The MacGregor's Lady

by Burrowes, Grace

Asher confounded her by simply grasping her hand and keeping it in his. The metaphor extended through the rest of their stay in Edinburgh, as Hannah accumulated the gifts and griefs she’d take with her back to Boston.

  She would never learn more than a few words of Gaelic, not until it was too late to understand the language spoken by the man who could turn it into the music of her soul.

  She would never learn the reels Lady Quinworth could toss off with such panache, spun from son to cousin to uncle and back into the arms of her adoring marquess.

  She would never learn the inner workings of the family distillery or become versed in the whiskey exports laws, much less the many customs surrounding a drink whose subtleties she increasingly appreciated.

  She would never see wee John carried on his uncle’s shoulders to a favored fishing spot in some high, sunny glen.

  Though there were consolations. Wearing MacGregor plaid, she danced the waltz with her beloved while he turned every female head in the room with his formal clan finery.

  She clapped and stomped along with the family when Con got out his pipes, the swords were laid down, and in the middle of a crowded ballroom, Asher danced for her alone.

  And on the train north, she could lay her head on his shoulder, pretend sleep, and know she could not be censured for her presumption.

  “You are not asleep.”

  She would not be believed in her deception, either, but Hannah made no move to sit up. “I ought to be asleep. I ought to be asleep for a week after dancing with all of your brothers and Spathfoy. You Scots take your celebrations seriously.”

  “We do.” He wrapped her hand in his, the gesture having at some point become automatic for them both. “Our betrothal ball was the first time many of the clan have seen me since I was a boy. They grieved when I was declared dead, they rallied to Ian’s side, and before they could rally to mine, they needed to see me, to know I would not abandon them again.”

  “I was hoping you’d come to that conclusion.” Hannah certainly had, and while she’d been pleased for him, pleased to see the sheer number and vigor of his extended family, she’d also grieved.

  An earl she might have allowed herself to remove to Boston, but not a laird. Not when there were so few left who could live up to the name.

  “How are you feeling, Miss Cooper?”

  Subject changed. She silently thanked him for it.

  “Glad to be on my way to your home. One hears the Highlands are beautiful.”

  “They’re bloody cold is what they are. I think it’s one reason the Scots leave home so successfully. Even Canada looks like a fine bargain—the winters are no worse, and there’ll be no clearances to part us from our property there. A few bears and wolves are nothing compared to the threats we endure from our neighbors to the south.”

  He had preferred bears and wolves to home and family. Hannah took some comfort that his priorities had shifted.

  His thumb stroked over her knuckles. “May I ask you some medical questions?”

  Ah. That subject. “Of course.”

  “Are you having to use the necessary more often than usual?”

  She considered her answer. “I am not.”

  “Are your breasts tender?”

  She might have replied in several ways, some of them flirtatious. “Not particularly.”

  “And your dresses are still fitting?”

  “They are.”

  “You aren’t abruptly sleepy at odd times of the day?”

  “I would say I’m tired generally, from touring the city with you or from being up half the night dancing.”

  He fell silent, though his point was clear: there might be a baby. There might not.

  In this too, he held her hand. On the strength of that connection and trust, Hannah shared a thought that had plagued her since they’d left London. “I’m told there are herbs, Asher—”

  “No, my heart. Those herbs are not reliable, and they are not safe, particularly not as a pregnancy advances. I would never ask such a thing of any woman, much less one I cared for deeply.”

  The immediacy of his reply and the reason for it both warmed her heart. The next words slipped out, no caution or forethought to them at all. “Asher, I don’t know what to do.”

  His lips grazed her temple. “Was that so hard to say?”

  He sounded proud of her, but she didn’t dare look into his eyes, not when her uncertainty had been made audible. “I have never voiced such a sentiment to anybody, not even Grandmama.”

  “Would you like to say it again? In some endeavors, practice is advisable.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  He was quiet, reassuring her with his steady presence and with his warmth rather than with words. “I was married before, you know.”

  The feeling engendered in Hannah’s breast at this confidence—for it was a confidence—was a vast, unconditional protectiveness that chased away her own woes and wobbliness. “You loved her. You still love her.”

  More silence, while Hannah tucked herself as close as she could without sitting in his lap.

  “I loved her as a lonely young man far from home loves a woman given to smiles and laughter. I loved her simply, without reservation, and that was unwise.”

  “It was not un—”

  He pressed two fingers to her lips. “For a physician to watch his family sicken and die is impossible, Hannah. This feeling you have, this great regard for another you admit to me not once but twice, when you are helpless to protect your loved ones, it builds and builds, not knowing what to do, until it becomes a purgatory with no exit.”

  His family? Not just his wife? No wonder he’d wandered for years in the wilderness. She pressed her cheek to his shoulder and tried not to cry.

  “Hannah?” He’d dropped his voice to a whisper. “I am not in that purgatory any longer. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but love as best we can.”

  The griefs in Hannah’s heart piled high, like so much snow driven by a harsh, relentless wind into suffocating drifts.

  Though the gifts piled higher: because Hannah had come to Scotland and joined her heart to Asher’s, there would be an exit from every purgatory; there was a hand to hold, if only in memory.

  The train roared northward on the track between the wide, rough sea and the high, cold mountains, and Hannah told herself the memories would be enough.

  ***

  Asher scowled at the letter before him, a single sheet of crabbed, nigh indecipherable scrawl delivered by messenger right here to the room that served as the Balfour billiards room and armory.

  “What does Fenimore have to say?” Across the card table, Ian peered down the barrel of an antique pistol, gun parts scattered before him on a folded Royal Stewart plaid. “Wishing you felicitations on your upcoming nuptials?”

  “Hardly.” Royal Stewart deserved better treatment than Ian was giving it. “He castigates me for having ruined a good man by allowing him to become distracted by the charms of the weaker sex.”

  Ian paused in the middle of working a soft, dirty cloth down the gun barrel. His fingers were dirty too. “Which good man?”

  Ian would get the letter dirty as well, so Asher didn’t pass it to him. “In his peregrinations about the realm on Fenimore’s business, Evan Draper made the acquaintance of one Enid Cooper, late of Boston. Draper treated the lady to a recitation of the ills and indignities suffered on his travels, and she was the soul of sympathy and solicitude—had a remedy for all of the man’s trials, including his loneliness.”

  Ian glanced up. “Aunt Enid? That Enid Cooper? She’s little more than a fading sot herself.”

  “A fading sot marginally revived by the attention of an old flame from her youth, though Draper appears to have routed the competition.”

  Which would be downright funny if Asher himself were drunk.

  “What else does Fenimore say?”

  “He demands we set a date.” Nobody else had had the temerity.

  “There isn’t goi
ng to be a wedding, is there?” Ian pulled the cloth through the tube of metal and began reassembling the parts.

  Rather than face his brother’s questions, Asher folded the letter and set it on the journal that had accompanied it, rose and crossed to the rack of cue sticks on the opposite wall. “Care for a game?”

  “Thank ye, no. The baby will going down for his nap soon, and I’ll be taking tea with my wife.”

  Taking tea. Oh, of course. Behind the locked door of their bedroom, Ian and his lady would be taking tea, with his pinky finger extended just so. Asher envied his brother and sister-in-law their frequent cups of tea almost as much as he envied them the way each knew the other’s schedule and whereabouts without even thinking about it.

  More, they both knew the child’s schedule, and to some extent, organized their lives around it.

  Asher racked the balls, broke, and studied the possibilities. “Whether there’s a wedding or not hardly matters. Hannah has to leave. I have to stay.”

  Ian screwed the barrel into its fitting. “You could go with her. I’ve held the reins here before. I can do it again.”

  So offhand, and yet the offer was sincere. Asher sank two balls in a single shot, one into each corner pocket. “You have not asked Augusta her thoughts on the matter.”

  “I have. We do not agree. She thinks Hannah should stay here. I think you should go to Boston.”

  The next shot wasn’t lining up—the price one paid for succumbing to the lure of sinking two balls at once. “I have not been invited to Boston. I have, in fact, been refused entry to the port. Hannah would protect even me.”

  Ian swore, ostensibly at the gun. “Then I can go to bloody Boston, or Gil or Con can go.”

  “You all have children to raise, or on the way, and you’d have no more authority in Boston over Hannah’s mother or half brothers than I would, and therein lies the difficulty.”

  Ian threaded screws through the inlays on the gun’s handle and tightened them in alternate applications of a small screwdriver. “You can’t just reive her family out from under the man’s bloody nose? He’d not wrest them away from an earl’s keep if you could get them here in one piece.”

  On the next shot the cue ball rolled slowly, slowly across the table, tipping into a pocket by a whisker, which at least allowed a man to do a little swearing of his own.

  “It’s good to hear you using the Gaelic,” Ian said, finishing with the screwdriver.

  “Gaelic is a good language for cursing in. I’ve considered inviting Hannah’s family here, asked my man for his thoughts on the matter, and received no response. Now I doubt my message even got through.”

  “Inviting. Such an earl you’ve become.” Ian’s taunt was without heat, and all the more annoying as a result.

  “One doesn’t force a woman to marry against her will without becoming the very thing that woman loathes most in the world. Why do you bother cleaning that old pistol when the servants could do it?”

  The gun was back in one piece, looking substantial and well cared for in Ian’s hand. He wiped it down with the dirty cloth, which somehow did in fact polish the metal. “The woman loves you. A little loathing won’t change that, particularly when you’ve given her a child or two.”

  “And I love you, Ian, but I would rather not leaven my fraternal affection with loathing. If you can’t leave this topic alone, then my preferences will not carry the day.”

  Ian smiled and sighted down the gun barrel at a portrait of some old fellow in tartan and hunting boots. “You love her too. A sorrier pair I have never seen.”

  Yes, Asher did love Hannah. The knowledge was unassailable, a fact of Asher’s bones and organs and his very mind. “You’d stand up with me, if there were a wedding? Even if there were a wedding merely to give her my name?”

  Ian set the gun aside and rose, coming to study the arrangement of balls on the table. “Why’d you set the cue ball down there? It leaves you not one decent shot.”

  “I’m not playing a game. One needs to practice the impossible shots.”

  “I’ll stand up with you, and so will Gil, Con, Mary Fran, and even that snippy English bastard Spathfoy. If you love Hannah Cooper, then we’re standing up with her too.” He set the cue ball down two inches from its original location, then scooped up his antique gun and left.

  One did need to practice the impossible shots, except, by moving the ball two inches, Ian had changed the entire field of play, such that the impossible had become, in several different ways, the possible.

  Twenty

  “If grief had a landscape, it would be these Highlands.”

  Hannah tucked herself more snugly to Asher’s side and tried to pretend the sun was not sinking closer to the rugged hills around them. This was no more successful than pretending a week had not already passed since her arrival at Balfour House, a week in which she’d made many such fanciful pronouncements.

  Asher shifted, as if eluding a pebble beneath a triple thickness of tartan wool. “Why do you say that?”

  “Many reasons. These are not high mountains, not compared to what you’ve seen in Canada, but they have a forbidding quality. And yet, we’ve walked them.” She shaded her eyes and pointed to the highest summit. “We ate scones and drank whiskey up there, three days ago.”

  They’d eaten scones and drank whiskey on many a blanket, making more picnic memories in a week than most couples collected in two decades of marriage. They’d ridden out together, fished the River Dee, tramped the woods, and stayed up late playing cards as an excuse to talk far into the night.

  Ian and Augusta made no pretense of chaperoning them, which was fortunate. In the wee hours of the morning, and on the high hills and in the forests, Asher had told Hannah of his years in Canada, and he’d told her his family knew little of what had happened there. She’d argued with him over that, until that argument, like so many others, had ended in a spate of kissing.

  Lying on the wool blankets under the afternoon sun, he laced their fingers and laid Hannah’s palm over his heart. “Your point is that grief can be surmounted.”

  She’d been trying to say that the sadness she felt when she stared at the calendar had a wildness to it, a passion that had certainly eluded her before her journey across the ocean.

  “I don’t know if it can be surmounted, but people dwell here, and they love it. You love it, despite the winters, the cold, the loneliness. People have died for this land.”

  He shifted again, turning her, too, so they were spooned together beneath the wide blue sky, his chest blanketing her back. “There will be no dying of broken hearts, Hannah. You and I are not that kind of people. We will be dignified, like these mountains. We will endure.”

  They hadn’t made love, not since they’d arrived in Edinburgh, and that had broken Hannah’s heart more than anything else. And yet, it was good that she could not see his face, or he hers. “I’m not carrying.”

  He petted her hair and gathered her closer. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. The day before I start my monthly, I get twinges, warning shots, so to speak, and they’ve started. I consider it a kindness that my body alerts me this way to impending inconvenience. We’ll not be tramping up here again tomorrow.”

  They wouldn’t be tramping much of anywhere for the next several days, which meant they had likely scaled their last peak together.

  “I am sorry, my heart. I am sorry we are not to have a child. I sense, though, that a child would have complicated matters for you, not simplified them.”

  He knew her so well. She could not have loved him more, not if they’d had eighty years together on earth. Hannah turned so she could wrap herself against Asher’s body. Their situation was too blessed simple. “Nothing can fix our situation. Nothing.”

  Nothing made it easier; nothing made it less painful. They would endure, as Asher had said. Dignity was far less certain.

  He kissed her, probably for comfort, but Hannah was incapable of being consoled by a mere brush o
f lips. What raged through her was as implacable as the high barren hills, as deep and unrelenting as the winter that scoured the summits of their trees.

  “Asher, I am uncertain of many things. I am uncertain that my decisions have been wise, uncertain of my reception in Boston, uncertain of… much, but I know I want to make love with you right now, right here.”

  He sighed against her mouth, something about a simple exhalation conveying a stubborn intent to apply reason. “Hannah, there is nothing I would deny you, but you might be mistaken in these twinges and warning shots. You’ve never carried a child, never conceived before that you—”

  “Damn you, Asher MacGregor. I am not asking for your permission, I am asking for your passion.”

  She pushed him by one meaty shoulder onto his back, and he went. When she straddled him—no dignity there—and unfastened his kilt, he sank his fingers into her hair and extracted one pin after another.

  His complicity gradually cleared the fog of desperation choking her, until Hannah could sit back and admire the man whose kilt, waistcoat, and shirt she had nearly torn from his body.

  Asher brushed her hair back over her shoulder. “Is it my turn, then? Shall I unwrap m’ treasure the way ye’ve unwrapped yours?”

  When a man was blessed with a burr, the inflection in his questions lifted not the end of an inquiry, as was common in Boston, but rather, gave the entire question a lilt.

  “Yes. Unwrap your treasure.”

  He started by framing her jaw in his hands, ensuring that Hannah’s gaze collided with his and stayed trapped in what he promised with his eyes. Slowly, slowly, he worked his way down the buttons of her shirtwaist.

  Never had a lady’s attire had so many buttons. Hannah dragged in one breath after another, while beneath her, Asher’s arousal became more and more firm against her sex.

  For the last time…

  Weeks had gone by while she’d pushed, wrestled, and blasted that sentiment away from her, moment by moment. Through their journey from London, their wandering in Edinburgh, their engagement ball, their travel to Balfour, and every day since.

  She let the reality of their parting take over, let the horror and terror of it fill her being, the wrongness of it, the inevitability, and the permanence.