Chapter 5 #2
For someone who spent as much time as he did taking steps to protect Ranulf’s various progressive policies and innovations, assessing what their neighbors’ reactions were likely to be and heading off the worst of the trouble, Arran couldn’t begin to explain what he was doing. Not even to himself.
In the Highlands, when a pretty lass caught his eye, he invited her to share his bed. More often than not she accepted, and then after a night or two or three he found himself bored and sent her on her way. They both wanted a bit of fun, satisfied a mutual desire, and moved on.
That method had served him well enough, and it mostly avoided the chore of him having to converse with the lasses beyond a few pleasantries.
They’d all grown up in the same set of valleys, had heard all the same gossip, and none of the ladies had ever seen a larger town than the village in which they lived.
And then there was Mary. Yes, he’d kissed her twice now, and since the hat shop yesterday he’d been imagining unbuttoning her pretty, fashionable muslin gown and licking her soft skin. He shifted, abruptly uncomfortable in the ill-sprung hired hack.
It wasn’t just a physical attraction, though.
He’d chatted with her. They had talked, the two of them—and he likely already knew her better than he did any other lass save his own sister.
More than that, he enjoyed talking with her.
He liked the way she viewed the world, even if it was contrary to his own way of thinking.
He liked her. And that, he hadn’t expected.
She interested him a thousandfold more than Deirdre Stewart and her “yes, Lord Arran” and “no, Lord Arran” politeness.
They said Deirdre was a great beauty, and he could see it, he supposed, in a porcelain doll sort of way.
But the porcelain doll had no passion that he could detect—especially when compared with an autumn-haired, clever-tongued vixen.
By the time he arrived back at Gilden House it was well past three, and he half expected Ranulf to be waiting on the front drive to bellow at him for being contrary.
As frustrated as he felt after naught but a kiss with Mary when he’d been fantasizing about a great deal more, a brawl might well be just the thing.
Or it might knock some sense into his skull so he could forget the lass before something happened that they would all regret.
Instead of Ranulf, however, the familiar face waiting for him in the foyer belonged to his sister, Rowena. “There you are,” she said with a merry smile, still burying her lovely Highlands brogue beneath the passing fair southern England accent she’d picked up from the Hanover sisters.
“Didnae Owen tell ye I was oot at luncheon?” he returned, kissing her on the cheek and using every ounce of willpower he possessed not to look into the neighboring room for Jane Hanover. “What brings ye here, Winnie?”
“You do.” She hugged his arm, pulling him into the morning room.
Arran held his breath until he could verify that she hadn’t brought anyone else with her.
When she seated herself primly on the couch, he settled down beside her.
Before she’d fled Glengask for a London Season, the youngest MacLawry sibling had confided in him frequently.
Even with the chaos of the past weeks, he’d missed that.
“Well, here I am,” he drawled. “What’s in yer heart, piuthar?”
Her shoulders rose and fell with the deep breath she took. “Firstly, why don’t you like Jane? She adores you, and if you married her, we would be sisters.”
“Ye’re supposed to ease yer way into a question like that, ye know,” he said with a short smile. “A bit of ‘how was yer day’ and ‘isnae the weather fine today’ first.”
She grimaced. “Not with you, I’m not. Answer the question.”
“As ye wish, then. I do like Jane Hanover. She seems a fine, friendly lass, and she talked her family into taking ye in when ye ran from Glengask and appeared on their doorstep.”
“That was Charlotte, actually, but go on.”
Had it been? Ranulf’s betrothed? That was interesting. “I thought ye didnae know Charlotte before ye arrived.”
“I didn’t. I never corresponded with her. But she was so nice, and then when Ran burst in to drag me home she walked right up to him, put her hands on her hips, and told him no.”
“And they fell in love because she argued with him?”
“I think that’s part of it,” she returned, “but you’d have to ask Ranulf. I’m talking about you and Jane, though.”
“Lass, completely aside from clan politics ye ken I cannae marry yer friend just because it’d be fun fer ye to call her sister, I hope. Ye’ll have Charlotte fer that.”
Her face fell. “But she’s pretty!”
“Aye, she is. She’s also nae but eighteen.”
“I’m nae but eighteen. Ranulf wants me to marry stupid Lachlan, so eighteen is nae—not—too young.”
So Lachlan had in a few short weeks gone from being her knight in shining armor to being stupid. He was going to have to tell Ranulf about that—if they were still speaking. But perhaps Lachlan MacTier could be of some help, after all.
“Winnie, do ye recall how Lachlan reacted to ye tagging aboot after him everywhere? And sighing and making doe eyes?”
“I did not—”
“He ran the other way as fast as his wee legs would carry him.”
“Lachlan does not have wee legs. He’s as tall as you are, Arran.”
Arran grinned. “So ye do still like him.”
Sending him an annoyed look, she rose to pace from the couch to the fireplace and back again, while he wished someone could have this same chat with him about Mary and remind him why he needed to stop tempting fate as he was.
That would entail telling someone about her, though, and he knew better than that.
“I don’t like Lachlan,” Rowena retorted belatedly. “He hasn’t even bothered to write me a letter since I left the Highlands. I was merely stating the fact that he was tall.”
She paused at the mantel to run her finger along the spine of a porcelain dog there.
Arran didn’t know where it had come from—but then Ranulf had purchased the house fully furnished so he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of searching out English knickknacks.
Personally Arran would rather have looked at bare walls and empty shelves, but then he wasn’t trying to become a Sasannach.
“Ye see my point, though,” he continued. “Jane’s been chasing me like I’m the last rabbit in winter. She’s too young, too agreeable, and too na?ve. And I think ye know we’d both be miserable together, even if Ranulf hadnae decided we need the Stewarts aboot to keep his Charlotte safe.”
She sighed. “Yes, I suppose so. It still would have been fun.”
“Nae fer me. Or fer her, after she realized I’m nae as nice as she thinks.
” As he spoke, it was another young lady’s face who entered his thoughts, and it wasn’t that of his nearly betrothed.
He barely knew Mary. And if a MacLawry ever married a Campbell, the earth would crack open and swallow the Highlands. That was the legend, anyway.
He shook himself out of the ridiculous daydream. Of course his mind went to making a match with Mary, because it was so absurd. Nothing meant for rational thought, anyway, and far outside the future being laid out for him. “Ye said ‘firstly.’ Was there someaught else, then?”
“You and Ran are arguing. I don’t like that, so stop it—whatever it is.”
“It’s nae that simple, piuthar. Ye can pretend nae to be Scottish, but I cannae.
I dunnae want to be a Sasannach. And Ranulf …
Since when do we consider Sasannach opinions before we do someaught?
Since when do we make alliances with clans we’ve had nae to do with for three hundred years just because now they bolster our numbers in Mayfair? ”
“Times are changing, Arr—”
“Aye, they are,” he interrupted, warming to the argument. “Because Ranulf and ye are changing them! The only difference between now and six weeks ago is that ye left Glengask, Winnie, and he followed ye.”
His younger sister stared at him. Then, putting her hands on her hips, she stalked up to him.
“So you’d rather we were still all alone in the Highlands without any allies but those who owe us loyalty because their great-great-great-grandfathers bent a knee to ours?
Ye’d rather we didnae have any friends or allies outside the village of An Soadh?
Perhaps Maggie at the bakery there could show Ran how to manage English politics. ”
“Winnie, ye—”
“Perhaps ye’d rather have had Lord Berling shoot ye last week when he aimed his pistol at your head, but I’m glad Ran could arrange a truce.
Times are changing, Arran. And because Ran’s in London and nae far away in the mountains, he can see to it that we profit rather than perish. Here and back home.”
She stood there, breathing hard and glaring at him, tears rising in her pretty, dark gray eyes. “Ye’ve made yer point,” he snapped. Being lectured to by a lass nine years his junior wasn’t something he’d ever tolerated before. Some things were definitely changing, then.
But other things weren’t changing. Ranulf could dine with English fops, but he wasn’t permitted even to dance with a Campbell lass. Not even when their meeting had been completely by accident. And he couldn’t explain any of that to Winnie.
Unless he could. For a long moment he gazed back at her. “What if I told ye someaught?” he went on in a calmer voice. “Could I trust ye with it?”
“Of course you can. You’re my brother.” She must have said her piece and done, because her brogue had disappeared again. A damned shame, that.
She would likely keep her word to him, then, whatever he told her. But saying anything aloud to anyone felt like he was putting voice to something that was too nebulous to be touched. If it became a real, solid thing, it might well shatter and break—like a piece of blown glass cooled too quickly.