Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (27 page)

“Thank you” Quince said for his sake only, because the poor white-faced maid had already gone.

Alasdair kept his attention on the white-faced lass who remained on the bed. The blood had already soaked through his cravat. Devil take him if they really would need a priest by the time all was said and done.

Clearly, his worries were writ large across his face. “It can’t be that bad, Strathcairn, though it does hurt like hell. But I fear you’re right that it needs to be looked at.” Quince took a few deeper breaths, and managed to push herself more upright. “Could you please help me get out of these clothes?”

“As attractive as that scenario might be to me at any other time, at the moment, I don’t want to be caught by your mother or father in the process of taking your clothes off. Just let me see the wound.” He crouched down next to her, and tried to take a better look at her arm. “Holding up coaches and getting yourself shot,” he muttered. “Damn your eyes.”

“No one in the other coaches managed to hit me.” She screwed her face into a grimace at his gentle probe.

“And how many other coaches have there been?”
 

She took a breath or two before she admitted, “Only two.”

Both he knew about—which meant that she had just started this more dangerous and more violent portion of her career quite recently. In fact, she had taken up highway robbery during the time he had become reacquainted with her.

The realization was a fist to his gut.
 

“How could you?”

“Very easily,” she sighed. “More easily than you’d imagine.”

He couldn’t imagine. “Do you promise you won’t do it again?”

She nodded. “You can be sure of that.” She waited a few more shallow breaths before she added, “And you can also be sure I won’t marry you.”

“You will,” he said grimly. “It’s inevitable. The whole of our acquaintance has been pointing us toward marriage, even if it didn’t seem like it until now. But now we must marry. My good name, not to mention yours, depends upon it.”

“Nonsense. No one need know but my family. I can live with their censure. If I live.”

He didn’t want to think about her living or not, the damn daft lass. “Don’t be in such a hurry to die. And frankly, it looks like the proverbial flesh wound.” Though he knew as well as anyone that flesh wounds could still turn septic and putrid. “How about this—if you do die, you don’t have to marry me.”

“How comforting.” A weak smile broke through her grimace. “I accept.”

“Regardless of whether we marry or not, that coat needs must come off.” He stood to try to ease the garment off her shoulders. “Easy. I’ll hold the end of the sleeve, and you pull yourself out of it at your own pace.”

She did as instructed, turning her shoulders, and carefully, slowly, bracing herself against the pain, she leaned her way out of the ruined garment. “You make an excellent valet,” she commented between gasps.

He tossed the ruined velvet aside, and knelt back down beside her. “Aye. I’ll make just as good a husband—the skills required are about the same. Now.” He reached to tear away the tattered linen shirt. “Show me.”
 

She had instinctively hunched over her arm in a protective posture, perhaps trying to ameliorate the pain. Or maybe she was just stubborn. “Nay. You might not think it serious enough, and try to shoot me again. You’re tenacious that way.”

He was both grateful and sorry that she was still responding with her usual insouciant humor. Grateful, because if she could laugh, it couldn’t be that bad. And sorry, because it made him feel as guilty as ever that he had made such a dreadful lapse of judgment as to allow himself to fire his gun in the first place.
 

“I think you’ve already bled a gratifyingly sufficient amount upon both the glasshouse floor and now the coverlet to prove the gravity of your injury.”

“I aim to please. You aim—”
 

“Quince!” Lady Winthrop rushed into the room with the housekeeper hard on her heels. “Oh, sweet Lord, I’ve been worried sick about you. You disappeared—” She stopped short at the sight of him kneeling beside of her daughter’s bed. “Lord Cairn. What on earth are you doing to my daughter?”

Alasdair squared his shoulders, but didn’t rise from his knees. “I’m doing exactly as I should, my lady. I am proposing.”

Chapter Seventeen

Alasdair knew exactly what he was doing—it was as if the words had been in his head, fully formed, and waiting for just the right moment to assert themselves. Desperate times called for desperate measures. And they were beyond desperate.

“My lady, forgive me.” Alasdair rose to face his future mother-in-law. “But your daughter has been injured.”

“Injured.” Quince’s voice was made petulant by the pain. “He shot me.”

“My God, Quince!” Her mother was at the bed in an instant. “Where?”

“On the Leith Links.”

“Oh, good heavens. I meant where on your
person
, though I hope there is also to be some explanation for why the two of you were out on the Leith Links shooting at each other in the middle of the night.”

“By accident. Though he was the only one shooting. And it’s my arm.”

“Even so—” Lady Winthrop was already delicately peeling back the blood-caked linen.

“Along the side, there.” Quince broke off, biting down on her lip hard enough to draw blood. She hissed another breath or two between her teeth before she went on. “I don’t think anything is broken. You needn’t take on so.”

“I have already sent for a physician, my lady,” Alasdair hastened to assure Lady Winthrop. “Though I think perhaps a surgeon ought also to be called.”

“Mr. Talent will do,” Quince insisted. “Even though he’s a physician, he’s not so particular and nice about titles, or so squeamish that he won’t dirty his hands doing a surgeon’s work.”

“You seem to know this Reverend Talent fellow fairly well.” Alasdair could not seem to help the derision in his tone. “You spent some considerable time alone with him this evening.”

Quince didn’t give anything away. “I know him well enough.”
 

He was sure she would have tossed up her shoulder in a shrug if she had been able—that shrug that he was coming to recognize as meaning she was concealing something.

Lady Winthrop spoke over their fruitless exchange. “Mrs. Mowatt,” she directed her housekeeper, “if you would see the physician up as discreetly as possible, please? And if you would furnish him with whatever necessary items he might request upon his arrival. But bring some dark cloths as soon as possible.” She turned back to scold her daughter. “You’re bleeding all over the coverlet.”

“That’s what I told him.” Quince was still trying to be nonchalant, but he could see her lips were white with the effort to suppress the pain. “Pass me the basin from the stand, and I’ll bleed into that.”

“Yes.” Lady Winthrop was as practical as her daughter, and held out her hand for Strathcairn to pass the basin and ewer to her. “My lord, if you would? And then you may leave.”

“Certainly.” He passed the articles in question. “But I should like to speak to you, and my Lord Winthrop, if I may.”

Lady Winthrop spared him only the barest of looks. “Yes, when Quince has been tended to. Ah, thank you, Mrs. Mowatt.” With the housekeeper’s assistance, Lady Winthrop fussed over her daughter’s arm, bringing over a table and a lamp upon which to place the basin and examine the long, oozing wound. It became readily, and rather bloodily, apparent that the long, ragged laceration, though shallow, was beyond either of their skill.
 

Lady Winthrop said, “We had best wait and let the doctor have a look.”

Quince did not open her eyes from where she had laid her head back against the pillows. “Must be worse than I thought. You’re a thorough fellow, Strathcairn.”

Lady Winthrop’s eyes were full of questions that could thankfully remain unanswered due to the timely arrival of the physician, who looked every inch the vicar in his somber black attire and grave demeanor.

“Lady Quince.” The man’s eyes were for no one else in the room, and he came to her with his hand outstretched, as if to greet her. “I came as fast as I could.”

Or perhaps Alasdair had it wrong. Perhaps the reverend doctor was merely being professional in examining his patient, because Quince turned her head aside, and simply entrusted her damaged and bleeding arm to his care, and the physician beneath the black coat set to work examining the wound without any other outward sign of intimacy. “How did this happen?”

Quince’s gaze flicked to Alasdair’s. “An accident,” was all she said.
 

“Aye,” he nodded, trying to tell her without words that he would do everything he could to protect her—even lie. “An unfortunate accident.”

“Very unfortunate,” Lady Winthrop concurred. “And under the circumstances, I think it best you leave my daughter’s bed chamber, Lord Cairn.”

“I would prefer to stay with my betrothed.”

The vicar’s gaze snapped from Alasdair to Quince, and then back to Alasdair with such force and speed that the man was like to do his neck an injury. Good. But such petty satisfactions were beneath him—beneath them all, and beneath the gravity of the situation. Still.

“Quince,” Lady Winthrop asked. “Is this true? Are you engaged?”

Under her mother’s probing gaze Quince could no longer keep up her mask of bravado, and for the first time in their acquaintance, she looked entirely vulnerable—unequal to the moment.

“Aye, my lady.” Alasdair answered for her, as if his surety could convince them all. “Your daughter has done me the honor of consenting to make me the happiest of men.”

“Over pistols?”
 

There was the ghost of a smile from Quince at her mother’s bone-dry tone.

“Aye, milady.” He felt steamed heat creep up from under his collar. “Something like that. And I am most sorry for the accident. Happily, I will now have the rest of our lives to make it up to her.”

Wee Quince Winthrop looked as surprised as Alasdair felt at uttering such a declaration, but by the time her mother turned back to look at her, Quince had closed her eyes and subsided back against the pillows.
 

“Quince?” Her mother asked again.

“Aye, it’s true. We are…engaged.”

It wasn’t a yes, but for the time being, it would do. “Thank you,” he murmured.

“I see,” Lady Winthrop said. “In that case, perhaps you would be so good as to apprise Lord Winthrop that his consent is needed.”

Alasdair took her sharp tone like a gentleman. “Yes, my lady,” he agreed. “I’ll speak to his lordship directly.”

Alasdair stepped out into the corridor just as Lord Winthrop was all but being dragged along by Lady Plum.
 

“Lord Cairn.” The eminent botanist held out his hand. “Now what’s all this my Plum’s been telling me?”

“My Lord Winthrop.” Alasdair shook the man’s hand. “I should like to ask for the honor of your daughter’s hand.”

“Ah! No wonder my Plum was in such a hurry. Congratulations, my dear.” Lord Winthrop kissed his daughter’s cheek.

For a long moment Alasdair could not understand whom on earth Lord Winthrop could possibly mean. And then a quick surge of something only slightly less sharp than panic sliced through his chest. “Nay, sir. Not Plum. Lady Quince. I should like to marry your daughter Quince.”

“Not Plum?” There was more than consternation on Lord Winthrop’s face now—there was disbelief. “But Quince? Oh, no, no. I couldn't let ye do that.”

Couldn’t? It stung to be so summarily dismissed. “Why not?” Alasdair considered himself a damn fine prospect. He had his hair, his teeth, his wit, and his until-this-moment sterling reputation and laudable career. Which now hung in the balance. But his ruddy peerage—and a lineage going back bloody hundreds of years—was secure. Surely that was worth something? The dotty old man ought to be jumping at the chance to add a marquessate to the fruit of his family tree.

And the thought of failure was like chalk in his month.

“Why?” Lord Winthrop echoed. “Good Lord, she'd have ye for breakfast.”

And Alasdair would have her for supper and dessert. “I insist,” he found himself saying. “I insist upon offering for her given the circumstances, which I would otherwise hesitate to tell you. But unfortunately, Lady Quince has been…injured. Under most unusual circumstances.” The second lie came more easily than the first. “When the two of us were alone together earlier this evening. And in order to protect her, marriage—to
me
,” he added just in case the old man should start to think of anyone else, “—is her best hope.”