Page 48 of The Trouble With Dukes
He stepped back. “Megan Windham, I owe you an apology. I ought not to have been kissing you where anybody could chance upon us. I ought not to have—”
She kissed his cheek. “I ought not to have taken such a risk either, but I’d love to kiss you all over again. Will you court me, Hamish MacHugh, or will you flee to Scotland?”
He wished she were wearing the blue spectacles, or maybe that he could wear them. Anything to obscure the hope in her eyes, and the trust.
“Meggie, nothing has changed. I’m not the man for you. I’d take you away from everything you know and care for, to a place where winter can start in September and go on until May. My siblings do nothing but bicker. You’d grow bored—”
She wound her arm around his. “My siblings bicker and I’ve been bored for years. What aren’t you telling me? The truth, Hamish, for I would very much like you to court me.”
The truth—the most dangerous weapon ever turned on a man’s good intentions. “We will talk, and you will listen, and then you’ll bid me farewell.”
Silence was another weapon an intelligent woman wielded with great skill, and Megan was a very intelligent woman. She wandered with him to the benches around the sundial, and took a seat, pulling him down beside her. His hip was throbbing, but the bench was warm—some consolation, that.
“Why would you want a man like me for a husband, Meggie? I’m not … I’m not polished. I’m not English. I don’t intend to be very good at this duke-ing business, and I am fond of a good Highland whisky.”
“My mother is not English, Sir Fletcher is very polished, and as for the duke-ing, you’ve done a fine job of being a gentleman, so what does the duke part matter? I rather enjoyed sampling your whisky myself.”
Logic should be forbidden to marriageable women. “Meggie, you think because I pilfered a few letters from a desk drawer that I’m some sort of knight errant. I’m nothing like a knight errant.”
“You learned to waltz so you wouldn’t embarrass your sisters. That’s the behavior of a gallant fellow, Murdoch.”
“I like to dance—most Scots do—and waltzing isn’t complicated.”
She raised her face to the sun, which would have set Ronnie and Eddie running for their bonnets and parasols—or ordering Hamish to fetch them.
“Am I so awful, Hamish? I thought you liked me.”
“You are lovely.” Her eyes closed, her chin tilted up toward the sun’s warmth, her freckles on view for any man within kissing distance to see … Hamish’s chest ached, and something like rage stirred at the thought of leaving her alone on that bench in … about twenty-three minutes, according to the sundial.
“What are you trying to protect me from?” Megan asked, opening her eyes and peering at him with the merciless sagacity of a cat. “That’s the only reason I can think of for you to abandon me now. You believe whatever retaliation Sir Fletcher will seek, whatever risks I’m facing now, your hand in marriage somehow trumps those fates for awfulness. You owe me an explanation, Hamish. Friends are honest with each other.”
Friends. Friends did not skewer each other with impossible demands for truth.
An inconvenient voice in Hamish’s head insisted friends didn’t ride off to Scotland without an explanation either.
“I’m trying to protect you from me, Meggie,” Hamish said. “Ask your soldier cousins, and they’ll tell you I have a reputation for violence and cowardice, both. I dodge the battles I ought to wage, and yet, once engaged, I’m a savage. I kill for pleasure according to some, and when I should have died fighting, I surrendered myself into enemy hands instead. I’m no kind of soldier, and they’re right. I hated the whole business, and you’ll hate being my duchess too.”
My duchess. The words alone brought him delight when he associated them with her.
She took his hand, which in a courting situation was permitted.
“I’m glad you didn’t die fighting. Your siblings are glad you didn’t die fighting, as are all those people up in Perthshire who depend on you. Who are theseblind idiotsthat think death is such a wonderful accomplishment? Death is within anybody’s grasp. The greater challenge is to live, and to love despite our errors and failings. Be glad you didn’t die, Hamish MacHugh. Maybe you had some bad moments, or you harbor regrets—I surely do. But be very glad you didn’t die.”
Between one quiet moment and the next, a queer feeling suffused Hamish, as if without Megan’s hand to hold, he might have lifted into the air and dissolved into the sunshine. As if Megan’s words had lit some taper inside him that longed to join with the greater warmth of the sun’s light.
I’m glad you didn’t die fighting.
“You are a woman of original and passionate sentiments.”
She said nothing, but kept a fierce hold of his hand. The words errant and error had the same root, both meaning to wander. Hamish’s heart had been wandering since he’d bought his commission, and for the first time, he had a sense of homecoming. Not coming back to familiar territory, but coming home.
He sat beside her for eleven more minutes, his backside throbbing, wonder suffusing his every breath. The sense of benediction would not leave him, the sense of an insight granted when most needed, the sense that Megan would not fail him.
I’m glad you didn’t die fighting.
“My superior officers called me an animal,” he told her. “They said the French should have put me down like a rabid dog.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. “Your fellow officers said this?”
