, and back bunched and rippled with his every breath.

She’d seen men without their shirts, even seen fit young men laboring without their shirts, but this…
Steam
rose off Balfour’s shoulders, as if he were some magnificent Vulcan come to the shires for his own entertainment. He hadn’t yet shaved, and his countenance was darker than ever. The skin of his arms, belly, and chest had the same sun-bronzed hue as his face, and when he smiled at her, his teeth fairly gleamed…

She’d been found out.

Caught gawking like a schoolgirl. Hannah turned without acknowledging Lord Balfour or his smile. The Englishmen she’d met in her father’s parlor would have expired of mortification if she’d seen them without their shirts as others looked on.

Nor would she have wanted to see them.

How long she churned around the little common she could not have said, but at some point, she became aware that she was sharing the path.

“Just think,” Balfour said. “All that vulgar muscle could have become your sentence for life had I not prevailed on the goodwife in the dale and her spouse.”

He wouldn’t be a sentence; he’d be a citadel. “And I haven’t thanked you yet.” She did thank heavens, though, that he was once again properly clad, right down to his many-caped coat.

“You’re thanking me for coming across a convenient way to avoid a marriage between us?”

“I do thank you for that,” she said, “but compared to preserving my life when the elements were threatening a dire fate, preserving me from scandal comes a distant second.”

“So you would not have married me had we been found out on the moor cuddled up in our bide-a-wee?”

Hannah couldn’t read his expression. She would not have married him—earls needed to stick close to their earldoms, even a Boston heiress grasped that much—but, wonder of wonders, she would have been tempted.

Hannah liked Balfour, she respected him, and—most curious of all—she trusted him. “I think it more the case we would not have married each other.”

“Despite the display you came upon in the smithy’s yard, I am a gentleman, Miss Cooper. I would have had no choice.”

“I know.” And that had bothered her most as the sleigh had taken them back to town.

“What do you think you know?”

“You didn’t enact that little charade in the dale to protect my good name or to preserve my marital options this spring. You did it to preserve your own.”

She dropped his arm—when had she taken his arm?—and tried to make a dignified retreat, but he kept up with her easily.

“This bothers you?” His tone was jaunty, and yet the topic mattered to him, or he wouldn’t have raised it. “It bothers you somebody might want the same freedoms you seek to appropriate for yourself?”

They were in view of the smithy again, with its complement of men passing the time of day with one another. Hannah had never thought of a smithy as a dark, mysterious place before, never had the urge to linger where she could watch one from the shadows.

If Hannah claimed the right to remain unfettered by marriage, she had to accord Balfour the same latitude. She also accorded him a bit of honesty. “I am not used to being rejected.”

The words had come straight from her brain to her mouth, the insight striking her even as she spoke. She was used to being marginalized, not
quite
rejected, but tethered to the fringes of acceptability by a stout rope of inherited fortune—or had she simply decided she preferred to dwell there?

Balfour—he’d given her permission to call him Asher—picked up her hand and tucked it around his forearm. A forearm she could now visualize thick with muscle, dusted with the same dark hair as he had in such abundance on his head. That hair was downy soft. She’d felt it against her cheek the night before as he’d drawn her body close to his.

“Ah,” said his lordship, but it was a teasing “ah,” not an insulting one.

“Ah, what?”

“I wasn’t rejecting you, Miss Cooper, I was protecting your dreams. Don’t pull away, if you please. The last thing we need is for you to do yourself another injury and delay us yet more on our way to London.”

In his words, in his jocular discussion of reasons not to marry each other, Balfour did Hannah’s heart an injury—a small injury. She kept silent, took a firm hold of his arm, and walked more quickly in the direction of the inn.

***

Miss Cooper flinched at his reference to her clumsiness, and Asher had to stifle an apology. He hadn’t meant to be scathing, but the woman was as uncomfortable being beholden to another as… Asher was himself.

“How long will we tarry here in Steeth?” she asked.

“Anxious to take London by storm?”

“Anxious, yes.”

She was looking about her with the same honest curiosity she’d shown upon landing in Edinburgh, though Asher suspected she’d allowed another small truth to slip past her full, unsmiling lips.

“Are you truly fretting over what most young ladies consider the dream of a lifetime?” He subtly checked their pace, which the lady had increased to something between headlong and unseemly. Another fall on the ice would not do, but neither was he in a hurry to return her to her aunt’s dubious company.

“A London Season with all the trimmings is the dream of a lifetime? Consider, Lord Balfour, much of the Season transpires in ballrooms, and I do not dance.”

He’d asked her to call him Asher, but now, when they’d narrowly escaped a forced betrothal, she exhibited a fine command of proper address. “There are always musicales.”

“I do not perform reliably or sing worth the name.”

His brother Gil was the family charmer, while Con was a font of common sense. Ian, however, was the family lawyer, and from him, Asher had learned to hear the difference between “I
do
not
perform reliably” and “I
cannot
perform reliably.”

Miss
Cooper, Miss Cooper.
For a lady who limped, she was adept at kicking snow over open flames. “What about Venetian breakfasts?”

“Where the primary fare is gossip, in which I do not indulge.”

“I believe we’ve had this discussion, but we must add swanning to the list, and I forget what else.” He was being nasty, and it was unlike him. “My apologies, Miss Cooper. I am not enjoying the delay any more than you are.”

“You enjoyed repairing the wagon.”

He saw no spite in her expression. Perhaps a little female curiosity, such as he’d seen when she caught him sweating off his stint at the forge, or maybe longing, because physical brawn was denied to genteel ladies.

“I enjoy being able to fix what’s amiss.” This was something about the practice of medicine—when it went well—that he missed. “I like being able to address my situation myself, though I know this is a lamentable tendency in a man headed for an earldom rife with servants and toadies.”

“I don’t hear you lamenting.”

“Like you, I have a list of behaviors in which I do not indulge. Shall we return you to the inn?”