How to Train Your Highlander

by Christy English

  Fourteen

  Mary Elizabeth had danced her fill with the English anyway, so she was happy to escape them. She was less happy to sneak away with Harry, who was clearly in demand among every person present, save perhaps herself.

  Not that she did not enjoy his company, because she did, but having him near that night had made her the butt of much English speculation, especially from the women present.

  In the hall just outside the dining room, she saw the fat duke again. This time his blue eyes grazed over her as if over a stain on the carpet before he looked away. She felt her stomach clench. When she stopped in midstep, Harry ran into her from behind.

  “Mary, what is it?” Harry asked.

  She tried to whisper but saw from the stiffness of the Recluse Duke’s neck that he’d heard her anyway. “It’s the fat duke,” she said. “I’ve been avoiding him for the last three days.”

  “The duke?” Harry asked. “And you say he’s fat?”

  “Lower your voice, Harry, for the love of God.” She dragged him into a darkened corridor that led around to a back staircase she had found just that morning. “He’s a duke and overproud, but I don’t mean to hurt his feelings by calling him names.”

  “You saw the duke, you say? In the hallway outside the banquet hall?”

  “Well, it’s his house and his party. But I don’t want to see him, and I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Mary—”

  “I mean it, Harry. Enough about the Recluse Duke.”

  Harry seemed to swallow something foul there on the darkened staircase, but he obeyed her. “All right, Mary. I’ll let the matter of the duke rest for tonight.”

  “We needn’t worry ourselves over him,” she said.

  “No. We needn’t. Not tonight.”

  Harry’s nose seemed to delve close to her cheek, and she thought he might kiss her again. Remembering her oath, she dodged his lips and dragged him up the narrow stairs behind her.

  She took him to one of her new favorite spots, a sitting room on the third floor that no one seemed to use. She had been there at all hours of the day and night, and had never seen a living soul. The house was large enough that, except for the maid who dusted daily and swept the carpets, that room very well might never see another human being for a year or more.

  Mary Elizabeth had seen very few maids in the house, but the house was not kept clean by fairies, so they must sneak about a great deal in order not to be noticed. Mary would have enjoyed a good conversation with a maid or two.

  She did not speak to Harry, as he was acting even stranger than usual, but opened the window and hoisted herself onto the sill without a backward glance. Harry caught her elbow before she could shimmy onto the roof and seek her favorite hiding place behind the closest gable.

  “I thought you wanted your whisky,” Harry said.

  Mary Elizabeth smiled at him in spite of herself, for he sounded so serious. Very few Englishmen took good whisky seriously, as seriously as it had been intended when the first Scot made it.

  “I always have my whisky with me,” she said, and climbed out onto the roof. He followed at once, having no concern at all for his fancy dress clothes, which made her like him even more.

  He did seem to have a fascination with her ankles, however, for she had to raise her skirts in order to step out onto the roof safely, and he did not speak for a long time, staring at them until she got herself situated against the roofline, which for some reason was unaccountably clean, and let her skirts fall back into place once more.

  “Does the duchess have maids who sweep the roof?” she asked.

  He blinked, settling down beside her but not too close, which made her sorry but also relieved. He had surprised her when he kissed her behind that potted plant, and she had thought perhaps he had gone back on his word to himself for good. It seemed now that he had not. Mary Elizabeth believed in a man keeping his word, but in this one instance, she was a little disappointed. She so liked kissing him.

  “Maids on the roof?” Harry asked, a bit distracted still. “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Hmmm.” Mary Elizabeth hummed a little to herself in agreement as she reached into the hidden pocket of her skirt and drew out her flask. Every dress she owned, even the fancy gowns, had a pocket in it despite her mother’s rants about fashion, because she could not live without her whisky near to hand.

  Harry laughed to see her silver flask. “Did you steal that from your brother Alex?” he asked.

  She gave him a pointed look. “I do not steal, Harry. You should know that.”

  He wiped the smile from his face, but in the moonlight, it seemed to be dancing still in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Mary. Of course you don’t steal. Why on earth do you have a flask?”

  “I always carry at least one sharp blade and a flask of whisky,” she said, offering it to him before she had taken the first sip. He was her guest on this roof, after all, and by rights should have the first tot.

  He drank deep, as a man ought, but grimaced when he had swallowed it. She laughed at him. “I’ll teach you to drink good whisky,” she said. “You’ll be surprised how quickly you come to love it.”

  “My father tried to teach me,” Harry said.

  He sounded musing, as if his mind was far away. He did not look at her but up into the stars above them, points of fire in a field of dark indigo. Mary turned her face away from his and drank them in, taking in their beauty as she listened to his voice.

  “My father,” Harry said, “was a hard man. And he believed that all men ought to be. He said that the first thing a man should know how to do is hold his liquor. He kept me up all night once when I was twelve, feeding me brandy until I was sick on mother’s rug and had to be put to bed.”

  Mary Elizabeth did not like to speak out against the dead, so she said nothing of what she was thinking of the old bastard who had treated Harry that way. Instead, she asked, “So you hate spirits?”

  “I do. I drank occasionally when I was down at Oxford, but it was never the thing. The other blokes did not seem to care if I drank or not, so I stopped.”

  “Why would anyone care if you drank?” Mary asked before she thought. Harry quirked a brow at her and she said, “Ach. The English.”

  “Aye.” Harry did a fair approximation of her brogue, and then reached for her flask to take another sip of the Islay. This tot seemed to go down better, and he smiled at her as he returned the flask and watched her drink from it.

  She took her own tot, then slipped the flask back into her pocket. A little whisky was warming and a gift from heaven. Too much whisky made for sore heads and an inability to rise in time for a decent ride come morning.

  She did not want to bring it up, but she felt honor bound to remind Harry why they were on the roof at all, while the duchess’s house was filled with guests who Harry should be seeing to. Even a poor relation must have social duties, surely.

  “Harry, we’ve both had our whisky. Tell me why you brought me up here.”

  “You brought me.” He sidled closer to her, and Mary felt the sudden urge to back away. But the roof was steep, and Harry was her friend. She tried again.

  “Harry, what did you want to ask me?”

  “I want you to marry me.”

  * * *

  Mary Elizabeth did not seem impressed with the moment, momentous as it was. She looked at him with a squint of suspicion, and then she said, “You’ve no head at all for whisky, do you?”

  “I do not, but that does not signify. I asked you a question, and I would like an answer.”

  “Harry, you asked a daft question, and I will not answer it. Only yesterday you told me in the picture gallery of this very hall that you could not marry me, nor even kiss me. And now you are on a roof, asking me to wed. Are you mad, then?”

  “I am,” Harry said. “I am mad for you.” He knew
he was making a botch of it, and he wondered if he should start over, begin again by telling her that he was the duke, lord of all he surveyed, a man who could keep her happy and warm and set up with fine whisky and sharp blades for the rest of her life.

  “Harry, we had better go in. You’re not in a fit state of mind to be speaking with a lady.”

  “I am in the best state of mind to be speaking to you. You’re the only lady I want to speak with. I love you. You are wonderful and funny and filled with life. Marry me, and make me the happiest man ever to walk these halls.”

  Mary Elizabeth sighed and moved to the window. He caught her by the skirt to hold her with him and she glared at him over her shoulder. “Let go, Harry. You’re foxed from two tots, and I am going in.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not foxed. I swear.”

  They both slipped a little then, down the slanting roof. Harry caught himself with his slippered foot against the gable rim, and caught her to him so that she would not slide any farther. The heat of his body seemed to speak better for him than his words did, for Mary Elizabeth raised her arms over his shoulders and clasped her hands behind the back of his neck, burying her fingers in his hair.

  “You’re talking daft, and I won’t hold you to it come sunrise, if you won’t hold me to my promise until then either,” she said.

  He was not sure what she meant until her lips were on his, her luscious breasts pressed against the front of his dress coat. He could feel the heat of her body through the layers of clothes that separated them and knew that if they had been in a bed, or even safe on a rug somewhere, he would have drawn her skirt up and taken her right there. As it was, his foot lost its purchase, and they slid a little farther down the roofline.

  Harry would not have cared, but Mary Elizabeth was pulling away from him.

  “Harry, you daft man. Let me go before we fall.”

  He obeyed her at once, though his body was screaming to touch her again. Separated from her, he looked down and saw that, indeed, they were actually in peril. He turned his mind from his lust to try and figure a way to get them both safely off that roof without sliding down it any farther when he saw Mary draw out a knife from God alone knew where and slice off the gold sash that had displayed her breasts all evening.

  It seemed there was a good deal more material than just the section that made her breasts stand out so beautifully. At least six feet of cloth of gold was in her hands, which she deftly secured to the roof with her dagger, placing the blade between two shingles and burying it deep in the wood beneath.

  “This is what comes of canoodling on a roof,” she said almost to herself as she cut away the ribbons on her dancing slippers with a second blade and kicked them off, so that they went sliding down the roofline and into the garden below.

  Harry expected her to cry a little at their loss, as any other woman might have done, or perhaps simply to cry from fright at the danger they were in, but Mary Elizabeth Waters did not cry. She shimmied carefully out of her stockings, letting both stockings and garters fall down the same path as her shoes.

  “Is that a yes, then?” Harry asked.

  “Shut your fool mouth, Harry, and let me work.”

  She used her now-bare feet to gain purchase on the roof’s slippery surface. She took hold of the gold sash and yanked it hard twice, as if to test its strength.

  She spoke to him then as to a simpleton, slowly and clearly. “Harry, I am going to climb back up to the window. I need you to stay here and not move. At all. Do you understand me?”

  He found himself smiling back at her. “Yes, ma’am.” He snuck a hand toward her supple calf and ran his fingertips along it, almost meditatively, reveling in the softness of her skin.

  “Harry, I swear, if we live to get off this roof and tell this tale, I may very well kill you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  She expelled her breath between her teeth and swore before climbing very carefully, one step at a time, back toward the window. For the first time, he saw how dangerous it was for her to move along the roof at all. He cursed himself roundly, first for coming out there as he had done so often in his childhood, and second, for not shouting the house down as soon as they were in danger, so that he might have kept her safe until help arrived. She would have been ruined, but she would have lived.

  Now Harry was left watching her hoist herself up, using the gold sash tied around her waist and her feet and hands as purchase as she stabbed her second dagger into the roof, over and over again, drawing herself closer to the window.

  She made it within only two minutes, but it was the longest two minutes of his life. She cut the sash from her and sent it down to him, where it fluttered against the house gaily, like some courtesan’s forgotten banner.

  “Climb up, Harry,” she called. He ignored the sash and climbed up without it, his muscles remembering how to move along that roof as he had when he was a child and desperately in need of escape. He got close to the window and saw that Mary was brandishing a fire poker at him.

  “Grab on!” she said.

  “Mary Elizabeth, step back before you brain me with that thing.”

  She frowned, but looked past him at how far the drop was below and tossed the poker behind her.

  Harry reached the window in a trice and managed to pull himself into the house. He lay on the floor beneath the window, breathing hard, as Mary Elizabeth stood over him like the Wrath of God.

  He sneaked one hand out to curl around her bare ankle, and she stepped back, out of his reach.

  “Enough canoodling for one night, Harry. We almost died, for the love of God.”

  “What better time to canoodle?” he asked.

  He raised himself up on one elbow and found that the room was spinning, whether from the whisky or the daredevil climbing or both. He lay back down and hoped it would stop.

  Mary Elizabeth squatted down next to him, close enough to look into his face, but far enough away that she could dodge his hands if he tried to reach for her. He realized how badly he had botched his proposal as she frowned down at him—and how drunk he actually was on only two shots of whisky.

  “I’m going to bed, Harry. I am going to forget this nonsense, and so are you. I’ll see you in the stables come morning. First person to get to Sampson is the better man.”

  Harry tried to speak, but she shushed him with her lips. The kiss was soft and almost glancing, but it made his body catch fire. He lay still on that rug long after she had gone, trying to calm himself. He needed to drink some water and sober up, so that he could propose again tomorrow.

  He still needed to tell her that he was the duke. But perhaps he should get her to agree to marry him first.

  One hurdle at a time.

  Fifteen

  Mary Elizabeth was up early the next morning, dressed in breeches once again, as she could not bear to wear one of her riding habits. She rose even earlier than she was used to, for she was worried about Mrs. Prudence, who had headed off in the night, to flee in secret to help her long-lost brother in London. When Robbie caught wind of it, there was sure to be hell to pay and only Mary left behind to pay it. She wondered, and not for the first time, what it was about her brothers that made their women want to go scampering off in the dead of night.

  Mary Elizabeth could not keep her mind on her friend as she ought, for she found that she was also troubled by Harry’s proposal. She was troubled because, in spite of all good sense and the fact that he was as drunk as a lord when he asked her, she wanted desperately to say yes.

  Had she lost the last of her mind, to think even for half a moment of marrying herself to an Englishman?

  Her mother would be pleased if she did. That was the reason her mother had banished her from Edinburgh and from home, after all, that Mary Elizabeth might make a “decent” match among her mother’s countrymen and stop riding free about the Glenderrin l
ands and fishing in the burn.

  The sting of her mother’s rejection was as sharp as it had been six months before. It was more of a knife in her side, hampering her breath, which was why she tried not to think about it. But now that Harry had offered for her, giving her mother what she wanted, Mary Elizabeth felt sick to her stomach.

  She wanted her mother to accept her as she was, with no husband standing beside her.

  She also wanted to go home. If she married Harry, she would only be allowed home now and again, for a Gathering one year out of three perhaps, before the children started coming and she was tied to hearth and home for the rest of her life, as all women had been since Eve.

  She did not even know if Harry owned his own home, as he spent all his time wandering around the lands and house of the duchess, a poor relation with little to recommend him save his connections. Not that Mary gave a fig for money or its trappings, but she had seen the way the crofters lived, and she knew that, as strong as she was, she would not raise her children to such a life. Even with her own money, if Harry had no pot of his own to piss in, she would turn him down and mean it, for their children’s sakes if not her own.

  Mary Elizabeth resolved to speak to Harry about it, to find out first if it had not been the whisky talking last night and he had meant what he said. But she knew him to be a serious man and was certain that he had proposed to her in earnest. Which meant she needed to think, and hard, before she gave her answer.

  She could not quite believe she was considering his proposal at all, but there it was. For she loved him, God help her.

  She came to the stables and saw Charlie standing about idle, looking as pale as a gray ghost. “What’s the matter?” she asked at once.