It didn’t help that MacLachlann was revelling in the role as lord of the manor, while she was so constrained by hers as his ignorant, vapid wife.
Or that he looked even more handsome in evening dress. The cut of his black evening jacket accentuated his broad shoulders, while his tight-fitting knee breeches and stockings emphasized his leanly muscular legs.
“Yes, the finest gelding I think I’ve ever seen,” he said, referring to the saddle horse he’d bought in London with Jamie’s money and had sent to Edinburgh, as if there weren’t any good horses in Scotland.
She mentally shuddered as she considered how much such an animal and its transportation must have cost.
“Should bring a tidy profit if I ever decide to sell it,” he noted.
Was he telling her that would be the horse’s fate when their task was complete? “You’d sell it?”
“Of course. If I could get the right price, I’d sell it tomorrow.”
So, he didn’t intend to keep it—thank goodness.
“I should be able to get a damn good price for it here. There’s no finer beast in Edinburgh—probably all of Scotland. I trust your mare will be just as fine.”
Esme nearly dropped her sterling silver fork. “You bought two horses?”
Then she remembered she was supposed to be dim, so she added a giggle and widened her eyes. “You don’t mean you bought a horse for me? I don’t ride.”
That was quite true. When she’d been growing up in the Highlands, they hadn’t been able to afford a horse. Jamie had learned to ride later; she never had.
MacLachlann laughed, and this time she did not find the sound of it nearly so appealing. “Well, now that we’re home, you’ll have to learn.”
If ever there was a time to be vapid… She clasped her hands together like a penitent supplicant. “But, Ducky, horses are so big and prancy, I’m sure I’ll fall. You wouldn’t want your dearest love to hurt herself, would you? And you wouldn’t make me do something I really don’t want to do, would you?”
He looked mildly annoyed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a horse.”
Undeterred, Esme put her napkin to her eye and sniffled as if she were weeping. “Is Ducky going to be cruel to his dearest, sweetest love?”
MacLachlann scowled as he reached for his cut-crystal goblet of excellent red wine. “If you really don’t want to ride, very well, don’t.”
“And you’ll sell the mare?”
His frown deepened for a moment, then it was as if he’d suddenly seen an angelic vision. “I should be able to make an even better profit on it,” he declared with obvious satisfaction, “so yes, I’ll sell the mare.”
A predatory gleam came to MacLachlann’s blue eyes. “Dry your tears, my sweet, and come give your husband a kiss.”
With the servants in the room, what could she do except obey? So she did, keeping her eyes demurely lowered and sliding an apparently bashful glance at the nearest footman before she gave MacLachlann a peck on the cheek.
Before she could move away, he slid his arm around her and pulled her close, The Look fully evident as he gently caressed her cheek. His touch was warm and gentle, light as a feather, yet enough to disturb every nerve in her body and make her remember him lying on the bed.
“How can I deny you anything?” he asked softly, sounding as if he truly meant it.
Her heartbeat quickened and her legs seemed weak as jelly. How she wished he meant it….
No, she didn’t! She couldn’t! This was still Quintus MacLachlann, and he was only pretending. There was no real sentiment behind that action or that look. The man was simply a superb actor—and she must remember that.
“Not in front of the servants, Ducky,” she murmured, pulling away.
He didn’t protest as she hurried back to her chair. Thank goodness the meal was nearly over—although what would happen after that?
She found out soon enough. MacLachlann downed the last of his wine, pushed back his chair and got to his feet.
“Good night, my dear,” he said briskly. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
She hadn’t expected that. “You’re retiring already?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to my club. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Sleep well, my little plum cake.”
“I shall try,” she replied, trying to hide her annoyance that he hadn’t informed her of this plan. “Don’t be out too late, Ducky. It’s been a long and tiring day.”
The leering expression on his face wouldn’t have been out of place on a Roman in mid debauch. “For you perhaps,” he said as he swaggered from the room.
Early the next day, Esme paced in the countess’s morning room. She was too agitated to pay much heed to the wallpaper depicting peacocks and nightingales, or the ornate plasterwork. It barely registered in her mind that the delicate chairs were gilded, nor had she been as enthralled by the intricacy of the inlaid ebony of the writing desk as she might have been otherwise, because she was exhausted. She’d lain awake for hours waiting for MacLachlann to return. She’d finally fallen asleep near dawn, only to dream of Quintus MacLachlann as a satyr, with horns and furry legs and a V-shaped beard. He had chased her and caught her, laughing as he laid her down on the ground and…
Worse, instead of being horrified, she’d been excited by his wild embrace. Passionately so.
She pressed her fingertips to her closed eyes, trying to forget that vivid dream.
It had to be the wine. She didn’t usually drink more than a single glass in the evening and last night she’d had three.
Now it was well past breakfast and MacLachlann still had not returned.
Had he really gone to a gentlemen’s club, she asked herself for the hundredth time, or somewhere else? Had he returned to familiar Edinburgh haunts, and if so, how long would it be before somebody realized he wasn’t the earl, but the man’s brother?
“Good God, what a night!”
She whirled around to see MacLachlann leaning against the door frame. He was unshaven and unkempt, his cravat undone and lying loosely around his neck, the top of his shirt unbuttoned and exposing his neck and too much of his clavicle. He also looked utterly exhausted—yet even then, he was still more attractive than the majority of men she’d met.
As for his weary, dishevelled state, he had only himself to blame. If he hadn’t gone out, he could have spent the night sleeping between clean, pressed sheets in a soft bed in a finely appointed chamber near her own. Very near her own.
Esme watched as he walked to the nearest chair and slid into it as if his legs were liquid. He closed his eyes. “I’ve never been so bored in my life!” he said with a long-suffering sigh. “All they talked about was dogs and horses—and not even racing horses. Just hunters. I thought I’d go mad.”
It certainly sounded as if he really had gone to a gentlemen’s club, which came as a greater relief than she cared to acknowledge. And yet… “If it was so boring, why did you stay so long?”
He cracked open his eyelids. “Because I thought I might hear something useful, of course. And I did. If the earl is having financial difficulties, it’s not the general state of things among the nobility and gentry here. If it was, I doubt they’d be spending so much on their hounds and horses.” His eyes closed again. “At least I found a buyer for the mare willing to pay a good price and I’ll be able to sell the gelding to him for a handsome profit, too, before we go back to London.”
Esme sat on the edge of a slender gilt chair near the writing desk and absently lifted the lid of the inkpot. It was as dry as the Sahara. “Nobody questioned your identity, I hope.”
“I hardly recognized any of them myself, so no, nobody questioned my identity, little plum cake.”
She crossed her arms. “Please don’t call me that.”
He came to stand before her, his arms crossed, his weight on one leg. “Are you going to keep calling me Ducky?”
She would not allow him to be intimate…intimidate her. “I’ll stop
calling you Ducky if you’ll stop calling me little plum cake.”
He nodded. “Very well. We have a bargain. Now I’m going to bed.” He started toward the door, then paused and glanced back, smirking. “What, no kiss good-night?”
She stiffened. “As we are alone and it is almost the afternoon, certainly not.”
“Too bad. You kiss quite well—for a novice,” he said as he opened the door.
Only a few days ago, she would have been tempted to throw the empty inkpot at his head for such a condescending remark.
Now?
Now, she hardly knew what to make of Quintus MacLachlann.
Two hours later, Esme sat at the writing desk. Where before the delicate piece of furniture had been as empty as the inkpot, now it was equipped with several sheets of blank foolscap, quills and a penknife for sharpening points. The inkpot had been filled with the finest India ink, and the sand shaker prepared. She’d given some of her pin money to the butler to purchase the necessary writing supplies.
She did not include that detail in the letter she was writing to her brother, only that they had arrived, their ruse seemed to be working and MacLachlann had already gleaned some useful information at his brother’s club.
She’d just noted MacLachlann’s observation about the gentry’s apparent prosperity when McSweeney arrived bearing a card on a silver server. “Are you at home, my lady?”
She took the card and frowned when she saw who was waiting before she raised her head. “Yes, I am.”
As the butler departed, Esme closed the writing desk, rose and smoothed down her pretty gown of pale green sprigged muslin. So attired, she felt on more equal footing with Lady Catriona McNare, the Mistress of Duncombe, breaker of her brother’s heart and destroyer of his happiness.
Chapter Six
As Catriona glided into the room, Esme tried not to stare. To be sure, she had known Catriona would be older—they all were. And Catriona was as stylishly dressed as ever, in a lovely dove-gray pelisse with black-frog closing and a matching gray bonnet with black velvet ribbons. So it wasn’t her clothes or her deportment that surprised Esme; it was the alterations to her features. Esme had seen her only once, on that fateful evening when Catriona had jilted Jamie, but she would never forget the youthful beauty who had broken her brother’s heart.
Catriona’s face had been soft and round, her cheeks plump and pink. Now she was pale and gaunt. Her green eyes had a haunted look, not unlike Jamie’s when he thought Esme wasn’t watching as he stared out the drawing room window on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
“Hello, Miss McCallan,” the Mistress of Duncombe said after a swift glance assured her they were alone. “I can’t thank you enough for coming to Edinburgh to help me, or your brother for sending you.”
However she had changed and however grateful she was, this was still the woman who had rejected her brother because he was too poor and unimportant for the daughter of an earl to marry. “He is a very generous, forgiving man.”
“But you don’t forgive me,” Catriona said with quiet wistfulness. “I don’t blame you. I treated your brother very badly, and I—”
“Well, well, who have we here?” MacLachlann jovially asked as he strode into the room.
Although it had only been two hours since Esme had last seen him, he appeared remarkably well-rested. He was also shaved, his hair brushed, and he wore a fresh white shirt, cravat, black trousers and dark green jacket and waistcoat. Indeed, he looked every inch the rich, confident gentleman.
“This is Lady Catriona McNare, the Earl of Duncombe’s daughter.”
“I’m delighted to meet you, my lady,” MacLachlann replied as he bent down to lift Catriona’s gloved hand to his lips.
“You must be Quintus MacLachlann,” Catriona said. “Jamie told me all about you in his letter.”
“Dear me, I hope he didn’t tell you everything,” MacLachlann cried with mock horror, “or you’ll never speak to me again.”
Looking more like the beauty she’d been in the first flush of youth, Catriona gave him a warm smile. “I shall always be happy to speak to any friend of Jamie’s.”
Not wanting to waste any time with idle chitchat and the sharing of meaningless compliments, Esme got right to the point. “Have you been able to find any pertinent documents?”
Catriona shook her head, making the little blond curls on her forehead dance. “Unfortunately, no. My father keeps his library door locked most of the time.”
MacLachlann darted an inscrutable glance at Esme, then gestured to a chair. “Please, sit down.”
Was he implying she’d been remiss? Or rude?
She didn’t care. She wouldn’t care what he or Catriona McNare, ruin of her brother’s peace and happiness, thought about her.
“Most of the time? But he doesn’t keep the door locked all the time?” MacLachlann asked Catriona once they were seated.
“No. Sometimes he leaves it open, although only for a little while if he’s temporarily called away.” Catriona delicately cleared her throat. “It’s my understanding that a locked door should present no hindrance to you, Mr. MacLachlann, so when I heard when you’d be arriving, I arranged to have a dinner party in your honor tonight. My father was quite a good friend of your father’s, I understand.”
“Yes, he was.”
Esme tried not to reveal her dismay at only hearing of this now. “You never mentioned that he knows you.”
“He knows of me, but we’ve never met,” MacLachlann explained. “I was rarely in Edinburgh when I was a boy. My father considered me too rambunctious, so he made me stay at school.”
Esme had enjoyed school, but she had enjoyed her holidays at home more. It would have been upsetting to be forced to remain there all year ’round.
She told herself to concentrate on the business at hand, not MacLachlann’s childhood. “Will he have met your brother?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
At his cavalier response, the blood warmed in her veins, and not with desire. “And yet you didn’t think that was something I ought to know?”
“We’re going to be introduced to many people who’ve met Augustus,” MacLachlann said lightly. “He’ll be no different from the others.”
“Except that we’re going to try to see his private papers. If the earl has any reason to suspect you’re not Augustus—”
“It’s my job to make sure nobody suspects we aren’t who we claim to be, and I’m very good at my job. If we’re discovered in the library, we’ll simply say the door was unlocked and we slipped away for…” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “A few moments alone.”
That explanation might be plausible, but sneaking into the earl’s library was still dangerous. “Our absence might be noticed.”
“Not right away,” Catriona said hopefully. “I’ve invited twenty couples.”
That sounded more like a ball than a dinner party to Esme.
“Father likes large parties,” Catriona explained, “and given your purpose, I thought it best to have as many guests as possible.”
“Right you are,” MacLachlann said with a reassuring smile. “The more the merrier, I always say.”
“Fortunately most of your set and your brother’s acquaintances are in the country this time of year,” Lady Catriona continued. “I’ve invited friends of my father, as well as our solicitor, Gordon McHeath.”
Although Esme wanted to believe no solicitor would ever cheat or defraud a client, she knew human nature too well to believe it impossible. “If your father is being defrauded or otherwise tricked in contractual matters, it’s possible Mr. McHeath is involved,” she said.
“I wouldn’t like to think so,” Catriona replied with every appearance of dismay. “His family’s reputation has been without blemish for three generations and Gordon McHeath seems a fine young man. I haven’t heard a word against him.”
Which didn’t make him an honest man. “Some of the people Jamie has represented have been cheated by men who were supp
osedly paragons of virtue,” she duly noted.
“It’s a bit early to be casting aspersions on anybody,” MacLachlann said. “As a matter of fact, my family uses the same firm.”
Esme stared at him. Why hadn’t she been told this, too? It would help their investigation to have a connection to the earl’s legal representation.
What else had MacLachlann and Jamie kept from her?
“I’m sure Mr. McHeath is trustworthy,” Catriona said with a shy smile, as if too modest to voice an opinion. “And perhaps you’re right and I’ve been worried about nothing. I do hope so! Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“What time should we arrive?”
“Seven o’clock.” Catriona looked from one to the other and toyed with the tassel on the bottom of her black velvet reticule. “I cannot possibly express how grateful I am to you both,” she said, her dulcet voice as soft and pleasant as Esme remembered, her green eyes moist, as if she were about to weep. “I fear our financial situation is even more precarious than I thought.”
“It can’t be so very bad if you’re hosting a dinner party for forty people,” Esme pointed out. And Catriona’s clothes were clearly new, as well as expensive.
Despite her logical observation, MacLachlann slid her another censorious glance. Like most men, he was obviously willing to accept anything that came out of a beautiful young woman’s mouth at face value.
“Father pretends everything is fine and we have no need to worry about money,” Catriona said as a blush tinted her cheeks. “Even after he tells me of another loss, if I try to economize, he insists on spending as we always have. But I fear we’re deeply in debt, and our property mortgaged beyond the capacity of the estate to repay.”
Highland Rogue, London Miss Page 6