Seduced by the Scot

by Eaton, Jillian

  “Aye,” Lachlan replied, the corners of his mouth twitching.

  Brynne bit back her own smile.

  They were certainly a far cry from the pomp and circumstance of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, but there was warmth here. Charm as well. And love, she thought, stealing a glance at Lachlan. So much love that it was a wonder the little building with its dirt floor and stone walls was capable of containing it all.

  And if there was also a whisper of something else, a sense of…unease, well, what bride wasn’t nervous on her wedding day? She was making the right decision. She had made the right decision. For short of spinning around and racing out the door, she was marrying Lachlan today.

  If the vicar ever got around to it, that is.

  “Ah!” he said at last, dipping an old-fashioned quill in ink and dashing a neat line through their names. “Here we are. Lord Campbell of Glenavon and Lady Weston of Yorkshire. Yer names have been in my register for some time, havena they?”

  Brynne flicked a startled glance at Lachlan. She’d assumed their visit here was unplanned, as he’d only asked her to marry him three days ago. But it appeared that he had been confident as to what her reply would be. Or maybe he’d simply hedged his bets, and had wanted to be prepared regardless of whether they ended up here or not.

  Clever, her Scot.

  Very clever.

  Arrogant as well, but wasn’t that what she liked about him? His confidence. His unwavering assurance that things would happen as he wanted them to, for no other reason than he refused to accept the alternative. In that way, Lachlan was like the tide coming in, letting nothing–not sand, or rock or steep embankment–stand in his way. And when he went back out, he pulled whatever was closest along with him…no matter their own intentions to remain on the shore.

  “Aye.” He gave her hand another squeeze. “I’ve always known I was going tae marry this one. It was just a matter of timing.”

  “Never a good time or a bad time tae commit yerself to wedlock, in my humble opinion. Ye’re not marrying a clock. But some seem tae think that if they marry in June instead of October, they’ll have a better go if it.” The vicar removed his spectacles, polished the lenses on the sleeve of his robe, and then slid them back into place. “I’ve yet tae find that tae be the case, but what do I know? Only been married tae me Mae for forty-seven years and performed more ceremonies than this old book can contain.” He raised his arm, coughed into his elbow, then peered straight at Brynne over the rounded edge of his spectacles. “Did ye have yer own vows prepared, or should I read the standard? The fee is the same, either way.”

  “Oh.” Flustered, she shook her head. “I didn’t realize–”

  “We’ve our own vows,” Lachlan interrupted.

  “But I don’t–”

  “Just repeat after me if ye can.” He briefly rested his forehead on hers. “And if ye find the words tae difficult tae remember, then all ye need tae do is promise tae love me and tae remain loyal tae me. A man canna ask for more than that.”

  When he put it that way, it didn’t seem too difficult.

  “All right,” she said, and he gave her a wink.

  “That’s me lass.”

  “Are ye ready?” the vicar asked. “I’ve a line nearly out the door, ye know.”

  “Aye.” Lachlan’s chest lifted as he took a breath, and then took her other hand. Fingers entwined, they faced each other, and everything else…the vicar, the pedestal, the witnesses…faded away, blurred into obscurity by the fiercely possessive glow in Lachlan’s gaze. “This is a Celtic blessing that me father spoke when he married me mother. It’s been used tae bind kings and queens, warriors and maidens, farmers and milkmaids. I use it now, tae bind ye tae me, in the hopes that nothing from within or without will ever tear us asunder.

  “Brynne Weston, ye are the star of each night. Ye are the brightness of every morning. Ye are the story of each guest. Ye are the report of every land. No evil shall befall ye, on hill nor bank, in a field, valley, on a mountain, or in a glen. Ye are mine, and I am yers, from this moment forward until death comes tae part us asunder.”

  A single tear ran down her cheek.

  Lachlan caught it on his thumb before it could fall, and pressed his thumb to his lips. “This is my solemn promise tae ye,” he said quietly. “As a man, a husband, and a lover.”

  Then it was her turn, and her voice trembled with emotion as she repeated the vows that would bind them together for the rest of this life and the next. “Lachlan Campbell, you…you are the star of each night. You are the brightness of every morning. You are the story of…of…”

  “Each guest,” he provided helpfully.

  She was crying in earnest now; her face as wet as if she’d stepped out into an early morning mist. But they were silent sobs born of joy, not sadness, and she smiled through them at the man that she loved as all of her misgivings and doubts were washed away by the cleansing rain of her tears. “You are the report of every land, and no evil shall ever befall you on hill nor bank, in a field or in a glen. You are mine, and I am yours, from this moment forward until death comes to part us asunder. This is my solemn promise to you as a woman, and a wife, and…”–sneaking a peek at the vicar, she discreetly lowered her voice–“a lover.”

  “Well done,” the vicar said with an approving nod and what might have been a tear of his own, although it was hard to tell with the spectacles. “With the power invested in me by the Church of Scotland, I hereby pronounce ye as husband and wife. Ye may…yes, ye may do that.”

  He obligingly looked the other way as Lachlan yanked Brynne against him and gave her a kiss that would have surely burned St. Paul’s Cathedral to the ground and earned them a lifetime of repentance besides.

  Clinging to his shoulders as he lifted her off the floor in his exuberance, she laughingly wrenched her mouth free. “Lachlan, people are staring.”

  And so they were. The vicar, and the witnesses, and even the other couples waiting to be wed, peering in through the doors and the windows with varying expressions of shock and amusement and disgruntlement.

  “Let them stare,” he growled. “It’s me wife they’re looking at, after all. And I’m pleased tae show her off.”

  She slid down his body a few inches. Gasped when her thigh encountered something quite unmistakable in both its size and shape. “Lachlan.”

  “Aye,” he said with a grin that bordered on the sheepish. “Maybe we’d best take this someplace private.”

  Evidently spying his opportunity to move them along, the vicar seized upon it. “If ye’ll sign here and here,” he said, all but throwing his quill at Lachlan, “ye may be on yer way tae a more…discreet location tae celebrate yer matrimonial bliss.”

  They wrote their names; Lachlan’s penmanship rough and hurried, Brynne’s elegant and perfectly spaced. A fitting juxtaposition that went far beyond a signature.

  “Lady Campbell,” said Lachlan, gesturing towards the door with an exaggerated sweep of his arm.

  “Lord Campbell,” she replied, sinking into a curtsy before she preceded him out of the shop with all the feigned aplomb of Queen Victoria exiting the throne room at Buckingham Palace.

  Her husband–how strange and delightful it was to describe him that way!–followed right on her heels, and like the children they’d been during that wild, reckless two weeks nearly ten years prior, they raced across the village square, giggling all the while.

  This, she thought dazedly as he pulled her into an alley, pressed her up against the brick side of a milliner’s store, and began to kiss his way down her neck. This is what heaven must be like.

  And for a while, it was.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Lachlan, the ceiling is leaking again!” Sputtering like a wet cat caught in a rainstorm, Brynne staggered out of bed, dragging the coverlet with her. The fire in the hearth had turned to ash overnight, the temperamental Highland winds were howling, and water was lashing at the windows–and pouring out of the ceiling–in
a freezing spray of wet.

  Shivering from head to toe, she cast her peacefully slumbering husband (who, she’d discovered during five months of marriage, would sleep through an earthquake if there were such things this far north), and went to retrieve a bucket from the closet down the hall.

  Were she at Hawkridge Manor, she could have sent a servant for such a task. Of course, were she at Hawkridge, there wouldn’t have been water waking her up in the middle of the night when any sensible person was tucked cozily in their beds, dreaming of warmer days soon to come.

  But oh no.

  Not her.

  She was stumbling blindly through the dark, her teeth chattering with such force that she feared they were going to rattle right out of her skull. Managing to find the closet, she opened the door…and released a hiss of frustration when she discovered that she wasn’t the first to go looking for a bucket to stem the flow of rain on this stormy eve.

  Not surprising, given that nearly every room in the castle had some sort of hole in it. Holes made from mice (and other creatures she dared not think about), holes from rot, holes from the menagerie of feral siblings that had somehow slipped Lachlan’s mind whenever he’d spoken about his family.

  Four.

  Four children under the age of fifteen trapped together beneath one (very leaky) roof.

  Even now, she could hear Eara and Tavish, the twins, calling out, their thin, squalling wails louder than the booms of thunder that threatened to raze the already crumbling stone walls to the ground.

  When it became apparent by the increasing fervor of their cries that the nursemaid was not going to attend them, Brynne gave a resigned sigh and took on the duty herself as she’d done nearly every night, in some capacity, ever since Lachlan’s one-year-old brother and sister were unceremoniously dumped on their doorstep by his stepmother, Lady Heather, with a vague promise to “return quite soon”. To Brynne’s consternation, there’d been no sign of Heather for the past seven weeks. To the best of her knowledge, Lachlan’s stepmother was “recovering” from the labors of childbirth at the steam pools in Bath with no sign of returning anytime soon.

  “There, there,” she said soothingly as she entered the nursery and lifted first Eara and then Tavish out of their cribs. The nursemaid was a useless lump of covers in the corner; her loud snores indicating that she was even more of a sound sleeper than Lachlan. “Let’s make you some milk, shall we?”

  She carried the twins down the winding stairs to the kitchen where she placed them into a round basket by the fire–which, thankfully, was still smoldering–and warmed cow’s milk over the glowing embers before transferring it into two porcelain bubby pots.

  Shaped like a traditional teapot with a slightly longer spout, the pots had a top that fastened securely in place and a spout that was sealed closed with the exception of three holes just large enough for liquid to dribble through. Ideally, the twins would be nursing at their mother’s breast, but short of that–and with no wet nurse to be found–these were the next best thing.

  Latching on to the spouts with all the ferocity of two starving hyena cubs, Eara and Tavish immediately ceased their cries, and Brynne sighed with relief as she sat down beside them in a pool of dimly flickering light and hugged her knees to her chest.

  She’d wanted to be a bride, she reminded herself as a not-unfamiliar longing for the life she’d left behind began to creep up the back of her throat. A bride and a wife to the man she was in love with. The man she loved still, even though he was upstairs peacefully slumbering away while she was sitting on a cold, damp floor feeding his siblings. Siblings he’d neglected to tell her about until after they were married.

  Ironically, despite their attachment to the witching hour, Eara and Tavish were the best behaved of the bunch. At least they didn’t release snakes to slither in the hall, like Callum. Or sneak frogs into her pockets, like Blaine. Those two–thirteen and eleven years of age, respectively–were in a perpetual state of mischievousness. And Brynne found herself the target of their playful antics more often than not.

  Yesterday, while playing swords at the table, they’d accidentally cut down the chandelier. The chandelier. It was a small miracle the room hadn’t gone up in flames. Which, considering the state of the castle, might have been an improvement.

  Through it all, Lachlan just chuckled and dismissed the behavior of his brothers as “lads being lads” while Brynne did her best to create some semblance of order and docility from the chaos. It was, to put it mildly, an uphill battle.

  She’d wanted to be a bride.

  Instead, she was a bride, and a mother, and a lady’s maid, and a scullery maid, and a cook, and a wet nurse, and an amphibian keeper. All the while, her paints, which she’d had delivered from Hawkridge Manor in secret courtesy of a trusted maid, remained in a trunk, with her dreams of travel packed away right beside them.

  There could be no seeing the world when she was quite literally responsible for the lives of four children whose mothers were either deceased or divorced or soaking in pools in Bath and whose father was too busy chasing skirts in London to be bothered.

  But the worst part–even worse than being awoken by a deluge of icy water or changing foul-smelling nappies or finding slimy worms in her shoes–was the loneliness.

  In a rambling castle filled with the bellowing war cries of infants and adolescent boys alike, more snakes than she cared to count, a skeleton staff of servants, and a husband, Brynne was lonely. The type of wrenching isolation she hadn’t felt since she watched Weston’s carriage leave for Eton.

  At least then she’d had Lachlan. Only for two weeks, it was true. A blink of an eye for some, but what felt like an entire lifetime to a lost, lonely girl yearning for love and attention. And now she was married to him. Now they really did have an entire lifetime to spend together. But then why did she feel more alone than she ever had before?

  Oh, the first month had been wonderful! A hazy blur of lovemaking and laughter and nearly ten years of longing to fulfill. Then somewhere along the way, the honeymoon–such as it was–had ended, and her new husband had taken to spending sunrise to sunset at the sight of his great-great-grandfather’s distillery and its surrounding fields as he struggled to coax seedlings from fallow soil. Which left Brynne at the castle, tending to any manner of things, none of which her army of tutors and governesses had ever prepared her for.

  She did not begrudge Lachlan chasing after his dream. She simply did not want it to come at the expense of her own. And as she returned Eara and Tavish safely to their cribs, she was unable to completely silence the little voice that reminded her if she wasn’t here, she might be in Paris, sitting shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest artists to ever yield a brush.

  Instead, she was stuck in a wet castle yielding bubby pots.

  “There ye are,” Lachlan mumbled, rolling across the mattress to wrap his arms around her as she climbed back into their bed, careful to avoid the large puddle forming at the foot of it.

  “The storm woke the twins.” Evading his grabbing hands even as her blood began to heat, she sat up on her elbow and frowned at him in the darkness. “I really think we ought to see about hiring a new nursemaid. This one cannot do her job properly if she’s asleep all the time.”

  Lachlan grunted. “Tavish and Eara need tae start learning how tae sleep through the night.”

  Easy for him to say, as he wasn’t the one constantly being awoken by their cries.

  “What they need is their mother,” she corrected. “Has there been any word from Lady Heather on when she might return for them? Or your father, for that matter? They’re his children as much as they are hers. I know you only mean to do well by all of your brothers and Eara, but–”

  “Canna we discuss this in the morning?” Dipping his head, he took her nipple into his mouth through the thin fabric of her nightdress as his fingers skimmed beneath her hemline and along the inside of her quivering thigh to where her curls were slick with moisture.

>   “Lachlan…” she groaned, exasperation at his evasiveness warring with the sizzling licks of desire rapidly turning her flesh to flame.

  “Aye?” he grinned, lifting his head for the fraction of an instant before he began to kiss his way down her navel and across her hip. As his tongue parted her curls and sipped the nectar within, she abandoned herself to the inevitable thrall of their passion.

  Brynne had never partaken in opium, but if she ever did, she imagined it would be like this. A heavy velvet curtain falling around her, drowning out the noise of her doubts, and worries, and frustrations until the only thing left was pure, unadulterated pleasure.

  This was what kept her from sinking.

  This was what kept her nails dug into a board floating aimlessly amidst the waves.

  She wasn’t drowning.

  Not yet.

  But neither was she swimming.

  And if she did dare to let go of that board…would she return to a ship that was on the brink of disappearing, or retreat to the safety of the shore?

  When Brynne woke the next day, the rain had ceased and Lachlan was gone. She was pleasantly surprised by the first–it was spring in Scotland, when rain was as natural as breathing–but felt an ache of disappointment at the second…followed swiftly by a sharp twinge of guilt.

  She didn’t want to be selfish. Which she would be, if she required all of Lachlan’s time to be lavished upon her. But surely she was allowed some of it. At least more than she’d been getting, which was an hour of blissful heat in the middle of the night…and a cold bed come morning.

  She’d gone to the distillery. Seen the fields for herself. The vastness of them, and the difficulty of the task her husband had chosen to undertake. For that reason, she knew that his inattentiveness wasn’t born of maliciousness, but rather distraction. Which, in some ways, made it worse. In ranking of importance, she was above food–there were times Lachlan hardly remembered to eat–and below barley seeds. But she hadn’t come here to trade one type of loneliness for another. That wasn’t the life promised to her. She and Lachlan were supposed to be partners. With no half of them greater or more important than the whole.