Boyd spat and wiped his mouth. “Injurious? To be married and to ruin ... To take ...”
Finally, Alasdair understood.
He stood up quickly, his chair now also falling back onto the floor. Boyd was seconds from coming over the table at him.
“’Twas not me, cousin. I am unmarried. I did nothing.”
Boyd became very still.
Alasdair went on, “We should not discuss this here, Boyd. Let us go outside. Let us go down to the shore. The sand will soak up the blood from my beating. But I will tell ye now that I am not the villain ye think I am.”
They went down to the shore. The sea was gray and frothy. Boyd had calmed and his fists were deep in the pockets of his coat. Alasdair kept his chin down in his coat to keep heat in. The unremarkable brown knitted scarf he had been wearing before was gone, lost on the street or in the public house.
“What has she told ye?” Alasdair asked.
“I willnae break her confidence,” Boyd said.
Alasdair said carefully, “I will tell ye my end of it.”
Boyd looked out at the horizon.
“Before today, I have ne’er touched Miss Lovelock except to take her gloved hand and bow over it. When I met her for the first and only time. In St. Paul’s Cathedral. In the presence of her mother. And the bishop. I have done nothing untoward.”
“Ye have met her only once before?”
“Aye.”
“Ye dinnae despoil her?”
“Nae. As I said, before today—”
“And today? What have ye done today?”
In truth, Alasdair thought, he still had done nothing.Shehad touched his chest, grabbed his coat, put her finger on his lips, pulled his head down and put her cheek to his. He had stayed in his head, in his imagination, andreceived. He was either a coward or a genteel man. Given both the detail and the intensity of his thoughts about Arabella and her body over the last almost four years, he knew the scales came down on the side of coward.
“What are ye here for?” Boyd pressed.
“I’m here to take her to her sister.”
Boyd’s lip curled. He snorted and kept his gaze fixed on the line where the sky met the ocean.
“She’ll not be back,” Boyd said. “When folk leave here, they dinnae come back. Like ye.”
“I cannae say, cousin.”
But it was his dearest wish that Boyd was right.
That evening in his bedchamber at the public house, Alasdair took from his bag the medical periodicals that he had studied on his trip north from Edinburgh. And then he replaced them in the bag, knowing he couldn’t possibly read tonight. He was far too occupied by other thoughts. Thoughts about Arabella.
What a miracle she was. She was entirely unchanged.
Oh, yes, there was the inch of height and the inch of chest she had acquired in the intervening years. But in essence, she was the same. Bright. Full of feeling. Thriving. She had not been “spoiled” or “ruined.” What idiocy that people should use those terms when talking about a woman who was no longer a virgin. As if that were the only thing a woman had to offer the world. As if all of her other gifts and qualities were naught.
He threw himself on his bed, thinking of how close she had been to him just before he had left her cottage. And the strong emotion and equally strong arousal he had felt, provoked by the soft skin of her face touching his.
He should find a way to sharpen his razor. In case, just in case, there was the slightest chance that she might ever put her cheek to his again, he did not want to scratch her. He must have a smooth jaw for her.
And then he realized that he was about to spend seven or more days in a carriage with Arabella Lovelock.
