Page 40 of The MacGregor's Lady
“Shall I return you to your aunt’s lively company, then, Miss Hannah?” He advanced on her, kilt flapping against his knees, the devil in his dark eyes. “Shall I settle you in with yet another novel by old Sir Walter, perhaps inflict yet another round of Tennyson on you? Maybe Dickens is more to your taste?”
“Dickens is mean. Like you.”
That stopped him just as he was nose to nose with Hannah there in the mews for anybody to see. In the frigid air, over the scent of the stables a dozen yards upwind, Hannah caught a whiff of the earl’s fragrance. Clean, spicy, bracing.
“Explain yourself, woman.”
“Dickens holds up his own society in the worst possible light. He ridicules everybody and calls it humor.”
The earl braced his fists on his hips, the ice skates bumping against a chest that might have been made of granite. “God bless us, every one? Tiny Tim getting his operation so he can walk without a crutch? That’s ridicule?”
Withoutacrutch?“Wretched, vile… Damn you, I cannot go skating.”
He studied her for a long moment, dark eyes speculative, mouth unmoving, a tower of masculine stubbornness in the bitter air. A loose strand of Hannah’s hair whipped against her mouth, but she would not drop his gaze and turn for the wind to loosen it.
Balfour’s bare hand—why had he no gloves on?—brushed at her cheek. “It’s all right to be scared, Boston. You think I’m not dreading the coming ordeal, too? I’m going to land on my backside more often than Dickens could imagine at his most ironic. Come along.”
This time he didn’t lace their arms; he took Hannah’s hand in his.
“What do you mean, you’re dreading the coming ordeal?”
“Not this little outing—I was skating almost before I could walk—but this London Season. I spent much of the winter relearning dances I’d gained only a nodding acquaintance with as a lad. Not the sword dances, not the dances of my mother’s people, but these stilted, measured, one-two-three inanities. I acquainted myself with what wine goes with which dish, with the damned order of precedence. If I’d been smart…”
He was leading Hannah through a series of backyards, gates, and hedges, until they’d come to a small, fenced square.
“If you’d been smart?”
This earl, the one who wore a kilt and knew the way between the marked streets, was an interesting man, a man whom Hannah did not understand exactly, but she couldn’t ascribe meanness to him, either.
He took a key from the pouch that hung from his waist and offered Hannah a crooked smile. “If I had been smart, I would have hired myself what they call a finishing governess here. A gray-haired old field marshal of the ballrooms, a lady who would brook no nonsense and tie me to a posture board for hours.” He unlocked the gate and stuffed the key back in the pouch, then led Hannah into a tree-lined patch of snow-dusted grass. High hedges sheltered the square from any passing viewers, and in the middle of the grass sat a small pond with a bench on its bank.
A small frozen pond.
“Perhaps I’ll watch, Balfour, while you demonstrate your skill.”
“Perhaps I’ll carry you bodily to the center of the pond and leave you there.”
A lick of true unease uncurled in Hannah’s belly. “I’d crawl to the bank.”
“For God’s sake, Boston, can’t you trust me the least little bit? I’ll not let you fall, lass.”
He motioned for her to sit, and with a sense of unreality, Hannah did. When he called her Boston, his voice held a gentleness that caressed and reassured even as it unnerved—and his tone held exasperation too, as endearing as the gentleness.
“I’ve modified the right skate, you see.” He unknotted the ties of the skates as he knelt beside Hannah. “It’s an experiment, a chance for you to get used to the notion of a lift. You won’t have to try walking with it, but you can put weight on that side and test it out.”
He began strapping the skate to Hannah’s half boot. She tucked her skirts away as he did, for it seemed… it appeared…
She was going to go skating, and he’d been right: she was afraid.
The earl finished with Hannah’s skates and shifted to sit beside her while he strapped on his own skates. “These are probably the largest skates in the whole of Victoria’s realm. Shall I test the ice?”
Reprieve.“Yes, please. Test it thoroughly.”
Part of her hoped it would crack and he’d get soaked and they could call off his blighted experiment, but another part of her—the part whom everyone expected to limp through the remaining decades of her life—watched him with interest.
He got to the ice in a few steps and stood in his skates, taller than ever, while the breeze whipped at his kilt. His first circuit of the pond was unremarkable, a wagon-wheel pattern that tested the ice at the perimeter and then in the middle. The way the wind occasionally flapped his plaid back against his thighs tested Hannah’s composure.
Such muscle, such strength, such oblivion to the risk of exposure.
