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

delivered one solitary jab as a lesson that his soon-to-be brother-in-law had best remember for the remainder of his life. These Englishmen used words as their weapons, and while he’d been attempting to adapt, he still didn’t like it. At all. A fist was a weapon. Words, as far as he was concerned, were overrated.

He stepped through the door into semi-darkness. Out in the part of the theater meant for the paying public, the floors were carpeted and the walls a clean white, interspersed with dark red curtains and panels of wallpaper that depicted exotic tableaux of the Far East. Through the door, though, the floor was wooden and plain, the walls bare brick, and up above might have been a lair for giant spiders, it was so crisscrossed with rope and wooden beams and planking.

Everything felt too close to him, so much so that he had to fight the instinct to duck his head. Coll took a hard breath, putting one hand against the brick wall to brace himself. Dim and closed-in, but not to the point where he had the immediate urge to escape. Not yet, anyway. For the moment, this was still better than being gawped at by debutantes too scared to chat with him.

Once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he moved away from the door, toward the dark curtains bordering the stage and the ring and echo of voices beyond them. Around him, an odd mix of brightly garbed actors and plainly dressed supporting folk scurried about—mice in a maze of painted trees, a stuffed horse fitted with a saddle and bridle, a scattering of thrones and plainer chairs, and giant painted screens depicting a storming ocean, a mountainside, the deck of a ship, and more he couldn’t make out.

In some ways it reminded him of a bairn’s nursery, with bits of wonder tucked into the corners here and there. The folk around him, though, looked serious-faced and earnest, with the exception of the lass standing beneath a row of hanging sandbags, her attention on the lad playing the role of Orlando onstage. Hmm. In the play Orlando didn’t win Celia, but he seemed to be doing well enough from this vantage point.

Coll studied her for a moment. She was pretty enough, with black hair and a slender waist, but he couldn’t see why it should cost a man two pounds to be closer to her than he could get from his seat in Francesca’s box.

“Excuse m—ah, another one,” muttered a short, thin man with a roll of blue material under his arm and a row of pins stuck along his lapel. “If you’re here for Mrs. Jones, stay out of the way. You can wait over there.”

He indicated a small square of space that had a good view of the stage, with only the open curtains blocking him from the view of the audience. That would do, and from there he would likely be able to overhear whatever curses his mother might be flinging at him. “Is that Mrs. Jones?” he whispered, indicating the black-haired lass.

“That? No, that’s Mary Benson.” The fellow glanced over his shoulder toward the door. “You didn’t pay good money to see her, I hope. She’s nearly too occupied with ogling Baywich over there to remember her own lines.”

“My thanks,” Coll returned, but the man had already scurried away.

A trio of men dressed as nobles trotted past him as they exited the stage. “Stand aside, giant,” the one called Baywich commanded, his voice lilting and imperious.

Coll ignored it, and they went around him. Half a hundred Sassenachs had referred to him as a giant over the past eight weeks. Aye, he towered over most people and he had done so since somewhere just short of his sixteenth birthday. So the wee Englishmen could have their opinions; he didn’t give a damn.

Instead, he tried to reposition himself to see the two lasses arguing onstage, only to be jostled aside again by a quartet of men dragging a forest of potted trees forward, just out of sight of the audience. The foliage looked a bit tame to be the forest of Arden, but they might suffice if the light was dim enough.

A round of applause welled up beyond the curtains, and a heartbeat or two later, a lass pushed through the trees and nearly crashed into him. “Romeo, you seem to be in the wrong play,” she quipped with a quick grin that lit her blue eyes before she hurried into an