The Bridegroom Wore Plaid by Grace Burrowes

Author:Grace Burrowes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Romance, Fiction, Historical, General
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

part

despair, part protectiveness— toward her. He came to

stand beside her, close enough to see the flecks of gold

in her brown eyes. “Julia, are you carrying some other

fellow’s bairn? Is that what drives you? A need to look

out for your child?”

“Am I carrying…? You think I’d lie about that?

For God’s sake, Connor, I know how to deal with

a child.”

Which wasn’t a no.

“How would you deal with a child?” He’d tried to

keep his tone neutral, but the emphasis on the words

deal with had been marked by disdain. A growing fashion in the South encouraged women to deal with

a lapse of virtue by jumping into the Thames as the

tide went out.

“If the herbalist can’t help, then a lady goes for an

extended trip to the Continent, or even the Americas.

She can have the child adopted in a foreign land— the

Papists are very good about such things— or she can

claim it’s her cousin’s child and so forth.”

“And you’d do that to your own child?” God help

the woman if Mary Fran heard such a recitation.

“No, I would not. Not ever, though I don’t expect

you to believe me. I’m English. En- glish. In your eyes, incapable of a selfless, moral deed even toward my

own child— which I am not carrying.”

He looked her up and down, saw the hurt in her

eyes— hurt he’d put there. “You’re capable of being

very generous and trusting,” he said carefully, because

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The Bridegroom Wore Plaid

he’d no wish to insult her. He turned from her when she

didn’t react to his words. “What was your question?”

“Are we married?”

He ambled over to the table where the gun lay in

parts and shot her a sardonic smile over his shoulder.

“If we were married, Julia, I’d sure as hell not be

wasting a pretty day by me lonesome, cleaning me

weapons, now would I?”

“Might you please be serious?” Her hands were

fisted and her teeth were clenched as she stalked

around the table. “Mary Fran was talking about

handfasting with Matthew, and she kept lapsing into

Gaelic terms and law Norman, and I don’t know

what. Something to do with promises and intimacies,

and I propositioned you, and then we were intimate.

Are we married? ”

“Would you mind so very much if we were?” The

question slipped out not as a taunt, but as a genuine

expression of curiosity. It stopped her midpace. She

drew back, two fingers going to her lips.

He watched a progression of emotions chase across

her face: surprise, intrigue, bewilderment, and some-

thing else, something… more innocent than calcula-

tion. Wistfulness, maybe? Something that came under

the surprising heading of: If Only…

“Would it be so bad, being married to me, Julia?”

He prowled up to her and set his hands on her hips,

not examining his own motives too closely. Step by

step, he backed her up to the billiards table. “Did

you mind my attention very much the other night?

You’ve never told me if you liked it.” He didn’t

let her answer. He kissed her instead, kissed her the

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way he’d been dreaming about kissing her for the

past week.

She did not even try to prevaricate. There was

no stiff English upper lip, no protest for form’s sake.

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