Page 9 of Christmas Wore Plaid

“Are you ill? I’ll carry you.”

He tucked his portfolio into the back of his belts and scooped her up, in spite of the stare they garnered from a passerby. Her grasp on the child’s hand severed. She looked into his face. His mouth was tight, and his eyes flickered back down to hers, worry etched in them.

“I’m fine, Brady, truly, I just—”

“Bollocks, lass. You fainted on the footpath. I’m taking you home.”

“Bring the child. I’ve promised her a meal.”

Brady nodded curtly. He glanced down at the bairn. “Come along, then, lass. Emerson Pritchard bids you join her.”

Emerson Pritchard, she thought, engulfed in his grip. It should have been Emerson MacInnes.

The child scurried along beside them, attempting to keep up with Brady’s long strides. Brady’s worry was for naught. She’d been coping with her frailty for years now.

Arriving down a lane to Bess’s front garden, Brady finally placed her back upon her feet as the footman opened the door and Emerson’s housekeeper dashed outside to assist.

Brady stepped back and cleared his throat. “I did wish to see you, Emerson.” He finally answered her question posed to him in town. “I thought my ears deceived me when I heard you were returned. I just didn’t expect to see you now. I didn’t know what to say. Because so much has happened since you left. And I wrote a letter each week for a year, until I realized you were never going to reply and your aunt bid me stop.”

“I wrote to you, Brady, for two years,” she said, though he shook his head as if disbelieving. “I swear I did. Tell me why you wished not to see me now.”

He frowned, then looked at her with a stern furrow to his brow. “I’m hardly the man anyone thought I’d turn out to be. But look at y—”

“What does that mean?”

He shook his head, unwilling to say more.

“And why are you hurt by my marriage when you married as well?”

His expression turned bitter. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Clara Ellsworth wrote to tell me that you’d requested a courtship with another,” she said.

He took another step back, descending down the path again and taking his portfolio from his belt, shaking his head.

“I never married, Emerson. I never even gained the betrothal I sought.” He shoved through the gate. “Life never afforded me the opportunity, like it did you.”

The gate slammed shut. He stalked away.

She took a deep breath. The way he had spoken “afforded me” was laced with anger. As if it had been her fault that the Lindt family was wealthy. His family was wealthy, too, wasn’t it? Why on earth would an attractive, charismatic earl from Aberfeldy Manor not have had the opportunity? The women should have been lined up at his door. She did what she could to be charitable, but clearly, Brady had turned into a hardened man who thought helping the poor was beneath him.

Perhaps Aberfeldy Manor has fallen on hard times, too. She thought on that. That would explain the calluses on his hands and heart. It saddened her to think that his aspirations might have fallen flat. For an outland boy, a schoolchild’s play may as well have been Shakespeare’s own debut production on the torch-lit stage of the Globe. In truth, she knew nothing of Brady’s family since leaving Crieff, for while news of her had been passed to her aunt, Bess hadn’t imparted any gossip about the MacInnes family to Oxford.

What had happened to Brady over the years, to turn him into such a hardened man now? Why hadn’t her aunt written to her about him? It didn’t matter anymore. She would be on her way home to her manor in Oxford as soon as she could finalize selling her aunt’s house. Brady would remain in her past. First kisses rarely turned into anything more, at least for a man. She’d been frivolous all along to hope that hers would.

Brady hadn’t believed his eyes. As he’d watched the newcomer in St. Fillan’s yard, he certainly hadn’t expected to see Emerson Lindt’s bonny blue eyes. He’d remembered them so vividly and yet seeing them blink at him after so long had been a shock. Damn if he couldn’t still smell her lavender scent and feel her delicate body in his arms. Nay. She’s now Lady Emerson Pritchard. He rarely talked to the townsfolk anymore, and why he’d spoken to the woman whose face was obscured by her fashionable bonnet, he couldn’t say, but as soon as he’d recognized her, he’d felt his stomach drop and his voice seize in his throat that she might also recognize him and see how far he’d fallen.

Damn the clearances that had sent so many needy people south. Damn his father for burdening the family with secret debt that had fallen squarely upon his shoulders. He hadn’t been raised to be a barrister or any such lucrative profession. He had been raised to see to the land and use it to grow his products. He was his father’s heir and only surviving child. His role had been prescribed before he’d taken his first breath in the midwife’s arms.

The dream of becoming an actor had been dashed when his parents had died. Play-acting as a school boy had been fun, but as a profession? Preposterous now. He’d used up every penny of savings his father had bequeathed him to compensate for the people kicked off their land and needing a home. He’d stopped waiting for Emerson. A mistake, possibly, but how was he to know that his correspondences hadn’t gotten to her? If they hadn’t, then what had happened to them? Had someone intercepted them? Had it been Bess who had done so? She had bid he stop writing. Had she known about his father’s outstanding debts and pressured Emerson’s uncle to thwart them?

God, he had dwelled upon those kisses at her window and her enthusiasm to his declaration of courtship. He’d ached like a lovesick fool. But when he’d learned she was not just recovered, but thriving in Oxford, he’d felt spurned and embarrassed that she was happy without him.

“What’s your excuse for turning your back on others?”

All right, he hadn’t made the best impression on Emerson today and damn if she was still as quick-witted as she’d been years ago, and unafraid to wield such a weapon. But he knew better than anyone in Perthshire what it was to open his gates, his land, and his accounts to those in need.In fact, caring for others was the entire reason he was in town today: to return the portfolio in hand and search for other records on an orphan born to one of the MacInnes tenant’s daughters five years ago, before the woman died. The unfortunate young woman had turned to prostitution to raise money for her family, because they couldn’t afford his father’s rents.

Her family had to pay us, so she had sold her body to do so.