“Wait!” Taran yelled, tramping over through the snow. “She needs a chaperone!”
“I’ll go,” Fiona offered.
Taran blinked in surprise. “You will?”
“I’m cold,” Fiona said with a deceptively placid smile. “And I still have sewing to complete before supper.”
“Do you think you might help me?” Lady Cecily asked, fidgeting beneath her cloak. “Nothing they brought down fits, and I am a terrible hand with a needle.”
“Of course,” Fiona said. “Why don’t you come with me? We’ll take tea in my room and see to the gowns.”
“You’re supposed to be chaperoning Miss Burns,” Taran reminded her.
“Oh, but Catriona will take tea with us as well,” Fiona said. She looked over at Catriona. “If that is amenable.”
“I would be delighted,” Catriona said, although not, perhaps, as delighted as this very moment, wrapped as she was in Bretton’s arms.
“Marilla, you must stay and watch the caber tossing,” Fiona instructed. Marilla looked about to argue, but then Fiona added, “The gentlemen must have an audience.”
Marilla must have decided that one earl plus one French comte equaled something more than a duke, because her expression quicksilvered into one of utter enchantment. “I cannot imagine a more pleasing activity.” She placed a delicate hand on Lord Oakley’s muscular arm. “It is all so very, very exciting.”
“Very,” Catriona thought she heard Lady Cecily say under her breath.
“Back to the caber, then!” Taran hollered. “The old laird and his nephews,” he chortled, elbowing Mr. Rocheforte in the ribs. “The way it should be, vying to impress the fairest maiden in the county.”
Mr. Rocheforte smiled, but it was a queasy thing, quite unlike his normal expression.
“That’s the one I wanted for you in the first place,” Taran said in a loud whisper. “Prettiest girl in town. She’s got some money.
Mr. Rocheforte said something Catriona could not hear, and then Taran’s bushy brows came together as he grumbled, “It was a whisper! Nobody heard me.”
And then, before anyone could contradict, Taran pumped a fist in the air and once again yelled, “To the caber!”
“To the house,” Fiona Chisholm said in urgent response, and she hurried off, Lady Cecily right at her heels.
As for the duke, his pace back to Finovair was much more measured. Catriona, snug and warm in his arms, could find no reason to complain.
Chapter 7
By the time Bret reached the drawing room, Miss Chisholm and Lady Cecily were nowhere to be found. “Your friends seem to have deserted us,” he said to Catriona as he set her down upon an ancient chaise longue.
“Perhaps we were meant to follow them to Fiona’s room?”
“Oh, but I could not venture into a lady’s chamber,” Bret said, placing one hand over his heart for emphasis.
Catriona gave a look that was dubious in the extreme.
“And at any rate,” he added, “I don’t know where her room is.”
Catriona cocked her head, then said, “Do you know, neither do I.”
He grinned at that. “We seem to be stuck here, then.”
“On our own,” she said, a small smile touching her lips.
“You’re not concerned for your reputation?”
She tilted her head toward the door. “The door is open.”
“Pity, that,” Bret murmured. He perched on the table directly across from her, testing it first before settling his entire weight; like everything in Finovair, it was chipped and rickety.
“Your Grace!”
“I think you should call me by my given name, don’t you?”
“Absolutely not,” she said firmly. “And at any rate, I don’t know what it is.”
“John,” he said, and he tried to remember the last time anyone had called him such. His mother did, but only occasionally. His friends all called him Bret. He thought of himself as Bret. But as he looked at Catriona Burns, who had already shifted herself to a sitting position on the chaise, he wondered what it would be like to have someone in his life who would call him John.
