Hannah drew the lilacs under her nose, though her expression suggested their fragrance was lacking. “A remittance man, then. Malcolm asked me if I liked you. He wants me to like you.”
A pronouncement such as that might presage Hannah’s intent to flee the gazebo, so Asher took possession of her bare hand and brushed his thumb across her knuckles. “Did you dissemble prettily and tell him you found me very agreeable?”
She regarded his thumb, the motion of it back and forth across the smooth skin of her hand. He’d touched her for his own pleasure, and because he needed to, but with her acquiescence in the contact, it became something else entirely.
“I told him I both like and respect you. I also desire you. I didn’t tell him that.”
He dropped her hand then wished he hadn’t. “You are going to harangue me now about your lack of virginity, about your need to be thoroughly ruined, et cetera, et cetera. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a man who finds ruining ladies a worthy pursuit.”
She sat back, looking like a cat disgruntled to have been removed from the toastiest patch of sunlight. “I don’t need a major scandal. A tidy indiscretion would do.”
He was disappointed that she’d cling to her scheme with such tenacity, and pleased that he’d divined her plans so easily. “In these surrounds, no scandal is minor, Hannah Cooper. If you are ruined while I am hosting your visit, then my reputation will suffer significantly.”
“You’re a man.” She might have said “You’re a toad,” for all the respect and liking in her tone. “I could misstep at some ball, and you could pack me off on the next ship, a host victimized by my colonial vulgarity. You’d earn the sympathy of every mama for ten blocks in any direction.”
This was a recitation, not a sudden inspiration. All the evenings Hannah had been smiling and swilling champagne punch, she had been mulling over her tactics. Refining some plan that would end in social disaster, could she but manage it.
“How would this go for your aunt, Hannah? You sail home head held high, triumphant in your disgrace, and she—dependent on her brother’s charity—must pay the price for having let your fortune slip away from her brother’s control.”
“It wouldn’t be like that.”
“She would fall into a permanent medicinal haze, her hope of any sort of dignity and joy blighted for the rest of her days.”
Hannah stared at the correspondence spread on the small table in the center of the gazebo, at the lilacs already beginning to wilt for lack of water. While Asher admired the curve of her jaw and the freckles sprinkled across her cheek, a tear slipped down that cheek.
What in blazes?
“You are not to cry.” His handkerchief was out, and he was dabbing at her cheek even as he spoke. “Crying is low and female and it isn’t… please don’t cry, Hannah.” He fell silent lest he start begging. To see his Boston adrift like this, cast down by tears…
“Aunt is doing m-much better.”
“Hush.” He tucked an arm around her and pushed her head to his shoulder. “Of course she’s doing better. She’s chaperoning the wealthiest heiress to be seen here in five years, my brothers are standing up with her almost every evening, and my sisters are distracting her from her potions by day. Stop crying.”
And that campaign had ensued after little more than hints from Asher that it would be appreciated.
Hannah turned her face into his shoulder and nigh broke his heart. She hated to lean, hated to show weakness, and while he relished that she’d allow him to comfort her, he hurt for her, too.
And for himself.
“You are the most stubborn woman I know, Hannah Cooper. Too stubborn—” Insight struck, and relief with it. “Are your monthlies plaguing you?”
A physician might have asked that question—had asked it, fairly often, in fact—and a husband might have asked it, but an earl would not.
She harrumphed against his shoulder. “Damn you, Asher MacGregor. I get the weeps as they approach, and I worry more easily. I doubt—” She pulled back abruptly to regard him with a glittery gaze. “What did Augusta want?”
The female mind was even more complicated and worthy of study than the female body—particularly Hannah’s female mind. He palmed the back of her head and drew her back to his shoulder lest she gain insights in her study of him. “I am trained as a physician.”
An innocuous place to start. Common knowledge. He fell silent, and Hannah prodded him verbally. “So you have informed me.”
On the occasion of taking liberties with her foot. Why hadn’t he heeded that warning, and why didn’t he wave a servant out from the house to put the poor lilacs in water?
“I have not practiced medicine for several years.” Also common knowledge. “I cannot foresee that a belted earl will have need of a profession at which he never particularly excelled.”
“You were a good doctor, Asher. You could not be else.” She offered this rebuke patiently, even sleepily.
“I was a good student of medicine, but I was not a good doctor. The physicians of the previous age knew something we modern fellows have forgotten: much of effective medicine has to do with interviewing the patient. Not examining him or her like a laboratory specimen, but earning the patient’s confidences.”
“You pluck confidences from me.” Her admission was an unhappy one. He stole a kiss to her temple in reward and left his mouth close enough to her crown to feel the silky pleasure of her hair brushing his lips.
“You toss out the occasional admission as a distraction, Hannah. I do not consider myself in your confidence.”
“Confidences are supposed to be shared, not hoarded by one party for use in negotiating with another. Why did you stop practicing medicine?”
“I’m not sure.”
Even Hannah, in all her brightness, would not understand that he’d just parted with a confidence, much less one that surprised even him. He’d started turning away from medicine to the more lucrative business of the fur trade even before he’d lost Monique, but her death had also signaled the death of his medical interests.
Or had it?
“That is not a confidence, Asher, and neither is this: I want to go home, but I can’t go home until I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish.”
He tucked her closer, not having foreseen that homesickness was part of her burden. “It’s different here,” he conceded. “That’s hard. Wearying.”
Another damned confidence.
She smoothed a hand over the wool of his kilt, her touch so distracted, it was as if she’d failed to notice that his thigh was one layer of fabric away from her bare hand. “People are polite here, but they aren’t nice. People in Boston aren’t so polite, but they’re genuinely nice.”
Well said. “Marry me, Hannah. We’ll live in Scotland, where people are both polite and nice, if a bit gruff. You’d love Balfour.” And he’d love showing it to her.
“You are a plague, Asher MacGregor. I cannot marry you of all men.”
Given the height of the sides of the gazebo, their hands at least had privacy from every direction. When she stroked her hand over his kilt this time, he wrapped his fingers around hers and brought her palm to rest over the growing bulge beneath the wool. “I’ll swive you silly if we marry, swive you often and enthusiastically, but only if we marry.”
He felt her smile. She patted his cock. “I’d swive you silly too.”
She said nothing for quite a spell as the morning breeze wafted through the roses, and Asher wondered what it meant, that Hannah would ask him to ruin her publicly, pat his cock in private, and then… fall asleep in his arms.
To distract himself from the pleasure of her bodily trust, Asher turned his mind to her ferocious determination to get back to Boston, and what might be motivating it. His gaze fell on the unfinished letter, this one to Allen, the oldest of the three brothers.
“I shall return in a few weeks, and then things will be better. I promise. Give my love to Mama when you safely can, and watch out f
or Grandmama.”
Give my love to Mama when you safely can.
One line, but enough to convey a disturbing realization to a man reduced to sneaking affection behind garden hedges: Hannah worried for her grandmother, understandably, if excessively. She worried as well for her younger brothers, and for her mother too. The mother he’d thought did not care enough to write even once to her daughter.
Or perhaps, the mother who could not write to her daughter.
Asher tightened his embrace, and for a long time, sat in the garden shadows, thinking and holding the woman he could not stop proposing to.
Twelve
Thirty years working for the Baron Fenimore meant Hogarth Evan Cletus Draper—“Howie” to his septuagenarian half brother, though only to him—felt some genuine loyalty to the old lord. Losing his baroness less than five years into the marriage, his one true love, had to be hard on a man who wasn’t likely to come across any more loves, true or otherwise, in the course of a long and spectacularly cranky life.
A sense of duty and a desire to visit the fleshpots of London were enough to see Draper eventually journeying south at the baron’s request. Duty, prurient inclinations, and an entire armed infantry regiment would not have been enough to inspire Draper to set foot on one of those thunderous, smoke-belching dragons of progress known as locomotives.
“Give me a trusty steed any day,” Draper confided to his mount. “You don’t leave a fellow covered in soot hours later, half the realm away from where he woke up. Never been inclined to cast up my accounts when on horseback.”
Unless of course he’d been overimbibing. For a mature Scot of Highland extraction, overimbibing took time, effort, and the sort of stupidity generally commandeered only by the younger males.
“Show me the locomotive that will get you home when you’re in your cups, take you right to your own stables, peaceable-like, and at a kindly walk that don’t alert the neighbors to your lapses, and then wait for you to find the ground and a bush you might avail yourself of before taking his own self off to his stall.”
Young people were all in a hurry these days, racketing about, when the tried and true methods of travel might leave them time to think, to plan, to sort out such cryptic guidance as the old baron had imparted.
“‘Keep an eye on things and see Balfour wed,’ says the laird.”
The horse flicked an ear.
“Not very specific, but then, the laird has been friendly with the poppy juice lately. Makes a man forgetful.” Though no less cranky.
The Earl of Balfour was a strapping fellow whom the ladies would no doubt mob with their interest, and whose title the parents would eye covetously. “And yet, the laird thought the lad might need some nudging toward the altar.”
Nudging MacGregor to the altar would take a team of plow horses, two teams if the fellow were inclined to be stubborn. “Just like the laird.”
On that profound bit of irony, Draper took out his flask—he didn’t journey so far as the privy without it—and tipped the contents to his lips. “Nigh empty, and us barely halfway to Berwick.”
The surrounds were desolate, but only in the way the lowlands could be, an altogether greener, more rolling desolation than the Highlands boasted. And why the desolation should matter…
Draper roused himself from his itinerant reveries to inventory his situation.
“Horse, you are not going unsound on me, are you? Locomotives don’t go unsound, though they explode and crash and whatnot.”
The horse lifted its tail and commented at some length on that observation, but Draper’s senses had not lied. The beast’s gait was getting uneven behind. A stone bruise, a close nail in the shoe, or just damned bad luck.
“Badly done of you, my friend. The nearest inn is five miles back, and…”
Draper’s gelding plodded around a sharp curve and through a stand of trees to present his rider with more bleak terrain, but this vista was graced with a tidy smallholding, complete with sheep byre, stock barn, and cottage.
Hospitality would be forthcoming, particularly when Draper got out his wallet or the farmer produced his jug. Draper dismounted, loosened the girth on his ailing beast, and prepared to rely on Scottish good manners for the loan of a mount, or at the very least, a refill for his flask.
***
“Whatever did the English people have to give up to gain a royal promise of access to all this land?”
Hannah’s question was posed to the company at large. Julia, Connor’s blond, pretty wife, answered.
“The land was in royal hands from the twelfth century, but Charles I came out here to escape the plague in London. When he decided to enclose the Richmond estate, the locals extracted a promise of access to the land. To appease his subjects, Charles agreed.”
Asher watched as Hannah’s mental gears spun for the space of a wink.
“He sounds like an agreeable fellow, as monarchs go, though isn’t Charles I the king who was put to death by his subjects?”
While his sisters-in-law and his sister debated the niceties of regicide versus tyrannicide, and Malcolm tried to interject a list of Richmond Park’s various attractive features, Asher stepped away to check the girth on the bay mare Hannah would be riding.
“Did you invite Malcolm to London knowing he’d appoint himself the Season’s master of ceremonies?” Ian asked, patting the mare’s glossy quarters.
Asher speared his brother with a look over the mare’s fundament. “I didn’t invite him at all. I thought you were the one who collected him in the general remove from the North.”
“He occasionally bides in Edinburgh, but in recent years he’s more often found in Paris or Rome.”
As head of the family, laird, earl, whatever Asher’s post was called, he ought to have known that. “He’s here now, and I for one am grateful for a whiff of fresh air and some greenery, regardless of who organized the outing.”
The next few minutes were absorbed with seeing the ladies onto their horses, deciding which party would ride in which direction, and sorting out grooms to accompany the various groupings. Asher was not disappointed to find that Malcolm had assigned him to Hannah’s exclusive company.
He boosted her onto the horse, organized her skirts over her boots, and waited while she took up the reins.
“Why are you glowering at me, Balfour?”
She’d taken to using his title when they were in company, a habit he positively loathed.
Asher turned his glower on the groom at the horse’s head. The man removed to his own mount with a nod and sat waiting several yards off, as immobile as a garden sculpture.
“If I’m glowering, it’s because I am concerned for your welfare on a ride of some duration. Will you be all right?”
“You mean because of my…” She fiddled with the reins. “I’ll be fine. Riding doesn’t bother my leg, though hacking in the park hasn’t done much to challenge my stamina.”
“I can’t imagine it would, not when every fortune hunter in the city has to lurk on the Ladies’ Mile, waiting to tip his hat to you.”
She smirked at him, looking both smug and smart atop her horse. Malcolm was fussing at the groom, directing the man to change horses and issuing last-minute instructions to all and sundry.
“And you’re off to the woods, correct?” Malcolm asked Hannah.
“I am in Lord Balfour’s hands,” Hannah replied, though Asher thought her tone ironic. “If he’s to show me the woods, then I’m off to the woods.”
In the several thousand acres of Richmond Park and its policies, there were a number of woods, at least one of them of significant size. Asher waited for the groom to mount up, then aimed his own horse—at the walk—in the direction of the largest wood.
The rest of the group set off in various directions amid laughter, teasing, and Malcolm’s reminders to gather back at the starting point in two hours—not a moment longer—for a picnic meal Mary Fran was already seeing unloaded from the coaches.
“You seem to
be enjoying Malcolm’s company,” Asher observed as his horse ambled along beside Hannah’s.
“Malcolm is charming, as are all the MacGregor men.”
The comment sounded sincere. He ought to tell her the picture she made in a forest-green habit was charming too, particularly when she’d worn her hair in a fat braid that dangled in a loop over her right shoulder. “You find Connor charming?”
“Of course I find him charming. Charming and full of blather are two different things. Malcolm is charming and full of blather.”
The groom had dropped back far enough to give them privacy, but something in Hannah’s expression suggested the conversation might veer off into areas more personal than Asher was willing to allow.
“Have you come across any eligibles whose suit you’d consider, Hannah?”
She did not so much as turn her head to scowl at him. “I have not, nor will I.”
“I’ve heard from your stepfather.”
She petted her horse with a slow stroke of her glove down the beast’s neck. “Oh?”
“He presumes on our mutual connection with Fenimore, and asks that I forgive a father’s concern for his daughter, but would I please consider allowing my solicitors to act as his factors should settlement negotiations ensue with an eligible parti.”
Had thunder rumbled in the distance—had cannon fire started booming over the distant hills—he could not have more effectively killed the joie de vivre Hannah had brought to the outing. Her horse gratuitously shied at a puddle, and Asher saw her give the reins forward in a tacit display of self-discipline.
“Have you written back to him, told him I have no intention of marrying and am a burden on the household generally?”
She was braced for him to mock her, to resent her, to treat her as a nuisance because she’d rejected his proposals. Would that he might.
“Hannah, from the number of times your stepfather referred to you as lovely, and the heavy innuendo in his financial references, I got the impression he was trying to pander to my pecuniary interests without outright asking how much it would take to make you my countess. Just how much do you have in trust?”
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