A Laird for All Time

by Angeline Fortin

  All she could hope was that he would overcome that impulse that had set him off soon and come back to share the love between them while they still had time. ‘Please, Connor, come back’, she beseeched in her mind. ‘Before I’m gone. Gone!’ she moaned.

  Ian had kindly offered to open the window when her moan had vocalized itself. Connor, it seemed, had warned him of her maleficent relationship with the carriage.

  “Thank you.” She breathed in the cold air. October was drawing to a close now. Five days she had been here. Emmy wondered if anyone had missed her yet in her time and concluded that given she was still on her vacation that they had not. But when that time was over, it was anyone’s guess what would happen then. Missing person’s report? Maybe they would think that she was dead in a ditch somewhere, taken by a serial killer and buried in the middle of nowhere. Amnesia! That would be interesting.

  “You have the strangest smile on your face,” Ian’s voice interrupted her morbid musings. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I was just wondering what all my friends might be thinking became of me if I don’t come home soon,” she confessed.

  “And that is amusing?” he questioned with a frown.

  “My sense of humor can sometimes go terribly wrong.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” he asked at length.

  “Sure.”

  “What did you say to my brother to get him to leave like that?”

  “Ha! I knew it wasn’t a business trip!” she felt very satisfied with herself. “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing beyond what I have already said that he had urgent business in Glasgow he must attend, but I knew that couldn’t be entirely true as no messages or telegrams had arrived recently.” His eyes were inquisitive as he awaited her response.

  “Did he seem angry at all?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say so, that I could understand.” Ian shook his head thinking. “If I had to define it, I might say he was defeated in some way, but that is certainly unlike my brother.”

  “Defeated?” she repeated. Why defeated? What had run through his mind? “We did have a fight.”

  “I know,” he shrugged and grinned. “Everyone knows. The entire castle can hear your arguments. It sort of resonates. Never knew it could do that but then I don’t think anyone has ever yelled like that in there before.”

  “I’m sure that Connor has shown his temper plenty of times in his life,” she murmured drily.

  “Surprisingly, no,” Ian corrected. “I have never heard him yell. He never even showed anger, always that icy demeanor. Connor has always been the sort to simmer in his anger. When he is truly maddened, he is cold and fierce and everyone says out his way including myself. I have never heard him bellow that way in my lifetime.”

  “You don’t think he was mad when he screamed right in my face then?” she asked in disbelief. “Because from where I was sitting, he looked pretty pissed.”

  “Pissed?”

  “Pissed,” she nodded in confirmation and he grinned again.

  “I rather like that one.”

  “We all do.” It was hard not to smile at Ian and Emmy didn’t even try to contain the amusement they shared.

  “You are a rare corker, Emmy,” Ian, like Dory, had taken to calling her by the name she preferred. She wasn’t sure if he believed her but was sure that Dory must have said something to him. Generally he was too good-natured to make a fuss.

  “And, you see, there is one I am not used to,” she teased. “I gather it means I’m pretty funny?”

  “Very much so,” he agreed. “I do so enjoy hearing you speak. There is always an element of expectation involved waiting to see what will come next.”

  “Glad I don’t disappoint.” She twisted her lips mockingly. Nothing was more enjoyed than the spectacle of the class clown.

  “Never, never,” he replied honestly oblivious to her self-disdain.

  “So when do you think he’ll be back?”

  “I would think not more than a day or two from now.”

  Chapter 30

  Five days later, Emmy’s overactive imagination had developed dozens of scenarios for the cause for Connor’s continued absence. The yacht had sunk in the middle of the sound with all hands lost, he had mugged and murdered, hit by a train…

  She had been unable to find Donell or any trace of him. She had even taken the carriage into Craignure to the inn to find him. Jimmy, the innkeeper, admitted that he hadn’t seen the old man since the previous week. It seemed the sometime busybody had fled Mull much as her laird had. Finally, when visiting patients and reading books were no longer enough to distract her, she had begged Ian to find him and bring Connor home.

  Dutifully, Ian had packed a bag and taken the ferry to Oban and boarded the train to Glasgow. As requested, he sent regular updates via telegraph to keep Emmy informed to his progress, but two days later he hadn’t found Connor yet in any of his regular hotels or clubs. Ian had found the estate manager and Mr. McAllen, however and conveyed the information that neither man had been aware of the laird’s presence in Glasgow. Defeated, Ian relayed that he was returning to Duart.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ian stared down at his brother, his laird, in disgust.

  Ian had left Glasgow unable to think of where his brother could possibly have gone. Concerned, he had made his way back through Inverary to Oban searching for signs of his brother along the way. He was beginning to consider the horrible possibilities Emmy had regaled him with might be true when he noticed his brother’s sailboat docked in Oban while he was waiting for the ferry. A quick word with the crew had sent him to a place he hadn’t thought to frequent in more than a decade.

  Though the brick building was discreet enough from the street, it housed the largest brothel in Oban. Ian had never known his brother to come here and surely never expected to find him drunken and wallowing in filth with a pair…aye, a pair! of Sally Loaman’s best girls.

  Ian reached down into the pile of sleeping bodies and pulled his brother roughly out of the tangle of female arms and legs shaking him forcefully. “My God, you reek of alcohol and perfume, Connor! What were you thinking?”

  Connor’s head lolled to the side as a slur of unintelligible words emerged from him. Ian snorted in repugnance draping his brother’s arm across his shoulders and half led, half carried him from the room. “You are utterly foxed,” he muttered. With some doing, he managed to get Connor into his waiting carriage and down to the docks where the crew helped him in dragging his brother below decks and dropping him on the bed. Given Connor’s size and weight, it was an effort to do so, but not as much as being close to him.

  “I feel as if I should be holding my breath,” one of the crew grumbled as they had hauled him below.

  “He sure is a ripe one, to be sure,” another agreed.

  “Never seen the laird in such a state,” yet another added and they all nodded agreeing to that.

  The crew returned above and Ian dropped down in a chair and considered his brother’s state. “Now what?” he wondered aloud.

  Connor groaned loudly but Ian had no other input. “Serve you right if I dumped you over,” Ian muttered rising to grab a bucket of water and a towel. Taking them to the side of the bed, he stripped his brother to his smalls and proceeded to wash the worse of the stink from him. Connor protested flinging his arms feebly before passing out once more.

  Ian had never seen Connor in such a state of drunkenness before. When Connor drank, he was always lucid, controlled and Ian had to wonder how much alcohol he had consumed to get to this state of excess. What made him do it? And to go to Sally’s! Ian shook his head, knowing that something had happened yet from Emmy’s recounting it hadn’t seemed anything so extreme to prompt this crude behavior from his brother. He wondered if Connor’s version would entail a completely different account.

  “Where am I?” A gruff voice spoke from the bed more than two hours later and Ian looked up from his book to see Con
nor propped up on an elbow rubbing his face thoroughly with his free hand.

  “We’re docked in Craignure,” he offered only.

  Connor scratched his growth of beard. “What time is it?”

  “Should I be asking if you know what day it is even?” Ian asked sarcastically.

  “It should be Tuesday, I believe, unless time has gotten away from me.” Connor glared at Ian. “Why are ye looking at me like that?”

  Since it was Tuesday, Ian could only wonder how his brother had managed to know it. He had been too foxed to mark the time. “How long were you at Sally’s?” he asked curiously.

  “Assuming it is Tuesday, I just went there last night.” Ian’s brows shot up in surprise.

  “Then where have you been the six days before that? I know it wasn’t Glasgow, because I had already searched for you there.”

  “Ye went looking for me? Why?” Connor grumbled in irritation.

  “You went without word for five days when you’d said you’d be gone but a day or two.” Ian pointed out. “You’ve never done that before and everyone was beginning to worry. Even Aunt Eleanor.”

  “I am sure no one realized I was gone.”

  “If you think that, then you are a fool!” Ian stiffened against Connor’s harsh glare. “Aye, you heard me, a fool! Emmy has been out of her mind with worry, thinking you’ve drowned, or sold to band of gypsies or been gutted and turned on a spit for a band of hungry cannibals.”

  Connor grunted in acknowledgment of Ian’s grin. “She told me she does that. She called it a worse-case scenario.” Connor murmured and lie back and ran his hands over his face. “I feel like a horse has sat on my head.”

  “An ass anyway,” Ian corrected. “Have you spent the last six days in this state?”

  “Sailing,” Connor confessed.

  That took Ian aback. He had assumed that his brother had been in the condition that he found him in for the entire week. “Not here? Where were you?”

  “Aye, we actually went all the way to Liverpool,” Connor covered his eyes against the bright sun coming through the porthole. “Thought I might get some supplies for the winter and some gifts for yer bairns. God, I need a drink.”

  “You smell like you’ve already drank a keg or more,” Ian scoffed, “and slept wi’ every lass at Sally’s. She’s going to kill you, ye know?”

  “I may have drunk the ocean, but I didn’t bed anyone. I wanted to; I planned to, but in the end…” Connor sighed. “Ach, mon, gi’ me a drink.”

  Finally obliging, Ian poured a glass of whiskey and gave it to his brother watching as he swished a largely dram around his mouth before he swallowed. “Ahh, that’s better.”

  “What’s gotten into you, brother,” Ian asked. “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  “Her,” Connor grunted as Ian chuckled.

  “Finally caught by Cupid’s arrow, hmm?”

  “More like his cannon,” Connor guzzled the remainder of the drink and dropped back down in fatigue pulling the pillow over his head. “That woman will be the death of me!”

  “C’est l’amour,” Ian sighed mockingly and laughed when Connor threw the pillow at him. “Come, brother, what has you up in arms? Love is a beautiful thing yet you act as if you have the plague. You should be rejoicing to have found such a woman to love. Emmy is an extraordinary lass.”

  “Emmy, huh?” Connor raised a brow. “She has got ye believing it, too?”

  “Dory has already told me that she knows that Em is not Heather. She will not tell me how she knows, which has its own frustrations, but she is certain,” Ian told him.

  “And ye believe her?”

  “I believe them both.” Ian poured himself his own glass of whiskey and sat back down. “Em just doesn’t seem the sort to take a farce to such an extreme. She’s a bonny lass in and out.”

  “Aye, she is,” Connor admitted finally. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”

  “Everyone in the house has been saying that about her,” Ian informed his brother. “There’s just something about her that is…beyond us. For example, she knows so many things I have never imagined knowing, much less a woman.”

  “Don’t let her hear ye say that,” Connor muttered.

  “Aye, and there’s another thing!” Ian pounced. “She doesn’t act like a woman does, ye ken? She refuses to be told what to do. Women offer opinions and hope a man might keep it in mind when making his decisions and choices, but Emmy expects us to or tries to make us do what she wants.”

  “Why do ye say that? What has she done?”

  “She wants to have the telephone installed at Duart and…” he pulled out the contraction, “she expects to have a ‘public phone’, that’s what she called it, put in Lochdon, Craignure and wherever else she thinks might need one so folks might telephone in case of emergency.” He nodded, “She said it just like that. She said if you are going to be the laird and be responsible for all these people, they shouldn’t have to wait for a messenger to get help.”

  “Lovely,” Connor grumbled and lie back once more. What a bossy, lass! But the idea was sound and as he had told her before when they were discussing the suffrage question, he respected her for her reason and logic. It was a sensible idea. “She’s probably right, too. She has a keen intelligence.”

  “Oh, I agree, but I didn’t want to tell her that!” Ian chuckled and drank. “What a corker, she is.”

  “Aye, she is,” Connor sighed and tried to ignore the pounding in his skull. He had fled Duart for just those reasons. Emmy, aye, Emmy, was having a greater affect on him than he had imagined possible. It had gone beyond wanting to simply try his hand at marriage again. He had considered matrimony based on companionship in bed and out of it…as a way of keeping her close by.

  Looking back, his desire for sport and camaraderie was naïve. Connor knew he could not uphold that standard indefinitely. Each day he was with her, he wanted more, more of her, more of them. He wanted to lie beside her each night, touch her constantly, furrow his way under skin and become one with her. He wanted the challenge and emotion of her. He wanted to possess her and, indeed, wanted to be possessed by her and there is where the problem had arisen.

  He was vulnerable to her. She had taken his defenses and beaten them to the ground though she seemed unaware of her victory. Had yet to wield the power she now had. Emmy could lay his heart open easily with a word or action. Even though he wanted her to stay with him always - he did accept that truth - she did not seem to have the same hopes. She spoke of ‘when she left’ and ‘when she got home’.

  Duart was not her home. She did not view them that way which meant that she might one day decide to go leaving him and his heart torn. It might be the end of him. He did not want to retreat to the hole he had recently crawled from. He liked who he had become with her, with her help.

  Connor had thought long and hard on these things during the past week and then, like the fool Ian accused him, had determined to purge her from his mind with the body of another. He had sat at Sally’s for hours trying to drink himself into going through with it and had even taken the girls upstairs to have it done, but in the end he had known that Emmy was all he wanted. He could use other women, but he would be deceiving himself as well as her. He couldn’t go through with it even as drunk as he had been.

  He loved her. He wanted Emmy as wife and mate for all his days. It was a terrifying truth that had taken him all these days to accept. If he confessed it to her, she would hold his life in her hands. She would have the power to destroy him because when she left him, it would not only mean a blow to his pride, but the devastation of his soul.

  Chapter 31

  Sunlight pierced his eyelids and forced Connor to reluctant consciousness. Groaning, he covered his eyes with a forearm. Pain unlike any he could remember lanced through his temples and his stomach rolled unpleasantly. An inventory of other sensations reminded him that he was in his own bed at Duart after being supported by Ian through an excruciating trip
from Craignure made longer by several necessary stops along the way. Chilton had aided his brother in practically carrying Connor up the stairs before depositing him unceremoniously in bed. Their mutual disapproval was obvious from the fact that they had left him in his clothes on top of the covers.

  “You’re an idiot, you know?”

  Connor peeked out from under his arm to find Emmy in the doorway with her arms crossed in disapproval. My God, she looked lovely! Her silk dressing gown clung to the curve of her hips and pulled tightly across her breasts above her folded arms. How could he ever have imagined that anyone could provide equal substitute for her? Words leaped to his lips but he swallowed them down.

  That Connor was back safely brought Emmy a measure of relief, but a rise of irritation. She wanted to pounce on him and demand to know what he had been thinking when he’d left. For a full week she had wondered and worried. Tormented by images of his bloody death. And then she had been awoken the previous night to find Ian and Chilton hauling Connor into his room, had considered offering her aid until the tang of his state had assaulted her senses. Drunk! Totally shot. Shit-faced, her college friends would have called it and they would have been right. He had left her to go on a weeklong bender! “What? Nothing to say?”

  “I apologize?”

  “For what?” she tapped foot impatiently. An apology was naught if it meant nothing to him. Even more so if he didn’t know what she was angry about.

  “I apologize for disappearing for so long without sending word.” Connor kept his voice low in pitch since each word pounded in his head for the effort of speaking at all but realizing that Emmy would not be put off.