by Karen Ranney
Perhaps the duke only acted in an autocratic manner when it came to women who annoyed him or who didn’t bow and scrape enough. She was too big to curtsy at this point. She might fall down if she tried.
“My mother says you make potions.”
“I sincerely doubt that Her Grace called them potions,” she said.
“Unguents,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “Lotions. Something for the stiffness in her hands.”
She stood, walked to the end of the bed to the small trunk sitting there. She opened it, pulled out a jar, walked back and handed it to him.
“This is what she used in the past,” she said.
“How much do you charge for it?”
“The price for it is your absence,” she said. “If you leave now, take it with my blessing.”
“And if I don’t? How much do you charge?”
How had she ever been attracted to this man? How had she thought he was the most handsome creature she’d ever seen? Why had her heart beat so rapidly when she saw him in his kilt? How did the sound of his voice make her skin tighten?
Evidently, her body was not connected to her mind, because even now she couldn’t help but recall how he’d kissed her senseless.
She was the stupidest woman alive.
“For the love of all that’s holy, Your Grace, will you leave?”
She could just imagine what tales Mrs. MacDonald would tell. The woman was probably listening now.
“I don’t want anything from you. I’m sorry someone left the duchess a note. All I want is to be left alone. Please.”
Thankfully, he moved to the door, the jar still in his hand.
She’d expected a last barrage of questions, but all he did was glance at her sketches on the wall and open the door.
Just as she’d suspected, Mrs. MacDonald was on the other side, a sly grin on her face.
Lorna sighed inwardly.
They both watched the duke leave the house. The moment the door closed behind him, Mrs. MacDonald rounded on her.
“You’re no widow, miss. You’re the worst of the worst. I’ve seen your type, girls who pretend to be better than you are. You’re the duke’s mistress. Why else would he come here?”
The frontal attack wasn’t completely unexpected. The duke had set things in motion by his appearance. Did he have any idea of the damage he’d done to her? Did he care?
“The Duke of Kinross came for some medicine for his mother,” she said. “The comfrey balm is for her arthritis.”
Mrs. MacDonald ignored her.
“I’m going to tell Reverend McGill. We’ll pray over you, but women like you only bring down good folk.”
What could she possibly say to the woman?
She closed the door before her landlady could say another word. Standing at the tiny window, she watched as the duke’s carriage disappeared from sight, feeling a strange confusion. She didn’t want to see him. She never wanted to see him again. Yes, she’d once been enamored of his appearance and charmed by his smile. Good looks didn’t mean a good heart. Nor could she forget the words he’d said to her that night.
Her father had always told her, A mistake done once is acceptable, Lorna, but twice is the act of a fool.
She had no intention of playing the fool around the Duke of Kinross. Not again. One life-changing mistake was enough.
Without his charm, he was a little frightening, the look in his eyes daring her to challenge him. But she had, hadn’t she? She asked him to leave and he had. A lesson, that. She was not without power in the face of the almighty Duke of Kinross.
The young girl she’d been, wise in the ways of herbs but not men, had nearly swooned over the sight of him. She’d fixed his image in her mind to recall during boring tasks or sleepless nights. She’d marked each separate minute in his company, how he looked, when he smiled, if he glanced in her direction.
That girl had disappeared in the last few months and she’d never return.
Hopefully, the duke wouldn’t, either.
But the damage had already been done.
Chapter 8
“Well? Did you see her?” his mother asked.
Alex took off his greatcoat, handing it to one of the footmen.
He went to his mother and kissed her cheek, unsurprised when she enfolded him in a hug. She never said anything before he left Blackhall, but she was always demonstrably joyful on his return.
She pulled back and slapped her hand against his chest.
“It’s been a long week and I’ve been patient, but you must answer me. Did you see Lorna?”
“Yes, I saw Lorna,” he said, taking her arm and walking with her into the family parlor. “Where’s Mary?” he asked, surveying the room.
“One of the horses has bloat,” his mother said. “She’s at the stables.”
They glanced at each other, complicit in their enjoyment of time free from Mary’s constant prattle.
He waited until she sat, then took the chair opposite her.
His mother was as tenacious as a terrier. He expected her next comment and smiled when she made it.
“The child is yours, of course,” she said, skewering him with a look.
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
She tilted her head slightly and regarded him in that way of hers.
“Do you believe the child is yours?”
He stood and walked to the sideboard, where he poured himself a whiskey, the first since that night. Instead of sitting, he walked to the window.
The view was of the north approach to the castle and beyond to Loch Gerry. Everything he could see belonged to the Russell clan and to him as its laird and the Duke of Kinross.
The ownership and the responsibility had never been a burden. From the moment he was born he’d been groomed and trained to manage Blackhall and its lands. Every lesson he’d learned from his tutors and later at school had been to further his understanding of what it meant to be duke. He was educated in mathematics in order to understand the wealth that was his to use and grow. He’d learned about Highland cattle and sheep, how to farm those properties owned in the south of Scotland. He could recite, by rote, all the various tracts and buildings owned in England and all the accounts under his name. He knew, down to a few decimal points, how much his investments had accumulated, what his working capital was, and how much he’d added to the Russell coffers.
He knew his place in the world, what was expected of him, and how he could best achieve his goals.
Lorna Gordon had shifted all that.
Perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame her for his sudden disorientation. He was as responsible. He’d been an idiot that night, ridden by lust.
“Is there a possibility it could be your child, Alex?”
“I’ve never heard of . . .” He stumbled to a halt. He’d been about to say something personal and private to his mother, for the love of God.
She grabbed the frame for her embroidery, picked up the needle and began stabbing at the fabric.
He wondered what she would do with this project. More than one had been completed and then carefully slashed.
“I hate needlework,” she told him when he’d first seen her do it. “But it’s either that or whiskey.”
He wondered if she still felt the same. Perhaps he should pour her a glass and urge her away from the bright flowered pattern on a beige background. Would she destroy this one, too, or would it become another cover for a footstool?
“Well?” she asked, glancing up at him. “You never heard of what?”
“I can’t say.”
“You must.” She pursed her lips, an expression of impatience he’d seen since he was a boy. “We must discuss this issue. Now is not the time for you to be reticent.”
Reticent? That word was hardly fair. It wasn’t being reticent to refrain from talking about intercourse with his mother.
He only shook his head.
“Why can’t the baby be yours? Did you not have an affair with the woman?”
“No,
” he said, glancing at her. “I did not. It was only the once.”
Her eyebrows rose. “And? It only takes the once, Alex. Surely you know that.”
“She’s taking advantage of the situation,” he said.
“How so? Did she demand money from you?”
“No, she ordered me out of her lodgings.”
She’d sat there, stubborn and proud, his recollection of her gaze not unlike that memory of seven months earlier when she’d called him a mouse.
“Your picture of Lorna is not one that I have,” she said. “Does she have a delightful smile? And the loveliest brown eyes?”
“Yes.”
“That’s most definitely Lorna. She’s always had such a sweet disposition.”
Sweet? He wouldn’t label the woman sweet.
After tucking the needle in the top of the fabric, his mother sat back.
“Why are you uncertain about the baby, Alex?”
“She had never . . .” No, the word wouldn’t pass his lips.
“She was a virgin?”
He took a sip of his whiskey. “It was only the one time.”
“Oh, Alex, I never thought you could be so naive. Of course the baby could be yours. I would urge you to go look in the mirror if you doubt that.”
“What?”
Her smile broadened. “Your father was virile, my son, while I was fertile. Nine months to the day of our wedding, you were born. Like father, like son?”
Bloody hell.
“What are you going to do?”
He didn’t have any idea. Normally, when he faced a roadblock, he never stopped looking for a way around it. In this part of the Highlands an occasional landslide would obliterate a track around a mountain. He didn’t turn around and return to his starting point. He just cleared the road. He faced any other obstacles in his life the same way.
Unless the obstacle was a woman heavily pregnant.
“What if the child is yours?” she asked. “Can you ignore its existence?” Her gaze didn’t move from his face. “I don’t know how you could. I would hope that you wouldn’t.”
She straightened her shoulders, placed one hand over the other and stared up at him, unsmiling.
“You’ve given no thought to marrying again, Alex. You’ve expressed no desire to do so.”
“Why on earth should I? And have my wife bed half of Edinburgh?”
She shook her head. “One bad experience should not color your reaction to all women, Alex.”
“What I’ve seen hasn’t led me to give your sex the benefit of the doubt, Mother.”
“You have no children, Alex. Did you never think that this might be your only child?”
“No, I hadn’t.”
Her smile thinned. “Such things normally happen in the course of events, my son. You should have considered that before you took her to your bed.”
That wasn’t exactly how it had happened.
“Do you dislike her so much, then, Alex? Why would you bed someone you dislike?”
“I don’t dislike her,” he said, feeling his way through the words. “She’s not what I expected.” She’d asked him to leave. No, she’d demanded it. He could still see the antipathy in her glare. “She has a great deal of pride.”
“You mean for a maid.”
He glanced at her.
“She was forced into service by circumstances, I believe. Most women are.”
He’d honestly never thought about why someone would come to work at Blackhall. He’d taken the servants for granted, that they would be there when he needed something done, that his meals would be prepared, that his rooms would be cleaned. He didn’t think about it any more than he thought about Blackhall’s many roofs.
But the servants were people, not tiles.
“She draws,” he said.
“She does?”
“Quite well, too.”
“Does she?”
He glanced at her. There was a note in her voice he couldn’t identify.
“I found her to be a woman of good character,” she said, picking up her embroidery once again.
She didn’t speak for a moment and he didn’t rush to fill the silence with words.
“Why is a woman considered fallen while the man is exempt from any responsibility?” she finally said. “Women who have children out of wedlock are treated badly, Alex. They’re rebuffed and reviled, seen as creatures of sin. They can’t work if they have a baby to care for.”
She frowned at one offending flower and sent her needle like a sword into the fabric.
“Perhaps that’s why there are so many baby farmers.”
“Baby farmers?” he asked.
She nodded. “Mary told me about them. An article she read in the newspaper. They’re women who advertise that they’ll care for the infant for a small fee. Most poor girls in Lorna’s situation have no choice. They have to go back to work and they have no one to care for their children. Unfortunately, most of those babies die of starvation or neglect.”
She sighed, shook her head at her needlework, then glanced up at him.
“I do hope that Lorna is not forced to do such a thing. Does she have any resources?”
He shook his head.
She lived in a hovel. He didn’t like remembering her small dark lodgings. The room was cold, the air stagnant with unpleasant smells.
Why had there been mud on her face?
She was sticking to his mind in a way that most women didn’t. A series of vignettes replayed themselves in a loop: Lorna with her dress twisted around her waist, her voluptuous breasts revealed in the dim light. Lorna, held captive by laughter as her wig disappeared into the storm. Lorna, her hand on the door latch, wanting to escape the ball. Lorna, heavily pregnant. And one that he remembered too well: Lorna, glancing up at him with contempt in her gaze, as if he were the most loathsome creature on earth.
He was most assuredly not a prancing mouse.
To the best of his knowledge, he’d never fathered another child. He’d always had his wits about him, not to mention discretion. That night, that infamous night—for which he would pay dearly for the rest of his life—was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Whiskey was partly to blame, but lust was responsible for the rest of it.
He’d had to have her. If it had been up against a wall, he would’ve done that, too. If Mary had succeeded in interrupting them, he would have turned his head and growled at her, “Go the hell away.” Nothing could have come between him and Lorna. Nothing, and he’d never felt that way about another woman.
He should go to his office and concentrate on the treatise he was about to submit to the society. He’d come up with a way of classifying the fingerprints he’d obtained in Inverness. He was separating each fingerprint into quadrants and labeling them by the predominance of each sworl and curve. That way, he could more easily identify a subject than if he had to scan through hundreds and, hopefully—as time progressed—thousands of cards.
He glanced over at his mother. She was smiling as she stared at the embroidery pattern, but he knew that smile was for him.
“I think the child is mine,” he said. “Even though she wouldn’t admit it.”
His child. The knowledge was like a blow to his chest.
Lorna hadn’t tried to convince him. She hadn’t charmed him or even smiled at him. All she wanted was his absence.
At his comment, his mother’s right eyebrow arched toward her forehead. She had the most expressive brows of anyone he’d ever seen. Without a word spoken, she could castigate, ridicule, or question.
He didn’t doubt that she was doing all three right now.
“I’ll send for Edmonds,” he said, “and provide for her and the child. She won’t have to worry. She certainly won’t need the services of a baby farmer.”
“That’s generous of you, Alex.”
“We contribute to several good causes,” he said. He would simply view Lorna as another one.
Once he was certain she was settled,
he wouldn’t have to think about her any further. He could go about his life without his conscience whispering to him.
As far as his memory, he would do everything in his power to forget her.
Chapter 9
Lorna put on her cloak and gathered up her herbs, all neatly tied with ribbon. She’d carefully penned instructions for their use either as a tea or a soak. A more difficult task than it had seemed at first because her fingers were stiff from the cold.
She’d managed to avoid her landlady for two days, but she wasn’t so lucky when she opened the door.
Mrs. MacDonald was standing there waiting for her.
“You make sure you sell enough of those herbal remedies of yours to pay the rent.”
Every week when she went to market, the landlady said the same thing. Every Wednesday she gave the woman the same answer.
“I’ll do my best, Mrs. MacDonald.”
“You see that you do. I’m not a poorhouse.”
Short of bodily moving the woman, she had to stand there and listen to her harangue. She was not going to hang her head low. Nor was she going to cry. Doing so would only please Mrs. MacDonald, but it wouldn’t soften her heart.
“If I don’t get to the market,” she said after a moment, “I won’t be able to sell anything. The best spots will be taken. Do you want your rent?”
Greed evidently worked when nothing else did.
The woman stepped back, letting her escape.
The day was bitterly cold and stormy, with cold drizzly rain that was mostly ice. Despite the weather, the market was crowded. She found a place near the end of the first row to set up.
Although she saw many of her regulars, she wasn’t making as many sales as she had the week earlier, which was a disappointment. She’d promised herself that if she made the same as then, she would splurge and buy some coal to heat her room.
Several villagers passed her table without glancing at her once. Only old Mrs. McGowan stopped by to comment about the cold.
“It’s the faoilteach,” the woman said. “That’s why my joints hurt so bad.”
She went on to tell Lorna that, according to the Highland superstition, the weather between the eleventh and fifteenth of February predicted the rest of the spring weather. The worse the faoilteach, the better the weather to come.
