The Devil Wears Kilts (29 page)

He drew a deep breath to bellow her name, whatever the damned consequences—and then caught sight of her. Her sister in tow, she hurried into the ballroom through the hallway door.
Thank God.
Relief flooded through him, heady and welcome, and Ranulf moved forward. She was not going to dance with anyone until he’d touched her and made certain she was well.

A lean, dark figure stepped in front of him, blocking his view of Charlotte. Ranulf started around the man, only to find his path blocked again. “The Marquis of Glengask, as I live and breathe.”

With a scowl Ranulf wrenched his attention to the man now standing directly in front of him. Tall, though not as tall as himself, with reddish-brown hair that partly hid a faint scar running from just beneath his ear and down to the right side of his mouth. A tickle of familiarity pricked the hairs at the back of his neck, but he couldn’t quite place the face.

“Have we met?” he asked, still moving forward.

The fellow kept pace, backing up to remain in front of him. “Not directly.”

“Then ye’ll have to excuse me. I’m meeting someone.”

Ranulf started to step around the man, only to find his route cut off yet again. Now it was clearly intentional, which as far as he was concerned, removed the need for him to be polite.

“Get oot of my way,
amadan.
”

The shorter man favored him with a polite smile. “I doon’t think I will.”

“So ye want me to knock ye on yer arse in front of all these bonny lasses,” he returned, speaking loudly enough that those directly around him could hear.

“I jest want a word with ye, friend.”

A nice, quick punch to the gut as he moved in, and no one would likely notice anything but him helping the fellow to the floor as he spewed sick over his own boots. Ranulf stepped in, coiling his fist.

“Lord Glengask,” Charlotte’s breathless voice came. “There you are! Your uncle’s been taken quite ill, I’m afraid. Please come with us at once.”

Ranulf straightened his fingers. No punching. That was Charlotte’s one rule. “Excuse me,” he repeated forcefully, fixing the lean fellow with the direct gaze that caused most men a sudden need to examine their own shoes.

Inclining his head, the scarred fellow stepped aside, then abruptly caught Ranulf’s elbow as he pushed by. “That sister of yers is a bonny lass,” he murmured, “with an especially fine mouth. I know just where I’d have her put it.”

Ranulf stopped in his tracks. In the next heartbeat, before he’d even registered the action, he had both fists wrapped into the man’s lapel and lifted him off his feet. Black fury blasted through him like thunder. No one—
no one
—threatened Rowena.

A soft hand in a red glove touched his sleeve. “You’re being baited,” Charlotte breathed.

If she’d spoken in any other voice, yelled or pushed or pulled at him, he likely wouldn’t have noticed. Of course he was being baited. That didn’t matter. The words had still been said. Words that couldn’t be unsaid, or forgiven, but only paid for in blood.

“Your uncle needs you,” she persisted in a louder voice, her hand squeezing his arm.

Her hand with the blisters she’d gotten trying to save his stable. Every muscle tight and fighting, gut versus mind, he took a step sideways and set the man down. “Excuse me,” he said for the third and final time, even though he felt like he’d been ruptured and was bleeding inside. “Ye seemed to be stepping on my foot.”

Taking Charlotte’s hand, he placed it around his arm and walked away. Behind him the scarred man laughed. Ranulf rolled his shoulders and kept going. This was what it took to keep Charlotte in his life. He would eat a hundred insults and smile at their foul words in exchange for a kiss and a smile from her. As she kept telling him, they were just words.

“I need to talk to you,” she said tightly, sending him a sideways glance. “And for heaven’s sake, you need to use your mind and not your muscles.”

“I prefer to use them in tandem,” he returned.

“Is that what you were just doing?”

“If my mind hadnae been involved, ye would know it. Now hold a bit. We have to find Myles first. I assume he’s well?”

“I have no idea. It was the first excuse I could think of.” Another glance. “I’m sorry I snapped at you just then. Are
you
well?”

“I’m a gentleman,” he returned, trying to sound mild when fury still bit at him with tiger’s teeth. “I’m always well.”

“Ranulf.”

“In a minute. There’s Myles.”

His uncle stood talking with the Duke of Esmond and his oh, so charming son, Lord Stephen Hammond.
Bloody wonderful.
Well, Charlotte had chosen the game, so he would play along with it.

“Myles, let’s find ye a chair,” he said, reluctantly releasing Charlotte to grasp his uncle’s elbow. “Ye shouldnae be walking aboot if ye’re still feeling light-headed.”

Lord Swansley frowned, then put an abrupt hand to his temple. “Perhaps I will sit for a minute,” he said. “If you’ll pardon me, Your Grace, Stephen.”

“Certainly, Swansley. The duchess is expecting a dance, anyway.”

Four strong now, they went upstairs and found a sitting room. As he pushed open the door a young lady lurched to her feet, an older man yanking his hand from beneath her skirt and then trying to cover his bulging nether regions with a pillow. Ranulf barely had time to raise an eyebrow before they fled. As much as he wanted Charlotte, he had little sympathy for the couple—a man should have more consideration for his lady than to lead her to a place where they could be discovered.

“What’s going on?” Myles said, once they were alone. “Why am I light-headed?”

“That’s my fault,” Charlotte admitted. “I needed to speak to Ranulf in private, and you were my excuse.”

“I was busy having a disagreement with a fellow,” Ranulf added tightly, “before I remembered that I’m a gentleman.”

Jane paced back and forth behind the couch as they spoke. Ranulf hadn’t given her much thought earlier, but now that he looked, she seemed supremely uneasy. Charlotte appeared much calmer, but then she didn’t unsettle easily. In the dimmer light of half a dozen candles, far from the hundred lights in the dramatic chandeliers, she looked even more stunning.

“What happened,
leannan
?” he asked, leaning a hip against the arm of the couch. At the Gaelic word Myles sent him a quick, surprised look, but he ignored it.

She told him. It wasn’t difficult to guess that the participants with Berling had been Charles Calder and Arnold Haws—as far as he could tell, the three of them were nearly inseparable. The fourth man stumped him for a moment, until Charlotte noted that the mystery man and the fellow he’d nearly flattened in the ballroom had the same laugh.

“I think Lord Berling called him cousin,” Jane put in.

“George,” Charlotte said a heartbeat later. “Someone said George.”

Now it made sense. “George Gerdens-Dailey,” Ranulf said slowly.
Damnation.

Myles began swearing under his breath. Ranulf felt much the same, but he was abruptly more concerned with deciphering how Dailey’s arrival in London would affect his family and those he loved. The woman he loved, who was frowning at him.

“Who is George Gerdens-Dailey?” Charlotte asked, her scowl deepening. “I mean, I know he’s a Gerdens, but clearly there’s something more going on here.”

She needed to know. Even if in telling her, he would have to confess the one thing she could never forgive, the one thing that might cost him … everything. Her. Straightening, he held out his hand to her. When she twined her fingers with his, it took every ounce of will he possessed not to kiss her right then. “Stay here,” he said to his uncle, indicating Jane. “We’ll be back in a moment.”

He led her through a side door and into what looked like a spare dressing room. Only after he’d brought in a candle and latched both doors did he release her hand. No one would be surprising them in here.

“I’m rather alarmed,” Charlotte said, watching him pace back and forth. The candlelight flickered when he stirred the air with his passing. “Who is this man?”

Finally Ranulf stopped to face her again. God, she looked like a wicked angel, golden hair and black and scarlet gown. “Ye lectured me a while ago aboot how violence only leads to more of the same, how it has no reason and the only way to stop it is to not begin it in the first place.”

To his surprise, she smiled. “You were listening.”

“I’ve listened to every word ye’ve ever spoken, Charlotte. Every breath, every sigh means the world to me.” Ranulf shook himself. “I don’t mean to use sweet words to sway ye, but it’s the truth.” And it might well be the last time she would ever stand for him even speaking to her.

“Tell me,” she said quietly.

“One more thing first.” Ranulf closed the distance between them, put his palm across the nape of her neck, and took her soft, sweet mouth with his.

Her gloved hands swept up around his shoulders, and she leaned along his body. The unhesitating trust she showed was utterly arousing. He sank into the moment, savoring every heartbeat of time spent with her in his arms. To think it might end because he felt the need to be honest with her … Well, all the more fool, he. But he would rather face the consequences now than later.

In a sense, though, the perfect harmony between them now only made what would likely happen at the end of this conversation worse. Savoring a last kiss, he set her upright again. “Enough delays, then,” he drawled, half to himself.

She would have kept her hands around his shoulders, but he pulled away. He didn’t want to see the disappointed expression on her face when he’d finished with what he needed to say, but to have her pull away from him as well was more than he cared to put in front of himself.

“I told ye how my father died,” he began, making himself stand still. “Half the clan called it an accident, while the other half knew it was murder. I may only have been fifteen, but I knew what it was. And I knew who’d done it. The Earl of Berling and his brothers, Harry and Wallace.”

“Not
this
Lord Berling,” she said, indicating somewhere vaguely outside the dressing room.

“Nae. His father. I’d seen ’em arguing with Seann Monadh—my father—trying to bully him into turning a good twenty acres of cotters’ fields into sheep grazing. He called ’em shortsighted, selfish fools who’d regret turning on their own people, and sent them away. Two days later he was dead.”

He could discuss it matter-of-factly now, but at the time he’d felt all the wind knocked from his lungs, and it had stayed that way for months. He hadn’t been able to catch his breath, to think, and the mourning, lost clan had all looked to him for answers and leadership. His mother had been inconsolable, but over
her
loss,
her
burden. As if she’d been the only one to feel pain from Robert MacLawry’s death.

“I’m so sorry, Ranulf,” Charlotte breathed, but didn’t attempt to approach him again. She knew that part of the tale, and she knew that wasn’t what he’d dragged her off to tell her.

“After the funeral I took my father’s old muzzle-loading hunting rifle and a shovel, and went to find the Gerdenses. Berling was already gone back to London—a cowardice shared by his son. The other two were at home, though, at Sholbray Manor, cozy in their parlor and drinking, talking aboot how Seann Monadh had fought and squirmed while they held his head under the water of his own loch, how he’d shat himself when he died. I crouched beneath the window and listened to all of it.”

Charlotte’s face paled, but she held her ground and her silence. And he’d thought her likely to shatter in a stiff breeze. She might look delicate as fine china, but she had damned steel in her spine.

“There were at least two dozen Gerdenses and their men and women and servants in the house, so I crept away and found a place down close to where they penned their sheep to wait. I waited fer two days until Harry and Wallace showed themselves, just the two of them. And I shot them, and killed them, and buried them where no one would ever find them. And then I returned home and tried to be the man my clan needed me to be.” He looked down at his hands, then met her gaze again. “George Gerdens-Dailey is Harry Gerdens’s son.”

Silence, so profound he could hear the orchestra tuning one floor and half the house away, hear her soft, shallow breathing. Eye-for-an-eye violence may have been older than the Bible, but that wouldn’t make it any more acceptable to her.

“Were … were the bodies ever found?”

“Nae. I wanted them gone, with no one able to weep over a tombstone or lay a thistle on a grave.” And awful as it had been, he would still have done it again.

She took another breath. “If you hadn’t killed them, what would have happened?”

“A clan war, most likely.”

“But that didn’t happen?”

“The MacLawrys figured the Gerdenses were involved in my father’s death. When the two brothers vanished, it made everyone a mite … uneasy. Up in the Highlands when the fog and the mist roll in, it’s easy to believe in witches and curses and the like. Folk began to say that justice had been done by some unknown hand. That was all I required. It was all anyone required.”

Ranulf sank back against a dresser. “I ken that ye would have brought in the local beadle and had the Gerdenses arrested and dragged before a magistrate. But it would have been an English judge, and English law, and the only one to hear a confession from the killers was old MacLawry’s eldest son, who might well have murdered the marquis himself to take the title. The Gerdenses would’ve gone free, and the accusations on both sides would have made things worse.”

He couldn’t know that for certain, of course, but he’d seen how legal claims, before and since, were handled in the Highlands. And justice generally had more to do with maintaining peace and keeping one family from standing too tall—especially a family that wanted naught to do with English rule. Independence, strength, and defiance were not encouraged. Ever.

“Why did you tell me this?”

Ranulf shrugged. “Firstly, ye asked me who George Gerdens-Dailey was, and that’s who he is. Secondly, if I hadnae told ye, nothing between us from here on would ever be completely honest.” He started to reach for her hand, then stopped himself. “I’ve never told a soul what I just told ye, Charlotte. Arran suspects I had a hand in the disappearances, and so does Myles, I’ll wager, but I’ve never admitted it to them. And I never will. None of what happened is Arran’s burden to bear, especially if he should inherit the title. It’s my burden.”