When a Scot Loves a Lady fc-1

by Katharine Ashe

  Christmas at Alvamoor. This year, the first in five, he would remain past Twelfth Night. He would remain indefinitely.

  As he walked, the back of his neck prickled, and he knew he was watched. As with so much of late, he cared little.

  Chapter 2

  A fortnight later Somewhere along the road, Shropshire

  “Kitty, I do beg your pardon.” Lady Emily Vale dragged up the hood of her cloak to cover pale, short-cropped locks and a finely tapered jaw. “My parents’ home is not three miles distant, yet I am certain Pen cannot drive the carriage another yard in this blizzard.”

  “Come now, Athena, it cannot be helped.”

  “I meant to tell you, I have changed it to Marie Antoine.” Emily buttoned the throat of her cloak and pursed her lips. “Those ninnies in the Ladies Regiment ruined Athena for me. They hadn’t any interest whatsoever in literature or politics. All they knew of ancient Greece were gowns and headdresses.”

  Kitty smiled. Through the carriage window and a curtain of snow she surveyed the excessively modest inn in the failing light of evening. A squat two stories, the structure boasted a peeling marquee, rough-hewn door, and four wretchedly small front windows. The yard stretched less than forty feet in either direction, blanketed in snowy furls and cords.

  Beyond, along a string of unprepossessing stone and timber buildings, the village’s main street, thickly white and swirling with wind, simply fell away into the river. Save for smoking chimneys, the only other visible movement was at the door of a pub teetering over the edge of a dock as a patron passed into it, escaping the storm.

  The inn’s stable, however, seemed sturdy enough for the carriage and team. A donkey brayed. The stable, it seemed, was already inhabited.

  The accommodations could not be helped. But it mattered little where Kitty lost herself in England as long as it was far from London.

  “This will do,” she murmured. “This will do quite well.”

  “I suppose it has the advantage of being as far from your mother and her beau as my parents’ home,” Emily offered.

  “I daresay.” Kitty’s grin widened. Douglas Westcott, Lord Chamberlayne, adored her mother as much as her mother adored him. But the dowager would not even go to the shops without her spinster daughter. For years they had been inseparable, as close as mother and daughter could be. In Kitty’s estimation this did not leave sufficient space for proper lovemaking, or for a widowed gentleman to address his suit to a widowed lady with any measure of success. And so four days earlier, at shockingly short notice to the woman with whom she had spent every day for the past decade, and with only a kiss on the cheek, Kitty had set off to Shropshire for Christmas.

  She pressed open the carriage door. “This storm will help with your little problem too, Marie.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “It could not have been more fortuitously arranged.”

  A boy emerged from the stable, clomping through the white up to his knees. The coach leaned as Mr. Pen jumped off the box, snow descending from his coat in chunks.

  “Poor man.” Kitty pulled her hood over her hair arranged into elegant plaits that morning by her superior maid. At some point during the day of increasingly slow travel, Emily’s first coachman had outstripped the servants’ carriage on the road, declaring his determination to achieve his master’s estate before the storm set in.

  Alas, no such luck. They were here, in the middle of nowhere apparently, and now the servants’ carriage was also nowhere, but a rather different nowhere.

  “Do you think this will persist?” Emily shouted into the wind, linking arms with her to press through the snowfall toward the door.

  “The night through, to be sure, mum!” The stable boy, all teeth and elbows, tugged at his cap.

  “Settled in right snug.”

  In a flurry of ice and powder they entered the inn.

  “Good eve, ladies!” A man approached, of middling age, whiskered salt-and-pepper, garbed in a simple coat and abundant red neck cloth. “Welcome to the Cock and Pitcher.”

  “Mr. Milch,” Emily said in the forthright manner Kitty admired, “I came through here with my mother and father, Lord and Lady Vale, a year ago. Your wife served us an excellent roast and pudding. Will you have the same for me and Lady Katherine tonight, and bedchambers?”

  “Of course, miss.” He smiled amiably and reached for their cloaks. “My missus will send your girls right up to prepare the chambers.”

  “Our maids are behind, still on the road,” as well as Emily’s companion, the formidable Madame Roche. London gossips had made Kitty’s unwed state a happy topic for five years now; she deserved spinsterhood after flaunting her love affair with Lambert Poole, they tittered. But as yet those gossips had little for which to criticize Emily, except of course her friendship with Kitty. Not that Emily would give a fig for it. Content in her books, she didn’t even care that the highest sticklers considered Kitty unfit company for a maiden.

  But Kitty cared for Emily’s spotless reputation on her friend’s behalf. It seemed, however, that an unchaperoned night on the road could not be helped.

  Mr. Milch clucked his tongue. “Well, then make yourselves comfortable.” He gestured them from the foyer. “I’ll fetch my Gert to see after you while Ned and I arrange matters with your coachman. I hope he’ll be all right sleeping at the pub a’ways. We’re all filled up here.”

  Emily nodded. “I don’t suppose Pen shall mind over much if he has good woolens.” Good woolens, good books, and good conversation—Emily Vale’s only needs. A practical girl, she was unconcerned with a person’s wayward past. It made her a lovely friend, one of Kitty’s few and cherished.

  The ground floor of the inn was a modest chamber divided into two parts by the stair to the upper story. Two square tables flanked by benches and laid with plain lace coverings adorned the right side, and on the left a sofa and a pair of threadbare chairs crouched before a hearth. On the walls hung quilted samplers and an impressive rack of antlers, the windows draped with unadorned wool. The place smelled of onions and mutton stew and coffee.

  “Kitty,” Emily said flatly, looking about the chamber, “I suspect you’ve never been in such a place in your life. You will never forgive me.”

  “Don’t be absurd. It is delightful.” Rustic and shockingly simple.

  The rug before the hearth shifted. Kitty leaped back. A gray shaggy head lifted from the floor and stared at her with great, deep eyes. Smiling, she removed her muffler and hat, and stepped to the fireplace, taking care not to tread on the dog’s tail and holding her palms out for warmth.

  “I suppose it cannot be helped, as you say.” Emily dropped her slight form into a chair without any grace whatsoever, threw her damp bonnet onto her lap, and ran her fingers through her short locks in a manly gesture. For eighteen, she lacked every female grace and was a thorough relief from the rigidly cool femininity Kitty had perfected over the past five years.

  She chuckled. “Really, you needn’t fret. But where exactly are we?”

  “I daresay quite near Shrewsbury. Pen said we came to the Severn hours ago. But Kitty, I cannot help being concerned.” Her fingertips scratched at the bonnet’s brim.

  “Emily—” Emily’s bow-shaped lips pursed.

  “Marie,” Kitty corrected. “You mustn’t worry. Even if the snow does not persist long enough to hold us from Willows Hall while Mr. Worthmore remains there, I will devise a plan to dissuade your parents from this unsuitable match. I promise.”

  Emily’s fine features set in earnest lines. “That is why I asked you to come, Kitty, because you are terribly clever with this sort of thing. This situation my parents have devised entirely befuddles me, but I know it shan’t pose any problem for you. After all, if you could rout a lord from Britain so successfully last summer, you can surely chase a mere mister from my parents’ house.”

  Kitty’s throat caught.

  Emily’s green eyes went wide. “Oh, I am terribly sorry, Kitty,” she rus
hed. “Madame Roche told me I should not mention it, but I am horrid at remembering such things, you know.”

  None of her acquaintances had yet spoken of it aloud. Leave it to Emily.

  Three years earlier, after a masquerade ball at which she had told Lambert Poole she no longer cared enough to even hate him, she had locked away all the sensitive information she’d collected on him. For two and a half years that file sat untouched in a drawer. But six months ago, as the season was drawing to a close, Lambert had threatened her brother Alex, accusing him of criminal activities to disguise his own. And Kitty finally unlocked her files. Along with information provided to the Board of Admiralty by another source, her knowledge of Lambert’s untoward activities had damned him.

  Of course, no one was supposed to know the part she’d played in his banishment. But the information leaked out, and for months now gossips had made a feast of the spinster Lady Katherine Savege’s astounding involvement in bringing to justice a criminal lord, those same gossips who even now still snubbed her because she had given her virtue to that very man.

  “You mustn’t allow it to concern you, Marie. I am quite—” Boots scuffed on the stairs. In sticky relief, Kitty looked up. Her stomach turned over.

  On the landing above stood a gentleman of considerable height, broad-shouldered and loose-

  limbed, yet without particular merit to those estimable masculine qualities unless one were enamored of natural beauty of form wholly lacking in companion beauty of mind. Or character. Or education. Or taste.

  Good heavens. She had wanted to escape London, but not to eschew civilization altogether.

  No. This was not the entire truth. Yet only now, as her hands went damp, did she realize it. She wanted to escape a great deal more than London. She wanted to escape the gossips, the association of her name with Lambert’s in drawing rooms across town, her misguided past that clung no matter how she wished to escape it.

  The presence of this man in the middle of nowhere abruptly made all of that impossible.

  Lord Blackwood smiled, a lazy curve of his mouth amid a veritable forest of whiskers, his gaze fixed on her. She curtsied.

  The smiled broadened. It was, in point of fact, quite a dashing smile. Despite the outrageously barbaric beard, she had noticed this once before. The streak of white running through his dark hair lent him a comfortably roguish air as well. Then he opened his mouth, and out stumbled that which ought to have remained on the battlefield with Robert the Bruce six hundred years earlier.

  “Maleddy, ’tis a bonnie surpreese tae meet wi’ ye here.” The rough words lumbered across his tongue like a flock of black-faced sheep running from wolves. A massive blur of gray streaked around his long legs and leaped down the stairs. Kitty braced herself.

  “Hermes, aff.”

  The beast flattened itself to the floor at her feet, its tail wagging frantically.

  “Sir!” Emily sprang up.

  “He winna harm ye, miss.”

  “How do you do, my lord?” Kitty drew in a steadying breath. “Marie, allow me to present to you the Earl of Blackwood. My lord, this is my traveling companion, Lady Emily Vale, who at present goes by the name Marie Antoine.”

  “Ma’am.” He slanted Emily a grin and started down the stairs. Kitty rooted her feet to the floor.

  She would not retreat. But this sort of man nearly required retreat.

  He stopped on the other side of his dog and bowed, perfectly at ease. “Maleddy.”

  Not retreat. That was foolish. Because there was no this sort of man. There was only this man, a man she had only spoken with once before, three years earlier, barely to exchange greetings. Yet he had changed her life.

  He had remarkably high cheekbones, a rawboned borderlands hollowness from the plane of his cheek to his whisker-covered jaw, and his eyes were indolently hooded. Kitty knew better than to trust in that indolence. At least she’d once imagined so, on that night when that dark gaze had seemed to look right through her. Into her.

  “What brings you to Shropshire, my lord?”

  “The fishing, lass.” A rumble of easy pleasure sounded from his chest behind a coat of excellent quality and no elegance whatsoever. “Catching up frae the summer. Raising mair dails than ye can lig, than, I wis.”

  “I see.” She had no idea what he’d said. There was no rationally conversing with a barbarian, even a very handsome one. “Are you lodging here as well?”

  “Aye. Storm’s a beast.”

  The innkeeper appeared. “My ladies, here’s Mrs. Milch to see you to your chambers. I’ll have dinner laid when you prefer.”

  “We’ve only the mutton sausage, and the gentlemen ate half already.” His wife glowered, swathed from skinny neck to knee in dull cambric. “Nothing else came today but them and the eggs, and I’ll be saving those for breakfast.”

  “Mutton sausage will do splendidly.” Kitty moved toward the woman, away from the fire and the large man.

  “Didn’t expect the Quality to be taking up with us tonight,” Mrs. Milch muttered in a damp voice.

  “Don’t have anything on hand.”

  Kitty followed her and Emily up the stairs. But at the top she could not help glancing back. Lord Blackwood watched her. No grin lit his face now, only a glint behind the indolence of something cold and sharp.

  That night three years ago his warm, dark eyes had glimmered with that steel. Across a dimly lit ballroom he had looked at her as he did now, and that was all she had needed to redirect the course of her life.

  For three years Kitty had wondered if her imagination had invented that hard gleam to serve her own need at the time. Now she knew.

  Chapter 3

  “Katherine Savege is here.” Leam scraped the razor along his chin. “And Lady Emily Vale.”

  “Lady Katherine, the unwed exquisite?” Yale lounged in the chamber’s single wooden chair, playing a guinea between his fingers. Back and forth, gold flickered in the thin morning light filtering through the window. Nothing wasted. The game improved agility.

  “The very one. Haut société. Political. She frequents the Countess of March’s salon,” and through friends at that salon six months earlier, she had sealed a treasonous lord’s fate.

  “Beauty and intelligence.” Yale’s gaze remained on the coin. “But the latter would not interest the cretin Earl of Blackwood.”

  “Her mother plays cards.”

  “Ah. More to the point.”

  “Lady Katherine has a number of close acquaintances on the Board of Admiralty in particular.”

  With a flick of his wrist, the Welshman pocketed the coin. “Not our business, then.”

  “Not any longer.” Cold metal swished along Leam’s skin. Soap dropped to the cloth below, laden with the past. “Deuced inconvenient, though.”

  “Then why are you shaving?”

  Leam drew the linen from about his neck and swiped it across his clean cheeks and chin. He ran his hand along the smooth skin. By God, it felt good to be civilized again.

  “It was on the schedule,” unlike this detour that kept him from Alvamoor where he should be by now. Damn Jin for changing their rendezvous from Bristol to Liverpool. If it weren’t for the snow, Leam would have left it to Yale and washed his hands of the Falcon Club’s business once and for all.

  “Who is Lady Emily?”

  Leam knotted his cravat. “Less than a fortnight off the job and already losing your edge? You were introduced to her at Pembroke’s ball last spring.”

  Yale’s face sobered. “Athena?”

  “She goes by Marie Antoine now, apparently.”

  The Welshman stood and headed for the door. “Well, I shall be off and away before les belles bestir themselves for breakfast.”

  “Two feet of snow on the ground.” If Leam could bear to abuse his animals so, he would saddle his horse and take Bella and Hermes to the road without delay. But he could not. He was well trapped hundreds of miles from where he ought to be two days hence. “Where do you expect to
go?”

  “I shall dig a trench to the dock, purloin a punt, and once at the river’s mouth cast mine eyes to the sea in search of a tardy privateer.”

  “Wyn.”

  “Leam?”

  “Behave yourself.”

  The younger man bowed with a flourish. Save for snowy linens, he wore all black, his single honest affectation. “As ever, my lord.”

  Leam tugged his coat over his shoulders, leaving it unbuttoned. Trapped in an inn with a pair of ladies who moved in the highest circles, he could not yet fully divest himself of the court jester; his public persona was too well-known. At home there would be fewer encounters with the existence he had led for half a decade. There he could dress and behave as he pleased. He would not go to Edinburgh. He had no reason to see others, and sufficient work on his estate to keep him there. He had neglected it for too long already, and not only the estate.

  He slipped a knife into the slit sewn into his sleeve at the wrist. Company had followed on the road the previous day. But each time they stopped to water the horses, the path had been empty and no one caught them up. Someone was following at a discreet distance.

  The inn’s ground floor was no more than a rustic ale room, set now for breakfast. Sounds stirred in the kitchen behind a door, the clinking of dishes and the continuous limp scold of the innkeeper’s wife to her lord and master. The aroma of coffee tinted the fire-warmed air.

  Lady Emily sat in a chair before the hearth, a book between her hands and a pair of spectacles perched atop the bridge of her nose. She glanced up with an abstracted squint.

  “Good morning, my lord.”

  “Guid morning, ma’am.”

  “Breakfast is to be served shortly. Eggs and little else, I believe.” Brow furrowed, she returned her attention to her page.

  Leam went around beneath the stair to the rear foyer. On hooks hung two ladies’ cloaks, his own overcoat, and several others of lesser quality. The exit let onto the yard behind the inn, and Leam had not yet investigated it in the light of day. But danger rarely entered through the front door.