He took one step closer. “You are a guest under my roof. You have only to ask, and any aid I can offer, any courtesy, is yours, Miss Merrick.” She was also his only ally in his efforts to wed the Daniels fortune, which fact excused his tarrying with her between the bookshelves.
She mumbled something, so he took one more step closer, and now he could see her cheeks were flaming.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Merrick?”
“Augusta.” She raised her gaze to his, her eyes lit with determination. “It might make your informality with Genie less difficult for her if you adopt the same address with Hester and myself. Just don’t…”
This was costing her, this declaration. For it was a declaration of some sort—maybe of support for his goal, or maybe of something else entirely.
“Just don’t?” he prodded. He put his hands behind his back lest he tuck that curl up into its rightful place.
“Don’t call me Miss Gussie, or Gus, or Miss Auggie, or—”
She could not have blushed any more brightly red, and abruptly, he did not want to look on her distress. Did not want to cause it.
“I’m Ian.” He interrupted her to say this. “I didn’t think your cousin would remain at table if I suggested we use first names only, though you may call me Ian if you like, and I shall call you Miss Augusta. My brothers will not refer to me by the title unless they are wroth with me, and it grows… awkward, to be Ian to this person, Balfour to that, my lord to the other.”
Her blush was fading, though this left a nice color in her usually pale cheeks.
“My grandfather said the same thing, said titles were confusing at best, and a damned lot of nonsense generally.” He thought she’d cause herself to blush again, but instead she gave him another of those shy, mischievous smiles. “A lady oughtn’t to use such language.”
She glanced around, as if someone might censure her for using “such language.”
“A guest in my home, particularly in my library, can use any damned language necessary to express herself. I hope you enjoy the book, Miss Augusta.”
And then he did something impulsive—something a little brave, a little selfish, and more than a little stupid. He gave her a peck on the lips.
A bit more than a peck, really. Enough of a kiss to learn that she had soft, sweet lips and she hadn’t been kissed worth a damn in recent memory. Her hand brushed down his chest, a fleeting caress to him, no doubt a simple bid for balance to her.
When he straightened, her hand stayed on the wool of his morning coat for one moment, while both of them stood there, staring at her elegant, bare fingers smoothing down his lapel.
Temptation barreled out of the depths of Ian’s male imagination, ambushing common sense with ideas Ian had no business thinking.
He would love to teach her to kiss.
He would love to take down all that black, shining hair and bury his face in it.
He would love to walk barefoot with her in the morning dew and lay her down in the cool summer grass…
While the sheer, beaming innocence of her smile said Augusta Merrick had no clue what he was thinking, no clue about any of it.
“I bid you a good morning, Miss Augusta.” She looked so pleased at the simple use of her name Ian would have turned from the sight even if there were not hours of work awaiting him elsewhere, and even if he had not flirted with lunacy by kissing her.
Not that anybody would mind if he dallied with her—she was a poor relation, and marriage was a calculating, unromantic business among the titled English… and lately the titled Scots, apparently.
He would mind if he dallied with her, and what a damned inconvenience that was.
As he made his way to the stables, Ian acknowledged he and Miss Merrick—Miss Augusta—had something else unexpected in common.
When he and his family had made the decision earlier in the year to file to have Asher declared dead, Mary Fran had insisted it was time for Ian to start using the title. He’d had a courtesy title—Viscount Deesely—but he’d never used it much. With the stroke of a pen on some arcane court pleadings, he’d become not Ian, but—presumptively and presumptuously—my lord, Balfour, Lord Balfour. The earl, but for the remaining legalities.
He could go entire weeks without hearing his own name, unless he was in company with his siblings. Inside, inside his very sense of himself, he felt the impending loss of some part of his identity with each use of more formal address. He couldn’t reverse this sense of loss; he relied on his family to do it for him by frequent use of his given name.
And now he knew he was not alone in his sense of isolation. Even proper little spinsters from the backwaters of Oxfordshire could suffer the same gnawing fear that if nobody ever called them by name, a part of them would eventually cease to be.
***
“They ride well for a trio of proper ladies.” Gil made the observation grudgingly, because women who rode well were women who’d had the luxury of spare time to learn, indulgent male relations to teach them, and good horses to learn on.
“Mary Fran could have come along if she’d wanted to,” Connor replied. “She’d rather terrorize the staff and concoct spells and incantations to shrivel the baron’s pizzle.”
“Hush, you.” Gil nudged his horse forward to keep in step with Connor’s younger mount. “Mary Fran hates that sort of talk.”
“Then she shouldn’t go dancing naked under the Beltane moon, should she?”
Gil did not ask whether Con was speaking figuratively or if he’d really seen their sister comporting herself without clothing by moonlight. God knew, Mary Fran was entitled to a little eccentricity, but Ian would be beside himself if she’d gone that far.
“The widow…” Con hesitated, his gaze on Mrs. Redmond, Miss Genie, and Miss Hester riding up ahead. They made a pretty picture even on the less-than-elegant mounts available from the Balfour stables.
“She seems the friendly sort,” Gil said, hoping to inspire Con to speak whatever piece he’d intended to speak. Miss Genie was petting her horse, stroking a gloved hand over the mare’s crest with a slow, easy rhythm that had the muscles over Gil’s shoulder blades relaxing.
“She’s the wealthy sort,” Con said. “Or was when she married into the Daniels family.”
“I’ve never held wealth against a woman.”
Con shook his head, so Gil resigned himself to patience. Con and Mary Fran were close, just as Ian and Asher had been close. Between those pairs of siblings, there had always been unspoken communication, while Gil struggled along parsing meaning as best he could and resorting to blunt inquiry more often than not.
“She said she does not want her niece to be married just for her wealth.” Con stretched up in his stirrups then settled back into the saddle. “Said that befell her, and she wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I told her I was sorry she’d been treated that way, which is hypocritical when my own brother intends the same thing toward her niece.”
Connor would loathe feeling hypocritical even more than he loathed running a glorified guesthouse for wealthy English pains in the arse. And of course he would apologize for a marriage Julia Redmond probably hadn’t even found truly bothersome.
“She wasn’t scolding you, Connor. She was making a chaperone’s version of small talk.”
Con indulged in one of his infernal silences, which might presage a silent exit, a grunted curse, or a startling profundity.
“She was confiding in me, or something.”
Gil knew himself to be handsome, knew Ian was handsomer, and knew Connor was… Connor was the braw fellow who ought to be watched and never was. His gruff ways, his indifference to refined dress and manners, and his rare, bold smile earned him all manner of female attention.
But confidences?
Gil ordered h
imself back to the topic at hand: “Ian isn’t an unfeeling brute. He’ll make Miss Daniels a passable husband.”
But as he spoke, Gil recalled the pathetic relief in Genie Daniels’s eyes that morning at breakfast when this outing—sans Ian—had been suggested. She’d had the trapped-prey air Gil felt every time he donned evening attire or stood up with a proper young lady at the local assemblies.
A look of such hopelessness, Gil had to wonder at it. “Let’s catch up to them.” He nudged his mount stoutly with his heels. “You can smooth the pretty widow’s feathers, while I flirt with the sisters.”
Connor said nothing, urging his horse to a canter and then falling in beside Mrs. Redmond, whose mare was winded enough that walking the rest of the way to the barn would be a kindness to the horse, if not exactly a kindness to her escort.
“Come, ladies, I can show you a path that will let us canter through the woods.” Gil offered them the smile useful for getting him his ale before any other patron, but only Hester returned it.
“I’m not in shape for any canters through the woods,” she said. “Particularly not after sitting on that train for an eternity. You and Genie go, and I’ll keep Aunt company.”
“Miss Genie? It cuts through the woods, where Her Majesty sometimes likes to walk and His Highness has been known to ride.”
Shameless of him to use such bait, but effective.
“We’ll take a groom, of course?” She glanced back at her aunt, whose horse was toddling along beside Con’s at the most sedate walk.
“We will,” Gil assured her. “Lavelle! You’re with us.”
The red-haired Lavelle, mounted on a sturdy cob, looked mightily relieved at the prospect of a meander through the woods. He fell in fifty paces back like the good but lazy lad he was. Gil well knew the last man back to the stables had fewer horses to put up.
Genie’s mare had to be as fatigued as the other mounts, so Gil kept them to an easy trot until they approached the woods, then slowed to a walk.
He waited for his companion to catch up before speaking. “Our woods abut those of Balmoral, though elsewhere, there are smallholdings between the two properties.”
“Have you met Her Majesty?”
“I have.” Victoria was downright neighborly at times, for a queen. Just another clucking, fussing, well-to-do mother with a large brood to keep track of and a doting husband at her side. “I’ve hunted and fished with Albert as well, and met such of the children as are old enough to be out and about.”
“The royal couple must be very much in love.” Her voice was so wistful, Gil glanced over at her. Her expression matched her melancholy tone, at variance with the sunny, breezy day.
“They’re up to at least a half-dozen children, and chronic rumors of more on the way,” Gil said. “If they’re not in love, they’re certainly making the best of their situation.” He tried his signature smile on her again, but she just looked… sad.
“Do I offend, Miss Daniels?”
She shook her head. “Marriage is such a daunting prospect, and to be married and the monarch…”
Marriage was daunting, or marriage to his brother? Or marriage to any Scottish title? “What about it daunts you?”
She swallowed. “There’s no hiding anything in a marriage, not if your husband doesn’t want to leave you any privacy. There’s no freedom, no hope. You can risk your life giving the man babies, and then he can take them from you and you’ll never see them again. You’re trapped, a slave with no hope of manumission save his death—or your own.”
Gil’s brows rose as she spoke. These were desperate words from a woman who’d had her pick of the swains from three London Seasons. “What is your mother doing right this minute, Miss Daniels?”
She turned a puzzled expression on him. “I don’t know.”
“I’d hazard your father doesn’t know, either. For all the weeks he’s up here with you, for all the weeks he’ll be shooting grouse in Northumbria, your mother will have complete independence from her entire family.”
The lady fiddled with the reins. “She will not. Papa has the servants in his pocket, and they’ll tattle on her in an instant. He believes a man’s home is his castle and his word is law within his own walls.”
She turned her face straight up into the sunlight pouring through the pines above them, as if she’d entreat heaven itself for agreement, while Gil struggled for something to say. Things went from bad to worse when she started to cry, which was no damned help at all.
“For God’s sake.” He caught Lavelle’s vacant gaze and nodded in the direction of the stables. The groom obligingly turned back the way they’d come, while Gil reached over and pulled Miss Daniels’s horse up. “Madam, this will not do.”
He swung off and came around to lift her from the saddle. She was boneless with her upset, sliding down his length like an exhausted child, then leaning on him, weeping softly.
“I can’t do this.” Her voice was low, miserable, and heartfelt. “I can’t impose on your family’s hospitality and let my father spend his precious coin when I have no intention of considering your brother’s suit. It isn’t… sporting.”
Sporting? What an odd notion in the politics of mutually advantageous matrimony between English and Scot.
“Come sit.” He took off his riding gloves and pulled her by the hand to a nicely situated boulder. When she was seated beside him, a shaft of sunlight gilding her hair, he fished out his handkerchief. “What is this really about?”
“I don’t know you, Mr. MacGregor, nor would I burden you with confidences even if I did.” She took his handkerchief and daintily blotted her eyes. “I apologize for this unseemly display. I simply do not want to marry like this, not your brother, not any titled man my parents might put up to the task.”
More tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, and Gil wished he might in that moment follow Asher into the wilds of Canada. “Ian will treat you with utmost civility.”
Except when he was swiving the woman witless in service to the damned title. There probably wasn’t a civil way to conceive heirs, not for a Scotsman and his wife.
“He will marry me.” This last was said so miserably Gil sensed his companion was holding on to her limited store of composure by a slender, taut thread. He settled his hand on her nape, rubbing his thumb gently over the bone that bumped at the top of her spine, much as he might seek to calm a nervous hound by touch.
“You assume because he must marry lucratively Ian will resent his wife or neglect her. This is not so.” She remained silent, but he thought some of her anxiety might be easing. “Ian and I have the same mother, as do Con and Mary Fran, but none of us had our mothers for long, or even our grandmothers. We adore mothers, do you hear me? We adore Mary Fran because she’s Fiona’s mother; we adore wee Fiona because someday she might be a mother too.”
Genie opened her eyes and turned her head to peer at him. The sight hit Gil with a visceral punch, sucked the air right out of his lungs. Her lashes were spiky with tears, her blue eyes luminous, and the sadness he saw there…
He drew back, lest he comfort her in ways guaranteed to get his face slapped, and then his lights put out by an irate brother with not even a prospective bride to woo.
“You must discuss this with Ian.” He patted her hand, resenting her riding gloves because they prevented him from enjoying the feel of her silky skin beneath his fingers.
“I could not.”
She swayed toward him and he was not strong enough to stand up, get on his horse, and leave the lady to dry her own tears. He tucked his arm around her waist as her head came to rest on his shoulder.
“Ian is a good man, Miss Daniels. The best. You think the title is what you’ll get out of the marriage, but that’s not the half of it. He’s loyal as hell, hardworking, fair, honest. Go
d knows he’s patient and generous with his family…” Gil trailed off, because she’d let out a sigh, and the hair on the crown of her head was tickling his cheek, bringing the scent of rose water and warm, clean female to his nose.
“I can’t discuss this with him,” she said. “I did discuss it with a solicitor, though. Once a woman is married, she is more or less her husband’s chattel, even if the contracts try to put limitations on his conduct. And there are far worse cruelties than raising your hand to someone. Trust me, Mr. MacGregor, your brother and I would make each other miserable.”
Gil fell silent, willing to steal a few minutes with a pretty woman plastered to him in the privacy of the woods. It should have been toweringly awkward, though she was making no move to leave his side.
“Being the spare can feel a little like being slave,” he said after a moment, trailing his hand over her back. “You can’t strike out on your own, and you can’t quite get out from under the title, though you dare not long for it, either. You sometimes think you’ll do anything to see your brothers wed and starting nice big families of healthy boys.”
He could not see her mouth, but he could feel her smile.
“I thought Scottish titles could often pass through the female line.”
“They can, many of them, and even be held by females. Ours has never been held by a female, though it originated like several dukedoms, when a young married lady caught the eye of Charles II.” He kept his arm around her for a few more moments while he wondered at his own motives.
“You are a very good brother,” she said at length. She sat up, taking away the warmth of her body along Gil’s side. “And I am sorry to be so dramatic. Papa has his heart set on this match, and I… I have my reasons, Mr. MacGregor, but I am averse to the kind of marriage my parents have chosen for me.”
There was a puzzle here, though Gil thanked God it wasn’t his puzzle to unlock. “Are you averse to marrying anybody with a title, or are your reasons specific to Ian?”
The Bridegroom Wore Plaid Page 5
