Hit Me With Your Best Scot (Wild Wicked Highlanders #3) - Suzanne Enoch Page 0,54

can do at least that well with the lot of them.”

“Ye found her more interesting than ye thought at first, though?” Niall prompted. Coll wasn’t a chatterbox by any means, but generally the viscount could carry his side of a conversation without Niall wanting to pound him on the head.

“She kept ‘my lairding’ me, and apologizing for being sharp at the theater. If the lass wants to marry that badly, I reckon she’ll nae object to the rest of it. She figured out that this isnae to be much more than a marriage in name, and didnae even blink. Unless ye told her already.”

“I didnae.” He should have, though, damn it all. If she’d figured all that out and decided she still wanted to be a countess, then he’d been wrong about several things. That disappointed him. No, not disappointed. Saddened.

“Why do ye care if I found her interesting? What does that have to do with the price of wool?”

“Because I’ve spent my entire time in London split between her and Lady Aldriss and ye, trying to keep that damned agreement and all of Aldriss Park from falling into the loch, amadan.” For the devil’s sake, she’d been far more patient and understanding than Coll deserved, not to mention witty and good-humored, and his brother didn’t even appreciate it. His brother didn’t even want that from her.

“Then I wish ye’d been the one to draw that card,” the viscount said, leaving the table in favor of a section of wall where he could lean back and glower.

“So do I,” Niall muttered beneath his breath, well below his brother’s hearing, as he followed.

“She may be our savior,” Coll went on, “but all I see is a yellow-haired lass who doesnae like me and cannae decide if she wants to tell me so, or if she’ll put up with the shite I’m feeding her because she wants a title.”

“Did ye bother to apologize for walking out on her at the theater and then vanishing until tonight, by chance? Maybe if she trusted ye, the two of ye could have an honest talk about what ye each want.”

Coll narrowed his eyes. “What hornet’s gotten into yer ear? She’s nae the woman I would choose for myself, and if I do marry her, I see nae reason she couldnae remain here while I go home to Aldriss and attend to my life there.” He straightened, taking a half-step closer. “Francesca might be able to force me to wed whomever she pleases, but she cannae turn me into a damned Sassenach. And neither can any damned woman I might marry.”

For the first time it occurred to Niall that perhaps the MacTaggert brothers had spent too long out in the wilds. They saw every meeting as a battle, every negotiation as a surrender, and every new thing as a threat to the old ones. Coll saw Amelia-Rose as the enemy. Only time and repeated interaction could sway his opinion, and his oldest brother wasn’t interested in either. All that so he could force himself to marry a lass he didn’t want, and who didn’t want him. Unless she’d changed her mind about Coll—or at least his title.

Niall knew he and Aden would be facing the same dilemma, even if they would have a little more choice where the lass was concerned. Marriage had begun to cross his mind even before they left Aldriss, but as the third son he wasn’t needed to produce an heir and ensure the line of inheritance, so he’d figured on waiting until he found a lass with whom he cared to spend the rest of his life.

Ignoring whatever Coll was talking about now, he looked out over the dance floor. There were a handful of pretty girls here, though Eloise had warned him that most of the single female guests would be either as desperate as the Spenfields, or already spoken for. Even from this distance he could fairly well tell which was which, and he could hear the edge of extreme anxiety in the scattered conversations.

Everyone lost in their own wee landscape, with their own fears and worries and threats and wishes. He’d never had a thought about any of that back in the Highlands. The things that had most worried him were the question of whether he could escape Lord Marmont’s hayloft and Lord Marmont’s daughter without being shot in the arse, and wondering if spring would come late again and the Lowlanders would snag the best wool prices