The Bridegroom Wore Plaid

by Grace Burrowes

  Mary Fran sat right back down, comprehending the phrase “weak in the knees” for the first time in her life.

  “Lord Balfour says somebody opened his gate,” Miss Augusta said. “Romeo’s apparently confined with not only stout gates, but gates that are both latched and then tied shut. On the other side of our pasture was a herd of yearling ladies, and they brought out Romeo’s protective streak.”

  “Oh, Fee…” Mary Fran gazed at her daughter. Fiona sat looking innocent and tidy in a clean pinny, somebody having redone her braids, her ankles demurely crossed.

  She might at that moment have been just as tidily laid out in the parlor. “Fiona Ursula MacGregor, you come here to me.” Mary Fran spread her arms, needing to hold her child. Fiona took one hesitant step then swiftly closed the distance.

  “Your daughter kept a cool head. She manned the gate for Lord Balfour so Romeo couldn’t get up to any more mischief. She didn’t panic, she didn’t argue, she didn’t question. You are raising a very brave and sensible young lady, Lady Mary Frances.”

  “Fiona MacGregor, what am I to do with you?” Mary Fran hugged her child shamelessly. “That bull could have been the end of you.” She lapsed into the Gaelic, though it was rude before a guest. Still, a mother needed to scold in her native tongue, and to be reassured, and to tell her daughter she was loved.

  When Fiona had related her great tale with many embellishments and much waving of hands—and even some snorting and pawing—she lapsed into silence, drowsing on her mother’s shoulder. Miss Augusta had slipped out somewhere along the second or third telling, leaving Mary Fran to carry the child up to bed and tuck her in.

  She didn’t always tuck in her own child. One of the maids saw to it if Mary Fran were too busy, just as Miss Augusta had seen to saving Fiona’s life when Mary Fran had been too busy today.

  Feeling guilt about to swamp her composure, Mary Fran grabbed a shawl and took herself to the back terrace. It was nearly dark, and the stars already coming out, meaning Fiona had been up quite late telling her story, working the worry and fear of it out of her system.

  And into her mother’s.

  ***

  Augusta had figured out at an early age that she lacked something all the other girls seemed to possess in abundance. Something quintessentially feminine and appealing to the gentlemen searching for brides, something that made a woman truly care which bonnet showed off a new dress to best advantage.

  She’d attributed her lack of enthusiasm for shopping or swilling tea by the hour to having spent a great deal of her early years with her father. In the secret depths of her youthful heart, she’d hoped her husband might be the one man who could stir her to passion—about marriage, about bonnets, about wifely duties, about anything the other girls took such delight in.

  Mr. Post-Williams had been ardent, he’d been impassioned, he’d been persistent as the devil and also conscientious regarding his tooth powder, so Augusta had capitulated only to be disappointed again.

  Disappointed worse than ever.

  Lord Balfour was going to disappoint her too—not in the same way of course—but unlike all the men who’d clamored for Augusta’s hand, Balfour stirred her passions.

  She was out of bed when the birdsong started, eager for their outing. He’d been a gentleman in each of their encounters, whether in private or surrounded by family, but he’d been a friendly gentleman. An affectionate gentleman, even.

  Which was occasioning great, foolish giddiness on Augusta’s part.

  She wanted him for her own. Wanted him reading her poetry as he’d read to Genie, who’d been oddly subdued by his gallantry and patience.

  Augusta wanted his smiles and quiet asides; she wanted his devotion to family and his boundless physical vigor. She wanted his restless, penetrating mind and his humor, and more than anything in her life, she wanted to know him intimately.

  This was very bad of her, very foolish. She desperately hoped she could keep from acting on such mad notions, but the intensity of the feelings consuming her was nigh overwhelming. Fortunately, Balfour showed no signs of reciprocal inclinations, and this was a relief. Augusta had no doubt Uncle would toss her off her property in Oxfordshire if she interfered with Genie’s prospects.

  She wouldn’t interfere, but she would steal a few hours with the earl for herself. She’d have his smiles; she’d have his companionship; she’d even have the occasional opportunity to take his arm or hold his hand.

  He was a hand-holder; she’d gathered that much. Lovely quality in a man, but not one she’d ever found in the effete and proper Englishmen who’d kept her company in the past. Balfour was different in so many ways.

  Or maybe, she was different.

  Augusta dressed quickly and considered this possibility. She was older, she’d suffered some bad years, she’d fashioned a meaningful life for herself with very few raw materials. Maybe her hand was more worth holding now, at least to a man who had more on his mind than fabricating tales of having gone walking with the Queen.

  She laced up her old half boots—the comfortable ones—pinned up her braid, and slipped out the door to the terrace.

  She caught sight of his lordship—Ian—standing in the early morning light at the edge of the terrace. He had a rucksack strapped to his back, but he was bareheaded and bare-handed, his kilt a subdued pattern of gray, red, and black. He smiled as he caught sight of her and held out his hand to her.

  This morning, being different was going to be wonderful indeed.

  ***

  Augusta Merrick was in surprisingly good condition, or she was too sensible to lace her stays to the ridiculous extremes that passed for fashion in the South.

  Ian was taking her up the easy way, nonetheless—the long way—the only way that didn’t require the nimbleness of a goat, nerves of steel, and some fervent prayers to the gods of weather.

  It did, however, require him to hold her hand, to help her over the various rough patches in the goat track, to keep a hand on her waist when the path widened enough to let them walk side by side.

  Just for this morning, he’d given up chastising himself for desiring his intended’s cousin. As a married man, he was going to have to discipline himself to look and not touch, perhaps to not touch even his own wife.

  The thought coincided with a cloud passing before the sun, turning the summer air chilly in typical Scottish fashion. The Almighty was nothing if not subtle in His humor.

  “How much farther to the top?”

  She wasn’t even out of breath, and they’d been climbing gradually but steadily for nearly an hour. “Not much farther. Let’s rest a bit, shall we?”

  She looked around and picked out a boulder from among the many possibilities.

  “Do you come up here often?” As she spoke, she was unpinning her braid, which had been threatening to lose its moorings. Lifting both arms shifted her breasts gently under her shirtwaist, forcing Ian to focus on the sky.

  “Not as often as I did as a boy. The view is magnificent, but the time to make the climb becomes harder and harder to find.” The view was riveting, in fact.

  “You attended university in Edinburgh, didn’t you?”

  Down came the braid, a thick dark rope long enough to reach her lap.

  Bloody damn… He pulled his gaze away from the blue hair ribbon twined around the end of her braid, the little bow resting right over her…

  “I studied law in Aberdeen.” He didn’t sit right beside her, but took the next boulder over, downwind, so he could catch her lilac scent without being too obvious. “The MacGregors were put to the horn and denied the use of their very name by action of law. The Clearances were conducted by operation of law. The sovereignty of Scotland was obliterated by passage of laws. I thought it behooved a prudent Scotsman to acquaint himself thor
oughly with this business of the law.”

  “England’s sovereignty was obliterated too.” She held up one of her half boots and upended it with a vigorous shake. Ian wrenched his mind away from the memory of her bare toes. “The Acts of Union were simultaneous and a Scottish monarch put on the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.”

  She did this. She argued with him, argued history, politics, animal husbandry. They’d argued all the way up the hillside, and he’d never enjoyed a woman’s company more—with his clothes on.

  “Give me your pins, Augusta.”

  They’d also dropped any pretense of using titles and polite address with each other. She graced him with an enigmatic smile and passed over a handful of hairpins. He sidled around to stand behind her where she sat.

  He gathered up her braid and coiled it neatly at her nape. “So why don’t we call this wonderful island of ours Great Celtland or Great Pictland? Why did we name it after the English heathen of yore?”

  “We don’t call it great Saxland or Great England.”

  “Hold still.” He forced his fingers to pin up her braid, when what they wanted to do was unravel the thing entirely. Admitting his attraction to her should have made restraint easier—not next to impossible. “You have to concede England certainly has a greater hand in Scottish matters than Scotland does in English matters.”

  She turned her head to peer at him while Ian was trying to pin up her braid. “One has the impression Scotland would consider taking a hand in English matters boring, a waste of time, and beneath the notice of most Scotsmen.”

  “Certainly thankless.” He finished with her braid and stepped back, adjusting himself in his clothes while her gaze was on the valley spreading out below them.

  “You have a very beautiful home, Ian. I can see why you’re so protective of it.”

  “Proud of it. So many of the clans lost everything. Their holdings in the mountains are mostly ruins, their lands overrun by sheep, their people gone across the waters never to return. What the Clearances and the famine didn’t take from us, emigration and the Highland regiments have. The MacGregors have been lucky.”

  She turned to regard him, her violet eyes showing the keen intelligence he’d noted even in his first impression of her. “How were you lucky?”

  Eight

  The cloud passed from before the sun. Ian focused on answering Augusta’s last question in its least metaphorical sense. How had his branch of the clan been lucky?

  “The earldom was a stroke of luck, another one of Charles II’s generous impulses with a fellow willing to ignore royal interest in his lady. I’ve often thought most peers never recall another man’s given name if he has a title, and thus, we weren’t tarred with quite the same brush as the rest of the clan. And our land here is among the best in the shire, mostly because we have an enormous bat cave to the south, which we guard more jealously than a mother wolf guards her cubs.”

  “A bat cave?”

  “The droppings are among the best fertilizer you’ll ever find. The local soil is thin at best, but a hundred fifty years of proper management and care, and our land has improved enough to produce a good crop of oats, though wheat still remains a challenge. Others are following suit, but it’s a painstaking process.”

  “You sell this fertilizer?”

  “Very dearly, but yes. We also make a present of some to our royal neighbor each year.”

  “You’re paying her back, aren’t you? Making reparation to the royal coffers for the earldom bestowed on your family all those years ago.”

  She would understand that. “It’s more a token. If Charles hadn’t had such a wandering eye, there would have been no need to bestow placatory titles.”

  She wrinkled her nose in thought. “Except many a monarch has the wandering eye and doesn’t bestow the titles in gratitude, so you feel indebted. Being Scots, and MacGregors, you repay the debt with your most precious coin.”

  “Perhaps.” Being Scots, they also enjoyed the profound irony of gifting the monarch with bat manure. “Are you ready to move on?”

  “Another moment. The view is lovely.”

  She was lovely. Her complexion had bloomed since she’d arrived in Scotland, and her hair shone with glossy highlights. She sat in the morning sunshine, face turned up to the breeze, eyes closed, the picture of a woman awaiting her lover’s kiss.

  She was clothed in a high-waisted old-fashioned dress that the breeze molded to her figure without interference from hoops or crinolines.

  He’d felt that figure against his body, could attest to the generosity of its curves. His intended had been in his arms as well, when she’d turned her ankle, but for some reason, Ian had formed no impression of Genie’s feminine attributes.

  Bad enough when a man wanted to touch but could only look. Worse yet when he’d touched and not even noticed.

  Augusta rose and smiled at him. “Shall we continue?”

  “This way.” He took her hand in his and led her up the track. The way became narrower and steeper—it was a trail used to herd livestock to higher elevations in summer—but she could have navigated the path without his aid.

  “How is it you’re accustomed to walking like this, Augusta?”

  “I occupy a small manor home in Oxfordshire with an elderly widowed cousin. I’m two miles from town, and unless I’m hauling a load to or from market in my pony cart, I usually walk the distance. Then too, tending to one’s animals and one’s garden properly requires diligent effort.”

  He tried to both savor and ignore the feel of her hand in his—which would soon drive him daft. “You have no servants?”

  “We have a housekeeper and maid-of-all-work living in, and a day man in most seasons. My cousin has a lady’s maid nearly as old as she is. Why?”

  “I heard you speaking with Mary Fran the other morning, describing your ramblings as a child.”

  She glanced over at him and dropped his hand, ostensibly to smooth back an errant strand of hair, though she didn’t take his hand again. “I’m not sure which conversation you refer to.”

  Just like that, she was English to the teeth. Chilly, proper, and punctiliously civil. It made him want to warm her up again, to mess with her hair, to see her bare… feet.

  Bloody damn, he hadn’t been this far gone since adolescence.

  “I refer to the conversation where you told Mary Fran you were acquainted with everybody on your father’s estate, from the goose girl to the beekeeper.”

  “And your point?”

  “An estate with a goose girl, a beekeeper, and all those other positions is a big place, Augusta. Your parents were wealthy.”

  “Quite.” She smoothed the lock of hair back again, though it hadn’t come loose from behind her ear. “Or I assumed they were.”

  “So why are you living like shabby gentry now? Even if your father suspected you were illegitimate, he would have made provision for you. Your uncle certainly has coin to spare, so much coin he can buy his daughter a relatively well-respected title.”

  She remained silent while scrambling over a rockslide blocking the path, then waited for Ian to catch up to her.

  “This is not a polite topic of conversation, my lord.”

  He smiled at her attempt to reestablish the lines. “Augusta, I am worried about you. How do you go on? Have you coin of your own? Did you choose this obscurity, or does it chafe? For a single woman to live virtually alone…”

  She was marching forth again, her back to him because the way was too narrow to walk side by side. She was making an assault on the summit now, no longer out ambling through a Scottish summer morning, and clearly, he had offended her.

  “Augusta, forget I asked, please.”

  She nodded without turning, which suggested Ian hadn’t only
offended her dignity, he’d also hurt her feelings.

  They continued on in silence until near the rocky tor itself, where the way opened up enough that he could take her hand again. She allowed it, which relieved him inordinately.

  “Oh… my.” She stopped abruptly right beside him as they gained the base of the tor. At their backs, rocks soared up another thirty feet from the hilltop, and before them lay a vista clear across the shire.

  “We haven’t views like this in Oxford.” She swung her gaze off to the west, where a rugged line of purple mountains created the horizon. “I have never seen… It’s beautiful, Ian. Breathtaking. Thank you for showing me this. And you’re right, I do want to sketch it. I want to sit here until fall and sketch it as the birches turn golden, and then watch as the snow covers those peaks and the beasts huddle in the hollows. I want to see spring take over the land from up here…”

  She turned, maybe to make sure he wasn’t laughing at her.

  “And you want to watch as it blooms into summer,” he finished for her. “As a boy, I understood God better once I’d seen the world from up here, and I wondered how so much of my family could leave beauty such as this behind them. The property with all the new construction is Balmoral, and my own home is back that way, to the southwest, near the base of the mountain that looks like a saddle.”

  “Your home?”

  He dropped her hand and shifted behind her, raising his arm over her shoulder. “Just there. On the slope of that mountain. The name of the place translates to something like ‘heart’s refuge.’ The Scots are romantic about the most prosaic things.”

  And he was inhaling the fragrance of her hair, helpless not to.

  “Ian?” She turned her face, exposing her nape. “Before, when you asked about my circumstances? I don’t have the answers.”