She had struck a man. Had struck her husband. She hoped the man—whoever he was—was unharmed, that she hadn’t done permanent damage to that handsome profile. She hadn’t been thinking, had impulsively given in to a lifetime of frustration. And was it any wonder she had behaved without due deliberation? She could scarcely breathe.
Thinking was out of the question.
She lifted her skirts and hurried down the street at an unladylike jog, determined to put as much space between her and the scene of her shame as possible. She repeated her inescapable new mantra in time with her steps. Dear God, what have I done? And after a minute or so, through a dawning sense of panic and confusion, she added a new piece for good measure: Dear God, where am I?
She hurried past foreign-looking storefronts, so different from London they made her eyes ache. There was no familiar landmark she could see, no sense of having been here before, no sense of knowing where she was going. Dogs and children, all bearing the ribbed, hungry look of the Scottish hills, scattered before her, and the thick brogue of snatched bits of conversation battered her ears.
She made it five blurry blocks before the exertions of the previous evening caught up with her. Reaching out a hand to brace herself against a brick wall, she leaned over, sucking in great breaths full of air beneath the shade of a shop awning. A pair of young women passed by, their bonnets trailing pink ribbons. They studied her with avid curiosity, putting their heads together to whisper behind cupped hands.
Georgette hated to imagine what she must look like. Heavens, her unbrushed hair alone should be enough to stop traffic, and there was no denying the smell of brandy still polluted the air around her. When she had escaped the inn, she entertained no thought beyond fleeing. But now she stood in a state of dishabille on a public street, her gown gaping rudely down the partially buttoned front.
She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d gone without the benefit of a corset, and now there were witnesses to her disgraceful, slatternly appearance.
Straightening up, she turned in a full circle, searching for a safe face or landmark. This time, with the benefit of a moment’s rest, she could see more. The striped awning across the street. The communal pump with its line of townsfolk waiting their turn to gather water. But Georgette truly had no idea where she was. The only person she knew in this town was the handsome, heathen Scotsman she had left in her bed.
And the only other person she knew in Scotland was her cousin, Randolph Burton.
She groaned, slumping back against the wall as she contemplated the mess her life had suddenly become. This was supposed to be the start of a two-week holiday at her cousin’s house in Scotland. She remembered arriving three days ago—or was it four? Randolph’s obsequious welcome had been a disappointment, as had the realization that the promised female escort was not in residence. Worse, she remembered her suspicions that Randolph’s interest in her seemed more calculated than cousinly, bolstered by a dinner when he had stared at her over candlelight and she had fidgeted in her seat. That, unfortunately, was where her memory ended.
“I’ve brought you a kitten, miss.”
Georgette whirled, her heart leaping in her throat. A man in a bloodstained apron stood a few feet away, close enough that she could smell the coppery, sweat-soaked scent of him. He sported a beard the color of clay, littered with bits of food and other ill-considered things.
Around the burly figure, the business of the town’s morning swirled. Children skipped by, and women with baskets headed to the market Georgette had seen a few blocks before. No one seemed to notice or care the man held a cleaver in one meaty hand, and clasped a brown and gray striped kitten by the scruff of the neck in the other.
“Do I know you?” Georgette asked, taking a cautious step back, not even caring that the movement took her into the street.
A smile cracked his lips, revealing a red, jarring hole where his top front teeth should have been. “MacRory’s the name. I dinna have a chance to tell you last night while we were getting acquainted.”
“I met you last night?” And they were acquainted? The man appeared to weigh close to twenty stone, all flesh and gristle. He was either an unhygienic butcher or a murderer. Neither career recommended him as a close, personal friend. He could crush her with a finger as easily as a fist. How familiar could they have become in the brief span of her memory loss?
“You dinna remember? Ach, well, you were on me and off again so fast, I suppose that explains it.” The aproned man’s voice carried the same rumbling burr of the man she had left in her bed, but the timbre of his voice evoked none of the same soul-stirring reactions. His words, and what they implied, make her neck flush with horror rather than attraction.
“I was on you?” Georgette prayed she had misheard him.
“Oh, aye. Wrapped your hands right around my girth you did.” His hearty laugh made the stains on his apron shake like windblown curtains. “You knew just how to squeeze.”
Sweat pricked the hollows of Georgette’s underarms and a racking shiver shook her spine. Her mind’s screamed protestations tumbled about until they distilled into a single, inarguable question. “I beg your pardon?”
“Take it, lass.” The man gestured toward the squirming tabby with his knife. “You earned it.”
Georgette was confused—and alarmed—enough to reach out her hand and snatch the kitten to her chest. It was impossibly tiny, perhaps three or four weeks old. How she was supposed to take care of the thing she hadn’t a clue, but some long-dormant nurturing instinct welled up in her chest. She could not give it back, not now. It might end up on someone’s dinner table if she did.
The butcher gave her one more gap-spaced grin and then turned and lumbered off down the street. Bile rose in the back of her throat as she watched him disappear into the crowd. Dear God, had she really touched him so intimately last night?
And worse, had she serviced him in exchange for a kitten?
Georgette blinked against the tears gathering in her eyes. She had not cried when her husband had died, though she felt no small measure of guilt for his untimely death. Neither had she cried upon discovering her shameful circumstances this morning, nor upon stumbling about a foreign town in a state of half dress and being gawked at by a pair of young ladies who looked as fresh as pressed flowers.
But now, upon hearing that she might have engaged in disreputable activities with more than one man last night, now she was crying? She was as disgusted with herself for her weakness now as for her apparent recklessness last night.
The sound of hooves and wheels pulled her from her self-flagellation, and Georgette jumped in her skin as a black draught horse cut through her thoughts, the driver shouting at her in some unintelligible brogue. She scrambled toward the edge of the street, her slippers grappling for purchase on the manure-slicked paving stones. She almost fell, then righted herself one-handed.
She clutched the kitten against her chest as the cart rumbled by. She shuddered as she considered how close she had come to dropping the helpless creature in her dash to safety. She slipped the kitten down the front of her bodice, then fastened the remaining buttons over it. It curled into a ball, right between her breasts. She would sort out what to do with it later. Right now she needed both her hands.
“Georgette!”
Her cousin’s voice, shrill as the hawkers selling their wares on the street corner, sent relief coursing through her body. She turned toward the shout to find Randolph standing a few feet away, his mouth wide enough to catch the dust from the retreating wheels of the wagon that had almost killed her. She had known Randolph Burton since childhood, and he had always been a fastidious sort of person. But this morning, his normally well-waxed hair hung in tufted blond clumps around his face, and his necktie was rumpled and askew.
Georgette had never seen him look so disheveled, or so dear.
He lurched toward her and she welcome
d his familiar clasp on her elbow. “Cousin,” she murmured, placing a grateful hand in his proffered one.
The touch of skin on skin was jolting. She had left her gloves in the room at the inn, if indeed she had even worn them last night. The reminder of just how far she had stepped outside of propriety, and the realization that she honestly didn’t know what she might have done, tightened her fingers in a fierce grip. Just a few days ago she shrank from Randolph’s touch, not wanting to encourage his fumbling interest.
Now, she didn’t care. She wanted only to lean on someone who could whisk her away from this place and these circumstances. “I am happy to see you,” she choked out.
He swallowed, the motion visible between the drooping edges of his en pointe collar. “You . . . you are truly happy to see me? Then why are you crying?”
Georgette swiped at her eyes. “You cannot imagine how glad, Randolph. You are the first familiar face I have seen today. I have no idea where I am, but if you are here, I must presume we are in Moraig.”
He swallowed again. “Er . . . yes.” His gaze scraped her skin. “Where have you been all night, Georgette?”
Her initial relief faltered at that. She pulled her hand from his grasp. Of course there would be questions. Not even Randolph—bumbling, oblivious man that he was—could accept her appearance this morning without wondering. “I . . .” She wiped her sweating palms on her skirts and shook her head. She could not say. It was too shaming, and far too intimate to share with her cousin.
A man in a top hat walked by on the opposite side of the street and called out a hullo, to which of them Georgette could not be sure. Randolph raised a hand to the man before turning his attention back to her. “I have looked for you all night,” he said, his voice dropping to a fierce whisper. “I was worried about you, desperately so. I was just on my way to the authorities when I saw you in the street.”
The thought of her cousin reporting her evening’s escapade to anyone, authority or no, made her pulse pound out a terrified objection. Georgette found a false smile and stretched it across her teeth. “No need for that.” She willed him to believe her. “Here I am, safe and sound.”
Randolph’s thin brow rose. “Truly? Where did you spend the evening?”
This was a delicate matter. Clearly, things were not right here, but she loathed revealing the exact circumstances of her morning to Randolph. “I . . . I was hoping you could tell me that,” she admitted.
He squinted down, concern flooding the gray eyes she knew matched the color of her own. Instead of answering her, his gaze pulled down in the vicinity of her bodice and lingered there. His face colored, a ruddy confection of capillaries and shock that sent her toes curling inward with shame.
“Where is your . . . er . . . corset?” he asked.
As if on cue, the kitten started to squirm. Georgette winced in mortification as tiny claws punched through the front of her bodice. “I would rather not say.”
For a moment he leveled a mystified stare at the space where she had stashed her little passenger. Then his face went from red to white in a heartbeat. “Dear God!” he gasped. “Have you been assaulted?”
She shook her head, despair clutching at her chest as sharply as the kitten’s needlelike claws. “No,” she whispered. “I do not think so.” Whatever else her mysterious Scotsman’s sins, she did not think she had been an unwilling party in the night’s festivities, not when her body flushed every time she thought of him. “How did I come to be here?” She sighed, pressing her fingers into her temples.
“On the street?”
“In town!” she snapped.
Randolph stuttered a moment. “Wha-what is the last thing you recall?”
Georgette closed her eyes. She remembered putting on the dress she now wore, a dove gray silk that was only just barely a step above mourning. She recalled struggling with the mother-of-pearl buttons, and her consternation that Randolph had neglected to provide her with the promised maid. Not so much for the convenience of the thing, but the propriety of the matter. She didn’t like being alone with Randolph, had wanted the buffer another human being would provide over afternoon tea.
She opened her eyes. “I remember taking tea with you. We had those ginger biscuits.” She recalled choking them down with an artificial smile plastered on her face. Hard as river stones, those cookies had been. Although Randolph possessed an almost frighteningly accurate knowledge of the historical and medicinal uses of aromatic herbs, his ability to translate such knowledge into something edible was suspect.
“And what next?” Randolph pressed, looking a sickly white.
She squirmed, trying to sort through the mental fog. A new memory surfaced, clear as daylight on water. Of Randolph twisting nervously in front of her near the hearth, saying, “Dearest Georgette, you are a woman of no small means. Now that you are out of mourning, there will be those who would take advantage. Let me be the one to protect you.”
“You asked me to marry you.” She remembered the taste of panic in her mouth that had accompanied his fumbled proposal. “And I explained why I could not.”
Randolph winced, his eyes squinting owllike over his spectacles. She regretted hurting him then, and she regretted hurting him now. But she had come to Scotland for a respite, not an offer of marriage. That he thought she needed protecting had perturbed her at the time.
That he might have been right shattered her now.
“So that you can remember.” His voice hung thick with regret.
“Yes.” Georgette blew a hot breath between her teeth. “Then . . . nothing.” She searched and came up empty. It was a maddening affair, to not know what she might have said or done. Why, anything could have happened. Anything at all.
She almost laughed. It was necessary to keep from catching on a sob.
“We went out,” Randolph offered, his fingers gripping her arm to steady her.
“Out?” she echoed.
He nodded. “After tea, we came to Moraig to attend evening services at St. John’s.”
“But why would I not remember that?” Georgette protested.
Randolph shook his head and took in a none-too-appreciative sniff. “I suspect it is because of the brandy.”
Georgette’s eyes widened. “I do not like brandy.” A warning began to pound in her ears.
Randolph smiled, and for the first time that morning he appeared positively smug. “That did not stop you from having two—no, I believe it was three glasses yesterday evening, before we departed.”
She gasped. “That . . . that isn’t possible!” Surely she would remember doing something so out of character. Then again, she couldn’t remember getting married, or crawling into bed with a deliciously proportioned Scotsman either.
Randolph leaned in, so close she could see the hairs that escaped his nostrils and the lines of exhaustion under his eyes. She had to resist the urge to back away from him. “Perhaps you were upset over our discussion, Georgette. Perhaps you were rethinking such a strong opinion, realizing how positive a match between us might be. I honestly do not know what was trotting around your head—I scarcely ever do. I tried to dissuade you, after the first glass, but you said you had come to Scotland to break free, to try new things.”
Guilt squirmed in her stomach. She could sense the disapproval falling off her cousin’s thin shoulders. She didn’t want to believe it, but this part of the conversation rang all too true. It echoed her secret thoughts and dreams, dreams she had kept hidden her entire life, even during her very proper come-out and the subsequent disappointment of her marriage.
Worse, with Randolph supplying the details, she remembered the first glass, now. And, dear God, it had been brandy.
“If it was your first experience with strong spirits,” he said, “is it any wonder you can’t remember?”
“I . . . I suppose you are right,” she breathed, shaken to her core
.
“Perhaps it is better to just focus on the future, rather than on the events of yesterday.” He covered a sudden yawn with one hand. “Given your appearance this morning, it might be something better forgotten, hmmm?”
Georgette wanted to agree. Randolph was being so nice, so understanding, it quite made her feel worse. He had lost sleep looking for her, while she had been out all night carousing and collecting orphaned kittens and forgetting her corset. But even as she turned herself over to the idea of banishing all thoughts of the man with whom she had awakened, an image of straight white teeth flashed into her mind. Had those teeth grazed her hot skin and nipped at the hidden recesses of her body last night? She had never imagined such a thing, had never even let her husband touch her so inappropriately. Her entire body flushed, as if objecting to the very idea of letting go of the false memory.
She wasn’t sure she could forget the way her Scotsman had looked on waking this morning. His lips had curved with wicked intent, just a shade higher on the left side than the right. His eyes had been the color of new grass, and just as fresh. No, wasn’t sure she could forget him.
Or that she wanted to.
Oblivious to her discomfort or the direction of her inappropriate thoughts, Randolph pulled her toward a waiting curricle. She let him lead, her hand still curved around his. He had not pressed her for more details. Her secret was safe. Relief trailed her, though it did little to lessen the guilt.
“I need only to speak with Reverend Ramsey,” Randolph said amiably as they walked, his words as light and fluffy as the clouds crowding the morning horizon, “and we can be married by tomorrow.”
What Happens in Scotland Page 2
