What Happens in Scotland (21 page)

“I . . . had not realized he left.” Georgette shifted uncomfortably.

“Have you eaten?” his mother asked.

Georgette eyed the woman who waited patiently for her response. The countess looked nothing like James. Her gray hair bore evidence of having once been a sunny yellow, and her eyes were soft blue instead of a penetrating green. But she carried the same hint of warmth in the lines around her eyes, a suggestion that she would be quick to smile or laugh, though she was doing neither at this moment.

“I had something to eat near noon, thank you,” Georgette answered slowly. “James has not.” She fought the flush that threatened to submerge her skin at the use of his given name in front of his mother. No doubt Lady Kilmartie would think her the most forward kind of woman.

No doubt she would be right.

She was not what Georgette would want for her own son, a lady who forgot herself and behaved so shamefully after only a glass or two of brandy. His mother was a countess. Surely she would think he deserved better, once the shameful circumstances of their meeting came to light. He
did
deserve better. But still, a hot curl of jealousy flamed inside her at the thought.

Lady Kilmartie smiled and beckoned with one hand. “We can’t leave you standing here waiting. James has not spoken to his father for eleven years, and it is certain he will prefer discretion for some of what must be said. This will likely take a while.”

Georgette grimaced. “James mentioned how long it had been.”

His mother shook her head. “Fools, the both of them. Alike as two men could ever be, stubborn to their last breath. ’Tis a wonder he’s come at all, and I suspect that has as much to do with you as anything.”

Georgette could not disagree. It was definitely her doing that had brought James to this point. Only it was not the motivation this kind, gracious woman suspected. Guilt was setting in, with claws as sharp as a raptor’s. The conversation James was getting ready to have with his father was her fault, and would never have been necessary if she had not been so stupid as to take that first glass of ill-advised brandy last night.

“Let’s stop by the kitchen,” Lady Kilmartie went on, oblivious to Georgette’s churning thoughts. “Before I go to fetch his father.”

Georgette took a step in the indicated direction, relieved to have the situation so quietly discharged. A thought occurred to her, one spurred by the rumble she had caught from James’s stomach as they stood outside. “Might we send a plate into the study?” she asked.

His mother smiled approvingly. “Indeed, I think we should insist upon it. James never did remember to eat, was always too busy to stop and take the time. It will be one of your sorest trials as his wife, I can assure you of that.”

“I . . .” The flush that had started on Georgette’s neck some minutes ago deepened into a full-body rush of embarrassment. “You mistake matters. I am not your son’s wife, Lady Kilmartie.”

The woman’s light brows drew down, perplexed. “Forgive my presumption . . . I saw his ring on your finger, and I thought that is what he had come to tell us.”

Georgette fought the urge to shrink against the polished marble floor of the foyer. She worried the damning bit of jewelry on her finger. She was without a ready answer here, had not imagined the woman would be so astute. She wasn’t sure why she was still wearing the ring. She should have given it back to James the second he found her outside his offices.

“It is more that I shall not be his wife shortly,” she clarified. “It was a mistake.” She thought back to James’s explanation they would need to present the facts of the marriage before some commission in order to ascertain if it was legal or not. “One we are both planning to see undone,” she added.

His mother’s lips parted. “I see. And the affection you hold for each other does not sway that thinking?”

Georgette blinked against the question. There was no accusation in Lady Kilmartie’s voice, just a far too observant inquiry. She could not deny an unexpected affection for the man who would not be her husband.

Indeed, she felt more strongly toward James after a day’s acquaintance than she had ever
hoped
to feel for her first husband, even after two years of marriage. But her desire for some measure of independence after such a poor first experience would not be swayed. “I . . . I honestly am not sure if affection is enough,” she admitted.

Marriage should not be something a body undertook so lightly. How a man treated his wife was one consideration, and whether his family would accept her, although those things seemed pointed in a hopeful direction. There was also the matter of a man’s financial acumen to ponder. James’s performance in that matter was questionable, given that he had become so overset at the threatened loss of a mere fifty pounds. Georgette had learned the hard way that having a man who was undependable in the matter of making and keeping money was a hard burden to bear.

Then, of course, there was the smallish matter of whether a man might keep a mistress in addition to a wife. Georgette had learned that the hard way too.

At her reluctant silence, Lady Kilmartie laughed, looping her arm through hers. “Good for you.” Her face dissolved into the smile promised by the fine lines that framed her eyes. “I knew I liked you, from the moment I saw my son’s hands linger after he pulled you off the horse and you stood up straight instead of falling at his feet.” She leaned in with a conspiratorial air. “I was watching from the drawing room window as you rode up. Anyone can see he cares for you, but I am happy you are not going to make this easy for him.”

Georgette’s mind squirmed in protest. She wrangled her words into something precise. “You do not understand, Lady Kilmartie. I am not going to make this
anything
for him.”

His mother waved a hand in dismissal. “ ’Tis far too late for that, dear. The pieces of a pairing are there, you simply need to fit them together. My son is a hard man to understand, contrary to the extreme. Like as not he would toss the gift of your love away if you presented it tied up in a neat little package.” The older woman pursed her lips. “Both of you need to work for it, to see if it’s right. Only then will it show some promise of growing into a marriage worth pursuing.”

Georgette’s throat swelled shut, as much in astonishment as worry. His mother spoke of love. It was preposterous. Love was a quality that grew in time between two people, nurtured by fond feelings and shared life experiences. Her mother had explained upon her come-out, in no uncertain terms, that such a sentiment only came with hard work and kind intentions, following a smart match. Georgette had tried her best to find it with her first husband, but night after night, month after month, her heart had remained locked up tight. She had thought there might be something wrong with him, a deficiency of spirit or regard. She had done everything she knew to win his favor, and he had become increasingly critical of her every move.

And then one afternoon she had seen him walking in Hyde Park with his red-haired mistress. The woman was animated and colorful and everything Georgette was not. Her husband’s head had been bent low over his mistress’s, his face lit with a delighted smile. That was when she had realized the faithless man was capable of love.

He simply didn’t love
her
.

The situation in which she currently floundered was different. Despite the stirring of attraction she felt, Georgette had known James for only four hours. The vows they exchanged last night could not count toward a shared experience, given that it was without a guiding memory on her part. Love was not a possibility.

Was it?

There was nothing she could say in response to his mother’s presumption, even had she possessed the physical ability to speak. So she numbly accompanied Lady Kilmartie into a warm-smelling kitchen, trailed by the two little soldiers who emerged with a fine display of manners at the last minute. She sat down at a table and regarded their curious, open stares, and conveyed the proper amount of approval at the exaggerated size of the fish they had caught that morning. She pretended not to notice when James’s mother hurried off to collect her husband.

And all the while, in a hidden corner of her mind, she wondered what on earth she was going to do about this marriage.

Chapter 23

J
AMES SAT ON
a chair in his father’s study and waited.

He supposed, if he were to be honest, the green damask upholstery might be considered comfortable. He ran a hand over the curve of the seat, sinking the tips of his fingers into the luxurious weight of the fabric. Unlike most chairs, it had been built of a size to easily accommodate the frame of a MacKenzie male. James had no such chairs in his bachelor’s house. Instead, he squeezed himself into whatever decrepit piece of furniture he and Patrick collected as castoffs from neighbors and prayed the joints would hold.

It was probably William’s chair, used when his brother sat at their father’s desk and applied his thick head to the study of ledgers and bills and invitations and such. The life of an earl-in-training demanded a chair that fit, he supposed. He did not begrudge his brother the demands of the job, but he did feel a twinge of jealously over the chair.

Despite the promise of the solid seat, James hovered near the edge. His mind and muscles refused to settle. He had been left waiting for many a client, and many a magistrate as well. Waiting was part of the life of a solicitor.

It was a part at which he had never excelled.

He rose to his feet with a strangled snarl and began to pace. Six steps to the east wall, six steps to the west. He mentally sorted through what he was going to say. He needed to plan and present the most logical side of the argument. Old worries and resentments needed to be pushed aside. It was either that or succumb to frozen silence.

James paused, fiddling with a paperweight resting on the edge of his father’s desk. He turned it over in his hand. An old stone tool of some sort. It reminded him of his childhood, of the hours he had spent digging in archaeology sites with his father. He cast his gaze farther. On the other side of the desk lay an old hammer, and on the outer edge of one bookshelf lay pieces of metal that looked to have come from a horse’s bridle. He turned in a circle. Artifacts lay here. Papers lay there, with notes scribbled in his father’s tight, familiar hand.

A knock on the door sent his heart leaping, but it was only an aproned maid, bringing him a plate of food.

“Lady Kilmartie asked me to bring you this, and to tell you Lady Thorold bade you to eat,” the servant explained, setting the china dish on his father’s desk and then taking her leave.

James eyed the roasted pheasant and new potatoes with an urgency removed from anything natural. Georgette had asked for him to have a meal. A flutter of appreciation bloomed in his stomach as the smell of sage and thyme reached his nose. His stomach growled its enthusiasm for the idea, and reprimanded him for its neglect.

Had he really forgotten to eat all day? And moreover, had the kitchen really produced such a meal on such short notice? The facts were irrefutable. His family must have already eaten, to produce a plate so quickly.

Before seven o’clock in the bloody evening
.

His chest tightened. Eleven years had changed things. The house he remembered as sterile and cold was bursting with warmth and the shouts of children. The lifetime of work his father had abandoned for a title had crept back in. And James was here, burning with news and things that must be said, demanding the audience he should have over a decade ago.

His father caught him perched on the edge of William’s chair, gulping down the last of the peas. James shoved the plate away like a ten-year-old caught filching pies from the kitchen window, and wiped his fingers hastily on the too-clean seat of his chair.

He stood. Swallowed. Offered his father his still-greasy hand.

“Sir.” As far as greetings went, he knew it sounded pitiful. But as the first word spoken to the man after so many years of silence, it was an olive branch of an oak tree’s proportions.

“Jamie.” His father sidestepped the proffered hand and went instead for an awkward embrace. James lifted his hands to the man’s shoulders in stunned silence. It was a brief gesture, lasting no more than a second or two.

But it stung, that contact. Sharp as needles raking his skin.

His father recoiled and motioned for him to take back his seat. As he turned away, the earl rubbed a quick hand across his eyes. To James, the significance of that stolen gesture hit him like a hammer on glass. He sat down and wordlessly regarded the man who had sired him, the man whose shouts and disappointments he had been prepared to bear.

His father looked . . . old. James had not seen him since that day, eleven years prior, when he had confronted the man over what he had done and received nothing close to an answer. His eyes took in the new gray hair around his father’s formerly dark temples, and the way his clean-shaven jowls folded into wrinkles. The intervening years had stripped James of more than just his father’s company.

He had neglected to consider his father’s advancing age.

“It’s been a while,” James acknowledged, canting his head in a show of respect. It was not what he had planned to say. The words he had been rehearsing while he paced the confines of the room were all tangled up inside him.

“Eleven years, two months, and thirteen days.” His father leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers on the desk in front of him.

Time might have taken the man’s dark hair, but it had not, it seemed, stripped his father’s memory. Ever the industrious scholar, he never forgot a fact.

Nor, it seemed, a slight.

“And for over a year of that time, I have been in town.” James welcomed the steel that crept into his voice, replacing the maudlin sentiments that had briefly threatened to derail him. “I have been living scarcely four miles away. You could have come anytime you wanted.”

“You have not invited me.” His father regarded him with brooding eyes that belied his age. His voice seemed textured with varying shades of pain.

“The Earl of Kilmartie does not need an invitation to come to town,” James pointed out, refusing to be swayed. “William comes to see me, with awful regularity, and Mother calls at least once a month.”

His father’s mouth drew down. “Yes, she has told me about taking tea in your odd excuse for a kitchen, ducking the sawdust bag you keep hanging from the rafters. Do you think I bloody well don’t know it has been a year? You made it very clear you did not want to see me.”

James gaped at his very proper father’s angry lapse into obscenities. “When? When did I ever tell you that?”

“When you refused me.”

James clenched his hands in surprise. “When did I ever refuse to see you?”

His father’s eyes snapped, a sharp shade of green that was all too familiar. “The horse. You refused my gift of the horse. And then you tossed the gesture back in my face.”

“ ’Twas not a gift, but a test,” James protested. “Do not look at me as if it was not. If you had come bearing Caesar yourself, it might have softened my response. But you sent a groom, Father. You couldn’t bring yourself to come down from your great, echoing castle and acknowledge the shameful way your youngest son had chosen to live.”

“Is that what you think?” A muscle jumped along his father’s clenched jaw. It was like looking in a large, angry, gray-haired mirror. “That I am
ashamed
of you? Jamie, I have been many things with you. Exasperated. Confused by your decisions. Saddened by your neglect. But I have
never
been ashamed of you, not of who you are or what you have made of yourself.”

James sat in stunned silence. The chair might have collapsed beneath him and deposited him on the floor, so off-kilter did his father’s words make him feel. All this time, all those years, he had thought himself a failure in his father’s eyes.

“What about the matter with the rector?” he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“I knew what pushed you there.” His father leaned back. “Your actions were justified.” His mouth settled in a grim line. “Wholly.”

“You never explained that to me.” A wave of emotion, strong as the surf pounding the rocks not a mile west from where they sat, threatened to knock James over. “You paid for his silence
.
His daughter’s death was on his hands as a result, and on ours as well. Your actions told the world you thought I was guilty. They told
me
you thought I was guilty, that I was unfit to be your son.”

“That is unfair, Jamie. I was trying to help you.”

James drew a deep breath, his brain dimly registering the fact his father had called him Jamie. William and his mother had continued to use his boyhood name, all these years. But he had become “James” to his father two months after his eighteenth birthday, the minute the man was made earl.

It made no sense.
None
of this made sense.

“Help me?” James choked out. “How did you help me? Every decision I made when I lived here, every step I took, which bloody university I attended, it was all subject to your deepest scrutiny. I was not permitted a single choice of my own. The matter with the rector was not the only piece of it. It was simply the tipping point that forced me to leave.”

The earl looked away. His gaze lingered over the artifacts littering his desk. His voice, when it came, was carefully measured. “It may be hard for you to understand, but I was a new peer, thrust into a situation I had not been brought up for and did not want.”

James leaned forward, his hands seeking purchase beside him and finding only slippery damask. He had never known his father had not wanted to be earl.

“I believed, at the time, I had to give up who
I
was in the process,” his father went on. “And though I hated to do it, I thought it kinder to prepare you for the possibility of the title too, to protect you from the shock it was to me.”

“But I was not the heir,” James pointed out, his words flung like pebbles against a wall.

“Neither was I.” His father spread his hands in a silent plea. “I was happier as a scholar, living a simple life in town with your mother and my boys. And yet, here I am.”

James shifted, his hands planting themselves more firmly on the chair seat. “Why did you not tell me this eleven years ago?”

His father’s eyes lifted, watery with regret. “Would you have listened if I had?”

“You did not give me the chance to find out.”

His father spread his palms out flat on the desk and drew a deep breath. “I suppose I deserve that. I let you down, Jamie. I was ill-equipped to handle the responsibilities of the peerage
and
fatherhood, and I did some things very poorly. I am sorry now that I took out my frustrations on you and William. I have learned, over the years, that I can be true to myself and still be an earl. I realize this is coming too late, but I am sorry for any hurt I have caused you.”

Stunned did not begin to describe the feeling that slammed into James’s chest. His father had offered him an apology. James had not known what to expect when he rode here bent for hell, but an apology had not been among his list of demands.

His father’s shoulders hunched, tight as a fist. “I have long been sick over what happened to the girl you cared enough to offer for. It was a terrible tragedy. But you must believe me, at the time, I thought the only good thing that had come out of that terrible new life I had been tossed into was having the ability to assist you financially. When I paid the amount demanded by her father, I thought I was helping. Truly.”

James turned that over in his head. With his father’s explanation, things about his past were already reordering themselves in a different light. Would he really have done anything differently, had their positions been reversed? And would he have had the maturity to listen and understand had they embarked on this conversation eleven years ago?

He wasn’t sure. He knew only that he was glad for the chance to do this now.

“Thank you,” James told him, his throat tight. He leaned back fully in his seat, testing the structural integrity of both the chair’s frame and this fragile new truce. “I will have your promise you will not put another penny toward fixing my mistakes. I am a proud man, Father. I suspect I come by that lamentable trait honestly.” His mouth quirked upward. “I do not deny that I have made errors in judgment, or that I will make them still. But I would ask that you let me be the man I choose to be.”

His father’s shoulders softened. “Does that include the mistake of letting eleven years go by without speaking?”

James nodded, relief dancing in his chest. “I do not think we could put a price on that, even if we tried. I am sorry I let it come to that. Do I have your promise, then?”

“Aye.” His father nodded.

James exhaled, leaning forward again. “I am glad to hear that. Because I have something important to tell you.”

J
AMES SET HIS
hand on the door with a heart lighter than it had been in years. It was going to be all right. His father had listened to the explanation of what had happened last night and the description of a possible threat from Georgette’s cousin. He had shown some amusement, but no obvious judgment, when he learned of his son’s drunken folly. He had expressed surprise to learn Burton’s name, telling James that he had leased the old hunting cottage on the east side of the estate to the man just last month.

And then the earl had asked James what he wanted him to do.

To be not only accepted but
consulted
on the matter was something James would have laid money on as a physical impossibility only a quarter hour ago. He asked for nothing. Or rather, he asked that his father
do
nothing. And incredibly, his father had agreed.

It was an unspeakable relief. There would be no blackmail attempt, no exchange of money. Should Burton show up here demanding an audience, his father indicated he would not receive him. Georgette’s insistence that they come here and tell his family now seemed the most sensible thing imaginable, though it had been one of the most difficult things he had ever done.

James’s mother scrambled backward from the door when he opened it, her cheeks pink with guilt. James fought a smile. One should not acknowledge eavesdropping with good humor. Still, after the difficulties two of the men in her life had caused her, he supposed she had every right to wonder about the conversation behind that big, locked door.