Hit Me With Your Best Scot (Wild Wicked Highlanders #3) - Suzanne Enoch Page 0,81
he repeated, still hanging halfway out of the barouche with a ridiculous gracefulness, “ye’re willing to make a bargain. Say, for example, we spend the Season in London, and the rest of the year in the Highlands?”
Amelia-Rose stared at him for at least a dozen hard beats of her heart. She hadn’t just heard what she’d heard. It was far too simple. “P … Please sit down,” she repeated.
Niall swung the door shut and latched it, then dropped down beside her again. “My point is, adae, that I grew up with one parent who’d nae leave the Highlands, and without one who’d nae stay there. I reckon there must be some space in the middle.”
She wanted to hug him. She wanted to kiss him. Just the idea that he would take her reservations into consideration without her first having to plead her side, or that he wouldn’t have conjured something he wanted that she could withhold so they could bargain for it, stumped her for a moment. Amelia-Rose cleared her throat. “Where might we stay in London?”
He smiled. “I’ve nae thought much about it, but Oswell House is grand. Or I reckon my ma would be happy enough to have us about that she’d find us a bonny house somewhere close by.” Beneath the level of the sides of the carriage, and more important, beneath the pile of her discarded shawl, he took her hand in his. “I’ve nae desire to stay at Baxter House, but that’s because I’ve a fair idea yer ma would like to kill me.”
“Niall, if I discover that you’re bamming me, I will punch you in the head,” she stated.
“I’m nae teasing, Amelia-Rose. I am accustomed to making peace in the family, but this is much easier than that. I’m nae about to let a stretch of countryside come between me and a lass with sunshine in her hair and the noonday sky in her eyes.”
This couldn’t all be true. It couldn’t be so … ridiculously straightforward. As a child she’d imagined falling in love with and marrying a handsome prince and living in his castle, but well before her debut she’d come to understand that while she might wed a prince, or a duke, or some other title, the rest of it didn’t matter to anyone but her. She continued to demand a partnership, affection, but she knew no one was listening to her. She might as well have been howling at the moon.
“Dunnae tell me ye’ve forgotten how to speak, lass,” Niall teased. “I am manly and rather splendid, but ye—”
“I am available tomorrow afternoon after half two,” she interrupted. “I will be attending a dinner party with family friends at eight, so I must be home by six.”
“Half two till six o’clock tomorrow. Aye.” His fingers twined with hers beneath the shawl, out of Jane’s sight. “I’ve an idea for an outing. Wear walking shoes, and I’ll fetch ye then.”
“I’ll meet you around the corner from the house,” she decided. “On Wigmore Street.” Her mother might accept that she’d taken today to let Niall down politely, but another rendezvous tomorrow would put the lie to whatever excuse she tried to make. Doom still loomed over her shoulder, but blast it all, today she felt like her feet weren’t even touching the ground. And that was a very difficult thing to walk away from. He was going to be very difficult to walk away from. So much so that she didn’t want to think about it.
“Your mother will not approve,” Jane pointed out.
“Just for once I would like you to be on my side, cousin,” Amelia-Rose returned. “Do you truly wish to be the villain of this piece?”
Her companion frowned. “And what happens if I say nothing, your mother discovers that you’ve been seeing this man against her wishes, and she sends me away?”
“If ye stand up for Amelia-Rose and get sent away because of it, ye call on Lady Aldriss at Oswell House,” Niall said. “She’ll find ye someaught. I swear it.”
“It must be very nice,” Jane countered, “to be so secure in yourselves that you can encourage others to ignore the tenets of their employment, to ignore what you know to be the wishes of your employer, on a whim. Mrs. Baxter is my aunt. She has fed and clothed me for six years, and paid me for the past two. It is not villainy to do the job one has been employed to do.”