MacTease Me Not (Wanton Wallflower’s Escapades #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

In Which a Cart Runs Wild, a Scholar Runs Late, and a Highlander Runs Out of Patience

The Scottish Highlands, Wanton decided, were a reckless overachievement of nature—so much wild beauty, so little restraint. Civilization, she thought, would do wonders here. Perhaps a proper road. Or trousers.

Mountains jutted into the heavens like unfinished sculptures; mist coiled in their hollows, clinging possessively to every slope; and somewhere, unseen but omnipresent, a piper practiced optimism at full volume.

The air itself felt different—so clean it seemed morally judgmental. It filled her lungs with brisk disapproval and the faint scent of heather, peat, and destiny.

Her conveyance, alas, was less noble.

The rickety cart—‘a fine vehicle for a lady of means and questionable judgment,’ according to the innkeeper who had rented it—was drawn by three rams of famously philosophical temperament. There had been four, but one had read too much Voltaire and demanded liberty.

She had named the other three accordingly.

Euclid, the leader, possessed the gaze of a mathematician who had glimpsed the abyss and found it wanting.

Plato, at his flank, frequently attempted to chew the cart’s reins, as if testing the theory of forms by mastication.

And Diogenes, the smallest, smelled perpetually of rebellion and old shoe.

Together, they trudged up the rocky path, turning their triangular heads toward her in turn, as though judging her choices with ancient eyes.

Wanton, perched on the splintering driver’s seat, sat perfectly upright—bonnet tied beneath her chin like a battle helmet.

Thank goodness she’d had the foresight to don reinforced bloomers—a marvel of English engineering, a veritable Hadrian’s Wall.

Otherwise, the splinters the size of a Highlander’s thighs would have compromised both her backmatter and her moral standing.

“According to these coordinates,” she announced, turning her map upside-down, “the Glenravish Highland Games should be precisely where that mountain is taking a stubborn stand.”

She snapped the reins gently. The rams ignored her, too busy contemplating the metaphysical purpose of grass.

“I should not like to be late,” she continued, more to herself than to them. “One cannot properly study masculine exertion without witnessing its inaugural gallop.”

Euclid snorted—a sound that combined skepticism with mild contempt.

Field Note One: Highland fauna exhibit a commendable resistance to authority. Possible correlation with national character.

The cart groaned as it crested the ridge, the wheels complaining with every revolution. Wind raced up from the valley, tossing her curls free of their pins.

The heather brushed her gloves and the scent of damp earth rose around her. Somewhere a raven croaked, sounding like a man clearing his conscience.

She smiled to herself. “It’s perfect,” she murmured. “Utterly savage. A most promising site for scientific inquiry.”

Now, the reader may be wondering—as indeed many sensible people do—why a young English woman of scientific persuasion was hurtling toward the Highlands in a cart drawn by existential rams. The answer, like most breakthroughs, lay in the laws of physics.

Since Sir Isaac Newton had made an apple famous, every ambitious scholar longed to contribute a principle of their own: velocity, momentum, mass—those tidy equations that explained why things moved, collided, or occasionally exploded.

But Wanton suspected that all those formulae were missing a vital variable.

Testosterone.

She had observed, through rigorous fieldwork (and several regrettable dinner parties), that the presence of male ego appeared to amplify motion to catastrophic levels. Doors slammed harder, voices rose louder, and objects—often furniture—achieved improbable flight.

Hence her personal hypothesis: The Laws of Motion are directly influenced by the quantity of testosterone present in the subject performing them.

And where, she reasoned, could one better test such a theory than at the Highland Games—a festival devoted entirely to male muscle, flying timber, and competitive perspiration?

“Perfect conditions,” she told the rams, who appeared unconvinced. “A living laboratory of torque, tension, and tartan. And perhaps,” she added primly, “proof that ungoverned passion—national or anatomical—always ends in disaster.”

Plato bleated in protest. Diogenes stumbled. Euclid glared over his shoulder, clearly of the opinion that scientific inquiry could go hang.

Wanton consulted her timepiece, a small brass contraption that ticked reproachfully. “The Games commence in—good heavens—fifteen minutes. I must expedite my approach.”

She reached for her whistle, polished to a heroic shine, and raised it to her lips.

“Encouragement through positive acoustics,” she reminded herself. “The foundation of all leadership.”

She blew.

Nothing happened.

She frowned, tapped it twice against her palm, and tried again—harder.

Somewhere in the unseen valley below came a muffled shout, followed by the sharp thwack of an unidentified projectile.

Wanton barely had time to lower the whistle before something small and spherical whizzed through the mist and struck Euclid directly in his philosophic posterior.

The ram went rigid, his pupils dilating with existential fury.

Then, with the tragic certainty of a creature betrayed by reason, Euclid bolted.

Plato and Diogenes, never ones to resist groupthink, hurled themselves after him.

The cart jolted forward, rattling down the incline with alarming velocity.

Meanwhile, bagpipes wailed from the valley, the sound swelling into what Wanton could only describe as aural encouragement.

“Excellent!” she cried. “External acoustic stimuli increase ovine momentum exponentially!”

The rams, however, had stopped listening to science. They were listening to destiny.

The cart lurched forward so violently that Wanton’s map leapt from her hands and into history.

“Ah!” she gasped, clutching the reins. “At last—initiative! Excellent, Euclid, that’s the spirit of scientific enterprise!”

They hurtled down the slope. Pebbles flew, wind screamed, and her bonnet strained to emancipate itself.

She fished for her pencil with one hand, notebook with the other.

“Velocity increasing… splendid consistency of gait… potential Royal Society commendation (posthumous).”

Her words bounced with every jolt and her handwriting resembled a seismograph’s confession.

“Maintain trajectory, my fluffy instruments of destiny!” she cried. “We are pioneers of motion!”

Through the mist below, she glimpsed movement—tents, banners, a crowd.

The Glenravish Highland Games.

Her pulse quickened. “Perfect! We shall arrive on time after all.”

They burst from the ridge like a wool-powered cannonball and punctured a stretched banner.

Color exploded before her eyes, the gleam of sunlight on polished cabers and whisky bottles.

Drums pounded somewhere to her left. The scent of peat smoke and roasted meat rolled through the air in defiance of moderation.

Men cheered. Dogs barked. Someone hurled a hammer the size of her self-control.

It was, by every measure, the most magnificent research site she had ever crashed.

“Though perhaps,” she said faintly as the rams surged downhill, “this time the crash is a bit too enthusiastic.”

She yanked the reins. The rams ignored her.

The bagpipes thundered three long, heroic notes that could raise the dead or, as it turned out, accelerate sheep.

“Good heavens,” she muttered, spotting the crowd, “so many observers. I hadn’t planned a demonstration.”

Men scattered. Barrels rolled. A dog barked in Gaelic.

She waved frantically. “Apologies! Merely passing through your physics!”

A wheel hit a rut, and the cart pitched sideways. Wanton clung to the seat, hair streaming, bonnet now an ex-bonnet.

A tower of whisky barrels, stacked three high, stood directly in their perilous path.

She was headed (for the first time in her life, mind you) to deathly disaster.

She gasped, torn between horror and the scientific implications of impact velocity on liquid displacement.

“Oh no, not the alcohol! It’s historically significant!”

The rams thundered on, blind to heritage and hospitality alike. Spectators shrieked. A piper dropped his instrument in existential dread. The barrels loomed larger, shining like golden doom.

Wanton yanked the reins with desperate decorum. “Brake, Euclid! Apply friction!”

The cart did not brake. It accelerated.

“Oh dear,” she said with dignified calm. “I appear to be approaching death at an unsociable speed.”

(and she had yet to write chapter two hundred and four of her memoirs).

Just as Wanton had braced herself for academic martyrdom, a giant of a Highlander strode into view, all bronze and motion and inevitability.

Time—always such a punctual companion—stopped to gape.

His hair, a tousled sweep of mahogany touched by sun and rebellion, caught the light like an act of defiance against centuries of English grooming.

His jaw looked carved for issuing decrees—or perhaps for defying them. Those shoulders could have marched with Robert the Bruce, painted blue like some Pictish war god who’d misplaced his trousers.

In short, he embodied every nightmare the Empire had ever had about Scotland—and every temptation Wanton had just discovered she possessed.

Her gaze, as any responsible researcher’s might, traveled downward for the sake of observation.

Past the broad chest, where linen strained with heroic intent.

Past the lean waist, where leather met plaid.

And lower still—

Her eyes became suspiciously moist. Right in front of her—while her cart hurtled toward annihilation—stood an authentic Highlander wearing that most perilous of garments: the kilt.

It was, she decided, both a scandal and a hypothesis.

Too free to be respectable, too functional to be dismissed. A garment so savage in its liberty it seemed to mock every stitch of her own underpinnings.

The wind caught it, and the plaid swayed—half garment, half rebellion.

“Field Observation 7.0,” she muttered, pencilless but sincere. “The Highland kilt represents civilization in retreat. It raises moral and anatomical questions for which no lady is prepared.”

And yet, even as she thought it barbaric, the question ignited behind her eyes—an ancient, treacherous curiosity: What in Darwin’s beard lies beneath those woolen folds?

“Hypothesis 7.1: The Highland kilt conceals the final unsolved mystery of the modern age.”

The rams bellowed, nostrils flaring, eyes wild, hooves skimming the earth with the reckless grace of barroom brawlers on roller skates. The barrels loomed nearer. Death, apparently, refused to pause for lust.

Still, she straightened her posture, one gloved hand attempting to pat rebellious curls into submission, the other tugging frantically at her petticoats. If she was about to perish, she would do so presentably.

Like uncle Barth used to say, “Should Death come calling, offer him a dram—and your better profile.”

Poor Uncle Barth. He’d had a fondness for brandy and a tragic habit of taking his own advice.

The first barrel shuddered in warning. Whisky glinted like liquid sunlight.

The highlander, the last bastion between life and death by liquor gave one heroic stride, and slapped his hands on the cart’s reins. The leather groaned. The air vibrated. His muscles flexed in a display so magnificently kinetic that Wanton cried out.

“Yes! Excellent form! Perfect application of torque!” She had indeed come to the right place for her physics study.

He braced his boots in the mud and yanked the reins, thrusting his hips forward with heroic precision. The cart lurched into a circular trajectory dictated by the merciless hand of centripetal force.

(For the uninitiated in physics, this meant they were spinning. Specifically, like a ladle in a punch-bowl, except she was the ladle, the bowl was destiny, and decorum had clearly evaporated with the spirits.)

Wind roared in her ears. The world tilted; her bonnet launched into the stratosphere. One ram bleated what sounded suspiciously like Gaelic profanity.

The leather groaned under strain, the wheels screamed their protest, and just as Wanton was preparing to enter the annals of scientific martyrdom, the Highlander gave one final, magnificent heave.

With a screech of wheels, the cart halted.

She did not.

“Ah! Momentum—my oldest foe!”

Her trajectory resembled that of an academic cherub catapulted by Newton himself. A gasp escaped her throat as she flew, all petticoats and peril, a notebook flapping against her thigh like an overstimulated wing.

The Highlander looked up—eyes widening, arms opening, as if prepared to catch both her and the concept of civilization. Albeit grudgingly.

It is a fact, dear reader, that civilization rarely announces itself, yet always expects to be received as a gift—even when it arrives smelling faintly of goat and poor decisions.

She landed against him with the audible oof of destiny fulfilled. His chest was solid as Pythagoras’s theorem—perfectly constructed, widely admired, and utterly irrefutable.

“Splendid reflexes, sir!” she gasped. “You’ll make an excellent data sample!”

Their bodies met with full impact. Her breasts pressed to his chest, her thighs astride his lap, her lips perilously close to the pulse in his throat.

The rams panted. The world stilled.

Their gazes locked—his, full of storm and stubborn pride; hers, full of inquiry, alarm, and Enlightenment.

Enlightenment blinked first, then fluttered her eyelashes, and—just as she was about to tender her resignation—a whisky barrel exploded behind them with the joyful force of a Highland climax.

Golden liquid erupted into the air, geysering upward, raining down in shimmering droplets that kissed her face, streaked his jaw, and soaked the already-compromised neckline of her bodice.

Wanton blinked through the downpour. Her breath came in shudders. Her thighs still trembled from the ride. Or the Highlander.

“Fascinating. I’ve just introduced the Highlands to open-bar diplomacy. You can thank me later,” she whispered, and promptly fainted.