The MacGregor's Lady by Burrowes Grace

Author:Burrowes, Grace [Burrowes, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical Romance, England, Regency romance, highlander, Scotland, Fiction, Romance, Victorian, London, Historical, Scottish, Scotland Highland
ISBN: 9781402268724
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Published: 2014-02-04T08:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Thirty years working for the Baron Fenimore meant Hogarth Evan Cletus Draper—“Howie” to his septuagenarian half brother, though only to him—felt some genuine loyalty to the old lord. Losing his baroness less than five years into the marriage, his one true love, had to be hard on a man who wasn’t likely to come across any more loves, true or otherwise, in the course of a long and spectacularly cranky life.

A sense of duty and a desire to visit the fleshpots of London were enough to see Draper eventually journeying south at the baron’s request. Duty, prurient inclinations, and an entire armed infantry regiment would not have been enough to inspire Draper to set foot on one of those thunderous, smoke-belching dragons of progress known as locomotives.

“Give me a trusty steed any day,” Draper confided to his mount. “You don’t leave a fellow covered in soot hours later, half the realm away from where he woke up. Never been inclined to cast up my accounts when on horseback.”

Unless of course he’d been overimbibing. For a mature Scot of Highland extraction, overimbibing took time, effort, and the sort of stupidity generally commandeered only by the younger males.

“Show me the locomotive that will get you home when you’re in your cups, take you right to your own stables, peaceable-like, and at a kindly walk that don’t alert the neighbors to your lapses, and then wait for you to find the ground and a bush you might avail yourself of before taking his own self off to his stall.”

Young people were all in a hurry these days, racketing about, when the tried and true methods of travel might leave them time to think, to plan, to sort out such cryptic guidance as the old baron had imparted.

“‘Keep an eye on things and see Balfour wed,’ says the laird.”

The horse flicked an ear.

“Not very specific, but then, the laird has been friendly with the poppy juice lately. Makes a man forgetful.” Though no less cranky.

The Earl of Balfour was a strapping fellow whom the ladies would no doubt mob with their interest, and whose title the parents would eye covetously. “And yet, the laird thought the lad might need some nudging toward the altar.”

Nudging MacGregor to the altar would take a team of plow horses, two teams if the fellow were inclined to be stubborn. “Just like the laird.”

On that profound bit of irony, Draper took out his flask—he didn’t journey so far as the privy without it—and tipped the contents to his lips. “Nigh empty, and us barely halfway to Berwick.”

The surrounds were desolate, but only in the way the lowlands could be, an altogether greener, more rolling desolation than the Highlands boasted. And why the desolation should matter…

Draper roused himself from his itinerant reveries to inventory his situation.

“Horse, you are not going unsound on me, are you? Locomotives don’t go unsound, though they explode and crash and whatnot.”

The horse lifted its tail and commented at some length on that observation, but Draper’s senses had not lied.

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