Chapter 11 #2
“My lord?” she ventured, unable to take her eyes from his. His eyes were like crystal lakes and the azure oceans her brother and Jeremy had only described.
“I would very much welcome being a part of the McQuoid-Smith clan,” Lord Culross murmured, and dropped his uncomplicated gaze to Linnie’s mouth.
Her body tensed. His words served as a reminder and righted Linnie from a brief moment of insanity.
The earl’s desire to join his empire with the McQuoids’ in a shipping dynasty alone accounted for any of his newfound interest in Linnie.
She’d been out for two Seasons, and he had never once expressed an interest before now—before Arran’s alliance with Jeremy had been shattered. Now he’d come around, smiling and charming because it suited his aspirations.
“Culross!”
Linnie and the earl—with clear reluctance—looked toward the source of that interruption.
Two tents away, Fleur and Andromena stood in matching poses: arms crossed, feet slightly apart, in the “man the wheel” position Cousin Arran once taught, their narrow-eyed gazes on the earl.
Lord Culross touched a hand to his chest.
Fleur cupped her hands around her mouth. “Yes, you!”
“Is there another Lord Culross here?” Andromena shouted loud enough to overcome the collective voices of all the peddlers and merchants.
Linnie pressed a hand against her eyes and groaned.
“It appears I’m being summoned,” Culross said with his permanently affable smile.
She dropped her arm to her side. “Yes.”
The earl lingered, his gaze upon her face. His expression grew solemn.
Linnie’s stomach muscles bunched. She preferred him light and carefree. This somberness recalled what his intentions truly were.
Lord Culross opened his mouth to speak.
Linnie’s panic crested.
“Can you not allow Linnie some space with which to shop?” Andromena demanded, puffing and out of breath.
Grateful for the interruption and the arrival of her sister and cousin Fleur, it took a moment to register what her scamp of a sibling had just said to the earl.
Linnie gasped. “Andromena.”
Her sister rolled her eyes. “However are you to purchase a gift for Lord Culross if you two are together this entire day?”
“Should I point out that we really only just arrived?” the earl ventured, his voice creeping up into a cautious question.
Wrong response.
Fleur and Andromena fixed scowls upon the newest member of the McQuoid-Smith fold.
“You may do no such thing,” Andromena snapped.
“And”—Fleur folded her arms and propped her shoulder against her cousin’s—“Andromena was being gracious before. You’ve been stuck to Cousin Linnie’s side.”
Stuck at her side. That was precisely how it had been, felt, and seemed since he’d dined with her family two days earlier.
He flashed one of his deliberately—she’d wager—disarming grins. “Ah, but what a place it is to be.”
The pair of girls, still both with clearly no sense of romance or interest in it, remained stone-faced and unimpressed.
“Have a care, Culross,” Andromena said flatly. “You’re disgusting me.”
“And me!” Fleur chimed in.
The same, however, could not be said for Linnie, who found herself frustratingly filled with warmth at his rogue’s response.
That’s all it was. All the world knew the gentleman to be a dashing rake, and those seductive men earned their reputations for a reason.
“My apologies, ladies,” the earl murmured with an impressive modicum of contrition.
Andromena inclined her head on behalf of the cousinly pair. “Your apology is accepted, Culross.”
“This time,” Fleur hurried to add. “Given everything you’ve shared, however, it is increasingly apparent you have no intention of abandoning Cousin Linnie, and so . . .”
“We must steal you away,” Andromena finished.
Simultaneously, the girls looped their arms through either one of Culross’s, flanking him and edging Linnie out.
“There.” Fleur gave his hand a reassuring pat. “Now Linnie may have time to find your present, Culross.”
Lord Culross bowed his head. “Ah, but more importantly, I will have time to find Miss Smith a gift.” From over the top of the girls’ heads, he caught Linnie’s eye and winked.
She found herself smiling in return.
“Mm-mm.” Andromena recalled the earl’s attention. “Cannot be done.”
He sighed. “Never tell me there exists a reason which prohibits me from conferring a gift to Miss Smith?”
“A tradition,” Linnie explained.
“I . . . see.” His puzzled brow said anything but.
Andromena took the onus off Linnie from having to explicate. “One must be part of the McQuoid-Smith fold, Culross.”
Fleur nodded. “Being friends with Arran is not enough. Those welcomed into our family must treat each of us as family, and though you’re making great strides—”
“It’s simply too early for us to make a determination either way.” Andromena once again completed her cousin’s unfinished thought, as the girls had an uncanny ability to do.
Lord Culross appeared to take all that in.
Then he nodded slowly. “Family before all,” he murmured. “I . . . very much like this.”
There rang a sincerity in his contemplative musing that called to Linnie.
“Come along then, Culross.”
“But we cannot leave Miss Smith behind.”
The earl’s protests were in vain.
“Worry not,” Andromena said. Already, she had Lord Culross in a march step. “She’ll follow and join with Cousins Myrtle and Cassia. They are waiting on ahead.”
The gentleman tossed a desperate glance back Linnie’s way.
She hid a smile. “My apologies.”
“Stop looking at Cousin Linnie,” Fleur ordered. “That is, if you wish to be part of the McQuoid-Smith fold.”
A rush of heat spilled over Linnie’s cheeks, and she was grateful her impish kin demanded the earl’s attention.
“Rule Seventeen,” Andromena was saying. “One must pay equal attention to the children as one does the adults.”
“Rule Eighteen. Gentlemen must pay equal attention to the McQuoid-Smith ladies, regardless of age, as they do their male counterparts.”
As the trio made their way along the market square, with Andromena and Fleur going over essential family rules, Linnie followed along at a more sedate pace.
Walking behind them, Linnie studied Lord Culross with the youngest McQuoid-Smith ladies. It became clear the gentleman didn’t just listen but also conversed with the pair.
Linnie angled her head.
He demonstrated a surprising ease with young, precocious girls. No, not just the McQuoid-Smith girls.
When she’d made her way to the foyer this morn to join her female kin for their annual Leadenhall Market outing, she’d found Lord Culross engaged in a rousing pretend sword fight with Oleander and Quillon.
Lord Culross, with his flushed cheeks and tousled hair, had been so embroiled in that make-believe battle, he’d not noted her arrival. She’d had a chance to observe him, just as she did now.
Just then, whatever he’d said roused cheer-filled laughter from the youngest McQuoid-Smith lasses, who were quickly warming to the agreeable gentleman.
Her sister and cousin abandoned Lord Culross’s elbows and took him by the hands. He joined them in a race to the toymaker’s shop. Once inside, the girls freed the earl. Bypassing the dolls, they raced on ahead to a table of toy soldiers and toy drummers.
Linnie rubbed her gloved hands together to bring more warmth to her cold fingers.
All the while, she kept close, weaving in and out of various tents, and studied Lord Culross, Andromena, and Fleur.
He was so very good with the girls.
The majority of noblemen failed to see any child, even their own. And when they did, it was generally the heir who garnered any fatherly notice—for reasons that had nothing to do with genuine affection. To Polite Society, children were miniature adults-in-waiting.
And so Linnie couldn’t sort out whether she was being petty or nitpicky in thinking about how Jeremy had never needed reminders or urging to include the youngest girls.
He’d been a fast friend of Arran at Eton, a young boy himself. But that hadn’t prevented him from including the girls in the fray or carrying her baby sister about when she’d been too small to keep up on their hikes through the Highlands.
Of course, there’d been times when the boys had wished to have only the other boys about. Just as the girls had wanted nothing to do with the irksome lads.
At that moment, Lord Culross’s rollicking laugh boomed about the market; his was the kind of infectious, joyous expression that had peddlers and patrons about joining in.
But for Linnie, there came none of a shared happiness. She stared at the carefree lord and diverted people surrounding him. In her mind, she could only recall the distant echo of Jeremy’s once-boisterous laugh and what it had since become: harsh, angry, cynical.
Hurting.
As if he felt her focus, Lord Culross’s humor vanished. His broad shoulders went ramrod straight.
Before he could turn and find her there, Linnie ducked through the thick curtains of a milliner’s booth.
From a high, thin wood beam hung horizontally across the tent, vibrant satin, silk, and muslin ribbons in every shade of green, blue, purple, pink, and red danced in the breeze.
Even with the weighted curtain enclosures, the delicate scraps fluttered and twisted like a brilliant kaleidoscope that lent a mystical, dreamlike feeling to the pop-up shop.
Her gaze caught and locked on a straw bonnet.
Spellbound, Linnie found herself drifting over until she reached the straw article.
She stopped.
The Venetian bonnet was more than a decade out of fashion and trimmed with purple straw forget-me-nots and yellow primroses; the color of the flowers sewn along the brim had faded.
“You interested in that one, miss? I can give you a good price if you are.”
“No, thank you,” she murmured to the wizened merchant seated on a stool at the far-left corner of the shop.
Unblinking, she stared at the eerily familiar article and found herself transported back through time, until the power of the memory drew Linnie all the way in. She closed her eyes.
“Why the tears, Linnie-Lou?”
Sobbing, Linnie looked up. She blinked so she could see Jeremy better through her blurred vision.
“M-my b-bonnet.” She sniffled. “I-it is my first b-big-girl bonnet and the wind took it, and n-no one stayed to help and I cannot find it.” Linnie wiped the back of her sleeve across her nose.
“And Brone said I’m a baby and Arran said it’s just a hat, but I’m not a baby because this is my first big-girl bonnet. ”
Her lower lip trembled. “O-or it was.” Fresh tears built in her eyes.
Jeremy, his palms clasped at his back, sank to his haunches beside her. “I came back, Linnie-Lou,” he murmured.
She blinked slowly. He was right. “You came when everyone else left me.”
He brought his left hand out from behind him and wiped his thumb at her tears. “I’ll always come back for you,” he promised.
He brandished his right hand.
Linnie gasped. Her eyes went flying back to his. “You found it!”
“’Course I did. Couldn’t have you sad.”
With a laugh, she launched herself into his—
Linnie’s eyes went flying open. A tremulous sensation whispered up and down her spine.
She felt a presence.
“Familiar bonnet, is it not, Linnie-love?”
With a gasp, Linnie wheeled about.
More than a decade older than the version of him in her reminiscence, a foot taller, stones stronger, and heartbreakingly harder.
“J-Jeremy,” she whispered. “What . . . How . . . Why . . . ?” Only, the why didn’t matter, just that he was here.
Jeremy sent a single, slightly arched eyebrow winging up. “Don’t you remember?”
Of course she did. But surely, he could not.
Dazed, Linnie shook her head. “I . . . ?”
“I’ll always come back for you, Linnie-love,” he murmured.
Linnie’s heart caught at the soft, husky endearment he’d wrapped about her name.
There it was again. Not Linnie-Lou, the childhood moniker by which her mother, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles referred to Linnie, but Linnie-love.
Her heart thumped wildly, not only at what he said but also at what he’d revealed.
I’ll always come back for you, Linnie-love.
“You remember,” she whispered.