For three years he’d been building his shipping empire and he could buy access into any London club he chose, but like many merchants...he would never be considered on equal ground with smart society. He’d no mind to try. He enjoyed frequenting the gaming hells and putting more coin on the table than the peerage could.
Enjoyed forcing them to interact with—and lose to—a man so beneath them.
A rebellion against his father and his fascination with the English.
But the time for games was over.
It was time for him to leave. Time for him to go back home.
Though, perhaps the memory he had of his homeland was one that wouldn’t stand all these years on. If he were greeted by swords and pitchforks, he wouldn’t be terribly shocked.
If the clan imagined he were anything like his dead father, he wouldn’t blame them at all.
His father had squandered his money, the money of the clan, the money of his people, trying to live life like the English peerage, drinking it away in pubs in Edinburgh while those they were sworn to protect starved, their ancestral homes falling down around them in disrepair.
It might be too late and there might be too little left for him to bring salvation now.
But defeat was not in his blood.
For good or ill.
Neither was mercy.
As the Earl of Avondale was discovering.
It was time for Lachlan to go home, but he would bring with him a souvenir. The greatest prize of the man who had nearly destroyed him.
He could think of nothing sweeter.
Lachlan’s mother had sent him to England, using a connection forged by his father, to gain him a position with the Earl. She’d sent him without his father’s knowledge or permission. A great dishonour, his father would think. To send his son to make money to replace the money he was squandering.
But the Earl had cheated Lachlan. Left his labour unpaid. And he could not return home a failure. So he had stayed. Waiting for the man to make good and in that time his mother...
She had given in to despair.
She had taken her own life.
His father bore the brunt of that guilt. But the Earl of Avondale had played a part in it and he would pay for that part.
Lachlan went to the door and knocked. He could have barged in. He had no patience for waiting around. But he would be let in here. Admitted by servants. A station he no longer held.
He could buy this manor, he could buy the Earl of Avondale, twice over. He bowed to no man.
Their fortunes had reversed and he intended to make the other man feel the weight of it.
The butler who answered the door was the same man who had been here when Lachlan was a boy of fifteen. He remembered him as being rather imposing. A hawkish face and broad shoulders, which Lachlan recognised now were padded.
The man’s black eyes no longer looked intimidating, rather Lachlan could see a depth of exhaustion there he would not have appreciated as a boy.
He felt no pity. It was the price to pay for working for the devil.
He didn’t judge the man, either, as Lachlan had once found himself in the Earl’s employ.
‘Mr Bain,’ he said. ‘The Earl is expecting you.’
‘Captain,’ he said. ‘Captain Bain.’
His ranking in the British Army, which he used only because it gave him some satisfaction to exceed the position this Englishman insisted on placing him in.
The man’s lip curled ever so slightly. If the man recognised him as the boy he had been, Lachlan couldn’t be sure. But he recognised a Scotsman and it was clear he found him beneath contempt. Yet the man had no choice but to admit him entry and so he did. Lachlan looked around the entry that he knew at one time had been grand. Now the wallpaper was stained and peeling, the flowers warped and swollen from moisture that seeped into the walls here. Apparently even aristocrats could not find insulation from the damp.
Before he could take another step, a door flung open and a woman all but tumbled into the space in which he was standing. She straightened, pressing her hands down over her skirts. Hands that were clearly shaking.
‘Steady, lass,’ he said.
His voice clearly provided her with no comfort. Wide, blue eyes met his and he could see fear there. He was used to men looking up at him with fear. He was quite accustomed to being the last thing a man saw. He had a reputation for being brutal in battle and it was well earned.
But he derived no joy from frightening small women.
It took him a moment to realise that this woman was his newly betrothed. He had not seen her since she was a girl. But he could see traces of the child she had been then. She still had a small frame, delicate. Her cheeks were no longer round, but her eyes were the same blue and the stubborn set of her chin remained.
Her dress was a simple, pale shift, the same milk white as her skin, the neck low and wide in that way that was so fashionable. He had wondered more than once if men were responsible for the current sensibility since it offered a tantalising view of female flesh.
He had not expected her to be beautiful. Beautiful seemed too insipid a word.
She was like a faery. It seemed that gold glowed beneath the surface of her skin.
She was infinitely lovelier than he had imagined she might be. He had not thought the collection of limbs she’d once been could be reassembled into something quite so pleasing.
She was still slim, her pale blonde hair like gold, her eyes the sort of blue found in the deep part of the sea. Mysterious like the ocean, too. He could see her fear, but there was more. A strength and stubbornness and something he could not define.
A depth he had not expected.
That, he supposed, had
