Rogue with a Brogue by Suzanne Enoch

Author:Suzanne Enoch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466838420
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Eleven

Peter Gilling looked up from his seat in the inn’s tavern as the large woman slipped into the nearly empty common room. If he’d been a gentleman he supposed he would have stood up and invited her over for a pint, but firstly he wasn’t a gentleman, and secondly he didn’t like the way she looked down her nose at Lord Arran. The MacLawrys could trace their ancestry back before Hadrian, back to the Vikings and the blue-faced Celts, and the maid sneered at Lord Arran for taking the lass he wanted and making off with her.

Of course he’d chosen a Campbell, which was both daft and dangerous, but Peter meant to follow Lord Glengask’s instructions: protect Lord Arran, and see him safely back to the Highlands. Everything else was secondary. Well, almost everything else was. If he’d had a way to inform the marquis about both Lady Mary being stolen away and the route they were taking he would have done so, but he couldn’t send the information without telling someone else the words to write down. And Lord Arran was adamant that no one else know what they were about—for good reason.

He finished his beer as Crawford left the tavern and returned upstairs. It was time he went back outside to watch the road for Campbells and Gerdenses and Dailys, as well. Moving past the wide bar, he waited until the one serving lass turned away. Then he reached over to pick up the letter Crawford had left for the morning’s mail coach.

He put it into his coat pocket as he left the inn. What the letter said he had no idea, but he could guess. And whether or not he found a way to contact the chief of clan MacLawry, he wasn’t about to tell the Campbells where they were, or allow anyone else to do so. Not while he had anything to say about it.

* * *

From the way Captain Evers from the local militia kicked up his feet for the country dance, Arran thought the lad might have had some Scottish blood in him. Whose and which clan he had no idea, so he kept as much distance as he could between the half-dozen red coats in the ballroom and himself.

“Mrs. Fox comes from money, I think,” Mrs. Castleman noted from several feet away. “I paid Mrs. Noland a shilling to braid up my hair, and it isn’t near as fancy as that.”

Arran put a smile on his face and turned away from watching Mary dance with the village’s baker. “She and her mother were both lady’s maids,” he said conversationally into the murmur of gossiping, trying not to sound stiff with the stiff Sasannach vowels. “Her mistress didn’t allow servants to marry, so here we are.”

This seemed to be the best gossip Mrs. Castleman had ever heard, because she closed in to seize Arran’s right arm. “That’s horrid!” she exclaimed with obvious delight. “Did you work for the family, as well?”

“In a roundabout

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