Page 18 of The MacGregor's Lady
Something in what he said wanted arguing with, but Hannah was unable to get her mind wrapped around it. For her to navigate five miles of slippery terrain was not well-advised, though he’d mercifully left her limitations off his list of reasons. She had no doubt were he not burdened with her, he could have marched back to the inn without breaking a sweat.
His lordship was a good man. A gentleman. A pity his ilk did not abound in Boston.
“Shall I escort you to the bushes again before we lose the light entirely?”
And he was a blunt man—a trait of which she had to approve, for he was essentially offering to escort her to the privy. Good heavens. What did one say? Hannah lifted her face to the sky, to the flakes drifting down from the heavens in a thickening swirl of small, frigid kisses to her nose, eyelashes, cheeks, and chin.
“Yes.”
Four
The lady was half-tipsy, or perhaps a quarter. Asher usually avoided tipsy women, but Hannah Cooper wasn’t silly or giddy with it. She was more like a man who’d imbibed a wee dram at the end of a taxing day: relaxed, her sense of humor closer to the surface, her dignity not quite so tiresomely evident.
The liquor was the simplest explanation for the lady eating up her dinner with her bare fingers, wiping her mouth on her scarf, and thanking him kindly for the most crude fare.
She’d drunk from his flask without comment too, and set about gathering rocks and kindling without grumbling. He’d tossed the tasks at her mostly to give her something to grouch about and to keep her moving, but she was singularly lacking in biting retorts.
She came around from her side of the bushes and took his arm as if they were bosom bows.
“It gets like this in Boston,” she said. “So cold your lungs shiver with each breath.”
“So cold,” he took up the conversation, “you don’t dare breathe through your nose, for the thing freezes together on you.”
“Yes!” She beamed at him. “That cold. Do you suppose we’ll freeze to death in our sleep?”
“Tonight? Of course not. This isn’t dangerously cold by my standards. It’s merely inconvenient.”
“And compromising,” she added, her tone dismissive. “I’ve been compromised before. Will you read to me?”
“Read to you?”
“You did earlier this week. The Walter Scott, I think.”
“You’re reading Scott now.” He’d thought she’d been asleep as soon as he’d started reading. She’d certainly acted asleep. “I can read to you for a bit.”
When they were back on their blankets under the lean-to, and Asher had arranged the tarps to keep the snow off the fire, he took up the book, lit a coach lamp, and began to read, slowly, because his glasses were in his breast pocket, and he wasn’t about to wrestle them onto his nose before company. For almost an hour, he regaled Hannah with the deeds of old Ivanhoe—an idiot, by Asher’s standards—while she sighed and watched the fire beside him.
“Nobody’s coming for us tonight, are they?”
“They’d be fools to try. Had the wind not come up, there would have been a broken track to follow, but that’s not the case now.”
“Time for bed?”
She sounded wistful, as if she were longing for a nice, cozy four-poster after somebody had made good use of the warming pan.
“Time for bed. Give me your cloaks.”
“I beg your pardon?” Not so tipsy now—not tipsy at all.
“If we’re not to freeze, and we’re not, then I need your cloaks. We sleep together, like kittens, and use both our coats as extra blankets.”
“You are a very large kitten, Mr. Balfour.”
“Call me Asher.”
“Is that yet another title? I can’t keep them straight as it is. Lord This and Lord That, it’s quite confusing.”
“Asher is my name, Asher MacGregor.”
