Page 30 of The MacGregor's Lady
She liked the parks most of all, and was content to stroll the walks on his arm, saying nothing for long stretches as she bobbed along beside him. She also liked to browse the shops, though not for herself. She was forever sending little gifts—ribbons, trinkets, scented gloves, sketches—home to her grandmother, and she’d occasionally ask him questions about this birdsong or that flower.
“Do all Englishmen know their flora and fauna as well as you do?”
“I can’t answer for them one way or another. I haven’t a drop of English blood in my veins.”
She referred to him as English to tease him, or to ensure he paid attention.
Paying attention to Hannah Cooper was becoming all too easy, even when she merely occupied the place beside him on a quiet bench. Hyde Park was never entirely deserted, but in late morning, the nannies had taken their charges back to the nurseries, the shop girls weren’t yet taking their nooning, and the fashionable crowd was still abed.
“Is that why you don’t sound English?”
“I sound English compared to you.” When he was sober and could ape the accents he’d heard at university, he sounded much more English than she. Ian, next in line of Asher’s siblings, had found that university accent uproarious until he’d acquired one of his own.
Miss Cooper scuffed a half boot over the dirt beneath their bench and tried unsuccessfully to hide a smile. She liked being from Boston, however many and varied her other dislikes might be. “You don’t sound American, Asher MacGregor, but then one hardly knows what an American accent might be. We’re so lately full of Irish and Scots. Before that it was French, Dutch, and English. We’ve many Africans as well.”
“Slaves.” He didn’t miss that aspect of the New World at all.
“Not in Boston.” Her spine straightened, and lest he be treated to an abolitionist homily, Asher gestured to a bed of tulips several yards up the walk. A few early stalwarts suggested the entire bed would be a bright, bobbing yellow in a few weeks’ time.
“I am hopelessly in love.”
She left off scuffing her boot. “Ibegyour pardon?”
He was bad to tease her like that, though she was a woman much in need of teasing. “That’s what an English gentleman would know about yellow tulips, that they stand for the sentiment ‘I am hopelessly in love.’”
“I’ve heard of this symbolic bouquet nonsense, though if you ask me, a yellow tulip ought to be simply a yellow tulip.”
That was her common sense talking, trying to deliver a little homily of its own. Asher leaned a touch closer, so he could catch a whiff of her scent. She used lavender soap, as most of his household did, but twining through that came a hint of something sweet and clovery.
“I declare my love for you.”
“Sir, you will not… Oh.”
He’d done something no English and few Scots would have dared attempt in Hyde Park in broad daylight: he’d plucked the first red tulip to bloom from a tightly planted drift.
And his crime—surely the English would have made appropriating a single, temporary bloom a crime—was worth the risk, because for the first time in his experience, Miss Hannah Lynn Cooper, late of Boston and points north, was blushing andbashful.
She didn’t turn as red as the tulip, but she colored up nicely and ducked her face to stick her nose in the flower. This was foolishness—tulips bore hardly any scent—and it resulted in a smudge of orange-yellow powder on the end of Miss Hannah’s nose.
“A proper Englishman would be glancing nervously about at the trees right now.” Asher withdrew his handkerchief. “He might be twitching his nose, making discreet signals that you’ve become unpresentable.”
“Unpresent—” She didn’t rear back when Asher dusted off her nose. She frowned though. “Am I presentable now?”
“We’re working on it. A few more trips to the modiste, several more to the milliner, and my hopes might be rewarded.”
Abruptly the frown became a scowl. “And here you were doing so well, Balfour. But no, you must ruin a perfectly lovely spring day with talk of the coming debacle.”
Her nose, once again free of unintended cosmetics, was aimed toward the sky. He liked that nose. In its angle and dimensions, that nose spoke of confidence and honesty. A nose such as hers might be coaxed to do some nuzzling in the right company on a cold night—provided such company did not start prosing on about marriage and dowries first.
“A suitable engagement would hardly be a debacle, Miss Hannah. You have an unnatural aversion to marriage and family if you believe that. It can be wonderful, to have a family.”
He hadn’t meant to say the last part, and she was regarding him again in that studying way of hers, suggesting she knew he’d revealed more than he’d planned to. “You have a family, I take it,” she said. “Where are they if they’re so wonderful?”
The pain of her question was spectacular, all the more so for being unexpected. The ache hit Asher bodily, constricted his airways and coiled in his gut, and then ricocheted around in his mind, leaving a trail of guilt, loss, and rage.
“I’ve sent for some of them. By the time the Season starts, I expect two or three of my siblings will come down from Aberdeenshire for the express purpose of helping me fire you off.”
He didn’t deserve their aid—Ian in particular had already served well above and beyond the call of duty—and neither did Hannah deserve his foul mood, but of all the things he might have been prepared for her to ask, the whereabouts of his family was not among them.
