Page 59 of The MacGregor's Lady
And for himself.
“You are the most stubborn woman I know, Hannah Cooper. Too stubborn—” Insight struck, and relief with it. “Are your monthlies plaguing you?”
A physician might have asked that question—had asked it, fairly often, in fact—and a husband might have asked it, but an earl would not.
She harrumphed against his shoulder. “Damn you, Asher MacGregor. I get the weeps as they approach, and I worry more easily. I doubt—” She pulled back abruptly to regard him with a glittery gaze. “What did Augusta want?”
The female mind was even more complicated and worthy of study than the female body—particularly Hannah’s female mind. He palmed the back of her head and drew her back to his shoulder lest she gain insights in her study of him. “I am trained as a physician.”
An innocuous place to start. Common knowledge. He fell silent, and Hannah prodded him verbally. “So you have informed me.”
On the occasion of taking liberties with her foot. Why hadn’t he heeded that warning, and why didn’t he wave a servant out from the house to put the poor lilacs in water?
“I have not practiced medicine for several years.” Also common knowledge. “I cannot foresee that a belted earl will have need of a profession at which he never particularly excelled.”
“You were a good doctor, Asher. You could not be else.” She offered this rebuke patiently, even sleepily.
“I was a good student of medicine, but I was not a good doctor. The physicians of the previous age knew something we modern fellows have forgotten: much of effective medicine has to do with interviewing the patient. Not examining him or her like a laboratory specimen, but earning the patient’s confidences.”
“You pluck confidences from me.” Her admission was an unhappy one. He stole a kiss to her temple in reward and left his mouth close enough to her crown to feel the silky pleasure of her hair brushing his lips.
“You toss out the occasional admission as a distraction, Hannah. I do not consider myself in your confidence.”
“Confidences are supposed to be shared, not hoarded by one party for use in negotiating with another. Why did you stop practicing medicine?”
“I’m not sure.”
Even Hannah, in all her brightness, would not understand that he’d just parted with a confidence, much less one that surprised even him. He’d started turning away from medicine to the more lucrative business of the fur trade even before he’d lost Monique, but her death had also signaled the death of his medical interests.
Or had it?
“That is not a confidence, Asher, and neither is this: I want to go home, but I can’t go home until I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish.”
He tucked her closer, not having foreseen that homesickness was part of her burden. “It’s different here,” he conceded. “That’s hard. Wearying.”
Another damned confidence.
She smoothed a hand over the wool of his kilt, her touch so distracted, it was as if she’d failed to notice that his thigh was one layer of fabric away from her bare hand. “People are polite here, but they aren’t nice. People in Boston aren’t so polite, but they’re genuinely nice.”
Well said. “Marry me, Hannah. We’ll live in Scotland, where people are both polite and nice, if a bit gruff. You’d love Balfour.” And he’d love showing it to her.
“You are a plague, Asher MacGregor. I cannot marry you of all men.”
Given the height of the sides of the gazebo, their hands at least had privacy from every direction. When she stroked her hand over his kilt this time, he wrapped his fingers around hers and brought her palm to rest over the growing bulge beneath the wool. “I’ll swive you silly if we marry, swive you often and enthusiastically, but only if we marry.”
Hefelther smile. She patted his cock. “I’d swive you silly too.”
She said nothing for quite a spell as the morning breeze wafted through the roses, and Asher wondered what it meant, that Hannah would ask him to ruin her publicly, pat his cock in private, and then… fall asleep in his arms.
To distract himself from the pleasure of her bodily trust, Asher turned his mind to her ferocious determination to get back to Boston, and what might be motivating it. His gaze fell on the unfinished letter, this one to Allen, the oldest of the three brothers.
“I shall return in a few weeks, and then things will be better. I promise. Give my love to Mama when you safely can, and watch out for Grandmama.”
GivemylovetoMamawhenyousafelycan.
One line, but enough to convey a disturbing realization to a man reduced to sneaking affection behind garden hedges: Hannah worried for her grandmother, understandably, if excessively. She worried as well for her younger brothers, and for her mother too. The mother he’d thought did not care enough to write even once to her daughter.
Or perhaps, the mother whocouldnotwrite to her daughter.
