Page 88 of The MacGregor's Lady
A list of tasks to be completed, or a recipe—for heartache.
“Thank you.”
“You are not welcome, Hannah Cooper. I have business in Boston, you know. I could visit there from time to time, once I spend a few years playing earl here to everybody’s satisfaction.”
“You need heirs, Asher. Don’t torment me with what-ifs, maybes, and perhapses.”
“I’m asking you to plan, Hannah.” His voice was very gentle, his grasp of her hand loose. “Plan for that day you’re larking around the shops, picking out a book to give a friend or to read to your hundred-year-old granny, and you look up, and there I am, across the street. I might have a touch of gray at my temples, my hair will likely be shorter, and our eyes will meet. Plan for that day, and the regrets and desire that will deluge us both.”
And he might be holding the hand of a small boy who resembled him, or have on his arm a pretty, wellborn Scottish countess. She turned her face to his shoulder. “I hate you.”
She’d have no husband at her side in that bookshop, though, which was a consolation of sorts.
“Then you also hate the part of you that is responsible, loving, and loyal. I’ve tried, but I cannot hate these things in you. I can resent them, though, just as you must resent them in me.”
His ability to see the situation clearly only made her determination to leave him that much more of a burden. “I want you to rant at me and wave the license in my face and tell me I have no choice.”
“We all have choices.” More humor, however bleak.
And he was right, blast him to Halifax. Hannah did have choices.
“I choose two weeks in Edinburgh, two weeks at Balfour, and then you will find me that ship.”
“A month, then. We’ll have one more month.”
For him that seemed to settle something. For Hannah, it only raised the question of how she’d endure her life when that month was over.
And then, because he had not and would never take her choices away, she entrusted him with one of her heartaches. “The last letter from my grandmother? She asked when I was coming home. She’s never asked that before, and I haven’t heard from her since. My brothers have stopped writing.”
He remained silent for a time, the sound of the train rolling north reverberating against Hannah’s soul. “Tell her you leave in a month. Tell them all you’ll be leaving me in one month.”
He kissed her, a soft press of lips against her mouth, no insinuation or reproach to it. Just a kiss.
As he offered her an ironic little bow and withdrew to the parlor car, Hannah knew that kiss for what it was: they might kiss again, they might even lapse again if she had the strength to endure such pleasure and passion, but that had been a kiss of parting, a kiss good-bye.
***
A man wasn’t worth the name if he sought to hold a woman by a confluence of desire, misunderstanding, and guilt. For Asher to accept this conclusion required no great love, no feat of sacrifice. Common sense said a female as convinced of her conclusions as Hannah Cooper was would eventually resent any marital choice imposed on her, and resent the man who’d imposed it.
When Asher returned to the parlor car—where else could he go?—his brothers were still in their shirtsleeves, playing cards, drinking just enough to dull the restlessness, and trading desultory insults to pass the time. Their company was at once comforting and oppressive.
“It’s Asher’s turn to hold the bairn.” Connor offered this pronouncement but made no move to pass the infant along.
Asher poured himself a drink and remained standing at the scaled-down version of a sideboard bolted along the wall. “You take turns with him, then? The deal passes to the left, the baby to the right?”
Gil cracked his jaw and tipped his chair back onto two legs. “Bring the whiskey here, why don’t you, or at least pour a man a wee dram.”
Asher set the decanter in the middle of the table, next to a pile of red, blue, and yellow chips. “Aren’t you all up past your bedtimes?”
“Tell it to the lad,” Connor grumbled. “Though I’ve no wish to sleep among the fartin’, snorin’ lot of you when I ought to be sleepin’ wi’ me darlin’ wife.”
“Take the baby,” Ian said, speaking up for the first time and spearing Asher with a look. “It’s your turn.”
“I’m not anybody’s nanny, Ian.” Asher took a seat next to his brother and heir. “Connor can teach the boy how to fart and snore, assuming the lad doesn’t already know. I suspect he does, and his mother thinks him quite the braw fellow for it.”
Ian shuffled a deck of cards and let them riffle back into order between his hands. “And you know how to hold a sleeping baby.”
Godabove, not now.
