Georgette dug her thin-soled slippers into the pavement and pulled them to a graceless halt. It wasn’t the words that jarred her as much as the arrogant assurance in her cousin’s voice. Panic scratched beneath her skin, panic of an entirely different sort than had sent her fleeing the brawny Scotsman this morning. Whereas that man had set her feet running because she feared her body’s unwanted, jolting response to the sight of his bare chest, the thought of intimacy with this man made her want to curl into a tight, protective ball that could not be breached. “We shall do no such thing,” she choked out. “As I explained yesterday, I have no wish to marry you.”
Randolph turned on her then, his gray eyes flashing. “That was before you stayed out all night and drank yourself into a stupor, cousin. Before you did God knows what with God knows who.” He pushed his spectacles up the narrow plank of his nose. “That was before Reverend Ramsey called out hullo on the street, and saw us both looking as we do. You have precious little to recommend you except your reputation, Georgette, and you have done a frightfully poor job protecting it. You are lucky I care for you enough to still offer for you, after the evening you appear to have enjoyed. You should be thanking me.”
Georgette gasped and pulled her hand from fingers that suddenly felt closer to talons. “I cannot marry you,” she hissed. That was not the complete truth, she realized as she stared at a muscle jumping angrily above her cousin’s pale brow. She didn’t want to marry him.
Where was a chamber pot when you needed one?
“You can and you shall marry me.” Randolph leaned in, his earlier familiarity escalating from something comforting to vulgar. “Everyone will believe you spent the night with me,” he went on, his voice an eager rasp. “Reverend Ramsey will have surely repeated it by now. And when you see how much you have to lose, I imagine you will happily say your vows.”
Anger splintered her rising panic. Randolph was the second man this morning who had tried to twist her to his will, the third if you counted the butcher who had foisted the kitten upon her. She was heartily tired of playing the biddable lady and doing what everyone expected of her. And the thought of marriage to Randolph, with all his panting insecurities, filled her with revulsion. She knew of only one way to dissuade him.
“It is too late,” she blurted out. Her voice was surprisingly steady, given the shaking of her limbs. “I appear to have gotten married last night.”
There. She had given voice to the terrible thing she had done. Randolph would be disappointed, but at least he would no longer be so desperate as to keep asking for her hand. And she felt sure he would not tell anyone why they could not marry. He was her cousin. He valued her enough to have offered for her, had only said those terrible things because he wanted to marry her. He would guard her honor. She was sure of it.
“Why do you believe you are married?” he asked, his voice very close to a growl.
“I awoke this morning next to a stranger who called me his wife,” she admitted, wishing it did not sound so . . . unseemly. “And there is this.” She twisted the ring around on her finger.
There was a beat of silence as Randolph stared down at the bit of gold. While he had been expressive throughout their earlier exchange, he now seemed hewn from granite. Clearly her unflappable cousin was in shock. She knew she still was. Why, yesterday he had done no more than wince when she had turned him down, but this morning he was frozen by the news of her evening’s escapades. He was no doubt wondering about her sanity, measuring her against the standards of Society and finding her lacking.
She was a proper lady, or at least she had been yesterday.
But she had a sinking feeling she would never deserve that title again.
Chapter 3
“CAN YOU HEAR me, you sodding fool?”
Though better sense bade him not to, James MacKenzie opened his eyes. His brother William loomed over him, as fierce and wild as their ancestors must have looked when they fought against Edward I. William’s face held a smirk and his fingers curved around shards of white pottery. Once upon a time, James would have put a fist to his older brother’s clean-shaven jaw in response to the insult. But that was a lifetime ago. He was a man now, with a measure of self-control. Besides, something about the oddity of waking to William’s none-too-handsome face told him that now was not the right moment for such childish antics.
“Bugger off,” James moaned, his head a mass of mangled thoughts and pain. “Can you not see I am sick?”
William hefted the ruined bit of china and dangled it above James’s nose. “I confess that was my first thought, but by the looks of things here, it seems you have put the chamber pot to a different use.” He frowned a moment, the motion looking more like a grimace. “Injured, is more like it. Did you get in a fight with your piss pot, then?”
James squinted up at his brother, absorbing his words like water into sand. As a fledgling solicitor, his life was built on seeing the truth behind a set of given facts, but he was damned if William’s remarks made any kind of sense. He had spent yesterday bent over his desk sorting out the proper legal precedent for damages over a mixed-breed bull jumping the fence to impregnate someone’s prizewinning heifer. His evening had consisted of dinner and several draughts of ale in the local pub house. Now he felt as if he had been hauled in from the knacker’s.
What had any of that to do with a ruined chamber pot?
“You don’t know what you are talking about.” James started to shake his head and then decided better of it. Life seemed so much easier when his brain wasn’t bouncing around his skull.
“Oh that’s rich, coming from a man who doesn’t know where his boots are.” William tossed a pair of battered footwear onto the bed. “ ’Tis a bonny nap you’ve had, nigh on two hours since dawn. But the innkeeper insists on your removal now, I am afraid.”
“Innkeeper?” James sat up and waited until his chest stopped heaving and the walls stopped bending toward corners. “Is that where I am?” He swung his bare legs off the edge of the mattress and hefted his barer arse off the bed, for once grateful for William’s brute strength as his brother caught him in a forward pitch. The floorboards crunched under his feet, and the sharp, sweet odor in the air gave him pause.
Christ, had he smashed a bottle of brandy on the floor last night? He peered around the room, took in the ruined wardrobe, the upturned washbasin. Feathers floated in the air and stuck to the walls. A woman’s corset hung from the drapery rod, something plain and demure but oddly beautiful for its lack of adornment. There was no denying the room looked as if a bloody good party had taken place.
“I hope she was worth it, you daft fool,” William snorted.
“Who was worth it?” James muttered, grabbing his shirt from the floor.
“The woman you brought up here last night.”
James stiffened against the slide of fabric across his chest. The shirt seemed different. It smelled of brandy, and an exotic fragrance that he could not quite name. “What woman?” he managed, starting in on his buttons. “And where in the bloody hell am I?”
“The Blue Gander.” His brother chuckled. “And the woman you married last night.”
That froze James’s progress more efficiently than had his hands been tied. What William was suggesting was impossibly vile. He was not someone who married women he didn’t know. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Oh, stop your sniveling outrage,” William chortled. The obvious glee on his face sent James’s fingers curling into a tight fist around the edges of his shirt. “It wasn’t a real marriage.”
James managed to raise one brow. This, at least, was familiar. He was used to being teased, by William in particular. Perhaps his brother had even cracked him over the head with the chamber pot himself, although that would admittedly be beyond the pale. “Put your wasted Cambridge education to work and attempt to formulate a complete sentence,” he growled. “What
are you talking about?”
“I am simply telling you what I heard when I stopped by your rooms this morning looking for you,” William qualified. “I don’t know what went on last night, but your friend was right full of information and all too willing to share. I came here to see for myself.”
“Have you been checking up on me?” Anger spliced through the pounding of James’s skull at the mention of his friend. Patrick Channing shared a set of rooms with him on the east side of Moraig, a necessity when you struggled to save every penny your fingers touched. More to the point, Patrick had shared several of those pints he recalled from last night.
But neither explained why his family was poking about his business.
“Someone needs to make sure you don’t kill yourself,” William retorted. “Channing said you didn’t come home last night, so I thought I’d better look in at the Gander. The innkeeper sent me right on up.” He tilted his head, a flash of sympathy skirting his usually hard features. “Ah, Jamie-boy. Happens to the best of us. There’s no denying you are in a sorry state for having gone sniffing after the wrong woman. You are bleeding all over the sheets.”
“The devil you say!” James pushed his hand to his right temple, then immediately regretted his haste as he located at least one source of his discomfort. “Oh! Ow.” He sucked in a breath as shards of memory, as fragmented as the bit of pottery in William’s hands, danced behind his skull.
“Aye, it’s a right fine one she gave you,” William nodded.
James’s fingers came away sticky with partially congealed blood. He held them up to his eyes and his usually faithful stomach pitched like a child’s toy boat in a stern gale. Someone—apparently a female someone—had given him a right good rap to the skull. He shook his head, trying to focus the pieces of memory that refused to fall into place as a result of the injury. His remembrance of how he had come to be here was as wrinkled as the shirt he had just buttoned. He could recall his bloody name. His recollections of his past were there too, bright and vivid and lamentable. Even his brother’s none-too-handsome face seemed as familiar as his own skin.
He just couldn’t remember her.
“Who was she?” James choked out. Whoever she was, the woman appeared to harbor a violent streak. Perhaps he should count himself fortunate to come out of the encounter breathing. But even as he considered the evidence, a ghost of a memory tickled at his anger. Nymph-white hair, dancing in candlelight. Wide gray eyes. A wide, laughing mouth. On him. He swallowed hard.
The woman had attacked him. What she might or might not have done before the assault bore no relevance.
“According to your friend Patrick, she wasn’t the queen, but about as high and mighty, and twice as pretty. Lucky bastard.” William tossed him his trousers. “Although unlucky might be a better title, given how things have turned up.”
James struggled into his trousers, one unsteady leg at a time. “Never was one for titles,” he breathed.
“Just because you do not have a title does not mean you do not have means, Jamie. ’Tis not your family’s fault you were born too pigheaded to see reason, and so determined to make your own way no matter the cost. Besides, this griping about not liking titles could not have helped you with the lady in question. Why, it’s no wonder she departed under such questionable circumstances. Couldn’t stand the Highland stink of you, I would wager.”
James sat down and fumbled to get his boots over his sockless feet. “I . . . I can’t remember.” The memory that tugged at him was too opaque for clarity, but something told him his partner of the previous evening hadn’t objected to his origins in the slightest.
“Getting soused will do that to you.”
James fought back a snarl. William’s yammering was starting to match the pounding above his temple. “I had a few, but I was not tumbledown drunk, if that is what you are implying.” He staggered to his feet and shrugged each protesting shoulder into his jacket. “And I’ve never forgotten a bloody thing before, not even when I have been falling down in my cups.” The throbbing in his skull reached a new crescendo of pain. “I suspect my memory loss has more to do with my crushed skull than a glass too many last night.”
“If you canna remember,” William retorted, “it matters little either way.”
Ignoring his brother, James stepped toward the window, his eye drawn by white linen. The floor crunched menacingly beneath his feet. He wondered if his companion of last night had cut her feet on the shards of glass upon waking. Somehow, the thought did not please him as much as it should.
He peered up at the bit of clothing that had caught his attention. The corset he had spied earlier hung from the drapery rod like a demented flag. Up close he could see the fine stitching and silk ribbons that lined the edges. The edge of an ivory busk peeked out of the center pocket, tempting him with a hint of engraving. He lifted the entire garment from its mooring, tucked it under one arm, and headed for the door.
William’s voice tickled his ear. “I don’t think it’s your size, Jamie-boy, which leaves me to wonder what you want with that bit of frippery. Memento of the evening you have forgotten? A spoil of war, perhaps?”
“It is a clue.” James stepped gingerly into the hallway and peered down the dank, musty stairwell.
William’s chuckle pierced the shadows that swept in from all sides. “Ah, like Cinderella’s slipper.”
James shook his head, which turned out to be a poor idea. The world spun on a broken axis, and he cursed beneath his breath. He hated feeling weak, out of control. It reminded him of how he had felt as a young man, striking out at and hating everyone and everything. He had worked too hard to overcome that feeling, just to sink back into it after one drunken night.
He focused on feeling his way along the sticky wall until the banister fit into his hand. “No, not like Cinderella. She didn’t attack the prince the day after the ball. When I find the owner of this corset, I will find the woman who assaulted me.” He turned his head back to his brother and offered a grim promise. “And then I will know who to prosecute.”
“Oh, aye, that’s rich.” William laughed. “Let the town know you can’t handle one wee lass in your bed.” A thick black brow rose in amusement. “And how are you going to find this woman? Are you going to strap the bloody thing on every girl you see until you find the one that fits? Do you need me to hold each one down while you try it on for size?”
James turned away from his brother’s taunts, concentrating instead on putting one unsteady foot in front of the other. He knew the value of a good clue. The busk alone was a promising lead. Perhaps it bore an inscription or etching that might hint at the owner’s identity. He imagined his bed partner tripping this way only a few hours earlier without her corset. He wondered if she, at least, had a headful of memories to warm her nights for her trouble. It didn’t seem fair that he should be left with so little of her, just the feminine garment beneath his arm and the smell of her skin on his shirt.
He reminded himself she had hit him. With a chamber pot. If that wasn’t a statement of some sort, he was a donkey’s arse.
He focused on feeling his way to the inn’s front desk. No matter what happened last night, he did not deserve to be assaulted. If history was any guide, she had been an all too willing partner, and he would have done his best to make it memorable for her. But this business about being married, or pretending to . . . it didn’t sit well with him. He was a man of the law, dependent on a certain trust among Moraig’s citizens for his practice. If he had demonstrated some culpability, or been seen exercising such questionable judgment last night . . . well, it needed to be sorted out, and quickly.
The inn’s proprietor stopped them on the threshold to the street. “Ah, Mr. MacKenzie.” The man’s smile did not reach his eyes. “You weren’t trying to sneak out again without covering your damages, were you?”
James breathed out through his nose. “Damages?”
“Oh, aye. You had quite a time in the public room last night, just before you snuck out the first time. Never say you don’t recall.”
James met William’s gaze over the little man’s balding pate. William shook his head and lifted a finger to his lips.
Every fiber of James’s being told him he was not the only party responsible for the events of last night. But short of admitting he could not remember, he could see no way clear. “I am terribly sorry for any trouble. How much was that again?”
The innkeeper’s shoulders relaxed a bit. “Five pounds should cover it.”
James gave an incredulous laugh. “Five pounds? That is robbery, man!”
The innkeeper shook his head. “You smashed the entire front row of windows out on the north side. Destroyed a table and a set of four chairs. Knocked out the butcher’s front teeth. Had him bleeding all over my public house.”
The silence that followed the man’s pronouncement roared in James’s ear. What the innkeeper was suggesting was impossible. But a faint scratching of his conscience told him something had happened. The town’s butcher was formidably built, and not a man he would normally invite to brawl, even deep in his cups. “Well, did he deserve it?” was all he could think to say.
“He deserves an apology.” The innkeeper crossed his arms over his chest.
James was mollified. If he had created such a public spectacle last night, he needed to invest in some damage control. Between the butcher and the innkeeper, the pair knew everyone in town. “All right,” he admitted. “But five pounds seems like a bloody lot of money for a few windows and some furniture.”
“The lady bought several rounds for all the patrons,” the innkeeper said.
James blinked. “The cost of those drinks is the lady’s responsibility, is it not?”
“The lady is not here,” the proprietor countered, “and there was a roomful of happy customers last night who can attest you stood up and claimed responsibility for the lady’s offer. And then, of course, there is the cost of the room.”
What Happens in Scotland Page 3