“Jane, please,” Amelia-Rose seconded, taking charge of the tall tree’s arm. “You know she’ll have an apoplexy, and we’ll all have to listen to it. And then she’ll likely lock me in my room for a week and marry me off to that horrid Lord Oglivy. And he smells like cats.”
Whoever this Lord Oglivy was, Niall meant to find him and suggest he go on holiday to the country for the next few weeks. He looked at Jane Bansil expectantly. He could threaten her, but that didn’t sit well with him. She was simply doing her job, even if it was one he didn’t much appreciate.
“Oh, very well.” Amelia-Rose’s companion sagged a little, pulling her reticule back up against her flat chest. “Don’t let me catch you again, for goodness’ sake.”
“That is a promise,” Amelia-Rose said, leaning up on her toes to kiss the woman on the cheek.
Jane eyed him as she straightened her gown. “And you, Mr. MacTaggert?”
“I’m nae going to kiss ye,” he informed her.
“I should hope not.”
“Now,” his lass went on, moving around her companion to secure his forearm beneath her hand, “let’s go see the jewels, shall we?”
“Aye. Jewels.”
Actually he didn’t give a damn where they went next, as long as they did it together. If he’d caught some fever, if his new obsession with Amelia-Rose was a signal that he’d been hit on the head one too many times, he needed to know. If by some chance he’d found the one lass in all of Britain that matched him, he by God needed to know that, too.
She leaned against his side. “Yes,” she breathed.
“Yes to what?” he whispered back, very aware of the menace stalking directly behind them.
“I reckon it’s worth the risk to spend more time with you, Niall. Skellum.”
Considering that he was presently escorting a lass and her chaperone to a jewel exhibit and then meant to take them driving in an open carriage through Hyde Park before carefully depositing them back at her parents’ house, it was entirely possibly that this was the farthest from a scoundrel he’d ever been. Perhaps the London smoke and soot had muddled his brain after all. The only other explanation was one he wasn’t quite willing to visit yet. Not when she’d barely begun to spread her wings. This lass could too easily fly from his grasp.
Clearly he needed to find a pair of wings for himself. Something that would make him acceptable to both her and her parents. And at the moment he hadn’t the faintest clue what that thing might be. All he knew was that he meant to try.
“We just ride about in circles, then?” Niall asked, twisting his head to watch Lord Alvin and a dozen of his very small dogs drive by in a modified phaeton. The marquis had decided that the dogs needed their own perches, so he’d attached what looked like a wooden, cushion-bottomed open casket at the front and another at the rear of the driver’s seat, with all the dogs popping up and down and yammering from within.
“Yes. And we stop and chat with acquaintances,” Amelia-Rose supplied. “It’s more crowded today because Parliament isn’t in session.”
He sat back beside her again. “I did just see that, aye? A portly man and coffin dogs?”
Pursing her lips to keep from laughing, she nodded. “Lord Alvin. He’s somewhat … eccentric.”
“We have one of those eccentrics up near Aldriss,” he returned, the Mercer twins and their large bonnets now catching his attention. No doubt he felt like he’d stepped—or ridden, rather—into some mad realm of oddities. London was magnificent, that way.
“Do you?” she prompted. “A man with too many dogs?”
“Old Sean Ross. He keeps a wee cottage overlooking Loch an Daimh. It was a Jacobite meetinghouse in the old days, with a tunnel leading from the cellar out to the nearest hillside and another down to the water’s edge for a quick getaway if need be. Old Sean, though, keeps the tunnels full of—”
“Let me guess,” Jane interrupted from the opposite seat. “Whisky?”
The fact that she knew a secret seemed to have emboldened Jane. This was actually the first time Amelia-Rose could recall that her second cousin had ever spoken directly to—or walloped—a man. Hm.
“Nae whisky,” Niall countered, without heat. “Cats.”
“Cats?” Amelia-Rose blurted.
“Aye. Every day he goes out trapping for mice and rats and voles, spends the rest of the day fishing and going by the neighbors asking for their vermin, and in the evening he opens the trapdoor to the cellar and tosses his catch down below. Then there’s an awful yowling for the next ten minutes or so, enough to make even a stout man’s hair stand on end.”
“Surely you’re jesting,” Jane protested.
“I amnae. I’ve seen ’em. Dozens and dozens of cats, Mollies and Toms down to wee kittens.”
“What does he do with them, though? Surely he doesn’t…” Amelia-Rose swallowed. “He doesn’t eat them, does he?”
“He says nae. Old Sean claims, though I’ve nae seen it so I cannae say if it’s true, but he claims he milks ’em. And he has some odd wee cheeses, so I reckon maybe he does.”
“No!”
“Aye. I swear it.”
Amelia-Rose burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. “That is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. ‘Wee cheeses’? Oh, good heavens.”
“He brings his cheeses to the fair every year to sell, along with a selection of Toms and kittens if his tunnels are overflowing. He owns but one sheep, and she’s without a lamb, so she isnae giving him that quantity of milk.”
“How does one milk a cat?” Amelia-Rose managed, tears of laughter gathering in her eyes.
“I’ve nae idea, lass. Carefully, I imagine. They’re wee, but they do have claws. And teeth.”
“I don’t believe you,” Jane said flatly.
“After Amelia-Rose and I are wed, we’ll send ye some cat cheese from the Highlands and ye can see for yerself.”
Wed. He’s said the word. He hadn’t asked her yet, of course, but heaven help her, she’d begun to imagine it, in a faerie dream sort of way. Just the two of them, without her parents to frown and tell her to mind her tongue. Without smelly, old stupid men with whom she was supposed to smile and agree and flirt simply because they were men. They wouldn’t even dare approach her with Niall as her husband. Oh, she could imagine it.
“I don’t see how that could happen,” Jane was saying, “since Amelia-Rose detests the Highlands and means never to leave London.”
“Jane!” she snapped, her daydream popping like a delicate soap bubble.
“It’s true,” her companion muttered, hunching her shoulders and turning to look out over Hyde Park.
Oh, now she didn’t want to look at Niall, but she could practically feel him gazing at her. She couldn’t even accuse Jane of ruining everything, because the subject would have arisen sooner or later. She’d just begun to hope it was later. If they ended up parting ways because of the dozen other things that lay between them, it might not even have come up at all. Except now it had.
Amelia-Rose took a breath and shut her eyes for a moment. “I suppose it’s just as well you know,” she said, watching the sunlight sparkle across the surface of the Serpentine.
“So if ye’d agreed to marry Coll, ye wouldnae have objected to being left here?” His voice sounded a little flat, but that might also have been her imagination.
“That’s the problem. I don’t want to leave, and I don’t want to be left behind.”
“And ye detest the Highlands.”
“They aren’t London.”
Silence. Tears rose in her eyes again, but she blinked them away. He and she would never have made a match anyway. It was only that she’d hoped to … enjoy him for a bit longer than one morning.
“Well, that’s it, then.”
She felt him stand, and looked over quickly as he moved to the barouche’s low door and swung it open. “Niall! What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving. Ye’ve set an impossible tangle, and I cannae see a way through it.” With one foot out the door, he paused. “Unless…”
“Unless what? Blast it all, you’re making a scene. At least drive me home first.”