Page 57 of The MacGregor's Lady
This honest if inconvenient reply was apparently the right answer, because Malcolm’s smile became a tad roguish. “I’m glad. Now, if I wheedle very prettily, will you give me your supper waltz? You made quite the fetching picture gliding around the dance floor with my lucky cousin. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the waltz had been invented in America, you dance it so beautifully.”
She gave him her supper waltz, though his importuning left her puzzled. Malcolm Macallan had dissembled a bit regarding her wealth, he’d not quite told the truth regarding how deserted the terrace would be, and now he was engaged in outright mendacity, for Hannah had stumbled twice during her waltz with Asher, and both times, her partner had smoothed her through it without a single comment.
And yet, for all his dissembling, misrepresenting, and lying, Hannah had to like Malcolm Macallan because he’d also armed her with the information she needed to protect Asher’s interests among the ladies vying for his hand.
***
Because a fresh breeze stirred from the west and not from the direction of the Thames, and because a storm had come through the previous evening, watching Hannah pen her biweekly epistles to Boston wasn’t a torment to Asher’s olfactory senses, only to his heart.
He sat in the shade of a lilac bush coming into its glory thirty feet downwind from the scribe in the gazebo. Alas for him, this put him in full view of any relatives intent on disturbing his reverie.
“Gentlemen usually reserve their doting smiles for when the ladies can see them.”
Asher gave up watching Hannah to greet one of the three English sisters-in-law his brothers had acquired for him. “Augusta, good morning. I smile at Miss Cooper all the time.”
“In the ballrooms, you grimace.” Augusta pulled her lips back in an expression that might have graced the features of a berserker charging into battle.
“That bad?”
Her eyes were sympathetic, while the pat she gave his hand was brisk. “When one thinks one might look but shouldn’t touch, it’s trying.”
Hannah bent over her paper, her pen moving in a steady rhythm across the page, just as her hands had moved—“We’ve touched.”
The murmured words were not carried away on an obliging zephyr. If anything, the sympathy in Augusta’s violet-blue eyes deepened. “You don’t mean you’ve handed her in and out of carriages.”
From an Englishwoman, this was an offer to accept confidences, but Asher wasn’t about to step into that snare. “I’ve done plenty of that. Tell me how my other sisters-in-law go on.”
“You could ask them. You could even ask your brothers.”
Reproof underlay her reply, or perhaps… pity. Augusta was a pretty woman, tall, dark-haired, and dignified with a smile that belied all her primness and English starch—when she aimed that smile at Ian or their infant son.
“I prefer to ask a woman. My guess is, the womenfolk are sparing their fellows all the less delicate aspects of carrying a child, and my brothers, being new husbands, don’t know how to ask what needs asking. Ian stands around pouring the whiskey and looking sympathetic, but he isn’t going to stir… the pot.”
She subjected him to reciprocal scrutiny, long enough that he knew what she was about; then she patted his hand again. “It’s early days for Genie and Julia, and Mary Fran has carried a child before. They seem to be bearing up well. They’re loosening their stays and napping when the mood strikes them.”
Asher’s gaze drifted back to Hannah, who was folding her first missive. She would write a second to one of her brothers, a third to her old governess.
“Tell Genie, Mary Fran, and Julia to consume red meat daily and to drink milk too, if they can. Pregnancy can be hard on a lady’s teeth, among other things, and organ meats are of greatest benefit.”
He hadn’t learned that from the medical college. He’d learned it from Monique, who had learned from her mother.
“Anything else?”
Hannah paused between letters, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes, probably the better to enjoy the rare fragrant day in Mayfair.
“Augusta, I am not fooled. You are the scout. If I provide you detailed medical information, then Mary Fran will be the next emissary, because she’s my baby sister, and I cannot deny her what knowledge I have. My money’s on Julia next, because she’s a widow, and they develop a certain formidability. When they’ve both interrogated me to their satisfaction, dear Genie will likely come swanning into the estate office asking all manner of indelicate questions, though she’ll manage to ask them delicately.”
He fell silent because he was trying to scold his sister-in-law into submission, and it was not working. Her smile, a beaming, toothy, mischievous version of the tenderness she aimed at Ian was turning his scold into a… pout.
“Don’t forget your brothers, Balfour. Ian will send them straight to you, claiming his involvement in the baby’s arrival was limited to events surrounding conception.”
Ian, who held his son every chance he got, confided in the boy about all manner of things, and fretted over the child’s every smile and burp.
Asher would have stomped into the house, except that would have meant leaving Hannah alone with her letters. He tried for a smile. “Go away. I will provide the names of competent accoucheurs to any sister-in-law who asks, and I will provide whiskey to brothers showing signs of excessive anxiety. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to seek the company of a woman who is not given to ambushing a helpless man in his very own garden.”Thoughshewasn’t above sneak attacks in his kitchen.
Augusta didn’t pat his hand this time; she kissed his cheek, a soft, fragrant buss that mercifully heralded her departure back into the house.
Asher spent another moment drinking in the sight of Hannah Cooper at her leisure, eyes closed, her face turned up to the sun slanting into the gazebo from the east. Sheoughtto be worried about getting freckles.
