When a Scot Loves a Lady

natural beauty of form wholly lacking in companion beauty of mind. Or character. Or education. Or taste.

Good heavens. She had wanted to escape London, but not to eschew civilization altogether.

No. This was not the entire truth. Yet only now, as her hands went damp, did she realize it. She wanted to escape a great deal more than London. She wanted to escape the gossips, the association of her name with Lambert’s in drawing rooms across town, her misguided past that clung no matter how she wished to escape it.

The presence of this man in the middle of nowhere abruptly made all of that impossible.

Lord Blackwood smiled, a lazy curve of his mouth amid a veritable forest of whiskers, his gaze fixed on her. She curtsied.

The smiled broadened. It was, in point of fact, quite a dashing smile. Despite the outrageously barbaric beard, she had noticed this once before. The streak of white running through his dark hair lent him a comfortably roguish air as well. Then he opened his mouth, and out stumbled that which ought to have remained on the battlefield with Robert the Bruce six hundred years earlier.

“Maleddy, ’tis a bonnie surpreese tae meet wi’ ye here.” The rough words lumbered across his tongue like a flock of black-faced sheep running from wolves. A massive blur of gray streaked around his long legs and leaped down the stairs. Kitty braced herself.

“Hermes, aff.”

The beast flattened itself to the floor at her feet, its tail wagging frantically.

“Sir!” Emily sprang up.

“He winna harm ye, miss.”

“How do you do, my lord?” Kitty drew in a steadying breath. “Marie, allow me to present to you the Earl of Blackwood. My lord, this is my traveling companion, Lady Emily Vale, who at present goes by the name Marie Antoine.”

“Ma’am.” He slanted Emily a grin and started down the stairs. Kitty rooted her feet to the floor.

She would not retreat. But this sort of man nearly required retreat.

He stopped on the other side of his dog and bowed, perfectly at ease. “Maleddy.”

Not retreat. That was foolish. Because there was no this sort of man. There was only this man, a man she had only spoken with once before, three years earlier, barely to exchange greetings. Yet he had changed her life.

He had remarkably high cheekbones, a rawboned borderlands hollowness from the plane of his cheek to his whisker-covered jaw, and his eyes were indolently hooded. Kitty knew better than to trust in that indolence. At least she’d once imagined so, on that night when that dark gaze had seemed to look right through her. Into her.

“What brings you to Shropshire, my lord?”

“The fishing, lass.” A rumble of easy pleasure sounded from his chest behind a coat of excellent quality and no elegance whatsoever. “Catching up frae the summer. Raising mair dails than ye can lig, than, I wis.”

“I see.” She had no idea what he’d said. There was no rationally conversing with a barbarian, even a very handsome one. “Are you lodging here as well?”

“Aye. Storm’s a beast.”

The innkeeper appeared. “My ladies, here’s Mrs. Milch to see you to your chambers. I’ll have dinner laid when you prefer.”

“We’ve only the mutton sausage, and the gentlemen ate half already.” His wife glowered, swathed from skinny neck to knee in dull cambric. “Nothing else came today but them and the eggs, and I’ll be saving those for breakfast.”

“Mutton sausage will do splendidly.” Kitty moved toward the woman, away from the fire and the large man.

“Didn’t expect the Quality to be taking up with us tonight,” Mrs. Milch muttered in a damp voice.

“Don’t have anything on hand.”

Kitty followed her and Emily up the stairs. But at the top she could not help glancing back. Lord Blackwood watched her. No grin lit his face now, only a glint behind the indolence of something cold and sharp.

That night three years ago his warm, dark eyes had glimmered with that steel. Across a dimly lit ballroom he had looked at her as he did now, and that was all she had needed to redirect the course of her life.

For three years Kitty had wondered if her imagination had invented that hard gleam to serve her own need at the time. Now she knew.

Chapter 3

“Katherine Savege is here.” Leam scraped the razor along his chin. “And Lady Emily Vale.”

“Lady Katherine, the unwed exquisite?” Yale lounged in the chamber’s single wooden chair, playing a guinea between his fingers. Back and forth, gold flickered in the thin morning light filtering through the window. Nothing wasted. The game improved agility.

“The very one. Haut societe. Political. She frequents the Countess of March’s salon,” and through friends at that salon six months earlier, she had sealed a treasonous lord’s fate.

“Beauty and intelligence.” Yale’s gaze remained on the coin. “But the latter would not interest the cretin Earl of Blackwood.”

“Her mother plays cards.”

“Ah. More to the point.”

“Lady Katherine has a number of close acquaintances on the Board of Admiralty in particular.”

With a flick of his wrist, the Welshman pocketed the coin. “Not our business, then.”

“Not any longer.” Cold metal swished along Leam’s skin. Soap dropped to the cloth below, laden with the past. “Deuced inconvenient, though.”

“Then why are you shaving?”

Leam drew the linen from about his neck and swiped it across his clean cheeks and chin. He ran his hand along the smooth skin. By God, it felt good to be civilized again.

“It was on the schedule,” unlike this detour that kept him from Alvamoor where he should be by now. Damn Jin for changing their rendezvous from Bristol to Liverpool. If it weren’t for the snow, Leam would have left it to Yale and washed his hands of the Falcon Club’s business once and for all.

“Who is Lady Emily?”

Leam knotted his cravat. “Less than a fortnight off the job and already losing your edge? You were introduced to her at Pembroke’s ball last spring.”

Yale’s face sobered. “Athena?”

“She goes by Marie Antoine now, apparently.”

The Welshman stood and headed for the door. “Well, I shall be off and away before les belles bestir themselves for breakfast.”

“Two feet of snow on the ground.” If Leam could bear to abuse his animals so, he would saddle his horse and take Bella and Hermes to the road without delay. But he could not. He was well trapped hundreds of miles from where he ought to be two days hence. “Where do you expect to go?”

“I shall dig a trench to the dock, purloin a punt, and once at the river’s mouth cast mine eyes to the sea in search of a tardy privateer.”

“Wyn.”

“Leam?”

“Behave yourself.”

The younger man bowed with a flourish. Save for snowy linens, he wore all black, his single honest affectation. “As ever, my lord.”

Leam tugged his coat over his shoulders, leaving it unbuttoned. Trapped in an inn with a pair of ladies who