Have Yourself a Merry Little Scandal: a Christmas collection of Historical Romance (Have Yourself a Merry Little... Book 1)

by Anna Campbell

  “Young men tell pretty lies to make stupid girls lie down with them.” More of that bitterness that sliced at his soul.

  She’d once been so bright and joyful. It pained him to see how the years had scarred her. Although what else could he expect? Especially if she believed, as it was so obvious she did, that the man who took her virginity had deceived her.

  “You weren’t a stupid girl.” He’d always delighted in her cleverness.

  Her lips turned down. What he’d give for her to smile at him as she once had, as though he was her whole world and she found that world a complete delight. But those sweet days were gone, never to be reclaimed.

  “The evidence would suggest otherwise.”

  “Actually I’ll rephrase that. You were a stupid girl to believe that I’d turned my back on you. You knew I loved you.”

  The mention of love made her flinch. “At least that’s what you said.”

  He regarded her steadily, willing her to remember the strength of the bond between them. “You didn’t trust it was true?”

  “Your father was scathing about my chances of becoming his daughter-in-law, and my father was sober enough that night to be furious and humiliated. He wasn’t pleased to hear that his daughter was with child and no wedding ring on her finger.” She spoke in a heated rush. “And there was not one peep from you to say that they were wrong.”

  Jimmy Macleod had still been angry when Malcolm tracked him down, drinking himself into oblivion in Aberdeen. It turned out that Malcolm’s father had offered the man money as well. In return, Jimmy had to leave the Dun Carron estate and never return.

  “So you took the money and left without a fight?” He couldn’t help being disappointed. They might have both lost, but at least he’d gone down fighting.

  He should have known better than to doubt her.

  Her glance was contemptuous. “As if I would. At that stage, I still thought you were Sir Galahad and you’d come galloping over the hill to my rescue.”

  If only he’d been able to. He’d raged, he’d sworn, he’d even damn well wept, but nothing had persuaded his father to unlock the chains. Chains that as far as he knew had last been used when the English penned a dozen Jacobite rebels in the dungeons after the ’45 Rebellion.

  And all the time he’d been aware that despite his good intentions, he was the one at fault. He was responsible for this disaster. Malcolm had been so catastrophically stupid. So trusting. So sure that the whole world would view his love with kindness.

  He’d gone straight from learning that Rhona expected his child to telling his parents he intended to marry her. His parents had taken the news that their only son was about to wed a penniless nobody with what he’d soon realized was suspicious composure. Later that night, a gang of servants had rousted him from his bed and shackled him in the dungeons. He guessed they were the same men who had descended on the Macleod croft with his father to bully Rhona.

  His parents had always indulged him, so it never occurred to him that they’d resist his will in this, the one thing in his life he really wanted. It should have. Both his mother and father were implacable in insisting that marriage to Rhona would ruin his future.

  While he was trapped in the depths of Dun Carron Castle, the father he’d always loved was making sure that Malcolm’s unsuitable sweetheart disappeared from the glen forever. Malcolm still hated to think back to those long hours of incarceration, as disbelief and anger gradually turned to soul-devouring despair. He still woke shaking and sweating from nightmares about it. Nightmares where he was back in that dungeon, helpless to stop his life from shriveling into a desolate wilderness.

  By the time his father let him go three days later, Malcolm already knew it was too late. Which didn’t stop him from rushing to the Macleod croft to find Rhona. But the tumbledown cottage was empty, with no hint left behind of where its inhabitants had gone.

  “I let you down,” he said grimly. “Not on purpose, but we should have run off together before anyone could come between us.”

  She observed him with a troubled gaze. At least she didn’t look like she loathed him anymore. Mention of the dungeon seemed to have earned him a scrap of leniency. Was she starting to believe his story? “We were young. I was just seventeen. You were just eighteen. Perhaps your parents were right, and we were too young to think about marriage.”

  He hadn’t been too young. He’d always known that the only girl he’d ever love was Rhona Macleod, with her passionate soul and vivid red hair.

  “It wasn’t just about us. We’d made a baby.”

  For one fleeting instant, she looked devastated. Then she made a dejected gesture. “It was all so long ago.”

  He frowned at her. “Have you forgotten?”

  She stared down into her lap, her shoulders taut as if she, too, relived those harrowing days. His mouth tasted rank with the defeat he’d suffered in that dungeon, and he could still feel the cold, rough weight of phantom chains.

  “No,” she said in a low voice. “No, I’ve never forgotten.”

  “Neither have I.”

  When she glanced up, the gaze she leveled on him was questioning but not hostile. She looked vulnerable and much younger. She could almost be the girl he’d loved so long ago. “Did you come to accept that I’d gone and it was time to get on with your life?”

  He responded with another unamused grunt of laughter. “Hell, no. My father kept me in prison for three days and the minute I was free, I headed out to look for you, but nobody on the estate was talking. I didn’t give up. Over the months, I searched for miles around, all the way to Aberdeen. I found your father there, but he said he didn’t know where they’d taken you. Finally, I managed to bribe one of the castle servants to tell me what they’d done. I suppose by then, the fellow thought I had no hope of finding you, so there was little danger confessing all.”

  “Because I was in London.”

  “My father must have been bloody terrified, if he sent you all the way to England.”

  She sighed and regret weighted her gaze. It seemed she was ready to believe him at last. What stung like nettles was that she had ever doubted him. He’d never doubted her. “Your father made it very clear that I was no longer welcome anywhere near Dun Carron. Or Dun Carron’s heir. What he also made clear was that he acted at your behest.”

  Grief made his belly clench. Grief, remorse, and guilt. “I’m sorry that I didn’t do enough to make you trust me. I thought I had. I trusted you. When I was with you, I felt invincible. Our love was so strong, nothing could defeat it.”

  Her expression was bleak. “Yet a determined parent and half a dozen stalwart servants brought us to ruin.” She paused. “I should have at least absolved you of conspiring to exile me. Everything I knew of you said that you’d give me my marching orders in person.”

  She definitely no longer sounded like she hated him. Instead she sounded tired and sad. Malcolm wasn’t sure it was much of an improvement. He answered her with the truth that had lived in his heart for most of his life. “I would never give you your marching orders. You were the reason behind my every breath.”

  She still was.

  Rhona went back to looking troubled. “You’re right. We should have run away.”

  “Even if my father disowned me, we’d have been together. Patrick would have grown up, knowing that his father loved him.”

  Malcolm had a vision of what these last barren years might have been like if he and Rhona had married. Then from long habit, he shut down the pictures filling his mind. When he’d first started searching for her, convinced that fate couldn’t be cruel enough to keep such true lovers apart, his fantasies about making a life with Rhona and his as-yet unborn child had spurred his efforts. But as weeks turned into months turned into lonely years, those hopes had become too painful to revisit.

  Now, sitting with Rhona, having met the exceptional young man they’d created together, the thought of everything he’d missed was excruciating. He could hardly bear that
Rhona had spent all these years convinced of his betrayal. If they ended tonight with her acknowledging that he’d never forsaken her, never given up searching, it would be some consolation.

  Malcolm forced himself back to his tale. “So I went to London and did my best to trace you. I tried all the inns. I checked the passenger lists of every boat that had left the port since you’d gone. I put notices in papers up and down the country, asking for news of Rhona Macleod and offering a reward for information. That ended up being a mistake. I and the people I’d hired to help me spent too much time tracing false leads. And all the time, no real information emerged. I started to feel like I chased a ghost. I traveled to Europe. I ended up spending a year in America.”

  He’d checked the brothels everywhere he went, too. The idea that Rhona might have ended up selling herself had been torture.

  Wondering, she looked at him. Astonishment wiped out her earlier doubt. “You did all that? For me?”

  “I would have done more,” he said, his tone grim. “Until five years into my search, I received a letter from your father saying that you’d died in Ireland. He didn’t mention the baby.”

  “But I was never in Ireland.”

  “Which makes sense because my agents and I combed every inch of the place, finding no trace of you.” Malcolm’s lips twisted in a grimace. “Once I got the letter, I went straightaway to Dundee, where your father was when he wrote, but he was long gone and I never heard from him again.”

  Old rancor sharpened her reply. “He’s always been good at disappearing. He disappeared often enough at Dun Carron when he was on a spree.”

  “I discovered after my father’s death that he’d continued to pay your father an allowance to stay away.” Pity thickened his tone. “I’m sorry, Rhona, but I think your father has passed away. The papers I found at Dun Carron indicated that the allowance stopped a year after the letter from Dundee.”

  She sighed and made a hopeless gesture. Longstanding sadness marked her features. “Any allowance he received would have gone in whisky. He never recovered from Ma’s death. I don’t think he cared one way or the other whether he lived or died. He certainly never cared much for me, even before your father bribed him to turn a blind eye to what happened.”

  Jimmy Macleod’s intemperate habits hadn’t helped Malcolm’s case, when he told his parents he wanted to marry Rhona. “You deserved better.”

  Her lips tightened. “I’m starting to think we both did.”

  “I suspect now that my father paid your father to write the letter saying you were dead, so that I abandoned my quest. He wanted me to take up my duties at Dun Carron.”

  “You should have.”

  He shook his head. “No, there was a chance the baby had survived. If I couldn’t have you, I could still have my child.”

  “Oh, Malcolm…” Her eyes were dark with regret and pity. “I shouldn’t have raged at you all these years. But everything that happened fitted in with my fears. I could never quite believe I was good enough for the heir to Dun Carron. Your father was right about that. You were rich and fine and handsome and highborn. I was an ignorant hoyden of a crofter’s daughter. What could I offer such a paragon as Malcolm Innes?”

  For the first time, he managed a genuine smile. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. You’re smart and funny and brave, and you’ve held my heart since I was old enough to give it. There’s nobody to rival you, Rhona.”

  She didn’t seem to notice his use of the present tense.

  When she shook her head, her expression relaxed a fraction. “That’s not how I remember it.” The faint ease seeped from her features. “So when the laird was so insistent that you’d sent him to do your dirty work, something in me was feeble enough to believe it. At first, he just offered me money to disappear. But I refused to go. Things only got rough after that.”

  Outraged, Malcolm surged toward her, but she waved him back. “Oh, nothing too bad. I wasn’t injured, at least. They tied me up and bundled me into a carriage and took me away.”

  Her explanation did nothing to allay his dismay. He loathed to think of her sufferings. “You must have been terrified. I can’t believe my father was so ruthless. I’d always considered him a man of honor.”

  “He acted according to his lights. You were his heir and only child. I wasn’t part of his plan at all.”

  “That’s very tolerant of you,” he said, sure that she didn’t really feel like that.

  “I’ve had plenty of time to think about what happened.” Her tone was resigned. “At least he didn’t kill me. I feared he might at first.”

  Malcolm couldn’t bear to imagine what she must have thought when rough men ripped her away from everything she knew and loved. A young girl, alone, afraid, defenseless, and carrying her lover’s child. The thought set nausea seething in his gut.

  “Dumping you alone in London to fend for yourself could have been a death sentence.” Her pregnancy would put respectable work out of reach.

  She must have read his thoughts, because she made a dismissive gesture. “I never had to sell myself. I found kindness where I was most likely to come to grief.”

  Malcolm should be relieved, but he wasn’t sure he believed her. “Rhona…”

  “I’m not saying that just to salve your conscience.” Even after all this time, she could still read his reactions. “I prospered in the city. You don’t have to imagine me servicing a string of men to keep body and soul together.”

  He took a breath to fill starved lungs and banished the hideous images that had pursued him since he’d lost her. “I worried about that for years and blamed myself.”

  She shook her head. “I’m quite respectable. Well, almost.”

  He cut the air with one hand. “Do you think I’d despise you if you’d taken that path? Even if you’d swived every man in the King’s Navy, I could never despise you. I’m just so bloody grateful that you stayed alive. You can’t imagine how I felt when I heard you were dead.”

  The news had sent him spiraling into a dark pit of hopelessness and misery. He’d wanted to die himself. For a long time, life had lost all purpose, until he decided to gamble on the chance that his child might be alive.

  More of that compassion deepened her eyes. “I’m sorry. Once things had settled down, I could have written to you, I suppose, and let you know that all was well.”

  He tried to see things from her point of view. “You were convinced I’d abandoned you with a callous disregard for your welfare and feelings.”

  “Yes.” She paused. “What can all this ancient history matter? I suppose you married and had children. You owed it to your name after all.”

  He sent her a straight look. “I vowed to my father that if I couldn’t marry you, I wouldn’t marry anybody.”

  Incredulity widened her eyes. “But when we parted, you weren’t much more than a boy.”

  “Perhaps. I still knew my mind.” He drew in a shuddering breath and gave her the stark truth. “I kept that vow. I’ve never married. I’ve been alone all my life, Rhona. I have no children but the one we made together. The estate is mine to dispose of as I wish, so I want to make Patrick my heir.”

  Chapter 3

  Rhona stared in shock at this man who in any reasonable world should be a stranger, but who didn’t feel like a stranger. In her memory, Malcolm Innes had remained the gloriously handsome and lighthearted boy she’d loved with such reckless abandon. But this man before her had an intimate acquaintance with suffering.

  He was still handsome. Age could never mar that perfect bone structure. The high cheekbones and straight nose and defined, angular jaw remained the same. But the thick satiny hair was no longer pure ebony. Instead, it was streaked with silver, although at thirty-six, he was in the prime of life. And nobody who looked into those intense dark eyes would imagine that this was a happy man.

  Her gloved hands fisted against the hay bale she sat upon. She’d spent years hating him, the other side of the coin from lovi
ng him so completely. Before their tragic separation, he’d been everything to her. She’d spent so much time sure she’d been wrong to give her trust and her heart to Malcolm Innes.

  Now it turned out his travails had been far worse than hers. His travails still continued. She’d found purpose and a place in the world. More, she’d had Patrick to love and tend and guide. Her son had given her a reason for living. Malcolm had had nothing but an empty life and an increasingly hopeless search for a child that he must fear was dead.

  When she thought of her girlhood lover, and despite her anger, she’d often thought of him, she’d whipped up her self-righteous indignation by imagining he never gave her or his son a second’s consideration. She’d pictured him marrying some horse-faced, blue-blooded harridan who made his life a misery and presented him with a brood of horse-faced children.

  When she really wanted to torment herself, that unknown blue-blooded lady was bonny and charming, and Malcolm’s lying eyes looked at her just as he’d once looked at Rhona. Then her mind had also summoned up children who were beautiful and bright, and happy to bask in their father’s love. A father’s love her own dear Patrick would never know.

  Now as she studied this man worn down by long years of sorrow, she wanted to cry. She wanted to take back every curse she’d ever laid on her first lover’s dark head. With a desperation that futility couldn’t seem to temper, she wanted to make everything better, to heal the wounds that festered inside him.

  As the silence extended, his sardonic humor reappeared. “Say something, Rhona.”

  She swallowed to shift the painful lump of emotion blocking her throat. “I can’t believe you’ve found no comfort or connection in all this time.”

  He shrugged as if the matter was insignificant. “Whether you believe it or not, it’s true.”

  “But your parents must have done their best to make you marry.”