Gits like Wheeler needed to be taught that just because they came from a wealthy and powerful family didn’t mean they could get away with torturing the small and the helpless. Wheeler and his band of bullies were no better than children with magnifying glasses pointed at a hill of ants on a sunny day.
Lachlan shouldn’t have been punished for knocking the sniveling little viscount down a peg or two. He should have been bloodycommended. Yet here he was, stranded at a stranger’s estate for the next fourteen days while Wheeler got to sleep snug in his own bed.
At least the scenery was pretty to look at.
And he wasn’t just thinking about the gardens.
Lady Brynne Weston reallywasbonny. The bonniest a lass as he’d ever seen. Not that there were many lasses in the tiny village of Glenavon. Bonny or otherwise. A few at the local pub, but the only time he went there was to drag his father home before he drowned himself in a tankard of ale.
Lachlan wasn’t the first Campbell to be suspended from Eton. He heralded from a long line of proud, violent Scots with an eye for pretty women and a penchant for drinking. On the day he’d arrived at the prestigious boy’s finishing school, the headmaster’s eyes had all but rolled into the back of his skull.
“Notanotherone,” he’d muttered before ushering Lachlan inside.
Lachlan couldn’t blame the old bugger for his trepidation. But he wouldn’t mind an apology. After all, three years into his schooling and he hadn’t burned down a building (as his grandfather, Robert Campbell II, who was now deceased, had famously done), or gotten pigs drunk on ale and set them loose in the dormitory (his father, Robert Campbell III), or chucked all of the Duke of Ashbury’s belongings out a third story window into the lake (his brother, Robert Campbell IV).
Why, aside from the little skirmish, Lachlan was a bloody paragon of virtue!
But courtesy of his last name, he was labeled a mischief maker before he’d ever stepped foot through the gates. That was the trouble with reputations…sometimes you made them, and other times they were made for you. Either way, they were difficult things to change. People saw what they wanted to see. And even though Lachlan was different from his father and four brothers in any manner of ways, he’d already been painted with the same broad brush.
The headmaster had probably beenitchingfor a reason to toss him out since he first walked in the door. Handing Wheeler his well-deserved comeuppance was just the excuse the school was waiting for to rid itself of another Campbell, albeit temporarily.
If Lachlan managed to stick it out another year, he’d be the first man in his family to actually complete all of his courses and attend convocation. As a general rule, Campbells enjoyed starting things–fights, business endeavors, marriages–but they were shit all at finishing them. Which helped to explain why Lachlan and his brothers all had different mothers…and why the once mighty and world-renowned Glenavon Distillery had been run straight into the ground.
But Lachlan had plans for that.
Not for the multitude of women his father had bedded, wedded, and either lost in childbirth, divorced, or simply forgotten about. There was nothing he could do aboutthatparticular family disgrace. As for the abandoned distillery, however…suffice it to say he had big plans for the whisky company that his great-great-grandfather, the very first Robert Campbell, had started under the cover of darkness in caves off the coast to avoid the bloody British and their excise taxes. And his children had subsequently bankrupted it through poor business practices.
Namely, they’d drank all the whisky and never gotten around to making more.
Before any renovations could begin, however, Lachlan needed to survive the next two weeks so that he could get back to his studies, finish school with high enough marks that he’d be able to secure a private loan, and hire an architect willing to work for the promise of what was to come.
It was a tall order.
Some might say impossible.
But in addition to their less desirable traits, Campbell men were also determined and stubborn to a fault. It wasn’t a matter ofifLachlan would see his dreams realized. It was a matter ofwhen. In the meanwhile, he’d serve his suspension. A punishment that was feeling a lot more like a reward now that he had a fair-haired companion to pass the time with.
He just needed to figure out a way past the dragon at the gate…but Lachlan was nothing if not inventive.
Tap.
Tap tap.
Tap tap tap.
Blinking groggily, Brynne sat up in her bed and drew off the covers. The floorboards were cold beneath her bare feet as she padded to the window and peered out, cupping her hands on either side of her face in an attempt to see through the darkness of a quarter moon.
Tap.
On a gasp, she leapt back from the sill when a small stone struck a glass pane. Given that her bedchamber was on the second story, she had been expecting a branch, or an owl, or some other naturally occurring nighttime noise that was responsible for rousing her from a heavy sleep. But there was nothingnaturalabout a rock being twenty feet off the ground.
Someone was throwing pebbles at her window.
And she had a sneaking suspicion of who it might be.
Careful not to rouse Miss Hardgrave, whose bedchamber shared an adjoining wall, Brynne quickly swept a wrap over her nightgown and tiptoed out of her room and down the stairs. She didn’t know what time it was. Somewhere after midnight, as that was when she’d set aside her book and fallen asleep, and before five, as that was when the servants woke and began readying the household for the day ahead.
Regardless of the exact hour, she shouldnothave been out of bed. The knowledge of which caused a tiny tingle of excitement between her shoulder blades. She, Brynne Weston, follower of rules and sufferer of anxious mannerisms, was beingrebellious.
