Page 73 of The Devil Wears Kilts
“I was busy having a disagreement with a fellow,” Ranulf added tightly, “before I remembered that I’m a gentleman.”
Jane paced back and forth behind the couch as they spoke. Ranulf hadn’t given her much thought earlier, but now that he looked, she seemed supremely uneasy. Charlotte appeared much calmer, but then she didn’t unsettle easily. In the dimmer light of half a dozen candles, far from the hundred lights in the dramatic chandeliers, she looked even more stunning.
“What happened,leannan?” he asked, leaning a hip against the arm of the couch. At the Gaelic word Myles sent him a quick, surprised look, but he ignored it.
She told him. It wasn’t difficult to guess that the participants with Berling had been Charles Calder and Arnold Haws—as far as he could tell, the three of them were nearly inseparable. The fourth man stumped him for a moment, until Charlotte noted that the mystery man and the fellow he’d nearly flattened in the ballroom had the same laugh.
“I think Lord Berling called him cousin,” Jane put in.
“George,” Charlotte said a heartbeat later. “Someone said George.”
Now it made sense. “George Gerdens-Dailey,” Ranulf said slowly.Damnation.
Myles began swearing under his breath. Ranulf felt much the same, but he was abruptly more concerned with deciphering how Dailey’s arrival in London would affect his family and those he loved. The woman he loved, who was frowning at him.
“Who is George Gerdens-Dailey?” Charlotte asked, her scowl deepening. “I mean, I know he’s a Gerdens, but clearly there’s something more going on here.”
She needed to know. Even if in telling her, he would have to confess the one thing she could never forgive, the one thing that might cost him… everything. Her. Straightening, he held out his hand to her. When she twined her fingers with his, it took every ounce of will he possessed not to kiss her right then. “Stay here,” he said to his uncle, indicating Jane. “We’ll be back in a moment.”
He led her through a side door and into what looked like a spare dressing room. Only after he’d brought in a candle and latched both doors did he release her hand. No one would be surprising them in here.
“I’m rather alarmed,” Charlotte said, watching him pace back and forth. The candlelight flickered when he stirred the air with his passing. “Who is this man?”
Finally Ranulf stopped to face her again. God, she looked like a wicked angel, golden hair and black and scarlet gown. “Ye lectured me a while ago aboot how violence only leads to more of the same, how it has no reason and the only way to stop it is to not begin it in the first place.”
To his surprise, she smiled. “You were listening.”
“I’ve listened to every word ye’ve ever spoken, Charlotte. Every breath, every sigh means the world to me.” Ranulf shook himself. “I don’t mean to use sweet words to sway ye, but it’s the truth.” And it might well be the last time she would ever stand for him even speaking to her.
“Tell me,” she said quietly.
“One more thing first.” Ranulf closed the distance between them, put his palm across the nape of her neck, and took her soft, sweet mouth with his.
Her gloved hands swept up around his shoulders, and she leaned along his body. The unhesitating trust she showed was utterly arousing. He sank into the moment, savoring every heartbeat of time spent with her in his arms. To think it might end because he felt the need to be honest with her… Well, all the more fool, he. But he would rather face the consequences now than later.
In a sense, though, the perfect harmony between them now only made what would likely happen at the end of this conversation worse. Savoring a last kiss, he set her upright again. “Enough delays, then,” he drawled, half to himself.
She would have kept her hands around his shoulders, but he pulled away. He didn’t want to see the disappointed expression on her face when he’d finished with what he needed to say, but to have her pull away from him as well was more than he cared to put in front of himself.
“I told ye how my father died,” he began, making himself stand still. “Half the clan called it an accident, while the other half knew it was murder. I may only have been fifteen, but I knew what it was. And I knew who’d done it. The Earl of Berling and his brothers, Harry and Wallace.”
“NotthisLord Berling,” she said, indicating somewhere vaguely outside the dressing room.
“Nae. His father. I’d seen ’em arguing with Seann Monadh—my father—trying to bully him into turning a good twenty acres of cotters’ fields into sheep grazing. He called ’em shortsighted, selfish fools who’d regret turning on their own people, and sent them away. Two days later he was dead.”
He could discuss it matter-of-factly now, but at the time he’d felt all the wind knocked from his lungs, and it had stayed that way for months. He hadn’t been able to catch his breath, to think, and the mourning, lost clan had all looked to him for answers and leadership. His mother had been inconsolable, but overherloss,herburden. As if she’d been the only one to feel pain from Robert MacLawry’s death.
“I’m so sorry, Ranulf,” Charlotte breathed, but didn’t attempt to approach him again. She knew that part of the tale, and she knew that wasn’t what he’d dragged her off to tell her.
“After the funeral I took my father’s old muzzle-loading hunting rifle and a shovel, and went to find the Gerdenses. Berling was already gone back to London—a cowardice shared by his son. The other two were at home, though, at Sholbray Manor, cozy in their parlor and drinking, talking aboot how Seann Monadh had fought and squirmed while they held his head under the water of his own loch, how he’d shat himself when he died. I crouched beneath the window and listened to all of it.”
Charlotte’s face paled, but she held her ground and her silence. And he’d thought her likely to shatter in a stiff breeze. She might look delicate as fine china, but she had damned steel in her spine.
“There were at least two dozen Gerdenses and their men and women and servants in the house, so I crept away and found a place down close to where they penned their sheep to wait. I waited fer two days until Harry and Wallace showed themselves, just the two of them. And I shot them, and killed them, and buried them where no one would ever find them. And then I returned home and tried to be the man my clan needed me to be.” He looked down at his hands, then met her gaze again. “George Gerdens-Dailey is Harry Gerdens’s son.”
Silence, so profound he could hear the orchestra tuning one floor and half the house away, hear her soft, shallow breathing. Eye-for-an-eye violence may have been older than the Bible, but that wouldn’t make it any more acceptable to her.
“Were… were the bodies ever found?”
