What Happens in Scotland

by Jennifer McQuiston

  He simply didn’t love her.

  The situation in which she currently floundered was different. Despite the stirring of attraction she felt, Georgette had known James for only four hours. The vows they exchanged last night could not count toward a shared experience, given that it was without a guiding memory on her part. Love was not a possibility.

  Was it?

  There was nothing she could say in response to his mother’s presumption, even had she possessed the physical ability to speak. So she numbly accompanied Lady Kilmartie into a warm-smelling kitchen, trailed by the two little soldiers who emerged with a fine display of manners at the last minute. She sat down at a table and regarded their curious, open stares, and conveyed the proper amount of approval at the exaggerated size of the fish they had caught that morning. She pretended not to notice when James’s mother hurried off to collect her husband.

  And all the while, in a hidden corner of her mind, she wondered what on earth she was going to do about this marriage.

  Chapter 23

  JAMES SAT ON a chair in his father’s study and waited.

  He supposed, if he were to be honest, the green damask upholstery might be considered comfortable. He ran a hand over the curve of the seat, sinking the tips of his fingers into the luxurious weight of the fabric. Unlike most chairs, it had been built of a size to easily accommodate the frame of a MacKenzie male. James had no such chairs in his bachelor’s house. Instead, he squeezed himself into whatever decrepit piece of furniture he and Patrick collected as castoffs from neighbors and prayed the joints would hold.

  It was probably William’s chair, used when his brother sat at their father’s desk and applied his thick head to the study of ledgers and bills and invitations and such. The life of an earl-in-training demanded a chair that fit, he supposed. He did not begrudge his brother the demands of the job, but he did feel a twinge of jealously over the chair.

  Despite the promise of the solid seat, James hovered near the edge. His mind and muscles refused to settle. He had been left waiting for many a client, and many a magistrate as well. Waiting was part of the life of a solicitor.

  It was a part at which he had never excelled.

  He rose to his feet with a strangled snarl and began to pace. Six steps to the east wall, six steps to the west. He mentally sorted through what he was going to say. He needed to plan and present the most logical side of the argument. Old worries and resentments needed to be pushed aside. It was either that or succumb to frozen silence.

  James paused, fiddling with a paperweight resting on the edge of his father’s desk. He turned it over in his hand. An old stone tool of some sort. It reminded him of his childhood, of the hours he had spent digging in archaeology sites with his father. He cast his gaze farther. On the other side of the desk lay an old hammer, and on the outer edge of one bookshelf lay pieces of metal that looked to have come from a horse’s bridle. He turned in a circle. Artifacts lay here. Papers lay there, with notes scribbled in his father’s tight, familiar hand.

  A knock on the door sent his heart leaping, but it was only an aproned maid, bringing him a plate of food.

  “Lady Kilmartie asked me to bring you this, and to tell you Lady Thorold bade you to eat,” the servant explained, setting the china dish on his father’s desk and then taking her leave.

  James eyed the roasted pheasant and new potatoes with an urgency removed from anything natural. Georgette had asked for him to have a meal. A flutter of appreciation bloomed in his stomach as the smell of sage and thyme reached his nose. His stomach growled its enthusiasm for the idea, and reprimanded him for its neglect.

  Had he really forgotten to eat all day? And moreover, had the kitchen really produced such a meal on such short notice? The facts were irrefutable. His family must have already eaten, to produce a plate so quickly.

  Before seven o’clock in the bloody evening.

  His chest tightened. Eleven years had changed things. The house he remembered as sterile and cold was bursting with warmth and the shouts of children. The lifetime of work his father had abandoned for a title had crept back in. And James was here, burning with news and things that must be said, demanding the audience he should have over a decade ago.

  His father caught him perched on the edge of William’s chair, gulping down the last of the peas. James shoved the plate away like a ten-year-old caught filching pies from the kitchen window, and wiped his fingers hastily on the too-clean seat of his chair.

  He stood. Swallowed. Offered his father his still-greasy hand.

  “Sir.” As far as greetings went, he knew it sounded pitiful. But as the first word spoken to the man after so many years of silence, it was an olive branch of an oak tree’s proportions.

  “Jamie.” His father sidestepped the proffered hand and went instead for an awkward embrace. James lifted his hands to the man’s shoulders in stunned silence. It was a brief gesture, lasting no more than a second or two.

  But it stung, that contact. Sharp as needles raking his skin.

  His father recoiled and motioned for him to take back his seat. As he turned away, the earl rubbed a quick hand across his eyes. To James, the significance of that stolen gesture hit him like a hammer on glass. He sat down and wordlessly regarded the man who had sired him, the man whose shouts and disappointments he had been prepared to bear.

  His father looked . . . old. James had not seen him since that day, eleven years prior, when he had confronted the man over what he had done and received nothing close to an answer. His eyes took in the new gray hair around his father’s formerly dark temples, and the way his clean-shaven jowls folded into wrinkles. The intervening years had stripped James of more than just his father’s company.

  He had neglected to consider his father’s advancing age.

  “It’s been a while,” James acknowledged, canting his head in a show of respect. It was not what he had planned to say. The words he had been rehearsing while he paced the confines of the room were all tangled up inside him.

  “Eleven years, two months, and thirteen days.” His father leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers on the desk in front of him.

  Time might have taken the man’s dark hair, but it had not, it seemed, stripped his father’s memory. Ever the industrious scholar, he never forgot a fact.

  Nor, it seemed, a slight.

  “And for over a year of that time, I have been in town.” James welcomed the steel that crept into his voice, replacing the maudlin sentiments that had briefly threatened to derail him. “I have been living scarcely four miles away. You could have come anytime you wanted.”

  “You have not invited me.” His father regarded him with brooding eyes that belied his age. His voice seemed textured with varying shades of pain.

  “The Earl of Kilmartie does not need an invitation to come to town,” James pointed out, refusing to be swayed. “William comes to see me, with awful regularity, and Mother calls at least once a month.”

  His father’s mouth drew down. “Yes, she has told me about taking tea in your odd excuse for a kitchen, ducking the sawdust bag you keep hanging from the rafters. Do you think I bloody well don’t know it has been a year? You made it very clear you did not want to see me.”

  James gaped at his very proper father’s angry lapse into obscenities. “When? When did I ever tell you that?”

  “When you refused me.”

  James clenched his hands in surprise. “When did I ever refuse to see you?”

  His father’s eyes snapped, a sharp shade of green that was all too familiar. “The horse. You refused my gift of the horse. And then you tossed the gesture back in my face.”

  “ ’Twas not a gift, but a test,” James protested. “Do not look at me as if it was not. If you had come bearing Caesar yourself, it might have softened my response. But you sent a groom, Father. You couldn’t bring yourself to come down from your g
reat, echoing castle and acknowledge the shameful way your youngest son had chosen to live.”

  “Is that what you think?” A muscle jumped along his father’s clenched jaw. It was like looking in a large, angry, gray-haired mirror. “That I am ashamed of you? Jamie, I have been many things with you. Exasperated. Confused by your decisions. Saddened by your neglect. But I have never been ashamed of you, not of who you are or what you have made of yourself.”

  James sat in stunned silence. The chair might have collapsed beneath him and deposited him on the floor, so off-kilter did his father’s words make him feel. All this time, all those years, he had thought himself a failure in his father’s eyes.

  “What about the matter with the rector?” he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  “I knew what pushed you there.” His father leaned back. “Your actions were justified.” His mouth settled in a grim line. “Wholly.”

  “You never explained that to me.” A wave of emotion, strong as the surf pounding the rocks not a mile west from where they sat, threatened to knock James over. “You paid for his silence. His daughter’s death was on his hands as a result, and on ours as well. Your actions told the world you thought I was guilty. They told me you thought I was guilty, that I was unfit to be your son.”

  “That is unfair, Jamie. I was trying to help you.”

  James drew a deep breath, his brain dimly registering the fact his father had called him Jamie. William and his mother had continued to use his boyhood name, all these years. But he had become “James” to his father two months after his eighteenth birthday, the minute the man was made earl.

  It made no sense. None of this made sense.

  “Help me?” James choked out. “How did you help me? Every decision I made when I lived here, every step I took, which bloody university I attended, it was all subject to your deepest scrutiny. I was not permitted a single choice of my own. The matter with the rector was not the only piece of it. It was simply the tipping point that forced me to leave.”

  The earl looked away. His gaze lingered over the artifacts littering his desk. His voice, when it came, was carefully measured. “It may be hard for you to understand, but I was a new peer, thrust into a situation I had not been brought up for and did not want.”

  James leaned forward, his hands seeking purchase beside him and finding only slippery damask. He had never known his father had not wanted to be earl.

  “I believed, at the time, I had to give up who I was in the process,” his father went on. “And though I hated to do it, I thought it kinder to prepare you for the possibility of the title too, to protect you from the shock it was to me.”

  “But I was not the heir,” James pointed out, his words flung like pebbles against a wall.

  “Neither was I.” His father spread his hands in a silent plea. “I was happier as a scholar, living a simple life in town with your mother and my boys. And yet, here I am.”

  James shifted, his hands planting themselves more firmly on the chair seat. “Why did you not tell me this eleven years ago?”

  His father’s eyes lifted, watery with regret. “Would you have listened if I had?”

  “You did not give me the chance to find out.”

  His father spread his palms out flat on the desk and drew a deep breath. “I suppose I deserve that. I let you down, Jamie. I was ill-equipped to handle the responsibilities of the peerage and fatherhood, and I did some things very poorly. I am sorry now that I took out my frustrations on you and William. I have learned, over the years, that I can be true to myself and still be an earl. I realize this is coming too late, but I am sorry for any hurt I have caused you.”

  Stunned did not begin to describe the feeling that slammed into James’s chest. His father had offered him an apology. James had not known what to expect when he rode here bent for hell, but an apology had not been among his list of demands.

  His father’s shoulders hunched, tight as a fist. “I have long been sick over what happened to the girl you cared enough to offer for. It was a terrible tragedy. But you must believe me, at the time, I thought the only good thing that had come out of that terrible new life I had been tossed into was having the ability to assist you financially. When I paid the amount demanded by her father, I thought I was helping. Truly.”

  James turned that over in his head. With his father’s explanation, things about his past were already reordering themselves in a different light. Would he really have done anything differently, had their positions been reversed? And would he have had the maturity to listen and understand had they embarked on this conversation eleven years ago?

  He wasn’t sure. He knew only that he was glad for the chance to do this now.

  “Thank you,” James told him, his throat tight. He leaned back fully in his seat, testing the structural integrity of both the chair’s frame and this fragile new truce. “I will have your promise you will not put another penny toward fixing my mistakes. I am a proud man, Father. I suspect I come by that lamentable trait honestly.” His mouth quirked upward. “I do not deny that I have made errors in judgment, or that I will make them still. But I would ask that you let me be the man I choose to be.”

  His father’s shoulders softened. “Does that include the mistake of letting eleven years go by without speaking?”

  James nodded, relief dancing in his chest. “I do not think we could put a price on that, even if we tried. I am sorry I let it come to that. Do I have your promise, then?”

  “Aye.” His father nodded.

  James exhaled, leaning forward again. “I am glad to hear that. Because I have something important to tell you.”

  JAMES SET HIS hand on the door with a heart lighter than it had been in years. It was going to be all right. His father had listened to the explanation of what had happened last night and the description of a possible threat from Georgette’s cousin. He had shown some amusement, but no obvious judgment, when he learned of his son’s drunken folly. He had expressed surprise to learn Burton’s name, telling James that he had leased the old hunting cottage on the east side of the estate to the man just last month.

  And then the earl had asked James what he wanted him to do.

  To be not only accepted but consulted on the matter was something James would have laid money on as a physical impossibility only a quarter hour ago. He asked for nothing. Or rather, he asked that his father do nothing. And incredibly, his father had agreed.

  It was an unspeakable relief. There would be no blackmail attempt, no exchange of money. Should Burton show up here demanding an audience, his father indicated he would not receive him. Georgette’s insistence that they come here and tell his family now seemed the most sensible thing imaginable, though it had been one of the most difficult things he had ever done.

  James’s mother scrambled backward from the door when he opened it, her cheeks pink with guilt. James fought a smile. One should not acknowledge eavesdropping with good humor. Still, after the difficulties two of the men in her life had caused her, he supposed she had every right to wonder about the conversation behind that big, locked door.

  “Did you hear anything of interest?” he teased as he stepped out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him.

  His mother’s lips pursed. “No, the door is too solid for my tastes.” Her hands clasped and unclasped in front of her. “How do things stand between you?”

  James grinned. He couldn’t help it. It started in his mouth, but rapidly consumed his entire face. “I think you can expect me to make an appearance for dinner, on occasion,” he told her, enjoying the way the news made her face light with happiness. “Father asked me to find you, so he could speak with you. I suspect he thought I might have to travel a bit farther than the doorway, though.”

  His mother answered with a sheepish smile of her own. “I expect your father knew exactly where I would be, and what I would be doing.” She
cleared her throat, and her gaze turned thoughtful. “Lady Thorold waits for you in the kitchen. Or should I call her Mrs. MacKenzie?”

  James almost tripped over his feet, though he was standing stock-still. “How . . . how did you know?” Surely Georgette, with her protestations over the permanency of the thing, had not confided in such a virtual stranger and perpetual busybody as his mother?

  “I saw your ring on her finger.” His mother clucked in disapproval. “Really, a lady deserves a finer piece of jewelry than a man’s signet ring, Jamie. What were you thinking?”

  He shifted uneasily. “Well, truth be told, neither of us was thinking.”

  His mother cocked her head, her eyes searching his. “She explained something of that. She told me you were both planning to undo it. Is that true?”

  James nodded, his stomach turning hollow. So Georgette had told his mother she did not want to be married. Somehow, when it had been a conversation between just the two of them, it seemed still negotiable. To bring others into the scheme made Georgette’s regrettable change of heart seem more real.

  “Does your father know?”

  “He does now.” James lifted his gaze to the floral-patterned wallpaper lining the hallway. He feared looking in his mother’s eyes, lest she catch a glimpse of the uncertainty he was sure radiated from him. “How is Georgette?”

  “She’s fine,” his mother assured him. If his mother disapproved of his use of the woman’s given name, the tone of her voice gave no sign. “Being entertained by the boys and their tall tales, last I saw her.”

  James shifted his gaze to his mother’s. “I abandoned her in the foyer. I was anxious over how the interview might go, but I should have been kinder in explaining that to her.”