The Bridegroom Wore Plaid Read Free Page B

company at table.” He bowed as they gained the front terrace. “And here is Mary Fran, who will be wroth with you if you do not allow her to see to your every comfort.”
    Mary Fran, more properly Lady Mary Frances—she was an earl’s daughter, for pity’s sake—was an imposing redhead with the same facile smile as her oldest brother. She collected the ladies with an air of brisk friendliness, and soon had them bustled into their rooms, maids clucking and fussing with an informality that would not have passed muster at all back in the South.
    Augusta’s room was done in the current Highland vogue—curtains, bed hangings, carpet, and even wallpaper sported either a green, black, and white plaid, or echoed the hues of the plaid. As a whole, the room was a little dizzying.
    “Is all the staff so… familiar?” Augusta asked her maid.
    “Familiar, mum?”
    “Friendly?”
    The girl’s freckled face split into a wide grin. “We’re to treat you like family, laird’s rules. Is there anything else I can do for ye?”
    Augusta shook her head and waited while the girl bobbed a curtsy then stopped by the door to check the level of the water in a bouquet of red roses.
    And then Augusta was blessedly, finally, at long last, completely alone .
    ***
    Wherever Ian looked for Mary Fran—the kitchen, the formal dining room, the pantries, the larder—the servants reported she’d just gone off to some other location, they knew not exactly where.
    And though Ian paid them some of the best wages in the shire, he did not fool himself: if the staff was intent on abetting Mary Fran, then she’d elude capture easily, despite her laird, earl, and brother’s pressing need to speak with her.
    A flash of red braids and quick, light tread on the footmen’s stairs suggested possible hope. Ian lit up the stairs, two at a time.
    “Fiona!” A door banged on the next flight up. “Fiona Ursula MacGregor!”
    Silence, meaning the child—who generally knew exactly where her mother had gotten off to—was intent on disregard for authority as well. Ian could expect as much—she was Scottish, a MacGregor, and Mary Fran’s own daughter.
    He burst through the door on the upper landing, lungs heaving, ready to bellow the rafters down in search of the child, only to stop short.
    “Your lordship.”
    As Ian mentally fumbled about trying to locate the good manners of a charming host, his brain produced the thought: The lady with the anxious, pretty eyes.
    “Miss Merrick.” Though not the Miss Merrick he’d met at the train station, or even the Miss Merrick he’d escorted from the coach. This Miss Merrick was clothed in a robe the exact shade between red and purple, a regal, substantial hue that flattered her black hair and perfect skin. She looked curiously luscious , with her hair piled on her head in a soft topknot, and her spectacles perched on her nose.
    “I confess, my lord, to having lost my way.” Her smile was more self-conscious than worried. “I was looking for the bathing chamber.”
    And while another woman might have been mortified to be caught wandering the hall in a robe, Ian suspected Miss Merrick was more troubled by the loss of her bearings.
    He offered her his arm—she was clothed from neck to ankles, for God’s sake, and the house was swarming with people. “It’s easy to get turned about in this house. When I was a boy visiting my grandfather, I delighted in discovering new rooms and hidden stairways.”
    And now he was hard put not to resent the entire property.
    “Did you also delight in your first experience with train travel? Boys do, I’m told.”
    Boys were likely a species of noisy, dirty savage to her. “I take it train travel does not appeal to you?”
    When he expected her to rap out some sniffy answer, she looked thoughtful. “I enjoy the sense of mobility, of being able to flee my surrounds for a bit of coin. Having come hundreds of miles though, I find I want nothing so much as the solitude,