Not outright, anyway.
And this would grant her the time she needed to acclimate her brother to the idea of his sister eloping with one of his oldest friends.
Really, she was doing him a kindness.
“So soon?” he asked.
“I’ll write you when I get there.” Impulsively, she went around the table to wrap her arms around his shoulders and kiss his freshly shaven cheek. “I love you, Weston.”
He twisted in his chair to observe her with a critical eye. “Are youpositivethat you’re all right? Nothing has happened that I should be made aware of? Someone didn’t say anything untoward at the ball last night, did they?”
With her mind finally made up, Brynne’s smile rivaled the sun. “I am fine,” she assured him. “Better than fine, I think I might actually be happy.”
“Now I know you’re feeling off,” he said wryly. “Our family is many things.Happyisn’t one of them.”
“That, brother dear, remains to be seen.”
She wasn’t coming.
As Lachlan prowled back and forth beside the brougham he’d rented to ferry them across the border to Gretna Green, his ungloved hands clenched and unclenched, giving cause for the other pedestrians in the village square to give him a wide berth.
He looked at the clock tower, and when he saw the time–five minutes past noon–his heart sank all the way down to his boots.
No, Brynne wasn’t coming.
And he was a bloody fool for ever thinking that she would.
“Let’s go,” he growled at the driver, a thin man with a head as smooth as a billiard ball that he kept diligently covered with a black cap.
“Yes, my lord.” The driver hesitated. “Do you still wish to continue on to Gretna Green?”
Lachlan’s mouth twisted. “That depends. Am I tae marry meself?”
“Straight to Carlisle, then.”
“Aye,” he said bitterly. “Carlisle.”
Courtesy of an influx of new rail over the past decade, Lachlan could board a train in Carlisle, a growing city ten miles shy of the Scottish border, and be in Glasgow within five hours. From there, he’d board the Highland Railway, and after a stop to change trains in Perth, would arrive in Inverness, the closest major town to Glenavon, by day’s end.
Excluding the time it would take the carriage to reach Carlisle, a journey home that had taken two weeks when he was a boy had since been reduced to a mere twelve hours by rail. Begetting the question of what advancements in transportation the next decade might bring.
The world was changing. Old ways constantly being shuffled out to make way for new. But whether ships one day sailed the skies or trains hurtled down the tracks at the unthinkable speed of fifty miles per hour, one thing would always remain the same: he’d love Brynne Weston until the day that he died.
Stepping up into the carriage, he was about to slam the door shut when he heard her voice calling his name.
At first, he thought it was a cruel trick his ears were playing on him. A manifestation of his greatest desire to help fill the hole her absence had carved out of his chest.
“Bluidy hell,” he groaned, striking the back of his head against the wood paneling above the velvet-upholstered bench seat. Then he lifted his arm, and slapped the palm of his hand on the underside of the roof to signal his readiness to depart. But the pair of horses, a bay mare and a brown gelding, didn’t move.
“It appears there is a lady trying to get your attention,” the driver called. “Should I go around her?”
Lachlan erupted from the brougham with such force that the entire carriage rocked on its wheels. His heart lodged somewhere in his throat, he scanned the village square with the panicked, hopeful desperation of sailor spying a lifeboat as he churned water.
And there she was.
Walking, no,runningtowards him across a flat section of grass, her skirts flapping in the wind, her hat partially dislodged, and her blonde hair blowing in the breeze all the while clinging to a cumbersome leather carpet bag.
Passersby stopped and stared as he ran to her, picked her up by the waist, and spun her around. The carpet bag fell to the ground with a heavythud, but neither Brynne nor Lachlan bothered to retrieve it. They were too busy gazing into each other’s eyes and laughing, like two people gone mad.
