Page 29 of The Trouble With Dukes
A worthy enemy, even including St. Clair, who’d held Hamish’s life in his hands.
Homesickness and horror that went deeper than the soul.
Hilarity only a soldier could grasp and only at the time.
Holding Megan, Hamish could acknowledge all of those losses and injuries, and even treasure them for the proof they offered that not all of his military memories were of shame and indignity.
He saw too, though, that war seduced a man’s reason by promising him that what he had to offer, what he had to give, mattered desperately. He would not live, die, march, moan, retch, itch, sweat, or swear in vain.He mattered.Every soldier, regardless of how stupid, clumsy, bumbling, or venal, mattered indispensably, and thus his future was forfeit and he was glad to surrender it.
Being a duke didnotmatter. Waltzing, social calls, riding in the park … so much wasted time and foolishness. Being oldest brother to a lot of unruly siblings hadn’t mattered as much as Hamish had hoped, for he’d been absent two years at a stretch, and his family’s life had gone on without stumbling.
Holding Megan Windham, though,that mattered. Holding her confidences, that mattered terribly. When all of polite society saw Hamish as some kind of titled bear perfect for baiting in a ballroom, she relied on him to come to her aid.
“About Sir Fletcher,” Hamish said, when the lady’s bout of tears had ebbed. “I canna kill him for ye, Meggie, though for once, the notion of murder has some appeal.”
She was luscious to hold. Soft, sweet, warm … her hair under his bare hand was the lambent warmth of candlelight and the cozy fire in the hearth, and silky too. Hamish wanted to gather her closer, but didn’t dare.
She gatheredhimcloser. “You are no killer, Hamish MacHugh. You needn’t posture for my sake.”
Society probably saw him as nothing but a killer—or a coward. Hamish made himself step back, resuming his place beside her on the bench, and to hell with propriety. He tucked her close, and she bundled against him.
The rightness of that, the sublime absolution of it, made the souls of the hundred generations of MacHugh warriors rise up and dance up across the heavens.
“I have promised a certain baroness I will never again call a man out,” Hamish said. “Her ladyship was most insistent, and the consequences she threatened me with motivate me to keep my word. Dueling is ridiculous, in any case.”
Inside the Windham mansion, the orchestra struck up the introduction to the waltz. Hamish had wanted to dance with Meggie Windham, but this conversation beneath the guttered torches was far more precious.
“If you can’t call Sir Fletcher out, what does that leave?” Megan wailed softly. “I can’t call Sir Fletcher out, and he’s pressed me again to set a date. My parents depart for Wales next week, and Sir Fletcher said either he’ll talk to Papa before then, or take other measures to ensure our engagement must be announced.”
Hamish considered calling on the Baroness St. Clair and asking for one small dispensation from the promise he’d made her, but no. That would mean calling on St. Clair as well. The baron still featured in Hamish’s nightmares, and in all honesty, the idea of a duel turned Hamish’s stomach. Then too, he did not want to explain Megan’s situation to anybody, for her confession had been given in confidence to Hamish.
And only to Hamish.
“I won’t let you do murder,” she said, stroking a hand over the pleated drape of his kilt. “Your conscience forbids you from dueling with Sir Fletcher, and yet, he has my letters. Thirty-one of them. He brags about taking them out and reading them before the fire in his library of an evening. Keeps them in his desk drawer, where he can enjoy them at any time. He finds them wonderfully entertaining too.”
In the privacy of his mind, Hamish fashioned foul epithets for Pilkington in English and Gaelic, both. The moment, however, wanted practicality, despite Megan Windham’s hand on Hamish’s thigh.
“I could bribe him,” Hamish said. “Buy the letters from him.”
“You are paying for two sisters to make their come outs,” Megan said. “Your wealth is in Scotland, I’m guessing, and Sir Fletcher will want his money before Mama and Papa leave next week.”
Sir Fletcher would also learn, if paid once, that he could demand more payment in the future, until all of Megan’s sisters were safely married. Megan would never know peace, and she’d have to confess her missteps to any fellow who sought her hand.
“The objective here is not to win a skirmish, then,” Hamish said as his thigh endured another soft, slow caress through a single thickness of wool. “We must win the war.”
“You hated war.”
How he loved hearing those words from her, for they were the truth a soldier, much less a disgraced soldier, never quite admitted to another.
“I do not hate that a man who plunged an entire Continent into twenty years of endless, pointless carnage, ended up sitting on his rosy arse in the middle of the south Atlantic, Meggie. Napoleon’s own troops were weary of him by the time we engaged them at Waterloo, but they’d lost their taste for being ruled by a king. Boney left them nothing to do but fight until not a Frenchman under the age of eighty remained to hold a gun.”
And God help the army that faced the surviving French women, much less the mothers of all those men who’d died in service to an emperor’s bloodthirsty delusions of glory.
“I do not want to marry Sir Fletcher Pilkington,” Megan said. “I’ve considered running off.”
So had Hamish. “Running doesn’t work, Meggie. You only look guilty of whatever charge you’re trying to avoid. You turn a retreat into a rout when you run, and you hand over the field to your enemy. The English learned that lesson on the way to Corunna. We fight to win, and we fight dirty.”
Battle talk felt oddly invigorating, for once. Megan’s hand stroking Hamish’s thigh, though likely nothing more than a nervous gesture on her part, was invigorating too.
