“It’s all right, little songbird,” Lachlan repeated tenderly as he read her expression. The panic in it, and the despair. “It’s going tae be all right. No need tae fret. As I said, I understand the game.”
The game.
Thegame.
It was a game, wasn’t it? All this pomp and pretense. An entire Season devoted to finding a husband, when it was really all planned from behind closed doors. Who could marry whom. Who needed to be avoided at all cost. Who might cause a scandal so large it would rock the entiretonto its foundation.
Why, Brynne had only to look to last year for what would happen if she strayed off the path that had been set for her from birth. Lady Henrietta Hartley, eldest daughter of the Duke of St. Albans and adored by all, had done the unspeakable. She’d fallen in love. With abaronet. And then–to make matters infinitely worse–she’d run off to Gretna Green andmarriedhim.
The last anyone had heard, the newlyweds were living somewhere outside of Leeds. Penniless, ostracized from High Society, and disowned by her father, Henrietta could never return to the life she’d known. Once a diamond of the first water with the world at her feet, now she was nothing more than another example of what happened to a young lady when she followed her heart instead of obeying her head.
“I may never be allowed to see you again,” she told Lachlan, sweeping a troubled glance at him from beneath her lashes.
“Aye, ye will,” he said, an arrogant smirk capturing his mouth as Lady Crowley, all icy indignation and thinly veiled fury, finally reached them.
“Lord Campbell,” she said between clenched teeth, “you are wanted on the other side of the room.”
“Somehow I expected I would be.” He levelled his grin at Lady Crowley, who sniffed and deliberately looked the other way. As his focus shifted to Brynne, his eyes softened, and the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck lifted in awareness when she glimpsed the possessive gleam in the depths of his gaze.
“I’m sorry”she mouth again.
Helplessly.
Hopelessly.
“Not tae worry.” He bent over her hand, and when he spoke, his low, rumbling brogue was for her ears only. “I said I know the game…I never said I had any intention of following the rules.”
Chapter Eight
Present Day
Hawkridge Manor
She saw Lachlantwice more that Season, Brynne reflected as she gazed blindly out the window. Once at a private dinner party for a mutual acquaintance, and again by sheer happenstance in Hyde Park. At least, at the time, she’d assumed it was coincidence that their paths happened to cross. Now she knew that it had most likely been an intentional act, as her husband never did anything by accident.
He was not a man to leave things to fate or chance.
Every last detail was planned.
Including their marriage.
As a chill seeped through the glass and settled in her bones, she turned from the window just as the door to the parlor creaked open. Tension ratcheted through her, a drawing rein pulled too tight, only to ease when the housekeeper entered the room.
“Mrs. Grimsby,” she said on a relieved exhalation of breath. “I thought…I thought you might be someone else.”
“And who might that be?” Attending to a mountain of pillows piled high at the end of a divan, the housekeeper gave them a sturdythwackwith the side of her palm to settle the newly stuffed feathers into place. “The person responsible for your Episode yesterday?”
Crossing the sideboard where a fresh tea service always sat at the ready, Brynne poured herself a cup with remarkably steady hands given her strained nerves and opted to stand, rather than sit, behind an ornate sofa trimmed in rosewood.
“I do not care to discuss it.”Or him, she added silently.
Perhaps, if Mrs. Grimsby wasn’t the closest thing to a mother Brynne had ever had, the servant would have left it at that. But she was, and she didn’t.
“Large Scottish husbands do not disappear simply because you wish it of them, dear.”
Tea sloshed over the rim of Brynne’s cup as her arm jerked in surprise. “You…you know?”
“Here, eat a piece of bread with jam and rest your feet. You’re pale, and those circles under your eyes indicate that you didn’t sleep well. Not that I can blame you.” Fussing over Brynne like a mother hen, Mrs. Grimsby refilled her tea, pressed a plate into her hands, and spread a blanket across her lap. “There we are, dear.” She sat opposite in a chair set on brass castor wheels, and as her kind brown eyes filled with understanding, Brynne’s inexplicably filled with tears.
