Page 13 of Hit Me With Your Best Scot
Francesca Oswell-MacTaggert slammed shut her office door before the butler could finish his query.An actress. Oh, this wasnotgoing to happen. Using a selection of some of the finer profanity she’d learned during her time spent up in the Scottish Highlands, she sat in the chair behind her late father’s massive mahogany desk and pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer.
Once she dipped her pen in the inkwell, she brought the fine tip down against the paper… and stopped.Oh, for heaven’s sake.“Smythe!”
The office door opened quickly enough that the butler had to have been standing directly on the other side. “My lady?”
“Which of my sons is home?”
“The two younger ones, my lady. Master Aden arrived not fifteen minutes ago, and Master Niall hasn’t yet risen.”
Which one did she want? Aden would be more alert, but he was also much less forthcoming and cooperativethan her youngest son. “Fetch me Niall, if you please. And Eloise.”
Sketching a quick bow, the butler practically ran out the door. She couldn’t blame him; as stoic and steady as he’d been over the dozen years since she’d hired him, the last eight weeks had been nothing if not unsettling. Her trio of sons had upended not just Oswell House, but all of Mayfair. And even with the theft of a marquis’s coach, his kidnapping, an elopement to Scotland, a brawl at Boodle’s that had gotten Aden banned from every gentlemen’s club in London, and Coll running naked up Grosvenor Square in the middle of the morning not four days ago, her oldest son had just presented her with the most outrageous situation yet.
And to think that, before they’d arrived in London, she’d believed the infrequent letters from her sons to Eloise had given her enough information to choose a woman who would suit Coll. Yes, Amy had suited Niall, so she hadn’t been so very far off the mark, but then again, if Coll had his mind set on Persephone Jones, then that did a rather fine job of telling her that she didn’t know him at all. And that troubled her.Morethan troubled her.
“Mama?” Eloise practically skidded into the room. She still wore her night-rail, her dark hair in a long, loose tail that made her look even younger than her eighteen years.
“I’m sorry to have awakened you, my dear,” Francesca said, indicating one of the chairs at the front of the desk. “But we have a disaster to hand.”
“Ifye’reannouncing a disaster, we’re done for,” her next oldest, twenty-four-year-old Niall drawled, appearing in the doorway.
Bare-chested and barefoot, her mahogany-haired son was naked but for the kilt knotted about his waist. At least he’d bothered to put on the kilt; being newly married had evidently civilized him a touch. “And how is Amy thismorning?” she asked, putting aside her impatience for a moment. This entire enterprise had been about reuniting her with her sons. Whatever Coll’s plans, she couldn’t afford to ruin what they’d all been working so hard to regain.
“Last I saw her, she was still trembling beneath the bedsheets, scared by the sight of Smythe bursting into the room while we were both sound asleep. What’s amiss? Has Coll disappeared again?”
“No, this time your brother managed to return to Oswell House after fleeing the theater,” she returned.
“That’s someaught, then. I told ye nae to ambush him with lasses again. At least he didnae insult any of them this time.”
Yes, perhaps she’d been overly confident that her oldest—a viscount, for heaven’s sake—would have refrained from creating yet more gossip by fleeing her theater box for the second time since the men’s arrival in London. “His behavior last night, though reprehensible, is not the issue.”
Niall dropped into the chair beside his sister. “Aye? What is it, then? The archbishop didnae deny Aden a special marriage license, did he? Because that wouldnae sit well with Aden.”
“Hush, if you please, Niall.”
From her son’s expression, his maddening line of inquiry hadn’t been entirely innocent. They’d begun this visit trying to aggravate her, and given that seventeen years had passed since she’d last set eyes on them, she couldn’t blame them for that. But she’d been trying to make amends for lost time. And perhaps eventually, they would realize that there was more to the story than what their father had told them. But for now, she would work with what she had to hand.
She took a breath. “Coll went riding off just now, after he announced that he’d found an Englishwoman to wed.”
Niall blinked. “He did?”
Ah, so his brothers weren’t even aware. That meant something—and more than likely, it was nothing good. “Yes, he did. This, after an argument over whether my agreement with Angus stated that you three were to wed English ladies or Englishwomen.”
“Englishwomen,” he responded promptly. “But if he found a lass, then—”
“He’s found anactress,” Francesca stated, the word distasteful on her tongue. “He means to marry her. Of course, he also announced that he’s presently serving as her protector, so no doubt by noon everyone in London will know that my oldest son intends to wed a woman he is presently… keeping.”
Eloise put both hands over her mouth. “He wouldn’t,” she breathed. “My wedding is in four weeks, Mama!”
“I recall that, my dear. Which is why I am writing your father to make him aware that Coll is on the verge of casting his lineage into the dustbin. Whatever Angus thinks of the Sassenachs in general, he has never been lacking in pride. And Persephone Jones is not going to become a member of the MacTaggert family.”
Her daughter lowered her hands, then raised them again. “Persephone Jones? She’s… Everyone knows who she is. We can’t even pretend that Coll didn’t know she was an actress.”
Niall tilted his head, his nearly colorless green eyes twins to his younger sister’s. “Even I ken who Persephone Jones is. She was Juliet at the theater the night Coll stomped off and left Amy to me—and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”
Francesca opened her mouth to point out that Coll had made quite a mess that evening at Drury Lane Theatre—and that he’d obviously begun another mess at the Saint Genesius last night—but she stopped herself. For Niall,that night atRomeo and Juliethad quite possibly been the most significant in his twenty-four years, because that was where he’d met Amelia-Rose Baxter. In retrospect, Francesca should have realized that introducing Coll to young, eligible ladies at the theater was a blasted mistake—one she’d repeated last night, to disastrous results.
“Perhaps my agreement with your father didn’t state that you three were to marry Englishladies, but that was the intent,” she said instead, turning the conversation back to the problem at hand. “I wanted a way to see my sons back in my life. If Coll does as he has threatened and marries someone so far below his station—and not even simply a commoner, but such an unacceptable female—he will be shunned by Society. The MacTaggert name will be whispered and laughed at behind fans. None of us will be welcomed into the homes of our peers.”
