Chapter 23
Caelan walked down the steps from the kirk, knowing in his bones that the conversation ahead of him was the most significant of his life.
Betrothing himself to Isla had been an easy decision. She had been delightfully pretty, and his mother liked her. After his father died, suddenly every single woman in Scotland seemed to be chasing him. Isla felt like a safe choice.
But Clara?
Her face was stoic, but he could see pain in her eyes. She’d gone pale when Leonora’s arguments hit home. She wanted her own castle and books, not his. Not theirs.
No, that wasn’t it. She wanted to marry a man who would fall on his knees at her feet.
He pushed open the cemetery gate and ushered her inside. Alfie was off in one corner, dangling a worm before Wilhelmina’s beak and trying to lure her to eat it.
As he looked down at Clara, a silent curse resounded in his heart. Isla’s grave was directly in front of the gate, and she was staring at it.
“It’s hers, isn’t it?”
Clara asked. Her voice had a small tremor. “Did you plant all those flowers?”
“Isla’s mother and I transplanted them from the moat. Mrs. Gillan makes certain that they flourish.”
“Isla was a lucky woman to be so loved,”
Clara said hollowly.
Caelan nodded.
“I’m not saying that I’m unlucky,”
she added.
“You are not the sort of person who complains.”
He took her hand again and drew her into the opposite corner from Alfie, far away from Isla’s grave.
“Would gossip about my stay in your castle really travel to Glasgow and beyond?”
Her eyes looked glossy, as if she were about to cry.
“Did you see the women sitting directly behind the front pew?”
“I noticed the plumes on their bonnets.”
“A group of hopeful ladies have undertaken to make the journey from Inverness weekly, in hopes that I will fall madly in love with one of them or decide I need a second wife and pick one at random.”
“Brave of them,”
Clara said.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Considering the infamous state of your castle.”
His heart thumped at the wry note in her voice. “Astonishing, isn’t it? Of course, after today, I am unlikely to attract a respectable lady.”
“Don’t you dare try to make me feel guilty about you as well as my mother.”
She glared at him.
“My point is that this gossip will be considered fascinating in Inverness and beyond. Lady Bufford is right that it will eventually make its way to London. How on earth do you know her ladyship well enough to call her Leonora?”
“She is my best friend’s sister.”
“The odds of that were very small,”
Caelan said.
Her shoulders were drooping. He couldn’t bear it. “It wouldn’t be so terrible to be my lady. You wanted a castle. And books. And a man in a skirt.”
Damn it, he sounded as if he was pleading. Begging. “You like me.” Her lips were trembling, so he added, “I landed a fish, looked up and there you were. Like an angel on the riverbank.”
“Don’t,”
she said. “That’s—that’s what Prince George used to say about me.”
“Right. I want to hear about that scandal. I suppose I can’t go to London and shoot a member of royalty. Besides”—he couldn’t help grinning—“it sounds as if you took care of him yourself. You rebuffed him.”
“With my reticule,”
she said, a trace of pride in her eyes.
“There’s my girl,”
he said, the words rolling out of his mouth without forethought. “What did he do to you? I’m still available to shoot him. Most of Scotland would approve.”
One side of her mouth curled into a shaky smile. “Nothing warranting homicide. He . . . he sang about me, not a nice song. Then a pigeon shat on me, to use your word. On my breast. He took out a handkerchief.”
She pressed her lips together.
“He used it as an excuse to take liberties,”
Caelan said, his fists curling.
“Yes,”
she confirmed.
He stepped closer. “If you want him dead, I’m your man.”
“I don’t.”
“Because that would be even worse for your mother?”
“No, because I don’t want you to be hanged. I like you. I truly do.”
She seemed to be turning pink. “I think that we . . . We both like books.”
“And kissing,”
he prompted, as she appeared to have lost her train of thought.
“I don’t know why I’m being so silly. I never truly believed I could marry for love. I hoped that I would, but mostly I wanted to find a spouse well-bred enough to make my mother proud. Hopefully a man who could fend off Prince George.”
He bared his teeth. “As I said—”
“I hit him,”
she said fiercely. “I took care of myself.” Her eyes had darkened to the color of the loch at twilight. “That’s the scandal that sent me to Scotland. It was not merely that the prince groped me—society had watched him hound me for three years. The scandal was because I struck him.”
“In those earlier years, no one courted you because the prince had staked a claim,”
he said, grasping the extent of the prince’s obsession.
“Something like that.”
“I should go down there. Shooting him would be doing the women of England a favor.”
Her eyes shone with tears, and they tore at his soul. “I wanted what you and Isla had, but I’m so lucky to have a dowry and books, and—”
“Me?”
Caelan handed her a handkerchief. “Don’t forget Wilhelmina, your favorite chicken. There’s Alfie, and Fiona, Elsbeth and Maisie. I promise to hire Mr. Cobbledick. Even Mrs. Gillan, who stood up for you today in fine style.”
“I am lucky,”
she said, obviously trying to convince herself.
Caelan sighed. It was time to come clean. “I had known Isla since she was five years old. Marrying her—”
“I’d rather not discuss Isla!”
“My point is that—”
“I mean it,”
Clara interrupted, her mouth compressing into a tight line.
Caelan decided to abandon the point and move on. “I like you. You, Clara. I like you very much.”
He studied her face, memorizing every feature in case she fled for the nearest carriage. “I love your imagination and your sense of humor. I love the fact that dreadful as your mother seems to be, you grew tearful over the idea of her ostracization. I think that you are incredibly beautiful.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Not only your hair and the glorious breasts that drove a future king to madness. Your lips, nose, chin, curves, shoulders . . . all of you.”
He hesitated and then told her the truth, because that mattered in marriage. “Would you settle for an absurdly affectionate husband who feels riveted by desire whenever he looks at you?”
Thankfully, her lips eased. “I’m in this situation because of decisions that I made. What would you have done when we first met if I’d introduced myself as the Honorable Miss Clara Vetry?”
“Summoned the carriage and sent you wherever you wished to go,”
Caelan said. “Instead, the improbable Mrs. Potts followed me back to the castle.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“When I didn’t have a bathtub, you could have confessed all and left.”
“I could have moved to Fiona’s house.”
“You remained in an echoing and empty castle and kissed me. Many times.”
He took her hands in his. “Please marry me, Clara. Not because of your mother, and not because we are madly attracted to each other, and not even because I like you so much.”
Her eyes were shining now. “Why, then?”
“I have things you want,”
he offered, feeling awkward.
“The castle? The books?”
“My legs. You like me in a kilt.”
“Your chest is also worth consideration,”
she said, a smile deep in her eyes.
“But mostly, you can be yourself with me, Clara,”
he said, putting his cards on the table. “Read books all day long, if you wish. Hire a housekeeper who is literate, though I think that Elsbeth has laid claim to the position, and I’m not sure of her schooling. Bring me tea and seduce me on the only sofa we have in the castle. Tell me stories about helmets and witches and sighing portraits. Please.”
“Oh.”
Now her eyes looked starry.
“Please, Clara.”
He didn’t go down on one knee, like a prince before a princess, but he hesitated long enough to see acceptance in her eyes before he gave her a kiss that commanded and begged, both at once.
“I did promise to make you a better fly for fishing,”
she whispered.
“Promise to teach our daughters to slap any man who takes advantage, future king or no?”
Her smile made his chest hurt, which was absurd. Still, it was that beautiful. He turned around, not letting go of her in case she changed her mind.
“Alfie,”
he shouted. “Come on, lad! I’m about to marry your future aunt.”
The boy looked over. “Now?”
He nodded. “Now.”
Alfie jumped up. “She can’t marry you looking like that!”
Clara felt a pulse of dismay. True, she was wearing her drab traveling gown. Alfie’s eyes were on her head, and her hair must look dreadful, given Leonora’s appalled expression. She put her hands up and tried to bundle it together. “Elsbeth carries pins.”
“No,”
Caelan said. “I love your hair. It’s as wild as a Scottish moor.”
“She needs flowers in her hair,”
Alfie said with authority. “That’s what brides do. Wear, I mean. Wait a second.” He dashed over to the lilac bush and broke off a branch. “Here, Uncle Caelan, put these in her hair. I’d do it, but she’d have to sit in the grass so I could reach her.”
“Would you mind?”
Caelan asked her.
Her mother would die.
“I would love that,”
Clara said.
“I wish Wilhelmina could come into the church to see you get married,”
Alfie said.
“She can be my maid of honor. You are a lovely boy,”
Clara said, smiling at him. “I’m so happy to become part of your family.” He darted forward and wrapped his arms around her waist, and they stayed like that while Caelan wove sweet-smelling white lilac blossoms into the floaty mass of her hair.
The kirk had emptied by the time the three of them (and Wilhelmina) walked back through the door. The fashionably dressed women from Inverness had departed, leaving only family and the Buffords.
“The villagers and crofters are preparing a celebration,”
Fiona whispered to Caelan, before she turned to Clara. “You look so beautiful!”
The windows of the kirk were old and warped, but enough sun came through the panes that Clara’s hair turned to spun gold as they knelt before the rail. Caelan couldn’t stop smiling as Mr. Boggs declared them husband and wife.
Afterward, he didn’t let go of her hand. She couldn’t leave for England now. She had vowed to stay with him. Anyone could tell that when Clara promised something, she kept her word.
“Everyone is waiting in the pub,”
Fiona told him after they signed the parish book.
“Not the castle?”
She shook her head. “You don’t have chairs, let alone a bed big enough for the two of you, remember?”
He had forgotten.
His sister grinned. “Not to worry.”