Page 89 of The MacGregor's Lady
Gil’s chair scraped back. “If I join Malcolm in the gents’ car, then I have a prayer of getting to sleep before you lot come lumbering to bed. Do your farting out here, if you please. Open a window, and the ladies will pretend not to notice anything come morning.”
“We’ll be in Edinburgh come morning,” Connor observed. “It’s always good to get back to Scotland.”
He rose and laid the baby against Asher’s chest, apparently willing to risk letting the lad tumble to the floor—which, of course, Asher could not allow. He tucked the boy into the crook of his arm while Connor and Gil tossed back whatever remained of their drinks and moved off to find their beds.
“You will admit the earth is not shaking,” Ian said, gathering up the chips. “The sky is not falling. Your heart is not ceasing to beat.”
Asher used his free hand to reach for his drink. “And I will admit my brother is a bleating fool. Take this baby.”
Ian started separating the chips into piles—blue, red, and yellow. “He’s happy where he is. Never rile a sleeping baby. I can smell the woman on you.”
Which might be why the child was content. Asher sat for a moment, exploring sensations. The baby had the solid feel of a child in good health. He was cozy and warm in his dress and blanket. Every few moments, his little mouth worked in a memory or a dream of suckling.
Beneath all those observations, clinical observations, was an awareness that Asher held life against his body, and not just any life. This child might someday become Earl of Balfour.
“The protectiveness does you no good,” Asher said, arranging the blanket more snugly around the sleeping child. “You want to keep them safe, but to keep them safest, you must allow them to suffer. I hate that.”
“Is this how you convince yourself that allowing Miss Cooper to return to Boston is the best thing for everybody? You might get a bairn or two or ten on her, and she’d never endure the inconvenience?”
The child made a noise, not a sigh, not quite a sound of sleeping-baby distress. Asher tucked him closer, catching a distinctive and wrenching whiff of clean-baby scent for his trouble.
“You know little, Ian, and you judge much.”
The chips stacked higher, as many red as blue and yellow combined.
“I know what it is to be an utter ass where the woman of my heart is concerned. I know what it is to let theories of duty and honor get tangled up with truths fashioned in the soul. I know what it is to be weary and afraid, Asher, and I can promise you this: the only thing that makes the whole burden bearable is to have the love of the woman your heart has chosen.”
“My heart has chosen a woman who has other obligations. I suspect Hannah’s stepfather is abusive to all in his ambit, and that means she has not only her granny riding her conscience, but also her brothers, her mother, very likely the household help, and the beasts in the stable. She is the Countess of Boston, or her little corner of it.”
Ian stared at a blue chip. “A man’s home is his castle. The Americans have taken on that much of the common law, so the bastard is free to terrorize all in his personal kingdom. How does Hannah think to stop him?”
“She has money; she has lawyers; she has wits and determination that have likely been beaten out of the others. All she needs is some time to get her hands on the money, and she’ll be able to send her brothers off to boarding school, set her granny up in style, and I don’t know what for her mother.”
Though Hannah likely had a plan of some sort.Whyhadn’t he asked her about this?
“You have money; you have solicitors; you have determination. I’m not sure about the wits.”
Asher gave in to temptation—to instinct—and cuddled the child to his chest. “Neither am I.”
At that rejoinder, Ian sat back and regarded him out of tired green eyes. “A woman’s courage is different from a man’s. We pillage and plunder. They endure. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I suspect the race would die without their version of courage much sooner than it would without ours.”
The lateness of the hour, the topic of the discussion, and the weight on Asher’s heart—a month was little more than four weeks—made further thought difficult. “Marriage has turned you up philosophical, or perhaps it’s the whiskey.”
“Marriage, Asher MacGregor, has made mehappy. Con, Gil, and Mary Fran would say the same. I bid you good night. Don’t let the boy drink too much, or I’ll never hear the end of it from his mother.”
And just like that, before Asher could protest, whine, or strategize a countermeasure, Ian had disappeared into the gentlemen’s sleeping coach, leaving Asher… holding the baby.
The parlor car sported a couch, a well-cushioned, sturdy affair positioned beneath the windows on the far wall. With the one-handed efficiency of a man holding a baby, Asher stashed the decanter back in its bracket, found an afghan in the sideboard, doused the lights, and arranged himself on the couch, the sleeping child swaddled against his chest.
In the darkness, the rhythm of the train brought sleep closer, and memories closer as well.
“Do you know, lad, for a long time I hated my father. He left my mother and went home to Scotland, there to die. Eventually, I understood a man must sometimes make his way, leave his loved ones, and be about his other obligations. I don’t like it, but it’s the way of the world.”
He brushed his lips across the infant’s downy crown, the sensation bringing back more memories, memories both sweet and piercingly sad. “I hated my mother next. She let him go—she didn’t have to, she might have made the journey with him.”
Though for the first time, Asher had to wonder if she’d suspected she was carrying, in which case, thirty years ago, the journey would have loomed as a risky ordeal—to the child at least. The thought made his hand on the child’s back go still, and his mind come to rest as well.
“She could have been worried. Afraid for her child, unwilling to see her husband’s journey put off for another year.” And of course, afraid for her man, assuming she loved him.
