Hit Me With Your Best Scot (Wild Wicked Highlanders #3) - Suzanne Enoch Page 0,117

Street appearing to drag them back to London. “Aye,” he returned. “Give us thirty minutes to dress and eat.”

The groom nodded, trotting back toward the stable yard. When Niall turned around, Amy already had her shift on, and she was digging into the trunk they shared for Eloise’s teal-colored walking dress. He liked it on her; it gave her eyes a bit of green together with the deep blue, like a loch on a clear day.

“That’s the dress ye’ll be married in,” he stated, handing her the borrowed hairbrush as he slung the kilt around his hips and buckled it.

She held the gown up to look at it. “Well, Eloise isn’t getting it back, then.”

Niall sat on the bed to pull on his boots. “I’d like to take ye up to Aldriss Park after this—another two days of travel. Are ye ready for that?”

“Yes. I want to meet your father, and I’ll be happy to settle somewhere after a week in the coach.”

He still felt the need to apologize; this wasn’t the life she would have chosen for herself. Yes, she said she was happy, and yes, he believed her. But he loved her, and he wanted her to have … more. “Ye’ll be happy every day from now on, Amy. I swear to that. There’s a bonny spot overlooking Loch an Daimh that’ll give us a view of the valley and the mountains. I’ll show it to ye, and if ye’re agreeable, I think we should put a house there.”

“It’s not too close to old Sean and his cats, is it?”

He chuckled. “Nae. We’d be a good mile or more from old Sean.”

“Good. I like cats, but I keep imagining them all escaping from the tunnels and roving the Highlands with little cheeses strapped to their backs.”

He laughed. That set him more at ease; perhaps he was taking this change to her plans more seriously than she was. She kept insisting that was so, and it reminded him that she was nothing he’d planned for, either. Meeting her had upended everything, and he embraced all of it, the good and the bad, that had come with loving her.

“Now I’ll have nightmares,” he muttered with a grin, walking over to help button the gown up her back.

Once they’d dressed he finished repacking the trunk and hauled it downstairs himself. They had a simple breakfast of eggs and ham, and well within the half hour he’d requested they were back in the coach headed north.

“What do ye reckon yer parents are doing right now?” he asked as she leaned against his shoulder to look out the window.

“I imagine I’ve been disowned,” she said, her voice much less concerned than he would have expected from her a week or so ago. “No doubt I’m now a candidate for Bedlam, and my mother will have surrounded herself with her dearest friends who will all spread the tale that I was always a wretched child and the Baxters are happy finally to be rid of me.”

“I cannae believe they wouldn’t have any ill words to say about me,” he protested. “I stole ye away, after all.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re being demonized, as well.”

“That’s more like it, then.”

Amelia-Rose smiled. She’d been smiling a great deal over the past few days, which she supposed under normal circumstances would indicate she’d gone mad. A dash to Gretna Green was the last thing she would ever have expected to find herself doing, but then since meeting Niall she’d done a great many things for the first time. It was an empowering feeling, really.

Through all of this, even when she’d been separated from him, Niall had been beside her. He believed in her. He loved her. His tall, lean form felt like a shield, a man who could protect her, keep her safe and, most of all, set her free from her own damned, limiting fears.

She looked at his profile as he checked his pocket watch, no doubt estimating just how much longer they had to go before they reached Scotland. The English laws of marriage didn’t apply there—at least not the Hardwicke Marriage Act, which said a lady under the age of twenty-one couldn’t marry without her parents’ consent. Not without the couple risking three weeks of having the banns read in church, anyway. In three weeks she would have been married to the Marquis of Hurst.

“Ye just shivered, leannan.”

Amelia-Rose tightened her grip on his hand. “I was just thinking about how my life might have gone