Once Upon a Highland Summer (20 page)

“I meant to sit on the grass,” he said with one of his most charming grins, and realized it was a mistake at once. Sophie looked horrified.

“On the lawn? Like a dairymaid?”

“I thought dairymaids sat on stools, in dairies,” he quipped, but she looked at him blankly. He took off his coat and gallantly spread it on the grass for her. “Will this do?”

Her lips rippled over her long teeth, but she gingerly took her seat. “Lady Sophie, I—” he began, but a gust of wind snatched the words from his lips. She cried out as it tugged savagely at her bonnet. He stood between her and the gust, forming a windbreak with his body. Sophie blinked up at him, looking chilly.

“Do you like it here at Glenlorne, Lady Sophie?” he asked.

“It is rather wild, is it not? Are there wolves in the hills?” Her china blue eyes flicked across the landscape, and he had a sharp feeling that she did not belong here, like a needle in the gut. He forced himself to smile reassuringly.

“Wolves? I suppose so—a few, perhaps, but very far off. There are deer as well, and foxes and—”

“Foxes?” Lady Sophie brightened. “Do you ride to a hunt here? I do enjoy a hunt ball!”

“Er, no. We mainly hunt grouse and deer here at Glenlorne,” he said.

“Oh.” The sigh was filled with disappointment.

“There are some glorious walks in the hills,” he offered.

She pursed her lips and examined an invisible mark on her glove, but did not reply.

His proposal of marriage stuck in his throat. He looked across at the village. Every cottage he could see needed a new roof. Plenty looked crooked, ready to crumble into the loch. That would certainly fill it in.

He took a breath and pressed on. “My lady, I assume you know why your father asked you to come here.”

Sophie’s gaze was sober. “Yes, of course—to see if we’d suit. Papa seemed quite sure we would.”

Alec waited for her to give her own opinion of the matter, but she simply blinked against the wind and waited for him to continue. He wondered if he should get down on one knee, but it seemed silly to do so on a hill. He’d be kneeling uphill, and if he went around her, then downhill. He kept to his feet instead, and clasped his hands behind his back. Then he unclasped them, and set one on his hip, and hooked the other thumb in his watch pocket, the way he’d seen English gentlemen do when they wished to look important, yet still at ease.

“My lady—” he began, but the wind reappeared and snatched the muff out of her hands. It tumbled down the hillside like a runaway lapdog. Sophie cried out in dismay, and Alec ran after it, trapping it under his boot before it could reach the loch. He held it up like a hunting trophy and grinned at her. She frowned at the boot print.

He climbed the hill against the stiff breeze, only to find the wind was battering the feathers adorning her fashionable straw bonnet, threatening to steal them too, and fling them into the sky where rescue would be impossible. In Alec’s opinion, the hat would be much more attractive without the outlandishly colorful embellishments, anyway.

“You were saying, my lord?” she asked, half shouting against the wind. How odd. It hadn’t been windy in the least when they came outside.

“I was about to ask—” he yelled, but her shawl caught the breeze like a sail and tangled around her face, pasting itself to her features, outlining her nose and eyes and wide open mouth like a paisley mask, knotting the long fringe in the ribbons of her bonnet as she scrabbled at it, her shrieks muffled. Alec wrestled with it, trying to tear it free from the wind’s grip. He yanked the shawl loose and stuffed it into his pocket, where it snapped against his leg like the tail of an angry cat, cornered but far from vanquished.

“Thank you, my lord. I am very afraid of the dark,” Sophie explained, breathing hard.

“You are?” Alec asked. It got very dark in the Highlands. You could see the stars here, count them, almost touch them. He’d missed that in London. He loved the dark, peaceful nights here. He shook himself, remembering why he’d brought her outside. It appeared the wind was getting more violent by the minute. “I mean . . . Lady Sophie, would you do me the honor of—”

Something tugged hard on his legs, hooking itself around his knees, and he lost his balance on the slippery grass. The wind tore the oath from his lips as he tumbled down the hill, head over heels. He landed hard on his tailbone, a large jagged rock between his outspread legs, and he realized in horror that if he hadn’t stopped when he did, then he certainly would have proven to be a disappointment to Lady Sophie on their wedding night.

He lay in the heather for a moment to catch his breath. Odd, it almost felt as if someone had tripped him, yet there was no one here but himself and Sophie. He got to his feet and climbed the hill yet again to her side. Sophie’s eyes widened at the sight of him. He glanced down. There was a green streak down one sleeve of his shirt, and a smear of dirt. His face stung, and his fingers came away bloody when he touched the scratches on his cheek. He must look like a wild Scot after a battle. He imagined his ancestors climbing this hill after a hard fight, clutching their swords in their bloodstained hands, looking forward to seeing their womenfolk— He looked at Sophie, sitting miserably in the wind with loose tendrils of blond hair snapping around her face like the riggings of a ship in a gale. Her nose was red, her lips white.

He remembered the first time he’d seen Caroline in the window of the tower. The wind had made her cheeks pink, and her eyes glowed. Her glorious hair had floated around her like a battle flag. He could imagine the joy a warrior would feel coming home to such a sight. He looked across to the tower, but the window was empty. He clutched his fist around the imaginary sword in his hand and looked back at Sophie’s pinched face. He almost turned and fled back down the hill, but he forced himself to stop. It had to be done.

“Lady Sophie, will you do me the honor of becoming my—” he demanded more gruffly than he’d intended, but the wind spun around him, stealing his words away.

“What?” she screamed. “I can’t hear you!”

“Will you marry me?” he bellowed.

She looked relieved, if not pleased. “Yes. Can we go inside now?”

“I think that’s a good idea,” he murmured, though he knew she couldn’t hear him over the blast. He helped her to her feet and retrieved his coat. Should he thank her, say something about her beauty, or how happy he was? But she was already three paces ahead of him, running for the safety of the castle.

By the time they’d reached the terrace, and Sophie had run across the flagstones with tiny, clipped steps and ducked inside. The minute the door closed behind her, the wind died to a disconsolate sigh.

He saw Megan in the hall, and she paused to stare at him. “You’re all bloody and scratched!” she exclaimed. “What have you been doing?”

“Proposing,” he muttered darkly.

A
ngus paced across the width of Caroline’s room, and back again. She was quietly reading by the window, and couldn’t hear him. “They mean to wed him, bed him, and kill him. Then, Brodie will do whatever Devorguilla bids him to do.”

He paused in front of her, though she didn’t notice. “You know this means the end of Clan MacNabb, don’t you, lass? It’s a disaster. ’Twould be better if he wed you, penniless though you are!”

Caroline turned the page, and he smiled softly. “Ach, you look like your grandmother did, the summer I fell in love with her,” he said, and put out a hand to touch her cheek. She looked up, her gaze passing through him. He felt a jolt of surprise. “Did you feel that?” he whispered. He put his hand on hers, clasped it as hard as he could, and her fingers curled for a moment. He felt a flare of warmth.

He squeezed harder, but felt nothing more. “Lass, I need your help.
Alec
needs your help,” he pleaded, and she blinked, and looked around her in surprise.

Georgiana appeared. “She can hear me!” Angus said, pointing at Caroline. “She knows I’m here!”

Georgiana looked at Caroline in surprise, but her granddaughter sat calmly reading a book, unaware of Angus, or Georgiana. Georgiana put her hands on her hips. “There’s no fool like an old fool! What the devil are you doing? I needed your help!”

Angus waved his hand between Caroline’s eyes and the book, but she didn’t even blink. Hope fizzled. He floated over the Georgiana. Caroline had her eyes, her straight, slim, elegant bearing. Even the way she pursed her lips while she read was like Georgiana. There was a pain in Angus’s chest where his heart had once been, beating just for her.

“Well, what is it?” he demanded.

Georgiana looked wistfully at Caroline. “I tried to stop him, but Alec proposed to Sophie.”

“When?” he demanded.

“Not a half hour ago.”

“Did she accept?”

Georgiana sighed, and Caroline looked up. “Of course she did,” Georgiana said.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
S
IX

V
iscount Speed paced the floor of the comfortably appointed dining room he had hired—along with the innkeeper’s two best bedrooms—at the Great Glen Inn. As inns went—or glens, for that matter—he could find nothing great about this place at all. “By God, I shall make sausage from his entrails!”

Mandeville, who was gnawing on a sausage skewered on a fork, set it down. “We did not specifically ask him if he was Glenlorne, though he was in the man’s castle. Perhaps we should have guessed that MacNabb and Glenlorne were one and the same?”

“How could we have ascertained that?” Speed griped, as he made another turn around the threadbare rug. “He looked no different than he ever did in London.”

“Course he did.” Mandeville took another bite of sausage. “He was standing in a castle, and now that I think on it, two of England’s wealthiest heiresses were in that castle right along with him.”

“He can’t marry them both!”

Mandeville shrugged, chewing thoughtfully. “This is Scotland. Perhaps the laws here allow such things.”

Speed frowned. “The laws of chivalry make no such allowance! It should be one heiress per lord in all places. ’Tisn’t fair otherwise.” He crossed to the fly-blown mirror above the sideboard. “How does he do it, I wonder? I have always cut a certain dash with the ladies. My face is surely just as handsome.”

Mandeville looked at his companion dubiously. “ ’Tis derring-do, old man.”

“What is that, some kind of Highland beverage, a dish made with sheep’s entrails, perhaps?”

“It’s sheer gall for the most part, though ladies like to think of it as the essence of heroism. They want derring-do in a man the way we want—” He rolled his hands out in front of his waistcoat, and nipped them in at his waist.

Speed looked into the mirror again, seeing something entirely different from his long, crooked nose, his small eyes, his thin, lopsided lips. “Surely we have plenty of that,” he said, and ran a hand through his greasy hair, practicing his most seductive smile, though he was missing two teeth.

“Indeed, but I fear MacNabb has more.”

“Then what are we to do? In London, we would simply start a rumor that he’s penniless, or call him out for cheating at cards and shoot him. How the devil do gentlemen deal with these matters in the Highlands?” Speed demanded, turning away from the mirror to pace again. “Not that it likely comes up often. There are few heiresses here of Lady Sophie’s caliber, and damned few gentlemen from what I’ve seen.”

Mandeville pushed his empty plate away and sat back. “Then I think we are free to make our own rules, wouldn’t you say? Think of the old Scottish custom of reiving, taking what you want.”

Speed stroked a pimple on his chin thoughtfully. “I thought that only applied to cows?”

Mandeville grinned. “Not at all. In days of old, a bold man simply took what he wanted, wedded it, bedded it, and the matter was settled to everyone’s satisfaction.”

Speed frowned. “Are we still talking about
cows
?”

Mandeville poured himself a glass of the innkeeper’s finest port and held it up to the light. He paused for a moment to stare into the ruby depths before turning back to his friend. “Not cows, no. But a fine woman is worth every bit of the same effort it takes to capture a fine heifer, I believe.” He set the glass down, and leaned toward Speed. “What if Glenlorne was accidentally injured—or worse? Dearest Sophie would be ours for the taking.”

Speed’s eyes lit. “Ah, derring-do!”

Mandeville nodded. “Precisely.” Mandeville picked up the glass and drained it.

Speed sat down at the table across from his friend. “But how will we do it? We could bash his head in on a dark night, or strangle him in his bed.”

Mandeville’s smile rolled up the flesh of his red cheeks like a sail. “It’s a fine land for hunting, don’t you think? I hear there’s plenty of game in these hills. Surely Glenlorne could be convinced to invite us out for a day’s shooting,” Mandeville explained. “ ’Tis the gentlemanly thing.”

Speed’s eyes glowed like the furnaces of hell. “I see. An accident, then—a shot through the heart.”

“Almost like a duel, a way to settle the manner honorably,” Mandeville agreed. “What could be fairer than that?”

“But how will we determine which of us will marry Lady Sophie in Glenlorne’s place?” Speed asked.

Mandeville folded his arms over his massive belly, giving his friend a friendly smile. “Whoever bags the earl shall win the lady.”

“And the loser?” Speed asked. “Seems a shame to go home empty-handed.”

“There’s still Lady Caroline.”

There was a discreet knock, and the innkeeper entered. “More wine, gentlemen, or ale, or another haggis?” he asked politely.

“Haggis?” Mandeville said, holding out his glass to be filled.

“I believe you referred to them as sausages when I brought the first one in, sir. I have never seen anyone eat nine of them in all my days.”

“The chill in the air gives one an appetite,” Mandeville said. “No, I am replete. Bring me some writing paper, if you have it, and find a lad to take a note to Glenlorne, sirrah.”