all she could do was nod her head. But she nodded with everything she had, and finally, when she realized that tears were running down her face, she whispered, “Yes. Yes, I will.”
John reached into his pocket and pulled out an ancient ring. She stared at it for a moment, mesmerized by the delicate etching on its sapphire center. “But this is yours,” she finally said. She had seen it on his finger. On his pinkie. She hadn’t even realized that she’d noticed this about him.
“I am lending it to you,” he said, his voice trembling as he slid it onto her thumb. Then he lifted her hand and kissed it, right where the gold touched her flesh. “So that you may keep it safe for our son.”
“Kiss her!” someone yelled.
John smiled and stood.
“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
Catriona’s lips parted with shock as he drew her close. “Right here? In front of ev—”
It was the last thing she said for quite some time.
Chapter 9
One could hardly say that there was adequate documentation on the matter, but Byron Wotton had always taken hell to be a fiery proposition.
He was wrong. Hell was obviously freezing, decrepit, and located in the Scottish Highlands. What’s more, it was ruled not by Beelzebub, but by an uncle with a fiendish sense of humor and not a single gentlemanly instinct to his name.
Byron had been watching, dumbfounded, as his old friend the Duke of Bretton declared everlasting love for a woman he’d met practically five minutes before, when Taran—alias Chief Tormenter—pulled him to the side.
“I hope ye’re taking some lessons from that English booby,” his uncle hissed.
Byron was watching the besotted look on his friend’s face as he gazed into Catriona Burns’s eyes. It gave him a queer feeling. Not that he could imagine himself in the grip of an emotion of that sort.
“What are you talking about?” he said, looking away as the duke drew his new fiancee into his arms. Actually, he could only assume they were affianced; he hadn’t heard her whispered answer to Bret’s proposal.
Given the way he was embracing Miss Burns, though, it must have been in the affirmative. It was truly odd. Byron knew damned well that the duke hadn’t any plans for marriage. Bret had confided only last summer that he planned to marry at the ripe age of thirty-five, and he was still a good six years from that milestone.
But now . . .
“Did you hear me?” Taran barked at his shoulder. “I gave you nevvies a chance to do the wooing that you don’t have ballocks to do yourselves, and yet you’ve let an Englishman steal a march on you.”
Byron scowled at him. “I have all the balls needful. And may I point out that you’re a single man yourself, Uncle, but you haven’t done a bit of wooing in the last decade or so that I’ve noticed.”
“I’m too old to put up with a woman.”
“More likely one wouldn’t put up with you.”
“No man in his fifties should be asked to make the sacrifice!”
“You’re only a year or two into that decade,” Byron pointed out.
“I’m a widower,” Taran said piously. “Kept your aunt’s memory in my heart, I have.”
Byron snorted. No woman in her right mind would accept the old scoundrel.
“Back to the point,” his uncle persisted. “You’ve lost one heiress already. You know what they say: as you grow older, yer balls grow colder.”
“You are being manifestly rude, Uncle.” He glanced back over his shoulder. Bret and Catriona were still locked in each other’s arms.
“Thank the Lord, he’s too much of a fool to realize that Catriona Burns doesn’t have tuppence to her name,” Taran muttered. “Her da will be kissing my feet for last night’s work, I’ll tell you. Burns would have danced a jig if she’d landed the second son of a baronet, let alone a duke. And he can’t say I didn’t try to chaperone the two of them.”
“Be quiet!” Byron hissed. He’d known the duke since they were both boys, and though Bret was easygoing to a fault, Byron had the firm conviction that no one would ever be allowed to insult his wife without being beaten within an inch of his life.
“As I was saying before,” his uncle said, mercifully abandoning that topic, “I’m giving you two every opportunity to snatch up yer brides, same as that Englishman done. Blindman’s buff seems to be working. I’ll make certain we play it every night. You lads are so lily-livered that you need the help of a blindfold.”
“I do not need help choosing a wife, from you
