by Liz Carlyle
“My nieces!” she snapped. “The ones you are holding hostage!”
It was as if the floor shifted beneath his feet. Lady Tatton’s nieces? Holy God. Somehow, he found the presence of mind to toss his gloves disdainfully down. “I was unaware, ma’am, that I was holding anyone hostage.”
“You have caused inestimable damage, sir, to Esmée’s reputation,” said Lady Tatton. “Do not you dare get on your high horse with me.”
Now he was rattled, and it took all his skill as a gambler to hide it. “You are the aunt, then, I take it?” he said lightly. “Returned at last from points afar?”
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Of course I am the aunt! Never say you did not know!”
He twisted his mouth into a sour smile. “I did not know,” he answered. “But it makes little difference to me. Sorcha is my daughter.”
“And a sad shame it is, too!” said her ladyship. “Bad enough she be thought the daughter of that devil Achanalt, but you, sir, are beyond the pale.”
Alasdair was swiftly losing his patience. This was not the happy occasion he’d expected his homecoming to be, and he did not like the comparison Lady Tatton had just drawn. “I hope, ma’am, that I am not sunk so low as a man who would put children out on the street to starve!” he snapped. “Now, have you a point? If so, make it and leave me in peace. I’m sorry for the loss of your sister, but Sorcha’s paternity is none of your concern.”
“Nonetheless, Esmée’s welfare is,” she returned. “And you, sir, have all but ruined her.”
“Good God, what do you want of me?” he gritted. “I did not ask her to come here!”
“No, but you persuaded her to stay!” snapped Lady Tatton. “You knew she was innocent, and you knew she was desperate, and you took blatant advantage of those facts, without an iota of consideration for the damage you would be doing her good name.”
Now her accusations were striking too close to home. “Wha—” His voice faltered. “What has Esmée told you?”
Lady Tatton looked at him suspiciously. “That it is all her fault,” she said. “And none of yours. But I do not for one moment believe that. She is as green as grass, and you know it.”
Alasdair tore his eyes from hers and stared into the depths of the room. For a moment, it was as if time held suspended, its passage marked by nothing but the ticking of the mantel clock. “Then I shall marry her,” he finally said. “There need be no more talk of Esmée’s ruin.”
Lady Tatton gasped. “Good heavens!” she said. “Absolutely not!”
He returned his gaze to her face and forced his voice to hold steady. “It would make me the happiest man on earth,” he said. He would not have wished such a thing on Esmée, but now that it had come down to it, Lady Tatton’s cold recitation of his sins made it all the easier to do what he’d already known he must.
But Lady Tatton, it seemed, saw nothing easy about it. “Out of the question!” she snapped. “Unless you are telling me there is some reason why she would not make an eligible parti for someone else?”
Alasdair drew an unsteady breath. “Esmée would make any man proud,” he answered. “And whilst I know I don’t deserve her, I am the man accused of bringing about her ruin.”
Lady Tatton’s eyes hardened. “You would do nothing but make her miserable,” she retorted. “You’ve already ruined her mother. Why should Esmée be forced to throw herself away on a gamester and a womanizer? On a man whose family is barely two generations removed from the croft? Perhaps my sister was a bit capricious, but our bloodlines go all the way back to the Conquest! Moreover, Esmée’s beauty and deportment are beyond reproach. Yes, she would make any man proud. And if there is anything of the gentleman left in you, you will step aside, hold your tongue, and let someone worthy have her!”
Again, the long silence. Alasdair went to the window and stared down into the street. Again, he felt that quiet, quivering rage, and the impotent sense of something precious slipping from his grasp. That awful fear of losing something he’d barely known he wanted.
But Esmée was not about to be torn asunder by a carriage wheel. She was not bleeding to death. She was being offered an opportunity. A chance to become what she had been destined by blood and by birth to be. And he was…well, he was essentially what Lady Tatton accused him of being. He had no excuse for it, either.
As a young man, he had not been denounced or cut off by his father, as had his friend Devellyn. He had not endured the agonizing loss of a first love, as had been Merrick’s fate. There was no dark, Byronic secret in his past, as with Quin. He was just a charming wastrel. Because that was what he’d chosen to be. And now, as he approached—well, if not the autumn of his life, then certainly a bloody late summer—he had little right to cry foul over it, or to drag youth and beauty and innocence down with him, simply because he had formed some pathetically adolescent tendre for a girl he didn’t deserve. It would pass, and soon enough.
“You are persuaded, ma’am, that you can make a good marriage for her?” he finally asked, his voice hollow.
“I believe so,” she said. “Do your servants talk?”
“They do not,” he said firmly. “Moreover, they hold Miss Hamilton in the highest regard.”
“Then I shall have her married by Christmas,” declared Lady Tatton.
He detected, however, a moment’s hesitation. He knew it boded ill. “And—?”
Lady Tatton sighed sharply. “Of course, Esmée is reluctant to go without her sister. So I really think it would be best if you just let—”
He turned from the window, his face a mask of rage. “No!” he rasped. “That is out of the question! Do not you dare to ask it of me.”
“I admit, it is an awkward situation,” she said. “But the child is my niece, and—”
“The child is my daughter!” he interjected. “Mine! And I am quite capable, madam, of raising a child and of giving her life’s every luxury. If Esmée wishes to leave me, take her, damn you! I can’t stop her. But my child? No. Never.”
Lady Tatton seemed to shrivel a little. “Well, the truth is, Esmée has put me off until this afternoon,” she admitted. “I believe she means, Sir Alasdair, to speak with you.”
“It is not necessary,” he said, the words tight and clipped. “Indeed, I wish she would not.”
“Just as I told her, but you know how she can be,” said her ladyship. “And unfortunately, I cannot tell what is in her mind. It might be something very silly. So if she should say or do anything foolish, I beg you to remember your promise. I beg you to set aside your selfish notions, and for once, do what is best for someone else. Esmée’s whole life has been fraught with disappointment. She does not need to find disappointment in her marriage.”
Alasdair felt himself trembling inside with rage. “In other words, you mean for her to wed someone sober and respectable?” he gritted. “Someone who will help her take her proper place in society? And whether or not this much-vaunted husband stirs any passion in her heart, or has any appreciation of her strength of mind, or any respect for her independent spirit, is to be considered wholly secondary? I should think that damned disappointing!”
“Well!” said her ladyship. “I seem to have struck a nerve.”
He had turned back to the window again, this time his hands clenched on the windowsill. “Lady Tatton, I fear you strain my limited civility,” he said. “You have at least half your pyrrhic victory. You may take one of your nieces, and marry her off to the first worthy suitor that crosses your path. Now kindly get out of my house!”
He heard nothing more but the sound of the door latch clicking shut.
It was not long before Lydia returned to the schoolroom in another breathless, wide-eyed rush to warn Esmée that Lady Tatton had cornered Sir Alasdair on his way in the door. By that time, however, Sorcha had become fretful, just as Dr. Reid had predicted, and Esmée was obliged to pace back and forth through the schoolroom, patting the child on the back until she drifted off to sleep.
Heartsick over the choice which now seemed inevitable, and very much afraid her aunt had berated Alasdair unfairly, Esmée continued to pace, even after Sorcha was tucked into her little bed, and Lady Tatton’s coach had vanished from the street below. She walked and she waited, her heart in her throat. Waited for Alasdair to come to her, all the while wondering what he would say.
It would be best, she supposed, if he said nothing at all. Had she not already acknowledged the wisdom—no, the necessity—of her leaving this place, even before her aunt’s arrival? She could not continue to live here and be, in essence, a kept woman. Still, in her fantasies, Alasdair burst into the schoolroom, flung himself at her feet, and begged her not to go. In her more logical moments, she imagined him simply arguing with her, just as he had that first night, then wheedling from her a promise to stay.
But neither happened, and by luncheon—a meal she sent away before the cover was removed—she realized he did not mean to come at all. It was a lowering thought, but she could not go without speaking to him just one more time.
Esmée found him in his study. The door was closed, but she sensed his presence inside the room. It was as if she could smell his scent, familiar and comforting, in the corridor. She drew in a deep breath, then tapped lightly.
She heard his answering bark. “Come!”
Esmée stuck her head inside. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”
He looked up from his desk. “Oh, you is it, my dear?” Abruptly, he shut a drawer, but not before she glimpsed the two green velvet boxes within.
She came into the room, feeling suddenly awkward. “I understand you met my aunt this morning.”
He had risen, of course, from his chair. “What?” he said absently. “Oh, indeed! Lady Tatton. A most worthy lady.”
“Aye, she is that,” agreed Esmée. “But a bit of a dragon, all the same.”
MacLachlan smiled. “In my experience, worthy ladies usually are.”
Esmée tried to smile back, but it faltered. “You know, I daresay, why she came?”
MacLachlan paced to the window, one hand set at the back of his neck, the other at his waist. It was a sign, she’d learned, that he was either angry or troubled. But when he turned round and paced back again, he sounded neither. “Ah, Esmée,” he said. “I collect you are to leave us.”
“Am I?” she said sharply. “I had thought we might…discuss it first.”
“Esmée!” He looked at her with chiding indulgence. “There is no question. You must go.”
The world felt suddenly unsteady to Esmée, as if the floor beneath her feet was shifting in a way she’d not believed possible. “I must go?” she echoed. “You beg me to stay here, and now you can so easily send me packing?”
He picked up a penknife from his desk, and began to toy with it in a way that looked faintly dangerous. “I mean only that this is an unlooked-for opportunity,” he said, slowly tilting the blade to the light. “Your aunt is well placed. She can give you entrée to a world most people can only dream of.”
“I have never dreamt of it.”
“Liar!” he said, still smiling. “What girl has not?”
“I am not a girl,” she snapped. “If ever I was, my mother’s death put an end to it.”
“Quite right,” he agreed smoothly—too smoothly for Esmée’s liking. “You are a lovely young woman, full of grace, beauty, and potential.”
“Alasdair, you don’t understand,” she said. “She wishes…she wishes me to marry.”
“Does she, by Jove?” For a long moment, he was silent. “And so you should, I daresay.”
Esmée did not understand what was happening. “But—But what about last night?”
“What about it?” he asked coolly. “I was drinking, you know. I usually am.”
Her eyes widened. “You are…you are saying you don’t remember?”
“Not…er, completely,” he said. “No.”
Esmée threw up her hands. “Oh, now who is the liar?” she cried. “You drank little more than a dram! A good Scot puts twice that in his porridge of a winter’s morn!”
He laid aside his knife and took her hands in his. They felt bloodless. Cold, like his voice. “Esmée,” he said. “We ought not even speak of last night. We must pretend it never happened, for your sake. We were all of us under such strain, doing and saying things, I daresay, we would otherwise never have done.”
She looked at him accusingly. “I did naught I’d no wish to do!” she answered. “We made love, you and I. Oh, not, perhaps, in the usual way, no. But you cannot tell me it meant nothing.”
“It was nothing, Esmée,” he said gently. “You are young. You do not understand men, or how they—”
“Oh, aye!” she snapped, jerking her hands from his. “A silly chit, am I? Well, listen to me, MacLachlan, and listen well. I have grown quite tired of everyone telling me how young and stupid I am. I am neither, and we both know it. And I know this, too: You are trying to drive me away.”
His eyes hardened. “No, I am merely accepting what you apparently cannot,” he said in an artic voice. “We have not been living in the real world, Esmée. We have grown close—inappropriately close—and I am to blame. It was a pleasant flirtation, no more. I should never have permitted you to stay here. And if you remain here, what do you honestly think will happen between us? I need hardly tell you, my dear, that I am not the marrying kind.”
She began to sputter with indignation, but he cut her off. “And if I am not the marrying kind, Esmée, then you need to find someone who is,” he finished. “You are a beautiful, deeply sensual creature. Lady Tatton has come home, it seems, in the very nick of time.”
Inexplicably, nausea gripped her. Esmée set a hand to her stomach. “My aunt—she put you up to this, didn’t she?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Esmée! I’m half again your age!” He tore his gaze from hers. “Your aunt made me ashamed of myself.”
“I don’t believe you!” she retorted. “I think you are just trying to do the honorable thing.”
Finally, he laughed aloud. “Oh, Esmée, I can hear society’s collective giggling all the way from Mayfair,” he said. “Sir Alasdair MacLachlan, sacrificing himself on the altar of a young lady’s honor!”
“Oh, aye!” she said, sneering. “Make a great joke of it!”
But Alasdair pressed on. “Oh, you think me noble and good now, is that it?” he challenged. “Just because I held you, and helped you forget something horrible and tragic? If you think that, Esmée, then you are as silly and romantic as your mother. I took my pleasure from your body—and trust me, I did not leave your bed feeling good and noble. There is nothing at all of the romantic in me, Esmée. I live only in the here and now, not in dreams of some perfect future. Go. Go with your aunt, and make a life for yourself. Forget about me, and forget about Sorcha. Let Lady Tatton find you some well-mannered, respectable young man who can give you children of your own.”
Esmée wondered if he’d lost his mind. “How—how can I?” she asked incredulously. “I am no longer innocent.”
“Oh, trust me, my dear; you are the very definition of innocence.”
“But after last night—I mean, what man would even contemplate—?”
“You still have your virginity,” he said.
“A technicality,” she countered.
“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But that little technicality is all that matters.”
She fell quiet for a moment. She did not feel like an innocent. But otherwise, there was little in what he’d said that she had not already decided. Still, she had not thought to hear it spill so coldly and so logically from his beautiful mouth. A mouth which had coaxed and comforted and made languorous love to her but a few hours earlier. The very memory of it still make her shiver, and for an instant she feared she might make a fool of herself again.
Perhaps she was like her mother, God help her. All of her life, she had tried to be otherwise. She had tried to keep both her head and her hea
rt safe, but Sir Alasdair MacLachlan had been her undoing. She wished to God she could blame him for it. Instead, she drew in a ragged breath. “Do you—do you think I am silly and romantic, then?” she demanded. “Do you think I am like my mother?”
Something inside him seemed to explode. “How the devil do I know?” he snapped. “I don’t even remember the woman, you will recall. That’s the sort of man I am, Esmée! There have been a hundred Lady Achanalts in my bed—lovers I never really knew, and whose names I don’t even care to recall. The truth is, I barely know you—and obviously, you do not know me.”
She felt hot, angry tears spring to her eyes, and blinked them back. “Oh, I know you, MacLachlan,” she returned in a low, steady voice. “I know you better than you might wish.”
“Come, Esmée! You have been here but a few weeks. You know nothing of the world beyond Scotland. Take what is being offered you. Don’t throw yourself away, girl, on a cad like me.”
“How can I?” she retorted. “You have already said you do not want me.”
He turned to the window and refused to look at her. “Esmée, please go to your aunt now,” he said. “I have things to do.”
“Aye, I shall, then!” she answered. “And fair fa’ ye, MacLachlan! I mean to forget about you. Perhaps it won’t even prove difficult—”
“Oh, it won’t!” he interjected.
“Aye, you’re right, I do not doubt!” she agreed. “But what I’ll not be forgetting is my sister. You cannot cut me off from her.”
He did not turn around, did not move from the window. “I have no intention of doing so,” he rasped. “You may see Sorcha whenever you wish. Lydia will bring her. Just make the arrangements, please, with Wellings. As I said, I have things to do now.”
Esmée stiffened her spine and went to the door, but at the last moment, another torment struck. “I wish to know one last thing,” she said, her hand on the doorknob. “I claim the privilege of asking, as Sorcha’s sister, if for no other reason.”
“What?” he snapped impatiently.
“Are you going to marry Mrs. Crosby?”
He was so quiet and so rigid, she feared she had gone too far. “God, I hope not,” he finally said. “But I suppose stranger things have happened.”